Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 433 



There was one principal song belonging to the bundle. It referred 

 to Wolf Woman's ability to transform herself into a female wolf and 

 reach a war party out 4 days. The other songs were the customary 

 War songs, the common property of all Wolf bundles. Bundle owners 

 would dress in their ceremonial outfits and dance whenever scalp 

 dances were celebrated. They were believed to get dreams from the 

 wolves whenever their enemies were lurking about the villages. 

 Whenever these women failed to predict the presence of enemies, it 

 was believed that these enemies had appealed to their own super- 

 natural guardians to bewilder and confuse the wolves so that they 

 forgot to warn the Wolf Woman impersonators. Although the Wolf 

 Woman impersonator had a definite part to perform in the Sunset 

 Wolf ceremonies, independent rites were performed on other occas- 

 sions. This was primarily a war bundle and little emphasis was given 

 to other village activities. The right to use white clay for doctoring 

 was optional. 



Buffalo Calling Ceremonies 



These rites constitute a series related by virtue of common beliefs 

 and practices believed to increase the buffalo herds and bring them 

 near the villages. These rites represent but a part of those in which 

 the buffalo is included, but they had become recently incorporated 

 into a related series in which the singers selected from the Earth- 

 naming bundle owners play a dominant performing role. There is 

 both historic and traditional evidence that this integration has oc- 

 curred recently (probably since 1800) and that the pattern has changed 

 to one approximating the Mandan as practiced through the medium 

 of the Okipa summer ceremony although the specific origin myths 

 for the two tribes are entirely different. 



EARTHNAMING 



Of the rites in this series, the Hidatsa believed that the Earth- 

 naming ceremony was the last to reach the form as practiced until 

 the final extermination of the buffalo. The ceremonies were based 

 on the belief that certain spirits, including the buffalo, were residents 

 of the various buttes of the adjacent prairies. A line drawn between 

 those buttes situated on the farthest periphery constituted native 

 concepts of the limits of tribal territory; it was with these limits, as 

 defined by the bundle owners, that the Hidatsa have been chiefly 

 concerned recently in all tribal claim negotiations with the Govern- 

 ment. Conceptually, these buttes were the homes of various spirits 

 whose leader was a large owl living inside the Killdeer Mountains. 

 Each butte had a spirit and each spirit a sacred myth, ritual, and songs. 

 These spirits would meet periodically at the Killdeer Mountains, 



