Note 36 — HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS

Several older Kiowa patterns parallel peyote usages (e.g. the smoking ceremony of the Old Women’s Society: leader west of central fire, lieutenants on either side of the door, five dishes of food from the fire eastward; the Buffalo Medicine Men’s Society bundle-repair meeting with a sage “stage,” etc.), and the Kiowa-Comanche had the all night singing and beating on a rolled-up hide on the eve of departure on the war-path. But such parallels from the tribes one knows best lead to often naïve particularistic explanations and should be guarded against. As a matter of fact it is the wide distribution of sweat bath doctoring and society meetings which accounts for the ease with which peyotism made its way in the Plains. The following two paragraphs are partly based on data gathered by Donald Collier, a colleague of the Laboratory of Anthropology Kiowa trip.