MENTAL AND MORAL CHARACTERISTICS. 111

implements and houses were copied from the neighbouring tribes of the
Klamath River region”!. We will see that the same is equally true as regards
the industries and mythology for which the Navahoes have since become
famous.

Returning north, we notice with Fred. Whymper that the Ingalik
Loucheux “use for cleansing purposes the liquid before mentioned as
adopted by the Malemutes”, viz. urine*. The Malemutes are Eskimos
living in close proximity to the westernmost Loucheux. According to
Th. Simpson, the Chippewayans’ “only attempts at singing are borrowed
from the Crees’?, The entire social organization and all the consequent
practices prevailing in the west were likewise copied from the coast
heterogeneous races. So were their mortuary customs and those of all the
other Déné tribes, which varied according to the nature of those obtaining
among their respective neighbours. Their habitations, arts and industries are
practically duplicates of those in honour among the tribes with whom they
came in contact.

In a word, the Dénés are possessed of such an innate consciousness of
their own inferiority that, in the same way as children naturally imitate their
elders, even so do these aborigines instinctively allow aliens to play over
them the rdle of superiors whose manners they must ape and of models
whom they must copy.

Their Cruelty.

Meekness and cruelty are two moral attributes which seem to exclude
one another. Yet it is incontestable that they are to be found side by side
in the same Déné tribes. I shall not speak of the Apaches, who have no
great reputation for mildness of temper. But peaceful and meek as their
northern congeners undoubtedly are when in their normal condition, they
are not any less cruel when provoked, or even with the weak without
provocation, or again when they can take unfriendly people at a disadvantage.

I could expatiate on their lack of humanity to their own wives, who
had formerly to do all the hard work, even to the dragging of their heavily
loaded toboggans on the very day that they had been delivered of a child.
I could enlarge on the unspeakable indignities and harsh treatment some of
their tribes meted out to their widows and the lack of feeling or consideration
they all display towards the old and the orphans. I could adduce as examples
of their cruelty the numerous massacres in which they were the prime actors,
and to which I shall have at least to refer when we come to the history of
the nation. For the present a quotation or two from Hearne concerning the

1 “Language as a Test of Mental Capacity”, p. 86. Trans. Roy. Soc. Can., vol. IX,
Sect. HI, 1891.
2 «Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska”, p. 154.
3 “Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America’, p. 165.