Note 10 — THE ETHNOLOGY OF PEYOTISM

Spier (Warfare) writes that “Clairvoyance on the part of the shaman who accompanied a war party is noted for Maricopa, Yuma, Pima, and Papago [as well as] in the Plains and Plateau.” Zuñi war chiefs, he adds, sought sound-omens on the eve of setting out on the war-path. In this last connection the detailed similarities in attitude and conduct of war-expeditions, peyote-pilgrimages, and salt-gathering expeditions in Mexico and the Southwest should not be overlooked. (The Huichol shooting of the peyote plant, however, is a hunting rather than a war symbolism, that of hunting the hikuli-deer of the peyote origin legend.) Information on the Comanche horse-raid is from E. A. Hoebel; unfortunately the Government took most of these peyote-given horses back again.

In the 1850’s the only Kiowa who ate peyote was Big Horse. When he wished to know the whereabouts of an absent war party he would take a drum and a rattle into a tipi, saying “gʸägūṇboṇta” (I am going to look for medicine), eating peyote and afterward telling what he had seen; sometimes he made the sound of an eagle, the bird that flies high above the earth and sees afar.

C. W., president of the Kickapoo Native American Church, often has prophetic peyote visions; Kishkaton says they are of “Judgment Day” when the “new world” will come, and makes them a proselytizing argument for peyote. The debt to earlier Kickapoo prophets is obvious. A specific Caddo prophecy among the visions collected would have prevented a serious industrial accident if it had been properly interpreted.