When a person who was ill desired to try this medicine, he or some friend was required to give a handful of native tobacco and some other small present to the person who had the medicine. The hochinagen could do what he pleased with the presents. The hochinagen would cast into the fire a piece of the tobacco, at the same time saying to the medicine, which he then held in his hand, “Take a smell of this tobacco, for I am about to make use of you.” Then he would visit the sick man, and taking a small vessel he would go to a running stream, and after making an offering of tobacco to it in the name of the patient, he would dip up the water with the current, not against it. He took what water he could dip up in this manner.
If the sick man was not very ill, this one dose would cure him; but if he was very ill other hochinagen who have this same kind of medicine must come to assist in the cure. They must cook a kettle of white beans for themselves and the singers who come to sing that night; they would also give strength to the medicine by the burning of tobacco as directed by the birds.
The first sentence of the song is “Now, this is the medicine to be taken.” When the medicine is swallowed the words are, “Now, let it begin to work over all his body.”
If the patient recovered his health he must celebrate the event by preparing a feast, the chief dish of which must be a great kettle of hulled corn seasoned with meat or venison cut into small pieces.
The hochinagen who gave him the medicine must come to sing and dance in honor of the medicine through whose aid they were enabled to cure the patient. Some of the sentences employed in the songs are: “The spirits have come and they have cured the ill person”; “We now dismiss them with thanksgiving”; and then they sing the songs employed when preparing the medicine, of which some of the sentences are: “I have been to the place of the plant”; “I have been to the mountain”; “I have been at the falls”; “I have been beyond the clouds”; etc. After recess they use: “Now we have assembled where the tobacco is”; “Now they meet together, say the ducks”; “Now the deer with two prongs say, ‘We have assembled,’ ” and similar lines. Only hochinagen may sing at this feast. [[493]]
SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS
Part 2
Seneca material collected by J. N. B. HEWITT in native text, in 1896, on Cattaraugus Reservation, New York, and translated by him, with two texts with interlinear translations. [[495]]