en ny A GATT

64 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 30, 1928

As a matter of fact, the dialect of those aborigines differs at
least as much from that of the Sékanais as does that of the Stuart
lake Indians. The former division forms the southern, the latter the
northern, Carriers. As to the Sékanais, they are not even western
but eastern Déné, even though some of them now have their
hunting grounds to the west of the Rocky mountains. Their
language, though genetically related to that of the Carriers, is
quite different in grammatical and morphological forms. If
Mr. McLeod will only repair to their haunts and spend nineteen
years in the study of both idioms, he will come back fully per-
suaded of this.

Pending this, or the publication of my Grammar-Dictionary,
he will have to content himself with my word on that score.

Will Harmon prove more reliable from a sociological stand-
point? His journal contains in this respect most important ma-
terial, but it is not free from error. Thus speaking of five Sékanais
who passed by Stuart lake, he says that “‘their intention was to
go and try to take a scalp or two from the Indians of Fraser’s
lake,”* and farther on he proceeds to show us the head-chief of
Stuart lake boasting that he had “brought home many of the
scalps of his enemies.’’!4

McLeod complains, with regard to another point of Carrier
sociology I have brought to his notice, that he “cannot find it in
Harmon.”!5 If my assertion was gratuitous because he could
not find it there, it might seem to follow that what that author
really has, what he so emphatically gives in his book, namely the
act of scalping, must have been practised by both Sékanais and
Carriers. Is not my induction logical?

My critic must therefore believe that that custom was beyond
the shadow of a doubt prevailing in Harmon’s time—as much,
at least, as cremation, which he expressly states was unknown to
the Sékanais. Yet it is hard to find a better established sociological
fact than that, either then or after, scalping was practised by
neither Sékanais nor Carriers, nay by not one of the tribes west of

18 Thid., 169.
4 Thid., 174.
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, 28: 569.