“Well,” ended the shaman, “we will perform secretly to protect you.” The idea about the cross-guns was that as a spirit will not go against a spirit of its own kind, with the image on my back other guns and bullets would not attack me.
Again last year when I had the influenza here, and they wired home about it, my friend Cries-for-salmon gave fifteen dollars in gold to the shaman to have him visit me through his fox, the one who carries his messages. Weasels and wolferenes, wolferenes are the most powerful of all, may be messengers for the shamans, but the commonest messenger is the fox. The fox is swift and sly.
A boy should marry among his own people, but it is not customary for him to marry near kin, a first cousin. To have relations with a sister is othlang. Of such a boy, people would say, “There are so many girls, yet he did not have the courage to go with them, he went with his sister.” If he did go with his sister, he would be thinking at the same time of another girl. And for this reason, a sister, realizing she was a substitute, would feel outraged. A really weak-minded boy would even go with his mother. It is possible, for it is all in the dark, and no one speaks; merely some one will come, some one will go.
Cries-for-salmon has a brother who is dead or, as we say, “has gone.” In telling of his death you will hear about the death rites and the way the people mourn. I will tell you, too, of a woman relative of Cries-for-salmon, who died.
But first I would tell you of another relative of Cries-for-salmon who has been such an invalid since the birth of her first child that she can not sit up, and who will never have another child. She had been a woman who menstruated with the waning moon—the character of such women, it is thought, is poor. So, as women do, she went to the shaman to have him regulate her periods to fall with the growing moon—the best hearted, best natured women menstruate at that time. Again there was a time when this woman was much frightened because the menstrual flow did not stop. This time she asked an old woman shaman—sick women are apt to go to women shamans and to the wives or widows of shamans, and sick men, to men shamans—if she should consult a white doctor. “Yes,” said the old woman, “we don’t know what is going to happen nowadays.” Since the whites have come people have lost self-confidence. Formerly they were far more certain that the cause of sickness, of an epidemic, let us say, was not keeping the rules.
Well, when Cries-for-salmon’s relative was sick after her first child was born, she went again to the man shaman. On this occasion the shaman expressed a desire for her, but she refused. Ordinarily women will not refuse the shaman. Nor would their husbands expect them to. The old women tell you never to go against the will of the shaman. “That is one of the things you will have to watch,” an old woman once said to me. Nevertheless Cries-for-salmon’s relative refused, and she has been sick ever since, and ever since the other women have sneered at her.
Her husband, too, has been down and out. They were poor to start with, he lived in one of the few underground houses left at Anvik, and now he has only three poor dogs, bale-back dogs we call them, nor can he borrow a dog team. Not long since, he was charged with stealing green fish (fish fresh from the trap) from another man’s cache. “Why did you steal?” the old men asked him. “Don’t you know if you are hungry we will feed you?” And so they would. Food would be given to any one who was hungry, although sometimes in return he might be asked to help at the fish traps or in making snowshoes. With us it is only when a man is put into a mean position, when he has lost pride in himself, that he will steal. In this case, the man denied the theft, so the old men kept at him. “Why do you deny?” they asked. “We know what you have done. Don’t you know that there is somebody watching you?” You see, since it is customary for the young men to be most of the time in the kadjim, except when they are away hunting or in other settlements—on their return they go directly to the kadjim to tell the news and to give the jokes they have heard about the persons they know—the old men know pretty well what the young men are about, where they are. Besides there is the shaman. A man believes that the shaman knows what he is doing all the time. It is just because of this knowledge that the shaman is head of the village.
It is not only for cures, and to buy songs for hunting and trapping, that people go to the shaman: the shaman has to blow upon the masks which we put on to represent other beings (when we put them on we are not ourselves), and the shaman has to give power to the dancers by blowing on them at the ceremonies or, as we say, the annual performances, of which each has its own name. Until the shaman blows on it, a spirit mask is just like any other mask. Besides downy feathers, from the leg and breast of duck and goose, are fastened to a spirit mask and from the forehead there is the quill of a goose feather with a downy tuft tied to the tip. The masks of the fun makers are not blown on. The fun makers come out at intervals to give the dancers time to rest. The fun makers are usually young men, but sometimes a witty old man will act. I remember one old man—he was a shaman—and one of his jokes. He acted like a woman and he said, “Half of me belongs up river and half down river. How are you going to ‘fuss’ me?”
Men may wear female masks. There are certain parts women may not take, so men act for them. But there are female masks that women wear. Women never wear male masks. Women sing in the kadjim, too, to big drums, four feet in diameter, made of a sea animal’s stomach on a spruce frame—five drums that can be heard a mile or more away. There may be as many as a hundred and fifty persons singing at one time in the kadjim. But in the powerful dances—the hagerdelthlel—ordinary women do not sing, only the wives of chiefs and shamans.
After a mask is made, it belongs in the kadjim for a year, and some man will appropriate it to wear for the year—or longer if he likes, and if he performs well what the mask represents. The shaman does not make the masks—he is too busy. He is charged with the welfare of the whole village, and he may be called upon in any emergency—at an eclipse, for example. Once long ago, it is said, there was a great famine, the winter ran into two winters, and Moon said to the shaman, “Whenever I go out of the sky, the people may not look, they should go inside and cover the smoke hole until I have performed my duty.” Since then, at an eclipse, the shaman will send out fast runners to cry out, “Moon has gone under the sky! Stay indoors!” The shaman himself will go on top of the kadjim and chant and go through the motions the moon taught. When the moon reappears, the shaman will reënter the kadjim where every one has been sitting silent,—if a dance had been on at the time, it had stopped. The following morning all form a long line, the shaman in the lead. They encircle the village, forming an arc starting from the river and ending at the river, and, as I said before, taking in a half mile of woods above the village and half a mile below. They drum and sing and go through certain motions, each having a bundle of fish on his back.