Howard] THE PONCA TRIBE 121 



right in front of my brother and took a big black water beetle from my brother's 

 chest. This was part of what the Gisna had put there. I saw this bug myself 

 as it was crawling away. Then the second medicine man danced around my 

 brother. He took some green moss from the joints of my brother's arms and 

 legs. [The joints were considered particulary vulnerable to medicine arrows, JHH.] 

 He piled this moss on the floor. The Gisnd had put this there too. Then the 

 third medicine man danced around my brother. He found some of the round 

 stones that we call "marbles" in my brother's hands. All of this stuff had been 

 shot into my brother by the water monster. 



Then Shaky came out to the middle of the floor. He asked each of the others 

 if they had taken out everything they could find. "Try again, and see if you can 

 find anything else," he said to them. Each of them tried again, but each found 

 him empty. Then Shaky, the head doctor, said, "There is something else. I 

 will try to get it out. If I can't get it out it will kill him." He went around 

 and around my brother, without saying a word. Finally he stopped. "There is 

 something else! He is standing on them!" He had my brother move each of 

 his feet. From under each one he took a human eyeball. 



"Now he is cleaned out!" said the doctors. Then Shaky said, "Don't take it 

 all away from him. We must leave him some power to protect himself." So the 

 doctor who had taken the marbles from my brother's hands gave him back one 

 of these. After that he was considered a member of the Medicine lodge society, 

 and was respected for having water-monster power. 



After this, one time, we were visiting over at Macy. Those Omaha Pebble 

 society people were having their ceremonies. As a joke they called my brother 

 out to take part in their shooting ceremony. They were going to make a fool 

 out of him. Just before they were going to begin the leader looked closely at my 

 brother and then said. "Wait, we had better pass him by, he really has some- 

 thing [i.e., medicine power]." 



The rhythmic singing for the dancing which accompanied the 

 ceremony was provided, according to AMC, by a gTOup of singers 

 seated around a large drum. This is strange, for in most tribes 

 possessing the rite a wooden water drum was used. The Ponca were 

 familiar with the water drum but used it only in the Wd-wq ceremony. 



Apparently the Medicine Lodge ceremony, unUke most of the old 

 Ponca rites, persisted longest among the Northern Ponca. The 

 ceremony described above took place about 1910, and Henry Le Roy, 

 the boy "shot" by the water monster and cured by the shamans, 

 was still a young man when he died in an automobile accident in 

 1926. Yet when Alanson Skinner (1920, p. 306) inquired about the 

 ceremony among the Southern Ponca in 1914 he found that it had 

 been "so long extinct . . . that practically nothing was remembered 

 by the writer's [Skinner's] informants." 



Another extremely interesting and perhaps significant medicine 

 society was the Mescal Bean cult. The rites of this group centered 

 around the mescal bean (So2)hora secundiflora) , the fruit of a legu- 

 minous shrub native to northern Mexico, Texas, and Ai-izona. The 

 only mention of the Mescal Bean cult in the older Ponca literature is 

 a vague statement by J. O. Dorsey (1884 a, p. 349), who, in discussing 

 the Wichita dance of the Omaha, and the use of the mescal bean by 



