GILMORE] TAXONOMIC LIST OF PLANTS 65 
ceremonial object of the Omaha and Ponca known as niniba weawan, 
used in the Wawan ceremony. In a family in which the birth of 
a child was expected the women busied themselves in collecting a 
great quantity of the down of 7ypha, in a mass of which was laid 
the newborn infant; that which adhered after drying the mother 
removed by manipulation after moistening with milk from her 
breasts. Cotton fabrics were unknown to the Plains tribes previous 
to the coming of white traders, hence, instead of cotton diapers, pads 
of cat-tail down were used for the purpose by the mothers in these 
tribes. 
ALISMACEAE 
Sacrrrarra LatiFon1A Willd. Arrowleaf. (PI. 1A.) 
Pshitola (Dakota). 
Si” (Omaha-Ponca). 
Si-poro (Winnebago). 
Kirit (Pawnee), “cricket ” (from the likeness of the tuber to the 
form of a cricket) ; known also as kits-hat, “ standing in water,” 
the tuber being termed iit. 
By all these tribes the tubers were used for food, prepared by boil- 
ing or roasting. The Pawnee must have some other use for the plant 
because an old medicine-man showed excited interest when he saw a 
specimen in my collection, but he did not communicate to me what 
the use is. 
In the Omaha myth, “Ishtinike and the Four Creators,” Sagit- 
taria (S2) is mentioned,’ also in the myth “ How the Big Turtle 
Went to War.” ? 
Peter Kalm? in 1749 mentions Sagittaria as a food plant among 
the Algonquian Indians: 
Katniss is another Indian name of a plant, the root of which they were 
likewise accustomed to eat,... It grows in low, muddy, and very wet 
ground. The root is oblong, commonly an inch and a half long, and one inch 
and a quarter broad in the middle; but some of the roots have been as 
big as a man’s fists. The Indians either boiled this root or roasted it in 
hot ashes. ... Their katniss is an arrow-head or Sagittaria, and is only a 
variety of the Swedish arrow-head or Sagittaria sagittifolia, for the plant above 
the ground is entirely the same, but the root under ground is much greater 
in the American than in the European. Mr. Osbeck, in his voyage to China, 
mentions that the Chinese plant a Sagittaria, and eat its roots. This seems 
undoubtedly to be a variety of this katniss. 
1 Dorsey, Zegiha Language, p. 554. 
2Ibid, p. 256. (The translator mistranslated si” “ wild rice.” Si" is Sagittaria ; wild 
rice is Si" waninde.) 
*Peter Kalm. Travels into North America, vol. 1, p. 386. 
74936°—19—33 ETH 5 
