A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historiae Literarum et Artium, 1. (Szeged, 1997)

Nagy Imre: „The Black Came over the Sun...” Lame Bull’s spiritual oeuvre

3 I wish to acknowledge Michael Cowdrey (Cowdrey 1995) for calling my attention to this fact. 4 Donald J. Berthrong mentions the Cheyenne Lame Bull in association with nine full-blood Arapahoes, and three white men married to Arapaho women in his The Cheyenne and Arapaho Ordeal (1976: 122). I think it very unlikely that a Cheyenne medicine man would have been associated with a group of white men married to Native American women, unless he married an Arapaho woman, and this way he was related to these white men. However, at present we have no information on Lame Bull's wife. 5 The „Little Chief attribution is very doubtful and questionable, and no one ever tried to identify, -which Little Chief would be the artist. This attribution was made by George Eager, one of the staff members of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York (Greene 1993). 6 The drawing is so rich in historic, ethnographic and artistic details that I will treat it in a separate paper in the near future. 7 The So'tae'e (pi. So'taeo'o) was a separate tribe, linguistically related to the Cheyenne proper, that retained its political independence as late as the 1830's. During the turbulent years of 1850-1860, they merged with the Cheyennes and donated many cultural traits to the absorbing tribe. 8 It is easily noticeable that Mooney tried to collect the meaning of the designs; however, either his informants were unaware of the meanings, or they were unwilling to share certain sacred knowledge with him. The case of the panther figures might illustrate this. Lone Wolf reported to Mooney that he did not know the meaning of these figures, and told him that possibly they were depicted on the lodge cover for their hunting abilities. This might be only one side of the coin. There is a special phrase in Cheyenne, spelled in a number of ways by different authors, which means „sacred lodge," or „medicine tent," and indicates a painted tipi, generally, red painted. Albert Gaschet gives the phrase as maheyúne-um (NAA 54), J.N.B. Hewitt writes it as mahe-om, meaning 'sacred tent' (NAA, MS 893), George Bent uses moheyuu, meaning 'red lodge' (Bent 1914), while Mooney gives it as máhoyum, and translates it as 'red tipi,' or 'red painted tipi.' The form given by the Northern Cheyenne Bilingual Education Project is ma 'heóneome, translated as 'sacred tent' (Glenmore and Leman 1986: 92). The theological idea behind this term is solved by Rodolphe Petter: „One tale speaks of the great magicians who lived in mounds or stone habitations, which were beautiful inside, with lions and bears watching the entrance" (Petter 1915: 228). Consequently, any Cheyenne tipi design with bear, or panther figures on a red background commemorates these underground abodes of the spirit persons. 9 There is another possibility: the only other known tipi painting of a similar design with Ma 'heono figures was dreamed by Owl Man the founder of the Wolf or Bowstring warrior society. It was owned by Old Red Moon, who was the brother of Yellow Wolf, leading chief of the Heevahetane group. This tipi had a yellow body, and its top was painted black. Green stars were on the smoke flaps. Four human figures faced the four directions and each had horns on his head, while instead of hands and feet they had wolf-paws. Each figure held a pipe, bowl up, in one of his hands. There was a red sun painted on the back, and a green crescent above the door (Grinnell 1923 I: 233-234). It is not known how this tipi design was inherited in the family, but Grinnell described the tipi design of Yellow Wolf, too, and this tipi also had yellow body and black top. We are informed by Mooney that Red Moon, the son of Yellow Wolf and the nephew of Old Red Moon, was the last owner of this tipi design, and he died in 1898. According to John Moore (1987: 273-275), White Shield married the daughter of Red Moon, while Mooney's primary informant Harvey White Shield contradicts this, since he explicitly told Mooney several times that his mother was the daughter of Me 'hatse, a noted medicine man. At the same time, in the miscellaneous notes of Mooney, while giving a basic description of the tipi of Yellow Wolf he wrote „This tipi also [has a] yellow body, [with] black top. ...Ask White Shield's daughter at Hammon, Máhiyunói_ = Medicine Sitting. She would know" (Mooney notes, NAA MS 2213). This clearly indicates that there was a definite relationship between the White Shield and Red Moon families. However, at the present state of research we can not go beyond this point. If the panoramic drawing illustrates the tipis of 76