"Feeding the Dead" ("Indians Offering Food to the Dead")

This picture shows two figures bringing food to a scaffold burial. Mrs Mary H. Eastman, in the American Annual: Illustrative of the Early History of North America, in which this engraving is also reproduced, gives some details about the picture: The dead body is wrapped in a (scarlet) cloth. It is placed on a scaffold, from one corner of which hangs a medicine sack to keep off evil spirits and from another corner, a small kettle containing food for the dead. A woman offers more food in a bark dish. A man holds up a bottle from which he will offer a libation (of whiskey) to the departed spirit. The tent-shaped arrangement of sticks below the scaffold marks the grave of a person already removed from a scaffold (sticks used to keep the wolves off). page 110.