202 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 184 
The mother remains in bed for 4 days after her baby comes. She 
may not drink water, but only kanyi tea; she may be permitted to 
drink coffee or tea, also, if it is hot. The mother may eat almost any- 
thing she likes in the weeks that follow childbirth, but there are some 
things that she should avoid. She should not eat peaches or pork 
because they produce pus. The wood rat, ckawac (Neotoma), is not 
eaten because he eats puslike material that is found on cactus plants. 
She cannot eat watermelon because that is ‘‘raw water,” i.e., not 
brewed tea. Beans are not eaten for a reason that I neglected to as- 
certain. 
The mother should drink kanyi tea for a specified time after child- 
birth. Clans vary with regard to the length of time specified: Coyote 
clan women are required to drink the tea for 1 month only; the Wacpa 
clan requires 2 months; and there is one clan, or perhaps a lineage 
within the clan, whose name was not ascertained, that requires its 
mothers to drink the tea for 4 months. The mother is not permitted 
to have sexual relations during the time that she is required to drink 
the tea. 
When a mother’s tea-drinking period has expired, she and her grand- 
mother go to a place on the south slope of Sia hill. There is a big rock 
there called yaya kape (yaya=mother; kapc=“‘where anything is 
sitting down’’); this is the mother of all the females in the pueblo. 
Mother and grandmother take the last of the kanyi branches to this 
place and deposit them there; they address prayers to the yaya and 
ask her to release the mother from the kanyi. Then they return to 
their homes. 
The father periodically bathes the baby with a strength-giving 
medicine for 6 months or a year. 
Stillborn babies are not buried in the churchyard cemetery. One 
informant said that they were wrapped and buried in the floor of a 
back room in the house of the mother; another said that they were 
taken outside the pueblo “toward the north,” i.e., in the direction of 
Shipap, and buried there. “It is rare,’’ says Stevenson (1894, ftn., 
p. 135), ‘for a Sia woman to die in childbirth; or for a child to be still- 
born.” We have no record of a woman dying in childbirth, but, it 
is said, babies occasionally do, and we have a record of a specific in- 
stance. Aberle (1932, p. 347) found “the rate for stillbirths . . . [at 
San Juan and Santa Clara to be] 1.6 percent as compared with 3.4 per- 
cent for the white population.” 
Some Sia women in the 1940’s and 1950’s have gone to Government 
hospitals to have their babies, but in smaller percentages than in other 
neighboring pueblos, according to the impressions of doctors, nurses, 
and some of the Sia themselves. 
