O-kee-pa, a religious ceremony ; and other customs of the Mandans.

O-kee-pa, a religious ceremony ; and other customs of the Mandans.

Catlin visited the Mandan in 1832. His month-long, in-depth ethnographic study of the Mandans and their O-kee-pa ceremony is particularly valuable as only a few years after his visit in 1838 the group was decimated by a smallpox epidemic. Only 40 members of the group survived the disease and they were either enslaved, murdered or assimilated into other groups.

Catlin was permitted to witness and document the O-kee-pa ceremony which took place over several days and involved dancing and singing of the whole group and a more extreme ceremony of fasting, sleep deprivation and pain for the young men of the tribe. This part of the ceremony was not very well understood by observers of the time and seemed to involve a belief that life or the world needed sacrifices to continue.

The sacrifice in this case was the ordeal the young men went through. Their flesh was pierced with splints and then the splints attached to cords, which were suspended from the roof of the lodge. They were to stay suspended as long as they could with weights attached to their feet until they fainted, "and chose to remain there until the Great Spirit gave them strength to get up and walk away."

Some of the practices of this dance are similar to the Sun Dance, which was practiced by the Sioux and other groups in the West. Shown here is a dancer in the character of O-ke-hee-de, the owl or Evil Spirit.

Catlin, George

Trubner

1867