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This Book List Sectory 11
Page 11
The Gaun Bagudzitash, or Dance of the Gods, is the one ceremony of the Apache that bears any material resemblance to the many Yebichai dances or "chants" of the Navaho, and even then the only feature common to the two is that the men, typifying gods, wear elaborate masks. The Apache are not unfamiliar with the making and employment of dry-paintings for the treatment of the sick, as has been seen. Originally the dry-paintings and the _gaun_, or gods, always appeared together, but in recent years the Gaun dance has been conducted preliminary to and as a part of medicine, puberty, and war ceremonies. Captain Bourke, in his "Medicine-men of the Apache" (Ninth Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1892), speaks of this as the Spirit or Ghost dance. Though performed infrequently now, as compared with other dances, on account of the expense and of disapproval by the agents, the Gaun Bagudzitash is unquestionably the most popular ceremony conducted by the Apache.
Briefly, then, the geologist assures us that when the cold of the Glacial Age was at its maximum glaciers streamed down from all the mountains of Scotland, Wales, and Northern England; that the ice was thick enough to overtop all the smaller hills, and on the plains it united in one great sea of ice some thousands of feet in thickness, that it stretched as far south as the latitude of London, England. But that to the west the ice streamed out across, the Irish Sea, the islands to the west of Scotland, and ended far out into what is now the Atlantic.<23> But these glaciers, vast as they were, were very small compared with the glaciers that streamed out from the mountains of Norway and Sweden. These great glaciers invaded England to the southwest, beat back the glacier ice of Scotland from the floor of the North Sea, overran Denmark, and spread their mantle of bowlder clay far south into Germany.
Because of their pastoral life the Navaho are not villagers. Their dome-shaped, earth-covered hogans are usually grouped two or three in the same locality. The summer house is a rude brush shelter, usually made with four corner posts, a flat top of brush, and a windbreak of the same material as a protection against the hot desert siroccos. The hogan proper, used for storage during the summer, affords a warm and comfortable shelter to its occupants through the cold winters of their high altitude. When a hogan is built it is ceremonially consecrated, and if an occupant should die in it, it is forever deserted and is called _tsi{~COMBINING BREVE~}ndi hogan_, "evil house." No Navaho will go near such a house or touch anything taken from it. If a meal were cooked with decayed wood from a hogan a hundred years deserted, a Navaho, even if starving, could not be induced to partake of it. Thus strong are the religious beliefs of this primitive people.
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