Based on the author's field work in 1908-13, this work on the Winnebago Indian tribe was originally published as an annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1923. It discusses Winnebago history, archaeology, material culture, social customs, education, funeral and burial rites, warfare, and shamanistic and medical practices.
In this transcription of the Medicine Rite, the most sacred ritual of the Winnebago Indians, anthropologist Paul Radin captured a poetic source of profound importance to the understanding of mystical experience. Performed by medicine men upon the initiation of a member to their cult, this secret rite recapitulated the mythic origins and heroes of the Winnebago while integrating those present with