“My mother was a curer. She just smoke and talk. You would meet her on the way to town mebbe and say ‘I don't feel good’ and she'd just sit down and smoke and talk [pray?] a little and then mebbe tell you what was wrong and what you should do.
“Along about the first war I got sick and couldn't make no water at all. My mother smoked and then spread ashes all over my belly and talked some and after that I passed a lot of blood and got better.”[5]
Far more important than the curers, however, were the Indian doctors. Such men were never exclusive specialists and were apparently expected to share in the work of hunting and fishing with less gifted men. With the introduction of money by the whites, shamans appear to have approached something like specialization, charging fees of up to twenty dollars a session for their services.
Until the middle 1930's there were a number of shamans among the Washo (Stewart 1944). However, with the introduction of the peyote cult, which among the Washo is concerned with curing, the shaman was superseded. Today only a single Washo practices shamanistic curing. Interestingly enough this man, now seventy-five, was an informant of Lowie's in the 1920's, and at that time Lowie described him as a sophisticated young Washo, somewhat mystic and with shamanistic ambitions (Lowie 1939).
This man, Henry Rupert, spent ten years in the Indian school at the Stewart Agency and after graduation worked for a number of years in a printing plant in Reno. When questioned about the old days he was a fair informant, seldom offering more information than was asked for and clearly enjoying the business of making a white man work for every scrap of information. He was also given to dropping subtle hints and waiting with stolid indifference to see if I had been alert. He did not deny his shamanistic practices but was less than willing to discuss them in detail.
His equipment, he admitted (but refused to show me), consisted of a butterfly-cocoon rattle, an eagle-bone whistle, and a feather headband. “I don't really do nothing but help nature,” he said. When I replied that only some people know how to help nature he was gratified and smiled. “Oh well, it's all psychological anyway,” he answered, confirming Lowie's description of him as a sophisticate.
He is noted for his rather atypical practice of tending a garden, which consists mostly of fruit trees, and for his open liking for old-fashioned foods, which he collects, including fly grubs and locusts. I was not able to observe his curing procedures, but they were described to me by another informant, a seventy-five-year-old woman, considered one of the most progressive of the residents of Dresslerville.