White] THE PUEBLO OF SIA, NEW MEXICO 157 
fledged doctors; that is, they are only part honawai’aiti—although 
they possess all of the ‘‘badges”’ of the honawai’aiti—and are qualified 
to do only the first two ways of curing; they have no songs to retrieve 
or restore hearts. They are sometimes, but not always, requested 
to participate in the midwinter communal curing ceremony. They 
have the chief elements of paraphernalia of a medicine society: the 
wooden slat altar, the sand painting, iariko, and bear paws. They 
can conduct the ceremony for the return of a deceased person’s soul 
to the underworld. Snake medicinemen are called to administer 
magical medicine to a newborn baby to protect him from evil influ- 
ences (see “Childbirth’’). And they have a special ability to treat 
snake bite. The patron spirits of the Snake society are the mythical 
snakes of the six directions (see ‘‘Cosmology’’). 
CONCEPTION OF SNAKES 
It is not easy to comprehend the Sia conception of snakes. They 
are supernatural beings, but then almost every living being is. But 
snakes have a special significance. The horned snake is depicted 
upon medicine bowls, altars, and dance kilts. The Sia are unwilling 
to kill a snake, even a venomous one. In 1957 a Government nurse, 
an Anglo-American woman, told me that on one of her periodic 
visits to Sia to hold clinic she encountered a large rattlesnake in her 
path near the schoolhouse where the clinic was held. The nurse 
requested her Sia woman assistant to remove the snake, but she 
would do nothing. The nurse then set out to find a man who would 
remove, or kill, the snake. She found a Sia man and asked him to 
help her. He returned to the schoolhouse with her, but he did not 
kill the snake. Instead, he took some branches of shrubs and very 
carefully “swept” the snake away, and finally it crawled away out 
of sight. The nurse was so upset that she told the governor of Sia 
that she would not go to the clinic again unless they ‘‘did something 
about the snakes.’”’ After that the governor sent one of the little 
officers to the clinic every time she came, to see that no snakes were 
around. 
This same nurse was once summoned to a house in Sia where a 
woman was critically ill; she had been bitten by a spider, the nurse 
was told. The woman was enormously swollen and in great pain. 
The nurse had the woman taken to the hospital in Albuquerque 
where examination revealed fang marks on the woman’s buttocks, 
and the case was diagnosed as snake bite. The woman had gone 
out to a corral at night, without a light, to relieve herself, so the 
nurse was told. When she squatted down she was bitten (the heat 
perceptors of a rattlesnake could have felt the warmth of her body). 
“That woman died after great suffering,’ the nurse told me, “but 
