Monday

Re: Monday

OK, I will start since no one else has:

Painter, first name George?

Re: Monday

And Dan is half ways toward the name of the tribe.

Yes

Re: Monday

Man, that is funny, isn't it? ;-)

Re: Monday answer

Dan and Larry both get gold stars for their forehead.

The more I read about this, the more confused it gets, even to the possibility of DNA tracing. The tribe is (was) the Mandan. The artist was George Catlin. The object that was the focus of this ceremony was translated as either the �Lone Man� or the �Big Canoe� an icon representing him. It has been shown as a wooden cedar cylinder made up of staves and tied with vines or saplings. The painting called �The Bull Dance � O Kee Pa (Okipa) Ceremony� and �The Last Race� shows a wooden stave cylinder in the center of the painting with tribesmen dancing/racing around the cylinder. It was during the ceremony that the edged tools to make it were sacrificed by sinking them in a body of water.

A different painting entitled �Sha Ko Ka, Mint, A Pretty Girl� is a half length portrait of a Mandan woman showing that she has western features. Some 240 Catlin pictures, including the above, available through the Smithsonian museums, are shown at: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/catlinclassroom/catlin_browsepagetribe.cfm?StartRow=101

If you care to research there is much speculation about the Welsh connection to the Mandan. Nothing as a single item makes a case, but many hints and factors combined, including the same style fences and boats still made today in Wales lead people to wonder. http://www.accessgenealogy.com/scripts/data/database.cgi?file=Data&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=0017337 (�Mandan Long Winter Months� scroll down and select figure 4 for sketches of boats and cylinder)

�Welsh and Mandan� on a browser delivers a number of articles. However, an April, 2009 article hopes to finally put that information to rest as being false. (http://www.languagegeek.com/siouan/mandan_is_not_welsh.html). Others still debate the legend.

The last full blooded Mandan died in 1971 so DNA testing is muddied. Long before that however the tribe merged with the tribes Arikira and Hidatsa. Originally the Mandan tribe in the early 1800�s numbered about 15,000 and had several permanent villages from what today is Ohio to North and South Dakota. However trade with whites introduced smallpox (epidemic of 1837) and almost wiped them out so that by the mid 1800�s Mandan numbers were reduced to 75 to 150 members total! They had little choice but to resolve former differences and merge with former enemies to survive.

Other interesting stuff.

Earlier, about 1804, a pregnant Indian woman Sacagawea was discovered and joined the Lewis and Clark exploration team from a Mandan village. Part of the reason L&C were at that place was that the expedition was ordered to try to locate the �white indians�. The Mandan (in the movie, the script switched the name to the current Lakota Sioux) were featured in �A Man Called Horse� movie. From that picture they were perhaps better remembered as the people who skewered their own initiates and warriors in the back or chest, then tied ropes to the skewers. The person was then hauled off the floor and hung until they passed out, the bindings or their flesh broke. Catlin painted that part of the ceremony also. Mandan males who completed the ceremony also had no little fingers on either hand as they were self amputated as part of the completion of hanging part of the initiation. The final end of the multi day ceremony is shown in the Catlin picture �The Last Race� showing those participants in the ceremony running (or being dragged) twice around the wooden cylinder. (It was tough to earn respect in Mandan Society).