The decorative art of the Dakota has been treated in a preceding paper,
in which brief mention was made of religious art, or that art in which
there was a definite, unmistakable motive on the part of the artist to
represent mythical or philosophical ideas. In this more serious art, a
large number of designs may be characterized as “protective designs,”
because their presence or possession is in part a protection. The idea
in a protective design seems to be a symbolical appeal to the source or
concrete manifestation of a protective power. It is not easy to get the
point of view and the spirit of the faith that make these designs
significant, but from the detailed explanations of them some general
idea can be formed. The descriptions given in this paper are based upon
the statements of Indians, in most cases the executers of the designs.
The attitude of the reader toward such a study as this is often that of
concluding that the points of view set forth by a writer are universal
in the tribe. This leads to a great deal of superficial criticism. In
the opinion of the writer, any rejection of such study because one or
two or several Indians deny all knowledge of some or all of the specific
native accounts upon which conclusions are based, is absurd. We might as
well test the artistic sense of a city by calling in one or two persons
from the street. As a case in point, the reader is referred to the
remarks of J. Owen Dorsey on the authenticity of Bushotter’s Double
Woman.[1] A great deal of the information received from Indians relative
to religion is largely individual, and every ethnological field-worker
must take the best of his material from the brightest men of a tribe.
The object of this study has been to bring together ideas expressed by
various individuals more or less eminent among their people, because all
of these individual conceptions seem to have much in common. The data
were secured by the writer when on Museum expeditions to the Teton and
Yankton divisions of the Dakota.
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[1] Dorsey (Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology,
p. 480).