HAKO - English Abstract

The ceremony called HAKO, from the Pawnee Hakkopirus, was a rite of fertility and adoption. For the Pawnees and the other Native Americans an interpersonal relation outside kinship could not exist. Whoever wanted to trde either goods or rituals had to establish kinship relations, a category wich ordered chaos, enlightening right relations and reciprocal obbligations. Outside kinship one could find only slaves and enemies. Adoption was stressed by a ceremony in which the fathers gave two ritually decorated pipes to the children.

Hakkopirus comes from akkow = mouth, where h suggests breath and the median k represents the word wood, therefore haccow could be freely traslated voice breathing fron the woods. Pirus means beat or hit and metaphorically points to the drum.

Tobacco smoke represents the breath of the sacred, the visual image of the life breath, therefore it is the most precious offering to the spirits. In fact it is the substance of the gift the Gods themselves had given to the human beings to be used in a sacred covenant between humans and gods or among human beings. The hallucinogenic smoke of tobacco and other plants such as red willow, sumac and dogwood, togheter with the fathers' fasting throughtout the ceremony, the continuous and obsessive drumming and the ceremonial repetition of gestures and songs provoked alterated states of consciousness and secured that the Sacred was there, witnessing the human covenant.