wild cats etc

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Anthony Grant wrote:
> Maybe this is why terms for 'whiteman' and 'trickster' (and both of
> these from 'spider') are the same in some Northern Plains languages.

It's not quite that simple, since the two cases of 'spider' = 'Trickster'
that I know of off the top of my head are Cheyenne and Dakotan, and the
Cheyenne case includes 'whiteman', while the Dakotan case doesn't.  On the
other hand, as far as I can recall Mandan also has 'Trickster' =
'whiteman', but not 'Trickster' = 'spider'.  A further dimension, of
course, is whether Trickster is called Whiteman in English by persons of
the group in question.

In the Dakotan case the term for 'whiteman' (was^i'c^huN) does, however,
suggest a category of supernatural beings (s^ic^huN), though the 'steals
fat' analysis is widely accepted by speakers, and apparently some people
object to the s^ic^huN analysis, on prescriptive moral grounds ("people,
and certainly not white people, can't be spirits") or on grounds of logic
("who would have thought a dumb thing like that?!").  Of course, I'm not
sure if everyone who has made a contrary argument to me has been a Dakota
person.  I suspect in most cases they haven't been, in fact.  Dakotanism
doesn't seem to be an evangelistic movement except among 'whitepersons'.
(I didn't mean the 'whitepersons' sarcastically.  It's just the plural.)