A. J. Hill

“ The prophet then, with the majestic mien of a god, places in his hand the desired weapons, as he says, “Go thou and test the swing of this tomahawk, and the thrust of this spear; but when in triumph thou shalt return—a man—forget not thy vows to the gods.”
In this manner every man, it is said, is enlisted into the service of the war prophet, and enlisted for life. ”

“ They have done all they could and dare do, in the circumstances, to oppose the progress of truth among their people, by slanders and snares, gibes and abuse, and violence, and even murder. But in spite of their vigilance and efforts to oppose, truth advanced with slow but steady step, and worked like “leaven in the meal.” Old men and young men, old women and young women, boys and girls, left them, and by open profession of regard for truth, stood boldly up in the face of their lies. ”

“ The medicine man is not only familiar with the superior gods who are out of him, but he also has inferior gods dwelling in him, to satisfy whose cravings he frequently, and in the most public manner, tears off with his teeth and eats the raw, quivering, bleeding flesh of newly-slaughtered animals, like a starving beast or bird of prey, devouring parts of dogs or fish entire, not excepting bones and scales. ”

“ Then the master throws off the covering, and chewing a piece of the bone of the Onktehi, spits it over him, and he begins to show signs of returning life. Then as the master pats energetically upon the breast of the initiated person, he, convulsed, strangling, struggling and agonizing, heaves up the shell which falls from his mouth on a sack placed in readiness to receive it. Life is restored and entrance is effected into the awful mysteries. He belongs henceforth to the medicine-dance, and has a right to enjoy the medicine feast. ”

“ The general name for the gods in their dialect is this, Taku-Wakan, i. e., that which is wakan.
Whatever, therefore, is above the comprehension of a Dakota, is God. Consequently, he sees gods everywhere. Not Jehovah every where, but Taku-Wakan.
This is the starting point in their superstitions, but it is not with ease that one can arrive at the other end of the subject. It runs out like the division of matter, to divinity. To use an expression of one of their own most intelligent men, “there is nothing that they do not revere as God.” Wakan is the one idea of divine essence. ”

“ The chief, if not the only difference that they recognize to exist, among all the tens of thousands of their divinities, is the unessential one of a difference in the degree of their wakan qualities, or in the purposes for which they are wakan.
We speak of the medicine-man, medicine-feast, medicine-dance, and the great-spirit of the Indian, while he speaks of wakan-man, the wakan-feast, the wakan-dance, and the great-wakan.
Evidence is wanting to show that these people divide their Taku-Wakan into classes of good or evil. They are all simply wakan. ”

“ Even those of the pagan party who surrendered themselves to our military authorities, felt that the Wood Lake battle was the result of the strife between their Medicine-men and “God Almighty;” and from that day, in their minds, the doom of their gods and of their representatives was sealed. They soon cast away even the symbols of their divinities, and a large portion of them began to seek to know how to worship the God of the Bible.
Those wakan-men will never suffer their people to enter into an honest treaty of peace with us while they are wakan-men. They can never be trusted. ”

“ They kill and make alive. When occasion requires they seem to calm the tempest, or to raise the storm, and converse with thunder and lightning, as with a familiar friend and equal. In their devotional exercises, at times, they wrangle with the gods, charge them with duplicity, and are defiant. If one of them is killed by the electric fluid, which sometimes happens, it only proves the truth, to the living, of all he had taught them concerning the Wakinyan, and that he had provoked their anger by his sins. ”

“ Dakota society—an influence which bears with all its force on each individual of their victims, which tends to crush him down still deeper, if indeed there are depths below them, in ignorance, superstition, degradation and misery of soul and body, and force them into an unreserved surrender to their own whims and caprices. Of these wakan men there are from five to twenty five in each of the little clans of Dakotas. ”

“ In particular, they are invested with the irresistable powers of the gods to do good or evil, with their knowledge and cunning, and their everywhere present influence over mind, instinct and passion. They are instructed how to inflict diseases and to heal them, to discover things concealed from common men, to foretell future events, to manufacture implements of war, and infuse into them the missive virtue—the tonwan—of the gods, and to perform all sorts of wonders. ”

“ If he fails he fully believes that the penalty may be the infliction of any, or all the evils to which an Indian is exposed. A man made a trip on foot from the “Little Rapids,” on the Minnesota river, to Big Stone Lake, and purchased and brought on his back, a pack of dried buffalo meat, weighing, probably, sixty or seventy pounds, a distance of nearly two hundred miles, to be used in the medicine-dance—a sacrifice to the Onktehi and to the souls of the dead. ”

“ To establish their claims to inspiration, these characters must, of course, perform things that are wakan, in a manner to satisfy those on whom they purpose to impose their superstitions.
For this purpose, they artfully lay hold of all that is strange and mysterious, and if possible turn it to their own advantage. To do this is the one object and effort of their lives. It is their study day and night, at all times and on all occasions. They think about it when awake, and dream about it when asleep. ”

“ There are occasions, also, when a man dances the sun dance as a thank-offering. He is sick and apprehends he will die. He makes a vow that if his life is spared he will dance to the sun. Or, he is on the war path and he prays to the great hunkayapi for success, promising in that event to dance to his honor. ”

“ The influence of the medicine-man in this capacity, permeates the whole community, and it is hardly possible to over-estimate it. Those who are led by him will be murderers, it is their trade. They are commissioned for this. Those who are bound to these war-prophets, by such rites, will be led by him unless they renounce their religion.
The Indian, if he can, will kill a foe, whoever he be, as long as he is a pagan. He is as apt to do it as a duck is to swim. ”

“ The Hurons, having so much audacity that they imagined the Sioux were incapable of resisting them without fire-arms and weapons of iron, conspired with the Ottowas to make war upon them, in order to drive them from their country, so as to be able to spread themselves more, to procure means of subsistence. ”

“ In almost innumerable instances, families sacrifice all that they have on these pretenders, and to be abandoned by them is felt to be a dire calamity. Parents are as careful to train their children to respect and revere them, as was an early Puritan to inspire his children with reverence for the divine institutions of Christendom. They are respected. They sit in the highest and have the best of everything. If some among them are thought to be mere pretenders, this circumstance only serves to enhance the importance of those who are believed to be true. ”

“ The rules of conduct which he gave them, were that “they should honor and revere the medicine sack, honor all who should belong to the dance, make frequent medicine feasts, refrain from theft, not listen to birds, (slander) and female members should not have a plurality of husbands.” The sum of the good promised to the faithful, was “honor from the members of the institution, frequent invitations to the feast, abundance of fowl, with supernatural assistance to consume it, and long life here, with a red dish and spoon in the life to come.” ”

“ Sometimes they pray to it, generally with the honorable title of Hunkayapi. Sometimes, as a god, it communicates with men in dreams and visions. But the nature of the communication is that the men should dance the wiwanyagwacipi, with the promise of success in hunting or war. Generally the object of dancing to the sun is to secure victory over enemies. In this aspect it is a waihdusna or self-immolation to the sun; it is an offering up of one’s strength and manhood to secure the aid of the sun in the day of battle. ”

“ Besides, the great struggle which at the present time exists between the heathen and the Christian Dakotas, is freely expressed to be a strife, between the old system of worship rendered to the Taku Wakan, and the new, which is rendered to the Wanku Tanku. The Christians are universally distinguished from the pagans, as being worshippers of Wakan Tanku, or as we speak, the Great Spirit.
One word more by way of introduction. It is true of all the Dakota gods, or wakans, that they are male and female, are subject to the same laws of propagation under which men and animals exist, and are mortal. ”

“ The two families already mentioned, like the Dakota and the Chippewa, are always in mortal strife. Neither has power to resist the tonwan of the other, if it strikes him. Their attacks are never open, and neither is safe, except as he eludes the vigilance of the other. The fossil remains of the mastodon are confidently believed to be the bones of the Onktehi which have been killed by the Wakinyan. These relics of the gods are carefully preserved and held in awful esteem, for their wakan virtues. The Wakinyan, in his turn, is often surprised and killed by the Onktehi. ”

“ These objects of superstition, are said to be armed with the bow and arrows, and with the deer-hoof rattle, which things are charged with electricity. One of the varieties carries a drum, which is also charged with the same fluid. For a drumstick, he holds a small Wakinyan god by the tail, striking on the drum with the beak of the god. This would seem to us to be an unfortunate position for a god to be in, but it must be remembered that it is wakan, and the more absurd a thing is the more wakan.
One of these gods, in some respects, answers to the wreathed zephyr of Grecian mythology. ”

“ Nothing can exceed the antagonism that lies between truth and the system of superstition which is the subject of the foregoing paper. Root, trunk, branches and leaves there is not the smell of truth to be found on it. It is plainly opposed to truth and truth is opposed to it. It is opposed by the truth of history, the truth of science, the truth of “animated nature,” social truth, political truth and spiritual truth. All truth tends directly to its destruction. A little boy was one day listening to a missionary who was endeavoring to explain to him the workings of the magnetic telegraph. ”

“ It is to be remarked that the country where they are [the Sioux] is nothing but lakes and marshes, filled with wild rice, separated, the ones from the others, by little tongues of land, which, at the most, from one lake to the other, are but thirty to forty steps, and, in many cases, only five to six or a little more. These lakes, or marshes, contain fifty or more leagues square, [19 or 20,000 square miles] and are divided by no river but the [29] Louisianne, which has its bed in the middle, and into which a part of their waters is emptied. ”

“ In their external form, the Onktehi are said to resemble the ox, only that they are of immense proportions. This god has power to extend his horns and tail so as to reach the skies. These are the organs of his power. The dwelling place of the male is in the water, and the spirit of the female animates the earth. Hence, when the Dakota seems to be praying, chanting or offering sacrifices to the water or to the earth, it is to this family of the gods that the worship is rendered. ”

“ Immediately over where the eyes should be, is a semi-circular line of lightning resembling an inverted half-moon, from beneath which project downward two chains of lightning, zigzaging and diverging from each other as they descend. ”

“ The doctor ascertains the sin which has been committed, and the particular god which has been offended and inflicted the disease. Then he makes an image of the offended god, which he hangs on a pole and which is shot by three or four persons in rapid succession. As the image falls the spirit of the god which is in the doctor, leaps out, and falling upon the spirit represented by the image, kills it. ”

“ After consulting with his goddess, the god holding up his left hand, and pattering on the back of it with the other, produced myriads of little shells, whose virtue is to restore life to those who have been slain by the tonwan of the sack. (Each of the members of the medicine dance is thought to have one of these shells in his body.) ”

“ Much as the savage loves ease and self-indulgence he will cheerfully subject himself to almost any privation, discomfort and toil, for days, weeks, or even months together, in order to procure the necessary provisions for a sacrifice which the priest assures him the gods demand. ”

“ On the 5th day of August, 1826, Lewis Cass and Thomas L. McKenney, commissioners on the part of the United States, made and concluded a treaty with the Chippewa Indians at Fond du Lac, Lake Superior, by which the Chippewas granted to the United States the right to search for, and [10] carry away, any metals or minerals from any part of their country. No efforts under this grant were ever made; but from that period (and even before,) explorations, from time to time, were made by individuals; and many indications of rich mines, (now within the limits of Minnesota,) were discovered. ”

“ They make use of all the means in their power, and their zeal never grows cold.
They assume familiarity with whatever astonishes other people, with a degree of self complacency, and an air of impudence and assurance which strikes the observers with amazement. They foretell future events with a degree of accuracy or of ambiguity which is sufficient for their purpose. Those at one village affect to be familiar with what is transpiring at another village leagues distant [51] They predict the result of a war expedition as if they had already been there ”

“ After repeated experiments, the doctor often discovers that the god who inflicts the disease is mightier than the one by whom he is inspired, and he desists. Now, unless another doctor is found, competent to expel the demon, death ensues. The wakan-men are wakan to a degree corresponding to the strength of the gods by whom they are respectively inspired. ”

“ They created the wild rice and a variety of prairie grass, the seed of which bears some resemblance to that of the rice.
At the western extremity of the earth, which is presumed to be a circular plain surrounded by water, is a high mountain, on the summit of which is a beautiful mound. On this mound is the palace of this family of gods. The palace opens towards each of the four cardinal points, and at each doorway is stationed a watcher. A butterfly stands at the east entrance, a bear at the west, a reindeer at the north, and a beaver at the south. ”

“ The Wakinyan gods are represented as ruthless, cruel and destructive in their disposition, and ever exert their powers for the gratification of this, their ruling propensity, at the expense of whatever may come in their way. They are ever on the “war path,” and are “sharp shooters.”
Once for all, it may be here stated, that a mortal hatred exists between [43] the different families of the gods, like that which exists between Indians of different tribes and languages. ”