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99

Insert rack to dry on.

Insert cut of pits & Stick.

Insert cut of "Winnowing Dish"

long sweep gun to keep the rice from falling into the fire. and about the edge of the bed is a frame of poles. In this rack the rice enclosed in the hull is place and a fire lighted beneath to thoroughly dry the rice and loosen the hull. When sufficiently dry the rice is removed from the frame and placed in a pit made in the ground. These pits vary in size and shape occasionally they are of a conical form, the sides being lined with staves split from a tree with a block or stone at the bottom of the pit at other times the pit is made with cylindrical sides and occasionally they are lined with birch bark as the circumstances seem to indicate The dried rice is put in such a pit and the process of hulling is commenced this is accomplished by means of a "Ma.ma gosh ka i gan ak" or "Stick to hull the rice." This is a stick about five feet long and three inches thick at the bottom it is cut in a pyramidal form and the angles of the pyramid are cut with an angular notch this stick is thrust down by a squaw standing at the edge of the pit through the rice raising and lowering it till the hulls are removed which is accomplished by the rubbing of the kernals of rice against the stick and against each other. The pits are small being about twenty inches deep and twenty four inches across the top when of the conical form. The cylindrical pits are rather more narrow and deep. When sufficiently hulled the rice is placed in a "Nosh-katchi na-gon". or "Winnowing dish" this is a broad oval dish made of birch bark. the edge supported by a stick of wood to which it is bound with Bass wood twine. The dish is thirty and one quarter inches long and about eighteen inches wide and seven inches deep A quantity of the rice is put in the dish and the squaw standing in a draught of air tosses the rice up and catches it in the dish the wind in the mean time blowing the chaff or hulls away leaving the kernals in the dish quite free from hull. The cleansed rice is then