Social life of the Crow Indians / by Robert H. Lowie.

  • Robert Lowie
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Social life of the Crow Indians / by Robert H. Lowie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ORIGIN TRADITIONS. Strictly speaking, there are no traditions accounting for the origin of clans, but merely fragmentary statements, for the most part giving a naively rationalistic reason for the adoption of certain clan names. Shot-in-the-arm’s wife said: “In the beginning there were certain families, all of one clan. Later, but very long ago, a chief divided the people into different clans, and from that time on the division remained.” The i‘pi’skurucé received the name ack-dmne because on one occasion. several clansmen went on the warpath and abandoned one of their party who had been shot. The other Indians said, “The members of this clan are like the Piegan,’’ whence the name. A more frequent and plausible. explanation is that the incident mentioned gave rise to the name dcbatctie for the Piegan clan, the awl being apparently the symbol of perfidy and meanness.! According to this version, the name ack-.dmne was due to the. fact that a member of the clan named One-eye killed another Crow, thus acting like a Piegan enemy. ‘The name “No-ear lodge”’ is connected with the Piegan clan, one member having cut off his wife’s ear as a punishment. for adultery. Fire-weasel said that the dcbatsi’rise were so named because they married within the clan, “not opening their eyes” to see whom they were marrying. isa’'tskawie is given as the old name of the a’wut’acé. Once this clan left the main body of the Crow for several weeks in search of food. They killed fat buffalo, and when they had eaten of the meat, their expectoration burnt like tallow in the fire, whence their name. According to Bull-chief, the i’sawatstz clan was called “ Not-mixed’” because most of the members were war captains; that is to say, it was a clan. in which captains were “not mixed”’ with other people. Gray-bull declared that one of his ancestors must have eaten dung,. since his clan was called acpénuce; that the ancestor of the birik-6’oce whis-- tled while swimming about in the water; that the acitsi’te had bigger lodge- poles than other clans; and so forth. According to Crane-bear, a woman in a certain clan was clumsy and put up a tipi that looked spotted and not properly scraped on the outside,. wherefore her people were called dexatsé. ) Bull-chief says that the Pretty Prairie Dogs adopted into the Medicine-. Pipe organization a Sioux named “Whistling Water,” and thereafter the- other people called them by the same name. acpénuce was a name con-- 1 Morgan translates ‘‘Treacherous Lodges,’’ Curtis ‘‘Backbiter Lodge.’’
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