Animal Legends and Lore

[brotherbear]

The Beast That Walks Like a Man by Harold McCracken.
Probably the first white man to ever witness the Bear Dance of the Utes, and one of the few to be privileged to learn some of its tenets, was Verner Z. Reed. In March of 1893 he was permitted to attend the sacred ceremony held in the valley of the Rio de los Pinos, a beautiful little tributary of the great San Juan, in the southwest corner of Colorado. Incidentally, this is not far from one of the last rugged strongholds where both the grizzly and the Utes are today struggling against complete extinction as species in that state.
The Utes believe that their primal ancestors were bears ( grizzlies )," reported Reed after learning what he was permitted to know about the significance of the ceremony and its traditional background. "After these ( the bears ) came a race of Indians, who, on dying, were changed back into bears, and as bears they roamed in the forests and mountains until they died, when they went to the Future Land and lived with the shades ( spirits ), preserving the forms of bears, but having human wisdom and participating in the pleasures of immortality. It is believed that this transmigration ceased a long time ago, but the bears of the present ( 1893 ) are believed to be descendants of the Ute bears of old, and are therefore related to the Indians. Bear worship, in one form or another, tinges many of their ceremonies.

The Utes believed that the grizzlies possessed great magic powers and wisdom, which they were capable of transmitting over long distances, and they also believed that the bears were fully aware of the ancestral relationship between themselves and the Utes. The ceremony of the Bear Dance was therefore an aid to continuing and strengthening this friendship and also of charming the dancers as a means of protecting them from death by these mighty bears. There were also other motives involved in the affair. Important among these was the sending of messages to their dead relatives and friends who dwelt in the land of immortality; also to assist the bears to recover from winter hibernation, to find food, and to choose mates; and it was on occasion for springtime courting and love-making among Indians themselves.

That the bear was accorded human relationship, and semi-divinity, with a spirit of a higher order than others, even above man in some instances, is borne out in the lore and legends of a great many primitive racial groups in North America and other continents as well. Reply