Ttvinkling Star 75 



TWINKLING STAR.i 



Albert B. Reagan, Cornfields, Ganado, Arizona. 



Synopsis. 



The Apache medicine girl Twinkling Star is dying of consumption. 

 Medicine singings are held over her night after night. The magic, 

 medicinal powers of the snake, frog, medicine god, medicine stick, and 

 medicine cane are applied, but she gradually declines. The medicine 

 game is then played to make her well, but the medicine man loses the 

 game. The Gunelpieya Medicine Disk ceremonies are resorted to, and 

 these are followed by the medicine dance. In the excitement, at the 

 climax of this performance, Twinkling Star joins in the dance in hilari- 

 ous action. She swoons and dies. A wild, indescribable scene follows. 

 After the body is elaborately attired, it is carried to the mountain side 

 and buried with her personal effects under a pifion tree. Her live stock 

 is then killed and her tepee burned. This being done, the women wail 

 and mourn for her at morning, noon and night for thirty days. 



Characters. 



J. Twinkling Star and the people about her tepee. 



2. Chief Medicine Man F-4. 



3. Medicine singers. 



4. Gumwapah, an old medicine woman. 



5. Clowns and ghost dancers and other medicine actors in the Gunel- 



pieya Medicine Disk ceremonies. i 



G. Medicine dancers and assembled Indians. 

 7. Actors in the ceremonies over the dead. 



Scenario. 



Scene 1. — Twinkling Star, a young Indian v\'oman, sits in front cf 

 her father's tepee coughing and showing every symptom of a person in 

 the last stages of consumption. 



Scene 2. — Subtitle: "Medicine Singing Performance." 



Night comes on and the medicine people come to her tepee to 

 perform over her. Among them is Chief Medicine Man F-4. 



Scene 3. — The sick one reclines on a pine-twig mat by the fire within 

 the tepee. 



Scene 4. The medicine man enters, goes over to the side of the 

 tepee by the central fire and doubles his feet under him in a sitting 

 position near the sick one. He then bends his body over forward, places 

 his hands claspingly over his face and forehead in the form of a sort 

 of hood and begins to sing. 



"Go away sick! Go away sick! Go away sick!" 



' This scenario deiiicts the m^'dical attention jriven TwinklinK Stai', an Apache 

 sirl, the c'.eath scene and burial ceremonies, as acted out by the Indians and witnessed 

 by the author, in 1902. 



"Proc. 38th IVIeeting. 1922 (1923)." 



