UNWRITTEN DAKOTA LAWS. 209 
father and mother do they will do. What the father and mother know they 
will know. What the father and mother are they will be. One ean hardly 
say there is much government in a Dakota family. Children are scolded. 
often, they are pushed, or shoved, or shaken sometimes, and they are 
wlipped rarely. They are petted and indulged a good deal, but not more 
than children in civilized lands. But somehow or other, with exceptions, 
they manage to grow up affectionate and kind, the pride of father and 
mother. The love of the parents has wrought this. Not untrequently the 
grandfather and grandmother are the principal teachers. 
TRAINING OF THE BOY. 
The old man sits in the tipi and shaves out a bow and arrow for the 
little boy. In the mean time he tells him stories of history and war. The 
boy’s father, it may be, has been killed by the enemy. The grandfather 
tells the story over and over again. It burns itself into the boy’s heart. 
It becomes the animus of his life. He shoots his first bird and brings it 
into the tent. He is praised for that. ‘When you become a man you 
must kill an enemy,” the old man says. ‘Yes; I will killan enemy,” is the 
boy’s reply. He dreams overit. He witnesses the “Scalp Dance” and the 
‘No Flight Dance” in his village. His heart is growing strong. When he 
is fifteen or sixteen he joins the first war party and comes back with an 
eagle feather in his head, if so be he is not killed and scalped by the enemy. 
All this is education. Then there are foot racings, and horse racings, and 
ball playing, and duck hunting, and deer hunting, or it may be the whole 
village goes on a buffalo chase. 
These are the schools in which the Dakota boy is educated. In the 
long winter evenings, while the fire burns brightly in the center of the lodge 
and the men are gathered in to smoke, he hears the folk lore and legends 
of his people from the lips of the older men. He learns to sing the love 
songs and the war songs of the generations gone by. There is no new 
path for him to tread, but he follows in the old ways. He becomes a 
Dakota of the Dakota. His armor is consecrated by sacrifices and offerings 
and vows. He sacrifices and prays to the stone god, and learns to hold up 
the pipe to the so-called Great Spirit. He is killed and made alive again, 
and thus is initiated into the mysteries and promises of the Mystery Dance. 
He becomes*a successful hunter and warrior, and what he does not know 
is not worth knowing for a Dakota. His education is finished. — If he has 
7105—voL I1x——l4 
