Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 7 



a Congregationalist, told how he had been in several close brushes 

 with lightning after he allowed Gilbert L. Wilson to take the Water- 

 buster (Thunder) clan bundle to New York City, and had been afraid 

 of lightning ever since. 



I discovered that all informants were unwilling to talk in the 

 presence of visitors, regardless of the subjects being studied. In 

 former times it was considered bad taste to enter uninvited when 

 one was telling stories or giving certain information to another and 

 the only trouble encountered was with young men not familiar with 

 this custom. 



The kinship charts were prepared primarily from the combined 

 genealogical data of all my informants. At this time (1932) there 

 were no important variations in the terminology and categories 

 with the exception of those of the father's father's sister and daughter- 

 in-law. Some claimed the former was a "grandmother" whUe others 

 thought she would be a closer relative by some other extension of 

 the kinship system. Daughter-in-law terminology also differed 

 between villages. It was found that many factors of social partic- 

 ipation affected the relationships between individuals and extended 

 the system to include nonrelatives, age-grade associates, ceremonial 

 participation, adoption of children and ceremonial adoptions by both 

 men and women, and equation of Hidatsa with Mandan clans. All 

 these produced systems of interaction between individuals in which 

 two people often stood in several relationships to each other. This 

 was not mentioned specifically by informants and came out in the 

 study of various customs. 



All of my informants had had previous experience with anthro- 

 pologists and claimed that no two of us worked the same way. I 

 heard several criticisms of us, chiefly that we either tried to answer 

 om* own questions or that informants were cut off by saying that 

 what was being told was not important. I tried to avoid doing 

 either, for I had a year to make this study and I was as interested 

 in what my informants thought about their cultural values as in 

 what they did. Each informant was encom-aged to digress when 

 one social pattern reminded him of something else, or when his 

 excursions into another area seemed to produce noteworthy cultural 

 data. Since the Hidatsa explain much in their culture by means 

 of formal myths, they were encouraged to relate the myths as they 

 had learned them. Lest continuity be broken, I usually avoided 

 interrupting informants and held back my questions until a narrative 

 had been completed. 



I followed few fixed rules in getting at the data, and these were 

 subject to change whenever the situation warranted. I frequently 

 requestioned an informant months later on obscure points. The old 



