The women are very industrious, rising usually at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning to prepare the day's supply of tortillas or corn cake. During the day they prepare tobacco (kutz) and make cigarettes; gather cotton (taman), which they spin (kuch), weave (sakal), and embroider for garments; weave mats of palm leaf and baskets (xush) of a variety of liana (ak); make pottery (ul), and cotton and henequen cord, of which they construct hammocks (ǩan). In addition to these tasks they do the family cooking and washing, look after the children, and help their husbands to attend to the animals. Till late at night the women may be seen spinning, embroidering, and hammock-making by the light of a native candle or a small earthenware cuhoon-nut oil lamp, meanwhile laughing and chatting gayly over the latest village scandal, the older ones smoking cigarettes, while the men squat about on their low wooden stools outside the house gravely discussing the weather, the milpas, the hunting, or the iniquities of the Alcalde. Among the Indian women of British Honduras the old customs are rapidly dying out; spinning and weaving are no longer practiced, pottery making has been rendered unnecessary by the introduction of cheap iron cooking pots and earthenware, candles have given place to mineral oil lamps, and even the metate is being rapidly superseded by small American hand mills for grinding the corn. The men's time is divided between agriculture, hunting, fishing, and boat and house building, though at times they undertake tasks usually left to the women, as mat and basket making, and even spinning and weaving. The Indians of British Honduras who live near settlements do light work for the rancheros and woodcutters; they have the reputation of being improvident and lazy, and of leaving their work as soon as they have acquired sufficient money for their immediate needs, and this is to some extent true, as the Indian always wants to invest his cash in something which will give an immediate return in pleasure or amusement. The men are silent, though not sullen, very intelligent in all matters which concern their own daily life, but singularly incurious as to anything going on outside of this. They are civil, obliging, and good-tempered, and make excellent servants, when they can be got to work, but appear to be for the most part utterly lacking in ambition or in any desire to accumulate wealth with which to acquire comforts and luxuries not enjoyed by their neighbors. It happens occasionally that an individual does perforce acquire wealth, as in the case of the head chief of the Icaichè Indians, who was paid a salary by the Mexican Government to keep his people quiet, and royalties on chicle cut on his lands by various contractors. He accumulated a considerable sum, all in gold coin, which he stored in a large demijohn and hid in the bush. At his death, as no one knew the place where the demijohn was buried, the money was permanently lost. They are remarkably skillful at finding their way in the bush by the shortest route from point to point, possessing a faculty in this respect which amounts almost to an instinct; they are skillful also at following the tracks of men and animals in the bush by means of very slight indications, as broken twigs and disturbed leaves, imperceptible to an ordinary individual. The men are very stoical in bearing pain. I have removed both arms at the shoulder joints, with no other surgical instrument than a long butcher's knife, and no anesthetic except several drinks of rum, for an Indian, crushed between the rollers of a native sugar mill, without his uttering a single complaint. The Indians are undoubtedly cruel, but not wantonly so, as the shocking acts of cruelty reported as being perpetrated by them from time to time are usually by way of reprisal for similar or worse acts on the part of the Mexicans. Before the rising of the Indians in 1848, they were throughout this part of Yucatan practically in a state of slavery, and were often treated by their Spanish masters with the utmost barbarity. As an instance of this it is recorded of a well-known merchant of Bacalar that he was in the habit of burying his Indian servants in the ground to the neck, with their heads shaved, exposed to the hot sun; their heads were then smeared with molasses and the victims were left to the ants; and this punishment was inflicted for no very serious offense. It is hardly to be wondered at that such treatment left in the Indians' hearts an undying hatred for their masters which, when in their turn they gained the ascendancy, found vent in acts of the most horrible cruelty—flogging, burning, mutilation, and even crucifixion.
Dress
The men wear hats of platted palm leaf, which they make themselves; those woven from coarse split palm leaf are known as xani pok, those of very fine leaf, like Panama hats, bear the name bomi pok (pl. [1]). They wear cotton trousers (eex), or in some sections short cotton drawers (xkulex), with a short, loose, shirt-like jacket of cotton hanging outside the trousers. On the feet they use sandals of danta hide (xanapkeuel) held in place by a leather or henequen thong passing between the great and second toes and around the back of the heel to the front of the instep, where it is fastened. Formerly the cotton was grown, spun, and woven at home, but nowadays it is giving place to cheap imported English and American goods, while the sandals are being superseded by moccasins and even by imported shoes. The moccasins the Indians make themselves, tanning the hides (usually of deer or antelope) in lime and red mangrove bark and stitching the parts together with thin strips of leather. These moccasins, which are made on crude wooden lasts, are very comfortable and wear well.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY BULLETIN 64 PLATE 1.
GROUP OF SANTA CRUZ INDIANS