Down the center of the lodge is a long ellipse where countless dance steps have bared the earth of this otherwise grassy plot. The entrance of the lodge faces the east, and there is an exit to the west. A fire is usually burning just inside the eastern entrance, the smoke ascending through a smoke hole left in the roof. The medicine men are gathered to the left of the fire on the north while the patient is usually seated to the right of the fire on the south. The medicine drum in use during a treatment for healing is smaller than the dream dance drum, usually seen by tourists, and of a different shape. It is about eight inches in diameter and sixteen inches high. The buckskin stretched over the end is moistened from time to time by reversing the drum which contains water, and rubbing the skin to permit it to take up the liquid. The tone and volume are greatly enhanced by this procedure. The medicine lodge members sit in groups around the lodge starting at the north side, and proceeding down to the west and back along the south side toward the east again. Every song and march around the lodge is repeated four times, this being their sacred number. The time needed in effecting a cure is varied but the writer has seen a woman carried in on a litter, recover in three hours time and take part in the dancing. The Indian Service in the past has wished to discourage treatment by medicine men and on larger reservations has supplied a resident physician. It is a constant competition between the two, for naturally a white physician cannot cure every case any more than a medicine man can, and when the medicine man apparently effects cures after the physician has given up or appeared to produce no improvement, the credulous patients are going to continue to believe in the medicine men. Christianity has had but little effect upon the Ojibwe so far as the writer has been able to observe, largely because of the reputation of the medicine men among them. According to the late Dr. William Jones, the ethnologist mentioned in “Ethnobotany of the Meskwaki Indians”, Part 2 of this volume, the Pillager Band of Bear Island occasionally practiced cannibalism ceremonially, and even as late as 1902 ate human flesh on the Rainy River during a famine. He cites the fact in 1905 that polygamy was once common and even still occurred among wandering bands.