XIX. Betty Brown's Dream

Yana Texts, by Edward Sapir, [1910], at sacred-texts.com

XIX. BETTY BROWN'S DREAM. ³⁰⁸

p. 196

I dreamt. I went off towards the east across a dried-up creek; the creek bed was all covered with moss, it was green with moss. Now I went to the north along the trail. Now I stood on the outside (of a house).

"Enter!" said to me a man whose hair was all white. There

p. 197

was also a woman who was blind in one eye. ³⁰⁹ She offered me as a seat a chair of ice. I looked from one thing to another. Everything was made of ice, and it hung down in icicles. "It is near dinner-time," she said. "He will pull the bell," she said. "Now you will be seated, and he will pull you up." "I seated myself, Now he had pulled me up. There was a medicine-man sitting there, talking. The medicine-man was made of rock, he had on a net-cap of white down; he was all white-haired, even his eye-lashes were white. I was afraid. I sat down to eat.

(She said to me,) "Go and see your mother! She is sitting inside there yonder." So I went into the next room to the south. "So it is you, my daughter!" she said, and hugged me. "Go and eat!" she said, and I sat down. Everything was of ice. "So it is you who have come here, cousin!" (said another woman that I recognized as Mary). "We are living in a good place. The place we lived in before was bad. This place here is very good, it is all covered with flowers and it is green. It is very good." And then someone overtook me. "Let us go back!" I slipped down on the left side to the north. Then I started to go back, but I did not go back home by the way I came.

Footnotes

195:308 This dream seems to be the result of a mixture of Indian and Christian ideas. Possibly it owes something to the Ghost-dance movement, which reached the Yanas from the so-called "Chico Indians," i.e., Northwest Maidu of the Sacramento Valley.

197:309 She was a. Wintun woman, named K!ulô't‘imat?ya, whom Betty had known in life. The man she had known as Wa'imayasi.