Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/176

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INDIAN CONGRESS AT OMAHA
147

a "Midway" performance. Among those given were the noted ghost dance of the plains tribes, the mounted horn dance of the Wichita, and the unique and interesting war dance and devil dance of the Apache, the last being performed at night by the light of a fire, with a clown and other masked characters, after the manner of the Hopi or Moki dances. There were also foot-races by picked runners from several tribes.

The Kiowa camp circle—a series of miniature heraldic tipis in buckskin, with the central medicine lodge and all the necessary shields, tripods, and other equipments to make it complete—was brought from Washington and set up within a canvas corral of eighty feet diameter. This presentation of the old camp circle of the plains tribes is a complete reproduction, on a small scale, of the last great sun-dance camp of the Kiowa Indians, just previous to their signing of the historic treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867, by which they gave up their free life and agreed to be assigned to a reservation. It is the property of the National Museum, and was prepared on the reservation under direction of the Bureau of American Ethnology, every miniature tipi and shield having been made by the hereditary Indian owner of the original.

Under an arrangement between the exposition management and the Bureau of American Ethnology a special fund was appropriated for securing portraits of the Indian delegates. The work was done by the exposition photographer, under the supervision of a member of the Bureau, according to a systematic plan, the Indians being photographed in costume in tribal groups and singly, in bust, profile, and full length, resulting in a series of several hundred pictures forming altogether one of the finest collections of Indian portraits in existence. The negatives are now in possession of the Bureau. At the same time the Indian name of each individual was obtained, with its interpretation, and some points of information concerning the tribe, with brief vocabularies of each language, from which is selected the following short list of words for comparison: