Niätóhsä, Atsina Chief

Description

Early on August 5 a party of Atsinas approached the keelboat. Niätóhsä, whose name meant either "Little Frenchman" or "French Child," stayed on board while the vessel sailed upstream to an Atsina encampment. Niätóhsä was a chief and a medicine man. He wears metal hoop earrings and his hair is smeared with red clay. The thick bundle of hair at the top of his head was not an uncommon Plains style, but Maximilian implies that among the Atsinas this style was restricted to medicine men. A. L. Kroeber; who studied the Atsinas more than fifty years later, noted that keepers of the sacred pipes could not cut their hair and so wore it just above the forehead.