The Washo word da¿man¿li¿ has a wide range of meanings which include
almost all people with supernatural powers, including curers of several
orders. The terms which they use when discussing the subject in English
are somewhat more precise and will be used in this paper.
The Washo make a distinction between curers (2594-96) and Indian doctors.
The latter, as will be shown, are true shamans whereas the former are
somewhat less powerful. Curers appear to be women who have certain powers
revealed to them in dreams. Such persons are usually members of what the
Washo describe as a “doctor family.” An informant described the activities
of such a curer:
“My mother was a curer. She just smoke and talk. You would meet
her on the way to town mebbe and say ‘I don’t feel good’ and she’d
just sit down and smoke and talk [pray?] a little and then mebbe
tell you what was wrong and what you should do.
“Along about the first war I got sick and couldn’t make no water
at all. My mother smoked and then spread ashes all over my belly
and talked some and after that I passed a lot of blood and got
better.”(5)
Far more important than the curers, however, were the Indian doctors. Such
men were never exclusive specialists and were apparently expected to share
in the work of hunting and fishing with less gifted men. With the
introduction of money by the whites, shamans appear to have approached
something like specialization, charging fees of up to twenty dollars a
session for their services.
Until the middle 1930’s there were a number of shamans among the Washo
(Stewart 1944). However, with the introduction of the peyote cult, which
among the Washo is concerned with curing, the shaman was superseded. Today
only a single Washo practices shamanistic curing. Interestingly enough
this man, now seventy-five, was an informant of Lowie’s in the 1920’s, and
at that time Lowie described him as a sophisticated young Washo, somewhat
mystic and with shamanistic ambitions (Lowie 1939).
This man, Henry Rupert, spent ten years in the Indian school at the
Stewart Agency and after graduation worked for a number of years in a
printing plant in Reno. When questioned about the old days he was a fair
informant, seldom offering more information than was asked for and clearly
enjoying the business of making a white man work for every scrap of
information. He was also given to dropping subtle hints and waiting with
stolid indifference to see if I had been alert. He did not deny his
shamanistic practices but was less than willing to discuss them in detail.
His equipment, he admitted (but refused to show me), consisted of a
butterfly-cocoon rattle, an eagle-bone whistle, and a feather headband. “I
don’t really do nothing but help nature,” he said. When I replied that
only some people know how to help nature he was gratified and smiled. “Oh
well, it’s all psychological anyway,” he answered, confirming Lowie’s
description of him as a sophisticate.
He is noted for his rather atypical practice of tending a garden, which
consists mostly of fruit trees, and for his open liking for old-fashioned
foods, which he collects, including fly grubs and locusts. I was not able
to observe his curing procedures, but they were described to me by another
informant, a seventy-five-year-old woman, considered one of the most
progressive of the residents of Dresslerville.
“I took my granddaughter to Rupert after the white doctors didn’t
do nothing for her. He don’t doctor in the real old Indian way [a
phrase I later learned meant that he did not hold a series of four
one-night sessions but only a short ceremony]. He don’t give you
nothing, just sings and prays and talks over you for a while. He
has a rattle and a whistle and a band on his head. After we went
to him my granddaughter got well.”
Another informant, the man who was cured by his mother—curiously another
graduate of the Stewart School and outwardly a progressive Indian—was a
veritable fountain of shamanistic knowledge. His father and maternal uncle
were both well-known shamans. Although he insisted that he had no
particular power himself, other Indians generally claimed that he had
certain hunting medicines which assisted him in taking game. There is
little doubt that he believed he had been approached by spirits offering
him shamanistic power. His life story was a long recital of ailments and
mystic occurrences. The ailments, coupled with his attitude about
spiritual power, suggested strongly that his suffering had been due to a
rejection of the power offered (Whiting 1950). He supplied the following
account about the process of becoming a shaman.
“Young fellows sometimes have dreams but usually they don’t pay no
attention to them. But when you get older and keep having dreams
you begin to pay attention. Maybe you see a bear or a rattlesnake
or Water Baby or anything. It tell you that you are going to be a
doctor. The next morning you go out and bathe and pray. This thing
keeps coming [in your dreams]. It may take any form, a skeleton or
an animal but you know it’s always the same thing as the first
time, just taking different shapes.
“These dreams keep coming for four, sometimes eight, years to get
you to be a good doctor. But during all this time you don’t get no
song. But they do give you your water. It tells you some certain
place up in the mountains where there is a spring. You mebbe think
there isn’t no spring there, but there is. Then it tells you where
to gather tobacco. Later it will tell you to make a rattle out of
cocoon. Mebbe at first you only make a rattle with one cocoon.
Later it says for you to add more. Finally it will give you a
song. You dream this song. But you don’t really remember it. You
just begin singing it like you had known it all the time. For a
while you may get a new song every year. Sometime you have a dream
that tells you how to handle your paraphernalia. Sometime a dream
tells you that you have to be all alone in your house. I don’t
know what happens in there but some of them doctors, I think, go
over to visit the dead for a little while.
“After you been dreaming for a long time maybe you try to cure
somebody but you don’t ask for nothing. You never tell them dreams
or what your spirit is but other doctors, they know. If your
dreams are right you can cure people and then you can ask for
something [payment]. The real Indian way was to doctor for four
nights. Then he’d lay out all his stuff and give it a drink by
sprinkling water on it. Then he’d shake his rattle and sing and
touch the patient with his hands. He’d talk to the sickness, like
he knew it ... like maybe he was friends to it ... he’d say ‘now
you behave and don’t bother this person no more. If you don’t
behave I’m gonna take you out and show you to everybody and then
you’ll be embarrassed!’ Then he’d suck at the patient (some of
these young doctors suck on a stick with a feather on it that they
pointed at the sick person, but the old ones didn’t do that), and
get out the sickness, it would be a feather or a stone. Sometime
that sickness come out and go into the doctor so hard they can’t
get it out and have to get another doctor to help him. Sometimes
it hit them so hard that they defecate. I seen them doctors just
fill their pants. If it’s real tough they get all stiff and fall
over. Sometimes fall right in the fire and their clothes all burn
off but it don’t burn them none. You can’t touch them then or it
will kill them. But when they begin to shake a little and that
rattle begins to go then you can pick them up. If he can, the
doctor will vomit out the sickness. When it’s out he puts it in
his hand and rubs it with dirt and throws it away toward the
north; that kills it.”
This recital of the process of becoming a doctor shows clearly the ideal
situation, the receiving of powers, unsought, from supernatural sources,
the guardian spirit watching over its protégé’s career, providing him with
the wherewithal in the form of songs, spells, and paraphernalia. In fact,
however, it would appear that the process of becoming a shaman was far
more a conscious and voluntary act on the part of an individual than would
be supposed from the foregoing story.
Doctoring power clearly seems to have remained within certain families.
The informant who gave the foregoing account was himself the son of a
woman curer and a famous doctor and the nephew of another doctor. From his
childhood he was familiar with the procedures of curing, with stories
about dreams, spirit visitations, trips to the afterworld, mysterious and
sacred locations. He somewhat proudly admitted that as a boy he “used to
shake that rattle” himself. In short, until his shamanistic education was
interrupted by white man’s schooling, he was a shaman’s apprentice.
This view is supported by the statements of other informants: “Of course
them people that is from a doctor family, they have dreams and get curing
power,” said one rather assimilated woman of about seventy-five. Another
informant, a man of sixty, who repeatedly indicated his fear of “power”
but at the same time was reputed to be an important curer in the peyote
church said: “If you come from a family of dreamers there ain’t nothing
you can do. You’re trapped by it.”
Young shamans appear to have undergone a period of informal apprenticeship
under an older doctor. Although there appears to have been no special
requirement that a shaman have an assistant, it was not uncommon for a
younger man to help out. According to one informant, when Blind Mike, one
of the well-known doctors in historic times, was becoming a doctor, his
teacher required him to smoke four hand-rolled cigarettes in a row without
allowing the smoke to escape from his lungs. This was not considered an
exercise in legerdemain but a way to develop the younger man’s control
over his power.
Each doctor received instruction from his spirit familiar as to what
paraphernalia he should gather but there was a great deal of uniformity in
the outfits of Washo doctors. The following description is of the kit of
my informant’s uncle, who practiced until the first decade of this
century, and it includes some items clearly postwhite in origin.
“I don’t know what all doctors had but I’ll tell you what my old
uncle had ’cause I seen it lots of times. [At this point another
Indian entered the house, obviously curious, and my informant
stopped talking until the visitor left.] He had eagle feathers and
magpie feathers. He had a rattle with six or eight cocoons on a
stick wrapped in weasel skin and humming bird feathers. He had a
tobacco pouch of tree-squirrel hide. He also had a stone. It
looked like a big tooth with a cavity in it. He told me how he got
that stone. He was walking to town [Genoa, Nevada] one day and he
heard something whistle. He kept on walking but it whistled again.
So he went looking for what was making that noise and he found
that stone setting by a fence post. I heard that stone whistle
sometimes when he was doctoring. He also had a tie made out of
beadwork. Lots of times a doctor would pay some woman to make him
a real fine basket or some bead work because that’s what his power
told him to do.”
Washo doctors often worked together on “tough” cases. One such was the
treatment of what seems to have been an infected elbow by my informant’s
uncle and Blind Mike. The first step in the process was to blow smoke in a
circle around the painful area so that the sickness couldn’t move. This
was followed by singing, rattling, and sucking until something bright
began to come out. It was, according to witnesses, as bright as a star, so
bright in fact that even Blind Mike could see it. The bright object proved
to be (if we can trust descriptions) the stone and setting of a cheap ring
which was removed from the sore arm. It is interesting to note that while
this process was successful my informant seemed to consider the cure less
than one-hundred-per-cent effective because the woman who was being
treated died two years later.
Doctors were privy to a number of secrets which were not common knowledge
among most Washo. Such a secret was the cave reputed to be inside Cave
Rock at Lake Tahoe. This cave was a retreat for shamans who went there to
commune with their spirits or to secrete a particularly important piece of
paraphernalia. The cave could be entered through a narrow opening on the
landward side, but most shamans preferred a more dramatic entrance. By
standing on a certain rock and singing a special song they were lowered
through the water and then lifted into the cave. The last doctor to
attempt this was Blind Mike. He was directed to go to the cave in a dream.
However, he permitted his wife to accompany him and when she saw him begin
to sink into the water she screamed with fear. The rock stopped sinking
with Mike only knee deep in the water. Since that time no one has
attempted to enter the room. This promontory is the center of Water Baby
habitation and is reported to be the upper end of a tunnel which extends
under the mountains to Genoa so that Water Babies can move freely from the
lake to the valley. The rock also marks the eastern end of a road of white
sand reported to cross the lake bottom. On the northwest end of the road
was located a bed of plants, probably wild parsnips, which doctors
gathered for medicine. The wild parsnip was poisonous but doctors ate it
to demonstrate their power. They also chewed it into a paste and spread it
on rattlesnake bites.
Another spot familiar to doctors was a mysterious hole in the mountains
near Blue Lake. The hole could be located by following a spiraling path of
white quartz toward the center. According to the Washo tale, if a man
dropped even as much as a hair into this hole it made a great roaring
sound. Suzie Dick, a Washo woman, whose claim of being one hundred years’
old is borne out by white residents, insists that as a fifteen-year-old
girl she went to see this hole and was terrorized by a huge hand which
reached up out of the darkness and tried to seize her.
Vaguely known to most Washo but familiar to doctors was a cave situated
south and west of Gardnerville where ready-made grinding stones were to be
found. These, depending on the informant, were made by old Indians or were
put there by “nature” for the use of the Washo.