And no one came to find the spoor;
The branches were broken and the leaves were turned,
And no one came to find the spoor.
And where were my brothers and the sons of the chief’s brothers,
That no one came to find the spoor? etc.
The petitioner will repeat his or her song for hours without ceasing. To all appearance no one takes the slightest notice of his presence, unless the dance should come to an end during the recitation, when the performers jeer and laugh at his tale of woe. This has no effect upon the plaintiff, who continues gravely to voice his grievance. The chief must, however, take note of the matter, and if it be thought of sufficient importance it is brought up for discussion and judgment at the next tribal conference in tobacco palaver. At any rate, this method of airing a grievance has the effect of placing the culprit on the black-list, in view of the resultant publicity; and the natural wariness that is shown by others of the tribe in all dealings with such suspect for the future, is in itself a punishment for the crime.
It is difficult in the extreme to obtain any reliable evidence of the existence of initiation dances. Sixty years ago Dr. Russell Wallace described as the initiation dance of the girls of the Uaupes a dance which, six years ago, Dr. Koch-Grünberg, the latest and most painstaking of Amazonian investigators, found as a Jurupari ceremony confined to men on the river Aiary. The dance is the same in each case, and depends for its distinction upon the infliction of serious bodily injury. The mysteries of initiation, as has been said, have not yet been fathomed in the Amazons, nor have those of Jurupari. There is undoubtedly a dance in which the performers beat their fellows with lianas until the blood is drawn and the victims faint with pain, but no white man has yet spoken with certainty upon its origin.[322] The dance is not known in the district between the Issa and the Japura, nor do the mysteries of initiation fall to be discussed in this chapter. Those are not matters which are readily laid bare to even the most enterprising investigator in the haunts of the aborigines.
According to Koch-Grünberg’s account, all the women, accompanied by the smaller boys, leave the maloka directly the notes of the flutes are heard, and either hide in the woods or in another house with closed exits. The performers circle round in quick marching time, blowing their flutes, which each holds in his right hand, his left resting on the right shoulder of the next man. At the completion of the circle they stand in line. One dancer then draws the long whip they all carry under their right arms, and while his companion holds his flute high up, blowing lustily, he gives him three blows on the side and stomach heavy enough to draw blood freely. This continues till all have taken part. There is no singing, but the gaping wounds and much drinking of kashiri rouse the performers to a state of wild excitement. This dance is followed by an ordinary one, in which the women take part.[323] Obviously none of the Issa-Japura tribes practise this dance, for I never saw any signs of the scars that must inevitably remain on the bodies of dancers cut in this wholesale fashion.
The account given by Bates of a dance at the Feast of Fruits among the Juri and the Passé Indians is an equally good description of some of the Issa-Japura harvest dances. The men carry long reeds instead of javelins, and with their left hands on their neighbours’ right shoulders move slowly to right and to left. The accompaniment is a song as drawling and monotonous as the movement, which will be continued for upwards of an hour at a time.[324]
In the pine-apple dance the Indians tie pine leaves to boughs and wave them as they move. The women of the chief, and possibly all the women of the tribe, form a semicircle with the chief in the centre, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. They carry the mid-rib of the Trooly palm or some similar wand, with a small pine, or often the pine-top, tied to the end.