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MUSIC OF THE PAWNEE

Gene Weltfish

Gene Weltfish taught anthropology at Columbia University and was the author of The Lost Universe, a study of Pawnee life and culture. During the late 1920s and 1930s, she actively collected the music of the Pawnee, mostly working with the Pawnee tribesman Mark Evarts. The recordings she made in the mid-1930s were issued in 1965 on Folkways album 4334, entitled Music of the Pawnee. This essay is derived from the notes that accompany the album.

Under the great dome of the sky in the western plains lived the Pawnee people. Three rivers flow eastward from the foothills of the Rockies to the Missouri, crossing Nebraska and northern Kansas, and along their middle courses the Pawnee villages were clustered. Overhead the sky was their major deity and First Cause, and the stars were its minions, and each man was born under a star that watched over him throughout his life. For 600 years, from 1250 to 1876, life ran its course and through this time the Pawnee developed into a nation. Then history began to press in upon them. First the dispossessed Sioux from the Lakes region to the east and then other tribes were moved onto their lands and their hunting grounds and finally came the Oregon Trail, The Mormon Trail, the Gold Rush, and white settlement. At last they could remain no longer, and they tried to find a refuge to the south, leaving their ancestral lands behind.

Their substantial houses of timbers, thatch, and earth, circular in shape with a high domed roof, were grouped into villages along the high banks of the Loup and Platte, with their cornfields in the bottomlands. Each village had a heredity chief and braves who were his administrative assistants. These were federated into four major Bands—the Skidi or Wolf; Kitkehaxki, Little Earth Lodge Village; Tsawi'i, Begging the Big Game Hunter for Meat; Pita-hawirats, Man-Going Eastward or Downstream. There was a major division between the Skidi and the other three, which were called "South Bands" because of their location: the division was noted on an historical map at least as early as 1701, and it was apparent in a minor variation in the spoken language. In historic times the Skidi were the most highly organized of the four bands, with an integrated theology and an official priesthood of five priests as well as an established association of combined Doctor Cults that held an elaborate thirty-day Grand Opera after the harvest in the fall.

According to their theology, after Heaven had created the Universe in a series of primordial

storms over many eons, he created the stars that were to create Mankind. In the western skies he placed the Evening Star, a beautiful woman, goddess of night and fruitfulness and her helper, the moon and in the eastern skies, the Morning Star, god of light, war and fire, born of hot meteors and a hot bed of flint. Between their realms ran the Milky Way. Assisting Morning Star was his younger brother, the sun.

For the Pawnee, the dome of the house was the dome of the sky in miniature, and life kept flowing through from the stars to the people inside at all times. The circular walls of the house were like the larger horizon outside where the earth meets the sky all around them on the Great Plains. The house was always entered from the east through a long vestibule, and as the Morning Star rose in the eastern sky, it entered the house and touched the fireplace, creating life anew each day when the fire was kindled.

In her western realm, the Evening Star kept her cultivated gardens of food crops and her servants, the Winds, the Clouds, the Lightnings, and the Storms that were given her by Heaven itself at the Creation. Then Morning Star waged a war upon her, invading the western skies to bring light into the world and life. At the invasion, Evening Star transformed her four servants into fierce animals in the four semicardinal quarters of the Universe—the winds in wild oat form in the southwest; the clouds as wolf in the southeast; lightning as mountain lion in the northwest; and the bear in the northeast. All these the Morning Star had to conquer through many trials, and at last he destroyed, with a meteor stone, the vaginal teeth that shielded the goddess from mating. From their union the first human being, a girl, was born, and a whirlwind carried her to earth. From the mating of their respective assistants, the Sun and the Moon, the first boy was born and also carried to earth. And so the human race—at least of the Pawnee, began.

But man had to pay for his life, for the Morning Star demanded the life of a young girl who was captured from an enemy tribe every year and sacrificed at planting time, so that all life could go on and the crops mature. The girl was sacrificed as she stood tied to a scaffold, shot with an arrow through the heart by a warrior impersonating the Wolf, god of death—the southeast star, Sirius. At the base of the scaffold was the oblong pit lined with white downy feathers symbolizing the Garden of the Evening Star, the kusaru, or bed. A number of features of Pawnee theology, particularly of the Skidi, are reminiscent of classical Mexican religion, and a direct analogy for the sacrifice is suggested by Herbert J. Spinden and Clark Wissler (American Museum Journal XVI, No. 1, January 1916, p. 54) in the mode of human sacrifice of the Ciucatecan tribe of the State of Guerrero, Mexico, illustrated in the Codex Porfirio Diaz now preserved in the National Museum in Mexico City. Other evidence prompts the authors to attribute the time of the diffusion of this custom between 1506 and 1519, when the victory of Cortés ended their communication. When news of this dramatic rite first reached the eastern seaboard of the United States, in 1820-21, it created something of a sensation—especially in the light of the obvious Mexican analogies.

In 1816 an Ietan girl was captured by a Skidi warrior in preparation for sacrifice to the Morning Star in the spring of 1817. The chief of the Skidi at this time was Knife Chief (ritsi-risaru) of Pumpkin Village. In 1811 he had been on a delegation to see William Clark in St. Louis, who was then Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the region. They had a long and serious talk in which Clark impressed Knife Chief with the fact that white people were coming in ever-increasing numbers "like the waves of the ocean—in, in, in … It's coming. Every year more people come over here," and the Pawnee must prepare themselves.

Knife Chief, impressed with the validity of this, tried to get the people to abandon the custom of human sacrifice, but the warriors and priests, always suspicious of the political motives of the chiefs, were hostile and defiant. The ceremonies were continued and on the appointed day, the young girl was led out and tied to the sacrificial scaffold. On his trip to see William Clark, Knife Chief was accompanied by his son (or nephew) Man Chief, pita-risaru, an outstanding warrior in his early twenties and universally respected by all the people.

With the crowd gathered and the warrior ready to shoot the fatal arrow, Man Chief rode before them and told them his father disapproved of what they were about to do and he had come to rescue the girl or die right there. By Skidi belief, anyone who touched the consecrated girl during her captivity would soon die, for they would be taken by the Morning Star in her stead. Thus all could see that Man Chief was offering his life as a forfeit for the girl. The crowd held off in awe while Man Chief cut the girl down, placed her on a horse, and sent her south where she was able to rejoin her own people.

By 1820-21, the story of the conduct of Knife Chief and his son, Man Chief, had come to the attention of Edwin James and Jedidiah Morse and through them it became known. An expedition of Pawnee chiefs from each of the four bands, including Man Chief, was called to Washington in 1821, led by Major O'Fallon. There, in the light of his bold rescue, the girls at "Miss White's Select Female Seminary" collected enough money to have a large silver medal cast to present to the handsome young Pawnee hero at a public ceremony. It bore the inscription: "To the Bravest of the Brave."

Man Chief was now a young man of about twenty-five. In his acceptance speech, Man Chief said when he did this thing, he did not know he was brave, but had acted according to his feelings, but now that they had called him brave and had given him this medal, he thanked them and would always remember them. His portrait was painted by Charles Bird King and appears in the Thomas L. McKenny and Hall volumes on Indian tribes. The medal was excavated near Fullerton, Nebraska, by Alonzo Thompson.

The Pawnee are historically credited by other tribes as the source of the main features of the Calumet or Peace Pipe Ceremony noted by the explorer Marquette as early as 1672, when he traveled down the Mississippi under its protection. This elaborate and beautiful ceremony was actually a ceremony of peaceful trade. The initiator of the expedition was a man of substance and influence, and for at least a year he enlisted his friends and associates in the accumulation of a quantity of valuable manufactured goods and preserved foods that they would carry as "gifts" to another tribe or politically distant band within the Pawnee group. When these preparations had been arranged for, the leader sent a messenger to make the necessary diplomatic contact with the other group, particularly with a person of comparable status, wealth, and social influence to the leader. With this notification, this man would enlist the pledges of his friends and associates within his tribe or Band for contributions of horses to be given as return gifts to the visiting leader on behalf of his party. (Possibly in the past, the visiting party brought manufactured goods and dried crops and received dried buffalo meat as a return gift). Such a "Pipe Dance" expedition often included a hundred people.

These mundane aspects were almost unrecognizably embedded in an elaborate metaphor and ceremonial procedure. The visiting expedition included under the leader, a number of chiefs, braves, priests and medicine men, exemplifying the main personages of Pawnee officialdom. In addition to the goods as gifts, they carried with them the best in tents, camping equipment, utensils, and food, enough for the entire expedition, including the entertainment of the people they were to visit. These would be left behind as part of their offering.

They assisted their hosts in horticulture and other work so that they would be free to participate in the ceremony. The host, on his part, provided a large earth lodge in which the main ceremony could be performed, lodging in his home for the leader, and adequate camping facilities for the rest of the party. When the ceremony was over, the contributed horses were turned over to the leader of the visiting party, who would later distribute them among those who had contributed or participated in the expedition.

The visiting party came as "Fathers," the host being referred to as "Sons" or "Children." The "Father" was bringing and communicating all that he valued to his "Child." The pipe comprised two elaborately decorated pipe stems, one signifying the female eagle and the values of the home, and the other the male eagle, hovering about outside and protecting it from attack. The female pipe stem was decorated with a fan-shaped pendant of ten tail feathers of the brown or golden eagle, and the male pipe stem with a fan-shaped pendant of seven tail feathers of the white eagle. Among the Pawnee, the symbolism of the pipe stem is basic; it signifies the windpipe, the breath, life, voice, speech, the soul, and the way of communication with the heavenly powers through the smoke of the tobacco, which rises to the Heavens.

The ceremony itself represented in a sense, a synopsis of Pawnee ceremonial and religious themes. A Pipe Dance Song "Baby Stop Crying—Look Upward at Father Sky" is described by its singer in these words: "They want the baby to stop crying and look up at the feathers at the end of the pipe stem, which is pointing with the mouthpiece upward (so that Heaven may smoke), and thence he will look up at Father Sky." The meaning is that Father Sky is the ultimate source of all their well-being, and it is in this direction that the child should look for his security. After the ceremony, a considerable number of horses, highly decorated for the occasion, are presented by the "Child" to the "Father." The "Father" leaves with the "Child" in addition to the other gifts, the sacred pipe stems, and all ceremonial paraphernalia. For a year or more at least, there will be peace between their two groups.

In my ethnological account, when the Pawnee villages were attacked by the Sioux, Eagle Chief took the decorated pipe stems and said to his wives, "Dear wives, it is said that this pipe is beloved of Heaven," and so he rode out holding the pipe stem aloft and as he approached, the enemy lined up, turned around, and rode away when they saw the pipe.

In addition to the interrelationship of the four bands of Pawnee, united in language as well as custom, were more distantly related people who spoke the kindred languages of the Caddoan language family. These people were distributed in a north-south "corridor" west of the Mississippi River in the midcourses of the rivers that flowed into it from the foothills of the Rockies. The Arikara, the northernmost of the Caddoan peoples, were in North Dakota, then the Pawnee in Nebraska and Kansas, the Wichita to the south of them in Kansas and Oklahoma, and the Caddo, from whom the language stock is named, still further south toward the Gulf in Louisiana and Texas.

There was a tendency for each of these groups to look for certain kinds of cultural stimuli toward the group south of it. It would appear that in times past, individuals from among the Arikara would spend several years among the Pawnee to gain ceremonial knowledge, while from among the Pawnee in their turn, some men went south to the Wichita and apprenticed themselves to the leader of a religious cult for some years in order to learn the ceremonies, the songs, and ideas.

Sometime during the early part of the 1800s, a man named Kind Warrior went from the Pawnee among the Wichita and stayed for three years, returning with many new songs and religious ideas. He brought with him the knowledge of the raris-ta, Deer-Dance, a ceremony concerning the increase of the deer and their life on the plains and in the timber. The symbolic elements have a decidedly southern flavor, rather than one essentially native to the Pawnee habitat. They included the green sage, which symbolized the fresh odors of spring and with which the floor of the ceremonial house was covered, the mescal bean, smearing with white clay to symbolize its seeds, and the rattlesnake. The Pawnee Doctor Cults, for example, were concerned with Bear, the Buffalo, the Otter, the Beaver, the Wolf, willows, cottonwoods, and other trees of the area, as well as ducks, geese, loons, etc.

The raris-ta shared many important features with the Pawnee Doctor Cults, among them an intensive practice of legerdemain and various degrees of trance, interpersonal suggestion, and hypnotism. There was some difference in primary emphasis, the traditional association of the Pawnee Doctor Cults having as their main theme the curing of the sick through an intimate knowledge of the nature of the wild animals and plants, while the raris-ta was organized as two opposing war parties, with the southern groups—Wichita, Weco, Kitsai,

Tawakoni—"attacking" the northern groups or isati, the component divisions of the Pawnee.

In both cases a demonstration of power was a successful demonstration of sleight-of-hand, which was referred to as "playing" (kusisaari) in the sense of children romping, and of trance-induction, called "fighting" or "shooting" (patsaku). The raris-ta, referring to this latter activity as "shooting the image or shadow"—awai-taaku. The more aggressive character of this activity in the raris-ta was evident. There is evidence that the Pawnee, like other tribes, used their power of suggestion and trance-induction both on the hunt in relation to the wild animals and toward the enemy in war. It is said that among the tribes of the North Pacific Coast, a war party would not set out without an able shaman to exercise his powers against the enemy.

After the death of the originator, Kind Warrior, the leadership of the raris-ta was taken over by a Skidi chief, Victory Call, and it became more and more a composite with many typically Pawnee ceremonial features added to the original Wichita nucleus. Among both Pawnee and Wichita, the participants in the ceremony were grouped around a central fireplace into two halves, one part in a northern "arc" and one in the southern. These were again subdivided into two "positions," each in the semicardinal directions: southeast, southwest, northeast, northwest.

In the raris-ta, at each end of these "stations," a number of cult leaders were seated, the positions signifying the ages of a man—southeast, youth; southwest, fully grown men, northwest, men in their prime; and northeast, old men. (The more usual Pawnee symbolism designates the west positions for youth; the cardinal positions for maturity and the east for old age—more particularly the southeast).

The procedure was for gourds and ceremonial bows to be brought to the first station at the southeast and for the men to begin to rattle and sing. Then someone would get up and dance, and eventually a feat of sleight-of-hand would be performed. Then further dancing, and for the next round the rattles and bows would be taken to the next or southwest station, and they would begin to sing—dancers would get up and another sleight-of-hand performance would be carried out, and so on through the two other stations—northwest and northeast. In the course of these performances the dancers jumped diagonally over the fireplace toward the diagonally opposite semicardinal "station," and a complete performance would include "forming a star," that is, making two diagonal crossings in the opposite direction.

The Pawnee pictograph for a star was an equal-armed cross like our plus sign and the star referred to was Sirius, the star of the southeast—the Wolf Star. The Pawnee referred to this star as Takirixki-tiuhats, Wolf-He is deceived, which refers to a legend in the mythology. Performances of trance-induction were also carried out between members of the diagonally opposite semicardinal "stations." Many observers have attested to the great skill of the Pawnee as illusionists. This ceremony was carried out in the fall for ten days after the harvest, nine night sessions, and a tenth all-day episode.

The ceremonies of the Association of Doctor Cults occupied thirty days after the harvest and comprised elaborate animal-mine performances and dances, some of them in the public dance-grounds in the open. An aspect of the animal miming was sleight-of-hand and trance induction between members of the different cults. It was characterized by public parades and was an elaborate Grand Opera with a central theme, an integrated vision story and songs, dances, and performances. In it the Doctors who had charge of the health of the people affirmed their kinship with the living things of nature—the wild animals, the birds, and the plants.

In 1867, the raris-ta was becoming so popular that a bitter rivalry developed between the leaders of the established Doctor Association and the raris-ta leaders. On his death bed, Victory Call attributed his death to sorcery by Big Doctor, of the Doctor Association. There is reason to believe that there were rival cults at an earlier time that finally became integrated into a larger composite cult.

In the Pawnee religious scheme, the Doctors were in charge of the realm of the earth and the water and the official priesthood of the Heavens and the stars and constellations. While all life and creation had its source in the Heavens, the cultivated crops were in a more immediate relationship with Cosmic realm. The palladium of the cosmic theology was an elongated bundle containing ceremonial paraphernalia wrapped in a tanned hide and tied around with a rope of braided buffalo hair, its form and mode of wrapping symbolizing a particular spirit.

Among the Skidi, whose theology was the most highly organized of all the Pawnee bands, there were twelve sacred bundles, with a certain variation in the objects they contained, but each having two sacred ears of corn of a special archaic breed grown especially for the bundles and renewed after the harvest each fall. Each of these ears of corn had an individual name, and as the bundles hung over the sacred altar in the earth lodge, offerings were made to it, and the ears of corn were addressed by their names. Every spring the ceremonial cycle began with a ceremony of the five official priests, who went to each bundle in succession, singing of the steps of the creation of the universe, of the star gods, and of the formation of the political federation of villages into the Skidi Band long ago. Many of these songs accompany an elaborate ceremony performed at the time when the ground was first broken for planting the corn. This ceremony is called Awari, which signifies activity or motion, and in the course of it, motions of breaking the earth are made with the adze-like hoe, made with a buffalo shoulder blade sharpened along the edge so that it can break the ground.

Like all American Indian groups, raiding parties went into enemy territory, but among the Pawnee, glory was far from the sole motive. Most of all they went to take booty—valuable costumes and decorative objects made of hard-to-get materials and also dried and preserved buffalo meat. There is evidence that this was an old pattern, but horses, as a highly mobile and convenient kind of booty, were certainly a prime objective.

The Pawnee always set out on their raids on foot, particularly with the expectation of getting horses—but they also packed the booty they got on their own backs. Scalps were taken as concrete evidence for the people at home that one had been in the land of the enemy, and honor was given for touching the enemy during battle, provided this could be attested to by an eyewitness or other conclusive evidence, sometimes even an erstwhile enemy during a time of truce.

Among the Plains Indians, the young men formed themselves into military societies under whose auspices raids were undertaken. Among the Pawnee, societies seemingly comparable in form, were not for this purpose but for national defense against enemy attack of the settlements and for providing official police during the semi-annual tribal buffalo-hunting expeditions.

A primary characteristic of Pawnee life was its dual alternations through the seasons of horticultural activities and tribal migrations south and west across the State of Nebraska to attack the buffalo herds, bringing home the dried and preserved meat for storage. In the spring they lived in settled villages and tended to the planting of the crops; in the summer (the corn being laid by) they migrated for the summer buffalo hunt; in the fall they returned to the villages to harvest, dry, and store the crops; and in the winter again they migrated to the buffalo-hunting grounds to attack the herd.

A storage pit in conjunction with each house held more than a year's supply of dried and preserved buffalo meat, corn, beans, and squash. At the western wall of every house there was a sacred altar on which the buffalo skull rested, and above it hung the sacred bundle with its ears of corn, signifying their dual dependence.

There were songs associated with the veneration of the buffalo, along with songs to accompany the Hoop and Pole Game. It comprised the rolling of a hoop down a long playing field and aiming a spear or pole at it, symbolizing buffalo mating, the hoop representing the female. At the same time the buffalo hunt with a spear was symbolized. This game was a constant and characteristic feature of Pawnee life, the men betting heavily on the sidelines. The gaming grounds were a favorite rendezvous for the men to watch the game, to meet and talk, or just sit around.

Another favorite game of the men was the Hand Game, in which two opposing teams sat on opposite sides of an oblong fire pit, two members of one side hiding a pair of long white tubular beads in their hands and representatives of the opposite side trying to guess the combination of beads and empty hands among the four. This was definitely a game of war symbolism—of attack on the enemy and reprisal—and the betting was very heavy. The players on opposite sides sometimes tried to strike each other, but the whole group combined to prevent them from actually doing so.

In this brief summary, I have been able only to suggest some of the richness of traditional Pawnee life. The dispossessed Sioux, who, for several centuries, had continued to be pressed westward from their original home around the Great Lakes, carried on a desperate crescendo of attack upon the Pawnee, attempting to take over their lands and their hunting grounds. They early acquired guns from French traders to the east, and as they added to these horses, which came ultimately from Spanish sources in the Southwest, they became a powerful military force, armed and mounted, and more and more displaced peoples who had formerly been settled joined up with them.

It is estimated that in 1780 the Pawnee numbered 12,000, in 1855, 4,000. Epidemic disease was also a major killer. In 1855, the Dakota Sioux alone are said to have had 30,000. In 1865 there were 3,400 Pawnee and on August 5, 1873, while on their summer buffalo hunt, accompanied by an agency-appointed trail agent, the hunters were massacred by a band of 800-1,000 Sioux warriors, who then proceeded to attack the rest of the encampment, including the women, children, and old people who had been rushed to a ravine near Trenton, Nebraska, for shelter. The death toll was very high, and finally, after visiting parties among the Wichita to the south had sounded out the possibility of migrating there, the movement became a landslide in spite of all the chiefs could do to dissuade them from leaving their own territory.

They migrated to Oklahoma in three contingents under different leaders. By 1876 the Pawnee had all left their ancestral home that they had occupied for 600 years. The move was disastrous for many of the people sickened in the new climate and from the hardships of the journey and the need to develop new resources for food, clothing, and shelter. By 1879, three years after the last move, they numbered 1,440, and by the census of 1910, 630—a loss of 94 percent in 130 years of contact. In 1928, when I first went to Pawnee Oklahoma to record the language, they numbered 750, and today (c. 1965) there are 1,800 on the tribal rolls.

Today remembrance of past traditions is faint, and most of the Pawnee have found their way into professions and trades—numbering among them engineers, accountants and business managers, a journalist and illustrator, a fine artist, a former Major League baseball player, a professional radio entertainer, a psychiatric social worker, nurses, clerical workers, carpenters, and others, with their working homes scattered throughout the country.

But their feeling for the past is not lost, and every year many return to Pawnee, Oklahoma, for a period of homecoming together.

But in 1928 there were a number of old people whose only language was Pawnee, whose youth was spent in Nebraska, living in the traditional villages and going on buffalo hunts. Their memory of their life was vivid, and they hoped to make a final record so people would know "what they had done."

After working on the morphology of the language in order to get materials for its semantic study, I tried to get as detailed an account of old Pawnee life as I could. I enlisted the help of Mark Evarts, who had lived in Nebraska as a boy and migrated to Oklahoma with the last contingent in his early teens. Later he joined a group of his friends and went to Carlisle School in Pennsylvania and, trying to adapt himself in New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and other cities, he returned to Pawnee, lonely and broken in spirit in the early 1890s, when an important religious revival known as the Ghost Dance was in progress.

By religious means, the Indians thought to turn back the clock, "blow away the white people and the devastating new conditions" and bring back their dead and old ways. With all his relatives and friends dead, Mark Evarts embraced this belief wholeheartedly, put away his new ways, returned to speaking only his own language, and, in a series of visions, saw with vivid clarity Pawnee life as he had lived it in his youth. Later, marriage, the birth of a daughter, and a successful farm seemed to bring him satisfaction, but his wife died of tuberculosis and his daughter followed at the age of twelve, and by 1924 his farm was lost through a bank loan in a bad crop year.

When I came to Pawnee in 1928 we first became acquainted through my friend Stacy Matlock and my linguistic interpreter, Henry Chapman, with whom I worked on the South Band Pawnee dialects. I was looking for material on the linguistic differences between the South Band and the Skidi. Henry Chapman continued to act as my interpreter, but finally Mark Evarts became exasperated with the obvious difficulty of direct translation and began to work with me in heavily accented English.

When we came to know each other, I realized that he would be the ideal informant for the detailed account of traditional Pawnee life I was looking for. The plan we devised was to get a complete round of an entire year of Pawnee life in all its detail when Pawnee society was still functioning and Mark was a small boy, roughly the year 1867. Beginning on a spring morning when he awakened in an earth lodge, he recounted the whole scene: the people, the day's round, etc. From 1929 to 1936 we continued this plan, finally completing the four-seasonal round in its normal course.

This material was collected in my book that was originally published in 1965, titled The Lost Universe. In 1936, Evarts came to New York and recorded many of the songs associated with the Pawnee rituals for me. He made a small water drum out of a glazed earthenware specimen jar with a piece of tanned hide drawn over the mouth and fastened in the traditional way, filling it partly with water through the skin. The drum that was used by the Pawnee was made of a section of cottonwood log that was partly hollowed out by rotting and then scraping, and then the skin drawn over the mouth and tied as in our substitute. A skin-covered drumstick was also improvised for the occasion and a gourd rattle was used. These recordings were issued on record in 1965 by Folkways.