ABSTRACT
A Skidi man named Harry Coons wrote about a Bear Dance held by one of the bear societies during the summer of 1889 in Oklahoma. The Skidi scholar, James R. Murie, published a 1914 description of Pawnee societies in which he wrote about the Skidi Bear Society. It is likely that a Pawnee bear claw necklace now held at the Denver Art Museum was communally owned as a ceremonial object by the Kitkahahki Bear Society during the 1860s. In one Skidi story published in 1906 by George Dorsey and James R. Murie "The Bear Medicine and Ceremony" a girl is born with the spirit of a bear that had been killed by her father. In adulthood after the death of her son, she is taken into a bear den and given certain gifts and knowledge. Thereafter the bears communicate with her through her dreams, and during the night she grunts like a bear.
