American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In previous commentaries I discussed the generalized concept of personhood across Native North America. I included funeral rituals in that discussion because of the widespread belief among Native Americans that how a person comes apart can instruct us on how he or she first came together. Well-known methods for disposing of the deceased’s physical remains include burial in earthen graves, exposure on scaffolds, and cremation, but burial in the fourth element, water, is virtually ignored. Suggestions that this type of burial was practiced, however, do exist. Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum holds a huge painting that shows bead-and-feather-dressed Natives in Woodland canoes on the verge of sinking a bundled body. Docents are carefully instructed, however, to explain to visitors that the entire scene is the artist’s imagining. Yet the deliberate placement of human remains into water deserves careful consideration. Unfortunately, any review of the past literature usually begins and ends with reports that Alaska Natives unceremoniously threw their deceased slaves into the sea. For our own times the immediate image called to mind is the end result of a Mafia contract that has “Guido wearing cement shoes and sleeping with the fishes.” Over and above all of these peculiarities, however, is the common knowledge that “water revives,” although, as we will see, this is not always a good thing. Water is both dangerous and powerful. Blessed as holy water it serves in many rituals and other acts of faith; raging as a tsunami, it destroys. Throughout the Americas, dangerous serpents live in water, perhaps most terrifyingly embodied by mythic anacondas in the rivers of the Amazon Basin. Among the Tsimshian of the Northwest Coast, spanaxnox, the abodes of wondrous beings (naxnox) were (and are) avoided by all those lacking the spiritual strength to deal with them. Other water beings with great power include Tie Snakes of the Southeast, the serpentine Missouri River itself, the “drawer-unders” of the Delaware, and the Underwater Panther (piasaw) of the Midwest.