Indians of North America -- Religion; Indians of North America -- Rites and ceremonies; Peyotism
The Yankton of South Dakota by 1916 had a peyote cult strong enough to
warrant the sending to Congress of a petition to pass an anti-peyote bill
signed with ninety-two names. The Yuchi affiliated with the Creek around
Sapulpa and Kellyville, received peyote from the Cheyenne. Shonle cites
three additional groups we have not yet included. These are the Shoshoni,
who received peyote in 1919, the Sioux (1909-10) and the Crow (1912).
Comparisons of the present list with Shonle’s gives on the whole earlier
dates, yet this need not be considered in any sense a discrepancy.
Shonle’s data were based on government sources, and should stand as
indicating the dates when the various cults became virile enough to
attract official notice. Our own data, based on native sources, give on
the other hand what are probably the earliest contacts and introductions
of the rite, without reference to the number or percentage of adherents
in any tribe. It is evident from them too that tentative starts and
multiple origins are the rule rather than the exception, and Shonle’s
information and our own should be regarded as supplementary rather than
contradictory.[74]
Although peyotism is gone or decadent among the Tarahumari and the
Mescalero, it is still vigorously spreading in the United States and
southern Canada. Conceivably it could spread until it embraced all
Plains, Basin and Woodlands groups whose earlier culture is sufficiently
consonant with its concepts, and it may have some slender chance
of spreading in the southern and eastern Pueblos and Plateau, but
scarcely elsewhere, for both geographical and cultural reasons. The
cult may be expected to spread for some time in the future, but when
its inevitable decadence and probable ultimate disappearance will have
been accomplished, we may have witnessed in it the last of the great
intertribal religious movements of the American Indian.
The present section sums up the external history of the diffusion of
peyotism so far as it can be known from our Mexican sources, and in the
Plains, where it appears that the pre-peyote mescal bean cult prepared
the way somewhat for the use of the narcotic cactus.
The Plains rites are basically derived from the Kiowa, Comanche and Caddo
peyote ceremonies, which in turn derive from the Mescalero Apache (whence
the diffusion traces back to the Lipan and Tonkawa through the Carrizo
perhaps to Tamaulipecan groups). The Kiowa and the Comanche led in the
diffusion of the standard aboriginal ceremony, but the Caddo variant was
powerfully influenced by the individual, John Wilson, and diffused to the
Osage, Quapaw, Delaware and others in a somewhat modified form. This is
the subject of a special appendix.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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