White] THE PUEBLO OF SIA, NEW MEXICO 177 
great importance in Sia: ‘He worked with the tiamunyi; he helped 
him to appoint the officers; opened hunts.’”’ The head of the Opi 
ranked next to the tiamunyi in some (but unspecified) respects, 
“ranking above Flint nawai in many things.” 
It appears that the Opi had important military functions in the 
days of intertribal warfare, but no one today knows just what these 
functions were. It is thought that the Opi, and especially the heads 
of the Opi, were the leaders in any communal military enterprise. 
They also had important ceremonial and magical functions; they 
performed a ceremony to receive a scalp into the pueblo, and, sub- 
sequently, performed a ceremony to safeguard the life of the scalp 
taker against the malevolent magical influence that was attached to 
killing and scalping. 
The Opi society, scalp dances and ceremonies, and the care and 
custody of scalps within the pueblo are closely associated with the 
Flint society in Keresan culture generally. In Stevenson’s day the 
Opi and the Flint societies had a ceremonial chamber together, and 
the Flint society played a prominent part in Opi ceremonials. The 
staff (yapi) of the former head of the Opi hangs on the west wall of 
the Flint society’s ceremonial chamber today. Scalps kept in Santo 
Domingo, San Felipe, and Santa Ana were tended by a Flint shaman 
(White, 1935, p. 60; 1932 b, p. 13; 1942 a, p. 305); in the first two of 
these villages the attending Flint shaman was also the head of the 
Flint society and cacique as well. 
Although the Scalp takers’ society is extinct in Sia today they still 
put on the scalp dance in which men dress like, and take the part of, 
Opi. Also, there are ‘‘animal Opi,” i.e., men who have killed either 
a bear or a mountain lion and who have gone through a ceremony 
as a consequence of this killing. It is my impression that the ‘‘ani- 
mal’? Opi have been instituted to take the place of man killers and 
scalpers. Bandelier (1890, p. 300), referring apparently to Cochiti, 
says that ‘‘bear and puma killers appear in the scalp dance in place 
of man-killers.” But we are not sure that killers of bears and lions 
did not become Opi before warfare and scalping ceased. We have evi- 
dence of animal Opi at only three of the Keresan pueblos: Sia, Santa 
Ana, and Cochiti (White, 1942 a, p. 132; one could become an Opi for 
killing an eagle as well as bear and lion at Santa Ana; Dumarest (1919, 
p. 199,) says that killing bears or lions was equated with killing a 
human enemy). 
The costume of an Opi is shown in figure 21. He is wearing an 
entire tanned deerskin, the forelegs of which are tied beneath his 
chin; the main part of the hide hangs down his back. A whistle, made 
of an eagle wing-bone, hangs from a cord around the neck. He wears 
an undecorated buckskin kilt, in front of which descends one end of 
