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Central Sierra Miwok Dictionary with Texts (1960) by L. S. Freeland and Sylvia M. Broadbent

Texts: VI. A Big Dance in the Roundhouse (Page 70)

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VI. A BIG DANCE IN THE ROUNDHOUSE

(East Central Dialect)

?yt_.•yt_.•i? kálŋa? hàŋi•t

1. There are six women and six men dancers. All the people would come into the roundhouse to watch them dancing.

2. The chief would call, would have them come, telling them to watch the performance of the dancers, the singers, and those who would presently play the drum and the rattles.

3. There were four singers. The women who were dancing would decorate themselves with feathers on their heads, the men too would put them on their heads. They would dance until morning. When they stopped dancing in the morning they would leave, they would go to bathe in the creek.

4. They would have Big Times in the roundhouse. They would eat acorn soup 'and acorn bread and ground squirrel meat, and wild cabbage and deer meat. The women, the men, the little children, they all used to come inside the roundhouse.

5. They used to divide up the acorn soup and deer meat, and after they had divided it they would eat it with squirrel meat and cabbage, all of them together

6. Any ones who wanted would challenge each other. One would stake his bead belt, they would meet it with a belt of abalone shell. They would take the bones, and fix counting sticks, and then they would play hand game against each other. The people of the Water Moiety would gamble against those of the Land Moiety.

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