The Assiniboin Horse Medicine Cult

Abstract

In a recent comment on contemporary ethnological field work among North American Indians Alfred L. Kroeber remarked, The days are over when an informant furnishing even a vocabulary felt marked, ashamed, and afraid. . . Indians of today sense the ethnologists' motivation far better, appreciate it, and respond accordingly.' During recent field investigations among the Assiniboin Indians the significance of Kroeber's observations on the change in Indian attitude toward ethnological research was brought home to me forcefully. With the passage of years many traditional cults of the Plains Indians have disappeared, but there has been compensation for the contemporary field worker in the greater willingness of the few remaining individuals who have had personal experience in the old way of life to discuss the more esoteric aspects of their traditional culture. Today, years after some of the old religious cults became defunct, their secrets have become declassified in the minds of elderly former members who survive. Not only are they willing but they are even happy to discuss with considerable objectivity the organization, activities and history of these organizations. They seem to realize that by presenting their accounts to sympathetic ethnologists, they may be aiding their own literate descendants by preserving a record of little-known facets of tribal culture.