1920.] Lowie, Crow Tobacco Society. 155 



The essential part of the proceedings following the initial song seems 

 to consist in a joint dance by each novice with the four song instructors 

 and the final song that regularly closes the adoption ceremony. However, 

 there were a great many other dances by various members of the society. 



To revert to my naive observations in 1910. The women were by 

 far the more frequent dancers. When the drummers had intoned a song, 

 several women would rise, unwrap their medicine bundles, and begin 

 to dance in the same way as in the preparatory tipi, holding in their 

 hands such medicine objects as stuffed skins of weasels, otters, or birds. 

 At one dance I saw two women holding a weaselskin in each hand. 

 Some did not use such objects in dancing, but substituted sprigs of 

 willow or eagle feather fans; still others were holding nothing at all. 

 Some clenched their free hands, others extended their fingers with the 

 palms down. In every case the hands, with or without skins, fans or 

 sprigs, were alternately advanced and drawn back, or raised and lowered, 

 in a peculiar convulsive manner. Sets of dancers took turns, each cor- 

 responding, it seemed, to a set of four songs. 



Lone-tree explained that the manner of extending fingers or clench- 

 ing hands depended on the song. He, as well as others, described the 

 movement with clenched hands, thumb up and little finger down, as 

 distinctive of the Tobacco dance proper; to hold the thumb and finger of 

 the clenched hand in one horizontal plane is distinctive of the Bear Song 

 dance, but this movement may be introduced into the Tobacco ceremony. 



At noon preparations were made for a feast. The relatives of the 

 boy who was being adopted piled up quilts and other presents for his 

 adoptive mother, all these gifts being taken charge of by a young woman. 

 At this time the members of the Nighthawk club were lined up in a body 

 outside the lodge. The novice was a member of their organization, 

 hence after the quilts had been heaped up each Nighthawk approached 

 and contributed a quarter to- help pay his Tobacco initiation fee. Since 

 my interpreter, James Carpenter, was a Nighthawk, I likewise contrib- 

 uted this modest sum. In return we received a case of fruit, which was 

 carried off to a Nighthawk tent, where the contents were distributed in 

 the most equitable fashion conceivable. 



Early in the afternoon I returned to the adoption lodge. Again the 

 women were conspicuously more active in the dancing. However, when 

 the male novice was to dance, two men took him between them and 

 danced with him at the foot of the altar. At the first dance all three 

 held up willow sprigs; the second time, feather fans; the third time, 

 rattles; and the fourth time they merely moved their hands. The novice 



