In a message dated 7/22/2002 10:21:09 AM Central Daylight Time, wood_owl@hotmail.com writes: > After a prescribed length of mourning (prescribed by > the medicince man or Ikbi), the bones were taken down and scraped clean by > the bone picker who had especially long nails for this purpose. The cleaned > bones were then bundled and placed in a common bone house. You can guess > that this practice was repugnant to Europeans. > Oh, I don't know George Ann, if that would have been very repugnant to Europeans. Afterall the relics that the Churches and faithful have accumulated in reliquaries over the years of so many saints. There was a time that people went very crazy over getting a relic of a saint or someone who was considered very holy and it could get pretty grizzly. There's a reliquary here in New Orleans at the Church of Our Lady of Prompt Succor but I don't remember whose bones are in it. And recently at the church I usually go to, we had the relliquary that carried the bones of the Little Flower, St. Therese of Lisieux. It was extraordinarily ornate. Very beautiful. You mention bone houses. There was something similar in Europe with some church I saw in pictures somewhere where people gathered skulls, and maybe other bones, of the deceased and used them to line the walls of the church. I can't remember what country in Europe or what church but I do remember seeing it. There also have been a number of "museums", such as in Cambodia, with thousands of human skulls from the various wars of genocide that have occured in the last century. I guess none of these are exactly similar to the bone houses of the Choctaw but there are some similarities. Were the Choctaw medicine men only called "ikbi" or were they also called "hopia"? John Craven New Orleans