212 DAKOTA GRAMMAR, TEXTS, AND ETHNOGRAPHY. 
taéanku, the spirits road, as the milky way is called. The friends are in- 
consolable. They give away their good clothes, and go into mourning 
with ragged clothes and bare feet, and ashes on their heads. Both within 
the lodge and without there is a great wailing. Miéinksi, mi¢inksi, my 
son, my son, is the lamentation in Dakota land, as it was in the land of 
Israel. 
The departed is wrapped in the most beautifully painted buffalo robe 
or the newest red or blue blanket. Dakota custom does not keep the dead 
long in the tipi. Young men are called and feasted, whose duty it is to 
carry it away and place it on a scaffold, or, as in more recent times, to bury 
it. The custom of burial, however, soon after death was not the Dakota 
custom. It would interfere with their idea that the spirit had not yet 
bidden a final farewell to the body. ‘Therefore the laying up on a scaffold 
which was erected on some mound, where it would have a good view of 
the surrounding country. After a while the bones could be gathered up 
and buried in the mound and an additional quantity of earth carried up to 
cover it. This is partly the explanation of burial mounds made since the 
period of the mound-builders. 
Thus the lodge is made desolate. It must be taken down and pitched 
in anew place. The young wife cries and cuts her flesh. The mother and 
other female relatives wail out their heart sadness on the night air. The 
father, the old man, leans more heavily on his staff as he goes on to the 
time of his departure. The brothers or cousins are seen wending their 
way, in the afternoon, to the place of the dead, to lay down a brace of 
ducks and to offer a prayer. A near relative makes up a war party. The 
feathers and other ornament, together with the clothing of the young man, 
are taken by this company on the warpath and divided among themselves 
in the country of their enemies. This is honoring the dead. If they suc- 
ceed in bringing home scalps their sorrow is turned into joy. For will not 
this make glad the spirit of the departed? So, then, this will be gladness to 
the dead and glory to the living. The young men and maidens dance 
around the war trophies until the leaves come out in the spring or until 
they fall off in the autumn.! 
THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 
If sorrow brings mankind into a common kinship, a white man may 
understand something of an Indian’s feelings as he stands by the side of his 
'For Teton burial customs, etc., see ‘‘Teton Folk-lore,” translated by the editor and published 
in the Amer. Anthropologist for April, 1889, pp. 144-148.—s. o. p. 
