Washo Religion Part 5

Young boys were encouraged to hunt with bow and arrow as soon as they could. Quite often such training was carried out by an older male relative-a grandfather or an old uncle. Expeditions of old men and young boys after chipmunk and squirrel appear to have been common, freeing able-bodied men for major hunting while the experienced, but less able, older men instructed the boys.

However, all the game taken by a boy was taboo to his immediate family.

This included young deer and does which he might kill. Such game was given to another family, usually related. The boy was also forbidden to eat his own take. The taboo included any fish the boy caught.

When a boy killed a buck deer considered by his father or other male relative to be big enough, he went through a simple ceremony. One informant said that in the old days a boy was required to crawl under the antlers of his kill. His father or older male relative then gave him a bath, and from that time he was considered a man and the taboo on his kill was lifted from himself and his family.

My informant, a mother of four sons now over forty, stated that all her sons had gone through the taboo period and were bathed by their father when they killed their first big buck. Until very recently she received meat from some relatives with a young son who hunted frequently.

Whether or not the young Washo are still observing this taboo and ritual I was unable to determine. However, in certain conservative families it seems probable that at least minimal ritual is observed.

Marriage (2018-2051)

Marriage is entirely a social inst.i.tution, and no religious elements appear to have entered into it. Traditionally the ceremony, if there was any at all, consisted of a "chief" (respected man) throwing a blanket over the shoulders of a couple at a dance. Ceremonial gatherings, such as the pine-nut dances and the girls' dances were important in the selection of marriage partners, inasmuch as boys and girls came together at these gatherings to engage in flirtation, affairs, and courts.h.i.+p. Dreamers at the "big times" are reported by informants to have exhorted married couples to be good to each other and not fight (see also Lowie 1939, p.

303).

Death (2389-2453)

No amount of social dislocation or cultural impact alters the constant fact of death. Each generation faces this inevitability. It is less than surprising then that changes in att.i.tudes and rituals surrounding death among the Washo have changed very slowly. The only changes which appear to have developed in Washo death customs are those imposed by direct intervention of the whites or as unavoidable consequences of changes in other aspects of the culture.

In the past, when a person died the house in which he expired was abandoned by his family. Of course, if the death occurred in the spring or summer such abandonment was simple; during these seasons the Washo usually lived in simple brush shelters. A winter death was a more serious matter; it was during this season that the Washo lived in the gal'sda?l-a structure made to last through the winter and until the next winter, when it was reoccupied. Valley Washo often made these winter homes of brush or tules. In the foothills and mountains, bark slabs and tree limbs were utilized. If an occupant died, this home must be abandoned and was often burned down, and the immediate family moved to another campsite. Thus a family which suffered no deaths during the winters might spend several years in a single campground, whereas a less fortunate family might have to move every winter, or even oftener than that.

A few Was...o...b..gan building simple rectangular board and batten houses in the 1890's. Most of the others continued to live in gal'sda?l made of boards and sc.r.a.p, begged, stolen, or purchased from the lumber mills which were quite numerous in the area at the beginning of the century. In the 1920's, when most of the Washo moved into the "colonies" established for them by the government, the native-style houses were abandoned in favor of the wooden homes built by the government. No longer permitted to move about the country at will, and frankly unwilling to abandon the more comfortable white-style houses, the Washo adjusted their death customs.

The most common adjustment was to prepare for an impending death by s.h.i.+fting seriously ill persons into an adjoining structure, often a shack built in the native manner or a shed or lean-to. This structure could be burned down without loss when its inhabitant died.(7)

The Washo viewed this destruction of a house occupied by a dead person as simply preventing his spirit from bothering the living.

Most Washo death customs display a conscious attempt to avoid a.s.sociation with the dead. Barrett reports that cremation was practiced, and the bones placed in a stream to prevent their desecration. However, this appears to have been only one of the disposal customs and is not well remembered by Washo living today. The burning or burying of the personal possessions of the dead was common. Certain prized possessions were interred with the body, which was usually wrapped in a shroud of matting, deerskin, or bearhide and placed in a fissure or cave in the mountains. Although there are a number of locations known by both Indians and local whites as old burying grounds, all my informants agreed that in the "real old days"

there was no special cemetery and that these burial spots have developed since the coming of the white man. This may well have been as a result of direct white interference with native funeral customs and an insistence that Indians concentrate their burials. Some of these sites have become traditional among the Washo.

The dispute between the widow and the sister mentioned earlier was an argument as to whether the deceased would be buried in one of these sites or in the cemetery at Stewart, Nevada.

A white man who has lived in the area for ninety years, reported that as a boy he often came across caches of belongings of dead Indians in the mountains. Today, prized possessions are either crowded into the casket with the body or burned or secreted in some remote area of the Sierra.

Funeral ceremonies were apparently simple. The body was wrapped and carried into the hills to be interred. Prayers in the form of a short speech were directed toward the dead. "We are burying you because you are dead. It's not because we are mad at you or don't like you. But you are dead. Please don't come back and bother us."

Widows traditionally cut their hair in mourning, a custom which is still practiced. Stewart reports that mourners painted their faces black. My informants denied this, but one elaborated: "I remember when I was a little girl old Indians who had lost someone would cry a lot and let the tears run down their faces and not wash their faces until they were real dirty and black with fire smoke." Crying at a funeral was expected and in fact positively sanctioned. At a funeral conducted while I was present the sheriff arrested a drunken Washo who was wailing quite loudly. The Indians were all bitter about this because: "All of us cry at a funeral whether we are drunk or not. That's the way the Washo do it." (This funeral was that of a murder victim and the sheriff was present because he feared there might be a reprisal attempt.)

A newspaper report of a funeral in Genoa, Nevada, in the late 1880's records that the Indians had borrowed a wagon from a white man to transport the corpse (that of a well-known Indian woman) to the burying ground. The wagon was followed by a large crowd of weeping mourners.

Modern funerals usually take place under the auspices of a funeral director, and generally services are performed by a Christian minister from the Stewart Indian agency. After the white minister has left, it is usual for an older Indian to approach the casket and repeat the old funeral prayers. The reason for waiting until the minister leaves is to avoid hurting his feelings. My informants said the prayers made the older Indians feel more comfortable. It is usually not necessary to burn the deceased's home, but his belongings are disposed of. There is an increasing tendency to tend graves and put flowers on them. The cemetery at Stewart appears to be well decorated with flowers. Two old Indian graves near Lake Tahoe are regularly visited and jars of flowers placed on them.(8)

When the husband of one of my informants died, following a twelve-year illness spent in a secondary house, she went to visit a daughter living near Lake Tahoe. When she returned to Dresslerville her two sons had torn down the shed and disposed of all their father's possessions. In deference to their mother's rather modern views about funerals, nothing had been placed in the casket.

While I was in Dresslerville an Indian of about forty put the torch to the house in which his mother and father had lived. The house had been unoccupied since their deaths. While the house burned no effort was made to extinguish the fire or to call the fire department. A nearby rancher saw the fire and summoned the fire department, but the Indians refused to tell the firemen how the fire had started. The local newspaper reported it had been burned to drive away evil spirits. This upset my informants, one of whom said that the sight of the house simply made the man sad. She elaborated that the Washo felt they were helping G.o.d wipe out the tracks of a dead person. The Washo claim that after a death there is always a rain or sand storm which wipes out the tracks of the deceased.

After the Washo return home from a funeral, they immediately wash their faces and hands. They would not feel safe in handling food or children until this ritual had been carried out.

The behavior of the dead is a matter of concern for most Washo (2606-2609a). Ideally, the spirit is supposed to go up and to the south where dead Indians are. This land of the dead is guarded by a number of men with bows. Some shamans were able to make the trip to the land of the dead (2541-2544). If they could elude these guards, they were sometimes able to recover the spirit of a recently dead person and return it. If, however, the spirit has partaken of the water of a spring immediately behind the guards, it can never be recovered. The by-now-familiar uncle of my informant once visited the land of the dead and reported that there were lots of Indians there playing games and having a good time. If murder victims were present they were with the celebrants, but the spirits of the killers were segregated and were not having a good time.

Ghosts, however, wander over the land. They are generally malevolent. If they feel they have been badly used in life, or are not properly honored after death, or have not been given the things they wanted when buried, they may wreak vengeance on the living. To prevent this, homes were abandoned, prayers were said, and names of the dead were not used. In discussing a recent murder, one of the most progressive of the Washo was extremely reluctant to give the name of the victim, and, when she finally did, she whispered it. One of the difficulties encountered by government agents when pine-nut lands were allotted to the Washo was a refusal to name the ancestors on whom the allotment claim was based.

Ghosts are often said to come in the form of whirlwinds or dust devils, and most Washo will avoid looking at a whirlwind. At night, a sudden puff of warm air is thought to be a ghost pa.s.sing nearby.

RITUAL IN SUBSISTENCE

Hunting, far more than gathering, appears to have been the focus of much ritual activity. This suggests that for the Washo the importance of ritual may have increased in proportion to the element of chance inherent in the activity undertaken. Gathering was a surety, a.s.suming of course that there was a harvest to gather. With the wide variety of plants available within the Washo territory during the spring, summer, and fall it seems highly unlikely that the failure of one species of plant created a serious problem. This, of course, was not true of the pine nut. A failure of the pine-nut crop was a harbinger of a starvation winter. The gathering of pine nuts, in contrast to the gathering of other plants, was the subject of a great deal of ritual and, in some degree, of ceremonialism uncommon to most Washo gathering activities. This will be dealt with later in the paper.

Hunting

_Deer_ (1-27).-Deer were hunted in a number of ways. Barrett reports, and old informants confirm, that hunting parties of as many as thirty or forty men were formed in the old days to go to the western slope of the Sierra in pursuit of deer. The large number may have been necessitated by the possibility of meeting hostile Miwok or Maidu. My own informants claimed that these large parties often set fire to the forest to drive the deer into the open, and that the large number of men was needed to cover the escape routes.

More common, apparently, were small groups of five or six men, usually relatives, who went into the deer country together. Their technique was to drive along a single deer run toward one of their number who was considered the best shot. This method was very common after the introduction of firearms, particularly repeating firearms.

Finally, any Washo man might hunt singly. Often groups of five or six men went hunting together but each did his own stalking.

Whatever the technique, hunting magic was an individual affair which did not require any ceremonial activities.

A single hunter, before the days of firearms, often stalked in the antlers and hide of a deer. Washo were often superst.i.tious about using the real antlers and made artificial sets from manzanita branches. This fear of using real antlers appears related to the treatment which was accorded to the bones of deer. These, once the meat had been completely stripped off, were submerged in a stream to prevent their being eaten by dogs or wild animals. Perhaps the best account of the magic involved in stalking is the following by an aged informant, reputed to have "hunting medicine."

"We never had no poison arrow for bear or deer but had something just as good. We took red paint and mixed it with marrow from a deer leg and rubbed it on the shaft and point of the arrow.

Arrowheads for war were little but those for big game like deer or bear were pretty big."

When I asked my informant the Washo word for this mixture he evaded the question.

"I don't think they had a word for it. They didn't talk about it, just used it. If you used it you had to carry some medicine to work against it, 'cause if you got a scratch of that mixture and didn't have this other stuff [the counter agent], you was a goner.

"A long time ago one man would hunt. Some of them fellas was superst.i.tious about using real deer horns, so they would make horns of manzanita and then cover up with a deer hide. They'd move along ... taking a long time, just like a deer. That old buck would try to get to the side away from the wind to smell you, but you kept circling around so he wouldn't smell you. Finally you could get real close, maybe only three, four feet ... going around making sounds just like a deer. Sometimes them bucks would really believe you and want to fight and then it was dangerous. When you was close you shot that arrow into the deer right behind the shoulder blade. That way when he jumped, the shoulder blade comes back and breaks off the shaft. The man would grab the shaft and suck off the blood. Then he'd make a little fire on a flat stone and when it was hot he'd sweep off the fire and spit that on the stone and it would bubble up and disappear. Then you'd go after the deer and you'd find him laying there with blood bubbling out of his nose just like that blood bubbled on the stone."