A Study of Siouan Cults: Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1889-1890, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1861, pages 351-544Dorsey, James Owen
Religion
A Study of Siouan Cults: Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1889-1890, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1861, pages 351-544
Dorsey, James Owen
Siouan Indians -- Religion
_h_ Mrs. M. C. Stevenson, in 5th An. Rept. Bur. Eth., p. 548.
According to Dr. J. Walter Fowkes the Hopi or Moki have a similar
order of colors, the west having green (or blue).
_i_ Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, Vol. VII (_fide_ Capt. J.
G. Bourke).
According to Gatschet the Chiricahua Apache call the sun, when in the
east, “the black sun,” and a tornado or gust of wind also is called
“black.” (See § 378.)
Matthews says that in rare cases white is assigned to the north and
black to the east, and that black represents the male and blue the
female among the Navajo. (See § 105 of this paper.)
§ 381. The author calls special attention to the colors of the four
sacred stones of the Omaha Wolf gens, red, black, yellow, and blue i.
e., E., S., W., N.; (see § 369), and to those on the tent of an Omaha
Black Bear man (see § 373, and PL. XLIV, E, where the colors are given
in the order N., E., S., W.). He has not yet gained the colors for
the upper and lower worlds, though the Omaha offer the pipe to the
“venerable man sitting above” and to the “venerable man below lying on
his back.” (§ 27.)
In the tradition of the T[s]iɔu wactaʞe gens of the Osage there is an
account of the finding of four kinds of rocks, black, blue or green,
red, and white. And from the left hind legs of four buffalo bulls
there dropped to the ground four ears of corn and four pumpkins.[306]
The corn and pumpkin from the first buffalo were red, those from the
second were spotted, those from the third were ca[p]e, i.e., dark or
distant-black, and those from the fourth were white.
Green, black, white, and gray are the traditional colors of the
ancestral wolves, according to the Wolf people of the Winnebago, though
for “green” we may substitute “blue,” as the corresponding name for the
first son in that gens is Blue Sky. Among the personal names in the
Thunder-being subgens of the Winnebago are the four color names, Green
Thunder-being, Black Thunder-being, White Thunder-being, and Yellow
Thunder-being (instead of Gray). James Alexander, a member of the Wolf
gens, said that these four Thunder-being names did not refer to the
four quarters. This seems probable, unless white be the Winnebago color
for the east and gray or yellow that for the west.
In November, 1893, more than two years after the preceding sentence was
written, a Winnebago told the author that among his people white was
associated with the north, red with the west, and green with the south.
Of these he was certain. He thought that blue was the color for the
east, but he was not positive about it.
COLORS IN PERSONAL NAMES.
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