As the men in former days used to know events beforehand, as has just been told, it has long been the rule for no one to reveal his personal mystery, which he regards as “wakan.”
HEYOKA WOMEN.
§ 224. Bushotter gave the following account of a female Heyoka who was killed by lightning:
A certain woman whom I saw after she had been killed by lightning belonged to the Heyoka Society. When she walked, she carried a pipe with the mouthpiece pointing upward, as she thought that the Thunder-beings would put the mouthpiece into their mouths, though the act would immediately cause her death.
§ 225. “Women used to dream about the Thunder-beings, just as the men did, and in those dreams the Heyoka man or woman made promises to the Thunder-beings. If the dreamers kept their promises, it was thought that the Thunder-beings helped them to obtain whatever things they desired; but if they broke their promises, they were sure to be killed by the Thunder-beings during some storm. For this reason the Heyoka members worshiped the Thunder-beings, whom they honored, speaking of them as wakan.”
§ 226. Some of the women sing, and some do not; but all let their hair hang loosely down their backs, and their dresses consist of a kind of cloth or a robe sewed down the middle of the back. Sometimes the cloth is all blue, at other times half is red and half is blue. Some times there is beadwork on the dress. Even the Heyoka women wear the long red cloth trailing on the ground before and behind them, in imitation of the young dandies of the tribe.
IYA, THE GOD OF GLUTTONY.
§ 227. Lynd speaks of the “vindictive Iya” as driving the hunters “back from the hunt to the desolation of their lodges”.[170]
And Riggs has written:[171]
A people who feast themselves so abundantly as the Dakotas do, when food is plenty, would necessarily imagine a god of gluttony. He is represented as extremely ugly, and is called E-ya. He has the power to twist and distort the human face, and the women still their crying children by telling them that the E-ya will catch them.