Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 283 



disruptive effect on the social order. Although people felt badly 

 and mourned their deaths, there was always the tendency to ascribe 

 death to supernatural causes and to look into their record and to 

 interpret events in terms of the supernatural. Convenient excuses 

 were to say that: he must have fasted wrong; his dream instructions 

 either must not have been genuine or were improperly interpreted 

 by the older people; he must have violated some tribal rule; he must 

 have spoken unkindly to or mistreated someone possessing unrevealed 

 supernatural powers; or his supernatural guardian must have sub- 

 sequently blessed the enemy and he had not reestablished his priority 

 with the same supernatural being by medicine feasts and renewal rites. 

 Even minor accidents were interpreted either in terms of loss or 

 lack of supernatural power. 



Ridicule or question of the potency of ritual acts was liable to result 

 in minor injury — at least to the disbeliever. On one occasion, not 

 long before the old village life was abandoned, a Crow Indian observ- 

 ing a Thunder rite expressed doubt that thunder was a large bird. 

 A few hours later, while sitting on an earth lodge, he was hit and 

 severely burned by lightning although none of the other young men 

 sitting nearby were injured. 



An individual should perform any rites for which he was otherwise 

 qualified by inheritance, or at least pledge the ceremony when he 

 received repeated vision instructions. On one occasion a Hidatsa 

 had received numerous visions instructing him to perform the Horse 

 ceremony, but he never got around to making the pledge to perform 

 the rites. One day while he sat talking with some of his friends, a 

 horse strayed by and kicked him, severely injuring him. Since his 

 father owned a Horse sacred bundle, the others inquired whether he 

 had ever had visions sent by the horse and, being answered in the 

 affirmative, it was concluded that the kicking was merely another 

 effort by the supernatual acting through the horse to induce him to 

 purchase a Horse sacred bundle. On still another occasion, about 

 1878, a party of Mandan and Hidatsa were traveling to the Crow to 

 sell them one of the Grass Dances. In the party were some young 

 Crow Indians. As they passed the scaffold on which a Sioux had 

 been placed, the young Crow men shook the bones from the scaffold, 

 rolled the skuU down the bank into the Yellowstone River, and ap- 

 propriated the pipe for their own use. The older Mandan and Hi- 

 datsa called their young men back, saying that once bodies had been 

 put away that way, they should not be disturbed. While cooking 

 their evening meal that day, the women accidentally set fire to the 

 prairie and the fine ceremonial paraphernalia they were taking to the 

 Crow Indians were burned. 



