The Threshold Covenant; or, The Beginning of Religious Rites — John Shaqi
The Threshold Covenant; or, The Beginning of Religious RitesTrumbull, H. Clay (Henry Clay)
Religion
The Threshold Covenant; or, The Beginning of Religious Rites
Trumbull, H. Clay (Henry Clay)
Covenants -- Religious aspects
“By reference to the paintings (and writings, to some extent) of such
men as Catlin and Stanley, and to the works of Schoolcraft, Matthews,
Bourke, and others, you will find that the red-hand symbol was painted
on the lodges, sometimes on the clothing and person, and sometimes on
the shields of various of the hunter tribes of the plains,–as, for
example, of the Ioways, Sauks and Foxes, Sioux, Arickarees, Cheyennes,
Arapahos, and Comanches. Precisely what the significance of the symbol
was, with these peoples and others like them, I am not able to say, save
that in some cases it was connected with war, in others with treaties,
and in yet others as expressive of power. There were yet other meanings
attached to the sign; but neither the former significances nor these
latter were, I take it, as definite or fixed [with the hunter tribes] as
with the more advanced and settled tribes of the farther south.
“Of these tribes, the typical Pueblos and the peoples more or less
directly influenced by them–such as the Jicarillas on the north and
east, and the Apaches to the south and west[247]–made frequent use of
not only the red-hand symbol, but also of the black-hand symbol. I have
seen both, not only in the modern but also in the very ancient
pueblos–as those of the Pecos, and those of the great cliff-dweller
towns in the Chelly and other canyons. In the Pecos ruins, to give a
special example, I copied beautiful hand-paintings and prints from the
rafters, as well as from the walls of ordinary dwelling-rooms. Sometimes
these paintings were in red, but more often in black. They invariably
represented the hands of women, as could be seen by their delicacy and
smallness of outline and by their shapeliness. There was, I think, a
reason for this, which the following facts will explain.
“It was my good fortune to witness, early in the eighties, a ceremonial
celebrating the attainment to puberty, or womanhood, of a young girl of
the Jicarilla Apaches. The latter people are not to be confounded with
the Apaches proper. They are a mixed people, descended not only from the
Apaches, but also the Comanches, and in large part also from the Pueblos
of the north, the so-called Tañoans of whom the Pecos people were a
branch. It was clear from the character of the masks and other
paraphernalia used in the ceremonials I witnessed, that the latter were
almost, if not quite, wholly derived from the pueblo, rather than from
the wilder, ancestry of the Jicarillas who performed them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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