![]() They deem it essential to their happiness here, however, to destroy as far as practicable their recollections of the dead.”Īmong the Cheyenne, the body of the deceased would be dressed in good clothing and then wrapped in a buffalo robe. They have no idea of a future life in the body, but believe that after death their spirits will meet and recognize the spirits of their departed friends in the spirit land. “…they believe each person to have a spirit which continues to live after the death of the body. Sometimes more than one body is placed on the same scaffold, though generally a separate one is made for each occasion.” “These scaffolds are about eight feet high, and made by planting four forked sticks firmly in the ground, one at each corner, and then placing others across the top, so as to form a floor, on which the body is firmly fastened. With regard to sky burial among the Brule Sioux, William J. ![]() “The Dakotas bury their dead in the tops of trees when limbs can be found sufficiently horizontal to support scaffolding on which to lay the body, but as such growth is not common in Dakota, the more general practice is to lay them upon scaffolds from seven to ten feet high and out of reach of carnivorous animals, such as the wolf.” Turner, an Army physician, reported in H.C. With regard to the Sioux on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, Dr. “Their manner of burial has always been (until recently) to inclose the dead body in robes or blankets, the best owned by the departed, closely sewed up, and then, if male or chief, fasten in the branches of a tree so high as to be beyond the reach of wolves, and then left to slowly waste in the dry winds.” Yarrow’s 1878 report, North American Indian Burial Customs): John Young, the Indian agent at the Blackfeet Agency, sent the following description (included in H.C. In addition to the scaffold burial, the Blackfoot also used tree burial. In his chapter on the Blackfoot in the Handbook of North American Indians, anthropologist Hugh Dempsey reports that scaffold burial was the traditional norm and underground burial was not practiced. Among the Assiniboine, for example, a warrior’s body on the scaffold would be oriented with the feet toward the south and the head slightly elevated. Some of the Northern Plains tribes practiced sky burial in which the body was placed in a scaffold or in a tree and exposed to the sky. In some American Indians cultures, sky burial was the preferred practice, while in others it coexisted with burial below ground. In American Indian cultures, sky burial included: placing the corpse in trees, building special platforms for the corpse and placing the corpse in a canoe which was elevated above ground. Sky burial is a practice found in many parts of the world and involves placing the corpse above ground.
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