Pomo Bear Doctors
()
About this ebook
Read more from S. A. Barrett
Ceremonies of the Pomo Indians Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPomo Bear Doctors Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Pomo Bear Doctors
Related ebooks
Osceola the Seminole The Red Fawn of the Flower Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Birch Bark Books of Simon Pokagon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Saginaw Trail: From Native American Path to Woodward Avenue Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClaiming the Land: British Columbia and the Making of a New El Dorado Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSounds of Tohi: Cherokee Health and Well-Being in Southern Appalachia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMoonflower, Medicine Woman: A.D. 1490 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmelia Island Book of Secrets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMemories Flow in Our Veins: Forty Years of Women's Writing from CALYX Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOld Peter's Russian Tales: 20+ Traditional Children's Stories: Baba Yaga, The Golden Fish, Sadko, Frost, Little Master Misery… Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Green Halo: A Bird's-Eye View of Ecological Ethics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSprinting Backwards to God Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Story of Louis Riel: the Rebel Chief Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Adventures of Gluskabe / The Legend of the Maple Syrup Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOld Stories, New Ways: Conversations About an Architecture Inspired by Indigenous Ways of Knowing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFort Clinch, Fernandina and the Civil War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Salish People: Volume III: The Mainland Halkomaelem Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCoyote: The Life and Times of Visionary Navajo Artist, David Chethlahe Paladin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAncient Sauk, Ojibway and Winnebago Cosmology: Myth, Mounds and Artifacts: A Theory of Ancestoral Diffusion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Lifetime of Healing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWarrior Woman: The Story of Lozen, Apache Warrior and Shaman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Land Has Memory: Indigenous Knowledge, Native Landscapes, and the National Museum of the American Indian Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Memory and Landscape: Indigenous Responses to a Changing North Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGale Researcher Guide for: The Ghost Dance and American Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmada's Blessings from the Peyote Gardens of South Texas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLooking for Lost Lore: Studies in Folklore, Ethnology, and Iconography Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMythology and Symbolism of Eurasia and Indigenous Americas: Manifestations in Artifacts and Rituals Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingskiyam Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Classics For You
Mythos Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master and Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Grapes of Wrath Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Pomo Bear Doctors
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Pomo Bear Doctors - S. A. Barrett
S. A. Barrett
Pomo Bear Doctors
Published by Good Press, 2022
goodpress@okpublishing.info
EAN 4064066156220
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
ORIGIN ACCOUNT
ACQUISITION OF POWER
ASSISTANTS
HIDING PLACES
THE MAGIC SUIT
WEAPONS AND THEIR USE
RITES OVER THE SUIT
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN BEAR DOCTORS
PANTHER DOCTORS
COMPARISON WITH YUKI BELIEFS
COMPARISON WITH MIWOK BELIEFS
SUMMARY
INTRODUCTION
Table of Contents
One of the most concrete and persistent convictions of the Indians of a large part of California is the belief in the existence of persons of magic power able to turn themselves into grizzly bears. Such shamans are called bear doctors
by the English-speaking Indians and their American neighbors. The belief is obviously a locally colored variant of the widespread were-wolf superstition, which is not yet entirely foreign to the emotional life of civilized peoples. The California Indians had worked out their form of this concept very definitely. Thus Dr. Kroeber says:[1]
A special class of shamans found to a greater or less extent among probably all the Central tribes, though they are wanting both in the Northwest and the South, are the so-called bear doctors, shamans who have received power from grizzly bears, often by being taken into the abode of these animals—which appear there in human form,—and who after their return to mankind possess many of the qualities of the grizzly bear, especially his apparent invulnerability to fatal attack. The bear shamans can not only assume the form of bears, as they do in order to inflict vengeance on their enemies, but it is believed that they can be killed an indefinite number of times when in this form and each time return to life. In some regions, as among the Pomo and Yuki, the bear shaman was not thought as elsewhere to actually become a bear, but to remain a man who clothed himself in the skin of a bear to his complete disguisement, and by his malevolence, rapidity, fierceness, and resistance to wounds to be capable of inflicting greater injury than a true bear. Whether any bear shamans actually attempted to disguise themselves in this way to accomplish their ends is doubtful. It is certain that all the members of some tribes believed it to be in their power.
Pomo beliefs differ rather fundamentally from those here summarized. In the first place, the Pomo appear to know nothing of the magician acquiring his power from the bears themselves. Since they ascribe no guardian spirit to him, he is scarcely a shaman in the strict sense of the word. The current term doctor,
misleading as it may seem at first sight, may therefore be conveniently retained as free from the erroneous connotation that shaman
would involve.
In the second place, the power of the doctor was thought to reside wholly in his bearskin suit, or parts thereof, and apparently was considered the result of an elaborate ceremony performed in its manufacture and subsequent donning. This distinctly ritualistic side of the bear doctor’s practices removes him still more clearly from the class of the true shaman.
Thirdly, there is a detailed Pomo tradition of the origin of