40 
ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
an incident which, despite its triviality, or be¬ 
cause of it, indicates the wonderful quality of 
the monograph, perhaps as much as the formal 
vote of a solemn scientific conclave. Some 
months ago, upon visiting an up-country dealer 
of pheasants and game-birds, and bearing in 
mind the very considerable cost of the volumes, 
I ventured to ask the man whether he had 
heard of Beebe’s Monograph. 
PARROT FEATHERS AND PUEBLO 
INDIANS 
By Elsie Clews Parsons 
T HE other night in New York I overheard 
a hostess give vent to a sense of outrage 
over a proposed city ordinance against open 
fires. The lady is one of those fire-lovers who 
preserves over summer the wood ashes which 
accumulated during the winter so that the first 
autumn fire may have a proper bed. At the 
wineless dinner table, wineless from choice, not 
from necessity, the guest next to me, who had 
been chaffing our hostess on her perpetual ashes, 
gave vent in his turn to a sense of outrage over 
the best known of constitutional amendments. 
A few minutes later I happened to mention to 
mv neighbor the hardship upon some of my 
Indian acquaintances from the law prohibiting 
the importation of certain kinds of feathers, 
parrot feathers to these Indian sacerdotalists 
being as red wine for the eucharist. My fellow 
guest proved to be an ardent bird-lover, and 
his passion for bird protection made him utterly 
indifferent to any considerations of propriety in 
tribal ceremonial. Truly one man’s meat is an¬ 
other’s poison. 
Among the Pueblo or Town Indians of the 
Southwest, parrot feathers are used in two 
ways. They are attached in a small bunch to the 
crown of the head of dancers, more particularly 
in the more sacred dances such as the kok’okshi 
or Good Gods of Zuni, mask or kachina dances 
for rain, or in certain maskless rain dances by a 
phallic clown society of the Hopi or by the 
“Heard of it?,” he replied, “why I own two 
sets! I got two boys, you know, and you don’t 
think I’m going to die and have to think of 
them boys quarreling all their lives as to who 
owns the Monograph, do you ?” 
Could praise be more complete ? 
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr. 
March 6th 1923. 
Saint’s Day dancers in the Rio Grande towns; 
and in all the towns parrot feathers serve as 
part of the “dress” of the most sacrosanct of 
fetiches, the Cornear Mothers. 
D ancing in wind or rain is hard on feathers 
and even the carefully wrapped and rarely ex¬ 
posed feathers of the fetich bundles in time wear 
out, so that there is a great dearth of parrot 
feathers today in the dance societies and the 
curing or weather control societies. To be sure, 
feathers from other birds may be substituted 
and even colored to resemble parrot feathers— 
as grape juice may be substituted in Christian 
ritual—but this is ceremonial shoddy, extremely 
distasteful to the Pueblo sacerdotalist to whom 
ritual sincerity and accuracy are essential for 
the validity and effectualness of his ceremony. 
Now and again a “Mexican parrot” may be 
seen caged in a Pueblo house, a sorry looking 
bird, for it is kept merely to be plucked, just as 
are the eagles which are caged on the house-top 
or, at Sia, in the plaza, or the turkeys which 
straggle about town. Eagle and turkey feathers 
are also important in feather ritual. 
Live parrots, however, are rarer than live 
eagles or turkeys and Mexican trade in parrot 
feathers lias been stopped. What should the 
Old Men do? Now and again there is in town 
some White person who is somewhat different 
from those who go into people’s houses without 
being invited and who are forever taking pic¬ 
tures, and different, too, from the people from 
Washington who interfere so seriously with life, 
often without knowing how they are interfering, 
perhaps not wanting to know. This other kind 
