Message from Garcia: The Sacred Dance Part 3

Editor’s Note: The following is part 3 of Louis Garcia’s most recent “Message from Garcia.”

The Sacred Dance, Part 3 & Bibliography

Singers and Drummers

The medicine chiefs having taken their places and the soldiers theirs, the members come in by families, in unison throw up their hands and cry “Brother, have mercy on me! [Hunkawanji, unŝimada wo!]. Then they relate when and where they were initiated into the mysteries of the “holy order”. (Each dance, it should be understood, is the ceremony of some religious or other order.) They then intone a sort of chant to the high priest, at the same time holding their medicine bags in their left hands with arms stretched across their breasts; the right hand is meanwhile raised as when an oath is taken. In this the members of each family follow t