322 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 194 



candidates and the fastening of the thongs of different candidates to 

 buffalo heads, the number to which the candidate was tied depending 

 upon his military reputation. Although Mrs. Good Bear did not 

 observe anyone so tortured when her husband performed the rites, 

 an individual frequently requested a "father" to pierce his skin so 

 that he might drag buffalo heads through the village on other occasions. 

 Perhaps the fact that the population was so much smaller in her time 

 provided time for all who wished to receive torture at the post. 

 McKenzie mentions those warriors who had killed the enemy as 

 wearing skulls and scalps while fasting. This was not a practice 

 unique to NaxpikE; f asters frequently wore human bones on other 

 occasions or fasted near the scaffolds and graves of their own people 

 or near heaps of bones belonging to the enemy. The practice of 

 throwing the buffalo heads over a beam in order to suspend the can- 

 didates was not employed in later years at Fishhook. 



In former times, according to Mrs. Good Bear, it was customary 

 for the pledger to offer flesh and fingers to the gods above during the 

 performance of the ceremony, but in her time this was not done ; in 

 fact, it was optional to the pledger whether he submitted to personal 

 torture. Rabbit Head did, but her husband did not. In McKenzie 's 

 time old women of the Holy Women society who prepared the grounds 

 also chewed Black Medicine root which they spat on the wounds. 

 In Mrs. Good Bear's time, although she knew of the above practice, 

 the Long Arm impersonator provided white clay for cleansing the 

 wounds. 



McKenzie correctly describes the practice of taking the finger tips 

 and flesh to the edge of the village as an offering to the Sun since the 

 Sun and his sister were cannibals who ate human flesh and decoyed 

 people into battles so that they could eat. Although the Hidatsa 

 NaxpikE has undergone numerous changes since first described in 

 1805, the same changes were being made in other ceremonies also. 



As the Hidatsa culture changed under the impact of White culture, 

 the NaxpikE was no longer considered a means chiefly of attaining 

 supernatural powers through the medium of the sacred arrows to 

 become skilled hunters and warriors with the arrow as a weapon. 

 Mrs. Good Bear interpreted her husband's dreams preliminary to 

 performing the ceremony in terms of existing values as of 1879: 



All of the things that Good Bear saw in his dreams or was promised by Porcu- 

 pine Pemmican and the other men came true. The first time he was away to 

 war he struck a Sioux. He afterward learned that the man in the white collar 

 and dressed in fine clothing was the Roman Catholic priest. And the shiny 

 thing that he saw coming down from above that he thought at the time was the 

 hoop used in the NaxpikE he learned after he joined the Church was the Holy 

 Ghost coming down from Heaven. Because he saw the two bulls that belonged 

 to the White man, he had many cattle. The boxes of goods stacked in front of 



