NO TES AND NE WS 195
producer may be — and this cross as its sign — I do not know. My direct testimony comes only from the Blackfeet, but the belief may well have been shared by their old-time allies, the Ats£na or Grosventres- of-the-prairie, and the Sarsi, who with the three tribes of the Blackfeet nation — Sl'kslkau, Kainah, and Pikii'nni — made up the five tribes of the " Prairie people." It is suggestive, too, that on the head of a Kiitenai baby-board in my possession, there are embroidered three conventional sprays of flowers, each flanked on either hand by a cross, which cer- tainly would have signified the butterfly as the sleep bringer, if the board had been ornamented by a Blackfoot woman. Crosses appear on two baby-boards figured in Prof. O. T. Mason's paper on Primitive Travel and Transportation}
On a very large lodge shown in an old photograph of "Southern Cheyenne wigwams," kindly loaned me by the Bureau of American Ethnology, appear four maltese crosses, quite like those shown on some Blackfeet lodges, except that they are much larger and are differently placed on the lodge, being in pairs one above the other. The upper series is well below the smoke-hole, and the lower is just above the ground painting, which seems to extend four or five feet up the side of the lodge. It looks as if the complete upper series of crosses runs entirely about the lodge, and the lower series also, except where inter- rupted by the door.
Still more to the point is the fact that on some prehistoric Hopi or Moki pottery collected by Dr J. Walter Fewkes, and now deposited in the National Museum, appears a figure identical with the Blackfoot sign for the butterfly, and in close juxtaposition to it the unmistakable figure of a noctuid moth. It will be interesting to learn whether this belief in the butterfly as the god of sleep and this same sign for it have any general currency among the western Indians.
The use among the Dakota of the Latin cross to denote the drag- onfly as a warner of the approach of danger, is interesting in this connection.
The Piegan Blackfeet call the spider u underground deer " (ksii' a wa kds), no doubt because of its rapid movements and the readiness with which it disappears from sight when disturbed. Its activity and supposed intelligence cause the Indians to hold it in high esteem. In ancient times there were religious beliefs and a ceremony about the spider, and though much of this has been forgotten, the animal still possesses a more or less sacred character among these people, so that even today in the ceremony of the medicine- lodge, the medicine-lodge women pray briefly to the spider and ask help from its intelligence.
1 Smithsonian Report* 1894, pp. 5x6, 517, figs. 907, 208.
�� �
