COMPOSITE NAMES.

§ 392. There are other composite names, most of which are found in the census lists of the Dakota tribes, whose gentes are said to have no animal names, and a few have been obtained from the personal name lists of the Omaha, Ponka, and Kansa, and the census lists of the Mandan, and Hidatsa, that give animal names to some or all of their gentes. In the Winnebago name list no such personal names have been found, though that people has animal names for its gentes.

Each of these composite names may refer to a vision of a composite being, who was subsequently regarded as the guardian spirit of the person who had the dream or vision. Or the bearer of such a name may have had a dream or vision of two distinct powers. In the pictograph of such a name, the powers (or symbols of the two powers) represented in the name are joined (see § 374).

§ 393. The following is a list of composite names which may be found to symbolize the four elements. The elements are designated by their respective abbreviations: E for earth, F for fire; A for air, and W for water. The interrogation mark after any name denotes a provisional or conjectural assignment.

There are several “Waśićun” names: Cloud Waśićun, Fire Waśićun, Night Waśićun, and Iron Waśićun. The last one has for its pictograph a man with a hat, i. e., a white man, and can hardly have any mystic significance. The name, Waśićun, originally meant “guardian spirit,” but it is now applied to white people (§ 122). In the absence of the pictographs, we can not tell whether Cloud Waśićun, Fire Waśićun, and Night Waśićun refer to guardian spirits (in which case they are mystic names connected with cults) or to white men.

Most of the above names are taken from the Dakota census lists. The ┴ɔiwere lists furnish only two composite names of this character: Iron Hawk Female, and Pigeon Thunder-being. The Kansa list has Moon Hawk and Moon Hawk Female, the latter name, which is found in the Omaha and Ponka list, suggesting the Egyptian figure of a woman’s body with a hawk’s head, surmounted by a crescent moon. Horse Eagle appears to be a sort of Pegasus. Buffalo-bull Eagle may refer to the myth of the Orphan and the Buffalo-woman, in which we learn that the Buffalo people ascended through the air to the upper world.[319]