But it is never good for a man not to know his faults, and so we let one’s clan cousins tease him for any fault he had. Especially was this teasing common between young men and young women. Thus a young man might be unlucky in war. As he passed the fields where the village women hoed their corn, he would hear some mischievous girl, his clan cousin, singing a song taunting him for his ill success. Were any one else to do this, the young man would be ready to fight; but, seeing that the singer was his clan cousin, he would laugh and call out, “Sing louder cousin, sing louder, that I may hear you.”
I can best explain this custom by telling you a story:
Story of Snake Head-Ornament
A long time ago, in one of our villages at Knife river, lived a man named Mapuksaokihe,[11] or Snake Head-Ornament. He was a great medicine man. In a hole in the floor of his earth lodge, there lived a bull snake. Snake Head-Ornament called the bull snake “father.”
[11] Mä pṳk´ sä ō kēē hĕ
When Snake Head-Ornament was invited to a feast, he would paint his face, wrap himself in his best robe and say, “Come, father; let us go and get something to eat.”
The bull snake would creep from his hole, crawl up the man’s body and coil about his neck, thrusting his head over the man’s forehead; or he would coil about the man’s head like the headcloth of a hunter, with his head thrust forward, as I have said.
Bearing the snake thus on his head, Snake Head-Ornament would enter the lodge where the feast was held and sit down to eat. The snake, however, did not eat of the food that Snake Head-Ornament ate. The snake’s food was scrapings of buffalo hides that the women of the lodge fed him.
When Snake Head-Ornament came home, he would say to the bull snake, “Father, get off.” And the snake would crawl down the man’s body and into his den again.