old 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