288 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 184 
asked. ‘No, you are not kanadyaiya,” he said, ‘but you must be 
some kind of tcaiyanyi-man.” This took me out of the evil super- 
naturalistic context, but still left me with supernatural endowments. 
He continued to call me, in a half-jocular way, tcaiyanyi-man for 
some time. 
Witches cause people to sicken by magically injecting objects such 
as thorns, sticks, broken glass, and live snakes into the victim’s body. 
Or, they may “‘steal someone’s heart.”” The foreign objects must be 
removed, or the stolen heart restored, or the victim will die. And 
only the medicine societies have the power to do this. If someone 
surprises a witch in an act of his evil art, the witch will try to bribe his 
discoverer not to tell; if the discoverer refuses to accept the bribe 
the witch will die (Hoebel, 1952). At the communal curing ceremony 
medicinemen engage in actual bodily combat with witches. Some- 
times a witch is in the form of a rat or a little figure of a witch (see 
fig. 37, p 322, in White, 1942 a, for an informant’s sketch of a witch; 
it is wearing feathers of the owl and the woodpecker). 
Most of my Sia informants were loathe to discuss witchcraft and 
some denied that it was still practiced, or that people still believed 
in it. Others, however, readily admitted that it had been practiced 
in the past and stated that ‘‘some people died.” Informants at 
Santo Domingo and Santa Ana told me that they knew, or had heard, 
of people being killed at Sia as witches (Indians are much more willing 
to admit executions for witchcraft at other pueblos than at their 
own). Elderly Sia informants said that there ‘‘was a lot of trouble 
in Sia after Mrs. Stevenson left, and some people died.” According 
to Bandelier (1890, p. 35), ‘‘certain pueblos, like Nambé, Santa 
Clara, and Cia owe their decline to the constant inter-killing going 
on for supposed evil practices of witchcraft.”” And in a journal 
entry dated June 21, 1886, he recorded that ‘‘some five or six years 
before, two witches were killed at Zia ‘in a quiet way. They did 
not use poison, but clubbed them to death’ ”’ (quoted by Lange, 1959, 
p. 254). 
Belief in witchcraft may be, and undoubtedly has been, used by the 
Sia as a means of injuring some member of the community. Hoebel’s 
informant ‘‘clearly recognized . . . the possibilities of exploiting fear 
of witches as an instrument of agegression’”’ (Hoebel, 1952, p. 588). If 
a man had a grievance against a person, or did not like him, he could 
accuse him of witchcraft and “ots of people will believe me. Who 
can prove different? I think that is the way it happens... .” (bid.). 
Medicine men and societies have the power to cure sickness and to 
oppose and kill witches, but only by virtue of power which they receive 
from animal doctors. The greatest of these appears to be the bear, 
and medicinemen wear bear-claw necklaces and the skins of the fore- 
