O BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY 



recover the hitherto lost meanings of several passages in the 



texts relating to the league. These recoveries now make the 



entire structure of the League of the Iroquois clear and 



consistent. 



During the fiscal year Dr. Francis LaFlesche, ethnologist, 



read the proof of his paper, The Osage Tribe: Rite of the 



Wa-xo-be, which will be published in the Forty-fifth Annual 



Report of the Bureau. At the time of Doctor LaFlesche's 



retirement, December 26, 1929, he had nearly completed an 



Osage dictionary upon which he had been working for several 



years. 



SPECIAL RESEARCHES 



The music of 10 tribes of Indians has been studied during 

 the past year by Miss Frances Densmore, a collaborator of 

 the bureau, in continuance of her research on this subject. 

 These tribes are the Acoma, Menominee, Winnebago, Yuma, 

 Cocopa, Mohave, Yaqui, Makah, Clayoquot, and Quileute. 

 The first tribe given consideration was the Acoma, the work 

 consisting in a completion of the study of records made in 

 Washington by Philip Sanche. These records were made 

 for the Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Thir- 

 teen were transcribed as representative of the series. An 

 outstanding peculiarity of these songs is a gradual raising or 

 lowering of the pitch during a performance. In some 

 instances the pitch was changed a semitone, in others a tone 

 and a half, and one example contained a rise of a whole tone 

 during one minute of singing. This was regarded as a 

 mannerism and the song was transcribed on the pitch main- 

 tained for the longest time. 



The work on Ymnan and Yaqui music consisted in the 

 retyping of almost all the text on these tribes, made necessary 

 by the combining of individual manuscripts into a book. 

 The analysis of each song was scrutinized and several songs 

 previously classed as "irregular in tonality" were otherwise 

 classified. The preparation for publication of a book on 

 Menominee music has been practically completed. The 

 manuscript contains 460 pages, with transcriptions of 140 

 songs, and a large number of illustrations. The material 

 collected at Neah Bay, Wash., and submitted in the form of 



