PARSONS] CALENDAR 307 



CEREMONY OF GENERAL CLEANSING (SHUN'ad) '" 



The evening of the day they conckide the Kings' dance, Januaiy 10, 

 the towTi chief summons all the chiefs and the war captains to his 

 ceremonial house to tell them they are going to look after the crops 

 and, if they see anything bad coming, to take it away. He says he 

 has chosen the chiefs of the medicine societies to help him and he 

 bids them to go to their ceremonial houses and wait there for the 

 war chief and kumpa to come. They go to their houses to stay in 

 them all night. 



At simrise the town chief takes meal from his bowl, faces the east, 

 waves the meal in the directions, wraps it in a corn husk, breathes 

 out on it three times, shows it to the sun, lifting his hand, and praying, 

 moves it in the directions. He gives the husk of meal to kumpa to 

 repeat the ritual. Kumpa passes the meal on to the war chief from 

 whom it passes to the hunt chief and to each Corn group chief, shichu 

 kabede being, as usual, the last. Each chief mentions his own name 

 in his prayer. The town chief divides the meal into two packets to 

 each of which kumpa ties a cigarette. The town chief chooses four 

 men, two couples of kumpawilawe and wilawe, each to carry the 

 request packet to one of the medicine societies. In each house the chief 

 and his assistant are waiting to receive these messengers. The war 

 captains also notify the governor and lieutenant governor who will 

 go, the governor to the house of the Town Fathers, the lieutenant 

 governor to that of the Laguna Fathers. This is the occasion on which 

 with their canes the officers participate in ceremonial. 



Now for four days the two medicine societies will be in retreat each 

 in their ceremonial house — ka'anitaib, "the fathers are in." The 

 Fathers will fast entirely from food and drink. Of toakoa (i. e., 

 iema'paru and Waeide) they ask the power to cleanse the ditch, the 

 fields, the plain, to cleanse the townspeople, the animals and birds, 

 and against weeds the growing com. They are to search out any 

 one who may have done harm to the animals, asked to do this by the 

 town cliief. They themselves ask also for power from Hon, bear, 

 snake, eagle, badger. 



On the first day a war captain will call out from roof top (any roof 

 top in the block of houses south of the plaza) that they are gomg to 

 have shun'ad; not to build fires outside;-' not to go out to work; not 

 to dig the ground. A second time the war captain calls out, for the 

 boys and men to get ready for a himt, that the town chief might have 

 rabbits to give to the medicine societies. The war captain mentions 

 the place of meeting — at Namburu, earth bowl, the liill by the railway 

 station where the women get clay for pottery, or Shemtua in the south- 



^ The term means collectively, "everything together," and the ceremonial is "for everybody, even 

 Mexicans and whites." 

 >i The smoke would keep the medicine men from seeing to a distance. Smoking outdoors is permitted. 



