"Big Doctoring" Pawnee Ceremony illustration

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Purpose

To illustrate the site configuration of an annual Pawnee tribe renewal ceremony

Audience/users

Native American cultural discipline

Production

Hand-drawn (pencil on paper) from diorama reference material, scanned to produce jpg for insertion into black-only book text.

The ceremony takes place inside a circular building with thick walls and four large poles, represented by the lettered oval shapes. The fuzzy gray objects are clumps of white down, which are scattered on the serpent's head, the tree, and in front of some of the birds. The serpent is a shaped mound, painted with a repeating array of colors, represented in various shades of gray. The seated woman is a statue, representing an elder. There are spirit figures hanging from a cord at the top of the image, indicating their presence at the top of the interior space, just under the roof. The fire pit is a depression inside a mounded turtle, which is also painted. The two 3-legged shapes near the woman are carved drums, shown with their playing sticks.