Kumush

Kumush is the creator of the Modoc, the allied people of the Klamath, and in dialect and spelling his name is the same as the Klamath Gmok'am'c (K'mukamtch). His signature act, recorded in full by Jeremiah Curtin from the Modoc narrator Koalakaka, is the descent to the underground world of the spirits with his daughter: there the spirit-people dance by night and become dry bones by day, and after six days and nights Kumush climbs back bearing a basket of their bones, stumbling on the way, and scatters them upon the earth to become the several tribes, whom he names and to whom he gives their countries, settling the Modoc about Tule Lake and Mount Shasta. He is also held to have ordained the first shamans.

Domains

• creation and the peopling of the world
• shamanism and spirit power

Powers

• to raise the peoples of the world from a basket of bones
• to name the peoples and apportion their lands
• to ordain the office of the shamans

Relations

• counterpart of: K'mukamtchKumush is the Modoc creator answering to the Klamath K'mukamtch; the two are the same old-man demiurge known under the differing spellings and dialects of the allied peoples, sharing the variant Gmok'am'c.Stern, Theodore, 'Native Myth and Modern Religion among the Klamath Indians,' Journal of American Folklore 69, no. 272 (1956) (secondary)

Sources

• Kumush (Kemush) is the Modoc creator who brings the peoples up from the underworld as a basket of bones and is the cognate of the Klamath K'mukamtch.: Curtin, Jeremiah, Myths of the Modocs, Boston: Little, Brown, 1912 (secondary); Ray, Verne F., Primitive Pragmatists: The Modoc Indians of Northern California, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963 (secondary); Stern, Theodore, 'Native Myth and Modern Religion among the Klamath Indians,' Journal of American Folklore 69, no. 272 (1956) (secondary)