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Show 62 V. KEYAH SANI were unknown in the new lands toward which the People were heading. The People brought with them a religion based on the shaman, or medicine man. He healed people by finding and returning souls that had left their bodies or had been stolen away. On these soul-flights, he often went into convulsive trances. When he returned from the spirit world, he brought power for the People, as well as carrying back the soul of the sick person. The shaman knew the night sky very well. The stars marked the trail to the spirit world, and he studied their light for power. The shaman probably also guarded the medicine bundle of sacred stones, earths, bones, and feathers. He had charge of the masks of the deer and the buffalo that controlled the hunt. Much of this sacred knowledge is kept, even today, in the chants. The People probably spread across the northwestern High Plains quickly. Between a.d. 600 and a.d. 800, some Navajos reached northern Utah and Colorado by going around both ends of the Uinta Mountains. The early Apaches arrived in southeastern Wyoming near the Black Hills. Here their journey slowed, as they met people who already occupied the land. Though they had brought shields and perhaps had already known war, the People were not ready to fight. They were too few in number. They had come in small groups of families, with only forty or fifty persons, at the most, in each group. At first the People probably settled on the outskirts of Fremont settlements and lived like the local people. They traded pottery and showed the Fremont how to make the pointed-bottom calcite cooking pots. They also may have shared their special hunting skills with the Fremont people. Perhaps they even worshipped the Fremont gods. The Fremont people made images of these gods in stone and clay. In the end, some of the People probably married Fremont people. From the Fremont, the Athabascans learned more about how to grow the strange corn they had brought from the Plains. Though they never ceased to be hunters, they grew more and more corn. They also learned to make a different style of dwelling. This four-posted pithouse still survived in a.d. 1900 as a medicine lodge. For about three hundred years, the People moved peacefully through Colorado and Utah. They crossed the Wasatch Mountains into the Uinta Basin. There they met kinsmen and slowly moved southward, crossing the Green River. Some moved onto the Uncompahgre Plateau, where they may have used stone to |