THE SOUTHERN DENES. 43

scem to have started the original movement, are to-day another proof of this.
Led by their innate roving proclivities, some of them went so far as to cross
into Mexico; but, finding no followers, they ultimately retraced their steps,
as we shall see presently.

The Northern Dénés remembered by their Southern Kinsmen.

The northern Dénés have absolutely no knowledge of any people of
their blood living hundreds, nay thousands, of miles away from them, in
countries where frost and snow storms are replaced by sunshine and sand
blizzards. This is but natural, as they had no hand in the fateful movement
which was to change the ethnographical map of the continent. However, this
very ignorance might perhaps be construed as pointing to a peaceful division
of the race, when an important portion of it departed without even attracting
the attention of the other. A separation caused by bloodshed and violence
would probably have left in the minds of both parties some trace of the
difficulties which led thereto.

But a converse reasoning is hardly satisfactory. If the entire race Origi-
nally formed a compact whole, the descendants of those who moved off should
know more or less of the kindred their forefathers had left, and whose former
peregrinations to the American continent they had probably shared. I was
therefore somewhat surprised at first when told by the late Dr. D. G. Brinton
that “the Navajos . . . have no reminiscence of their ancestral home in the
north” *. But, on second thought, it may easily be seen that, even though this
statement should be correct, it can hardly be taken as meaning that they have
altogether forgotten their northern kinsmen. It is a well known practice of
the native mind to transfer to places within one’s actual knowledge and vici-
nity the scenes of the happenings handed down by their ancestors.

Now, Father Leopold Ostermann, O. F. M., the latest investigator in the
Navaho field, whose pen has already yielded valuable information on that
tribe, spontaneously wrote but a year ago: “The Navajos have a faint tradi-

* “The American Race”, p. 72. ;

* Another motive, which sometimes actuates the displacement of events in the traditions
of Indian tribes, is selfishness or personal interest. According to the Navaho mythology, that
nation emerged from an under-world through an island in a small lake within the San Juan
mountains, that is, the heart, as it were, of the country they have long claimed as theirs. Such
a pretension, in the face of aborigines (the Utes) who had an anterior tight to that land, is
easy to understand. About 1820, an accident happened whereby the entire portion of the Babine
tribe living along the Bulkley was deprived of its fishing grounds (See my “History of the
Northern Interior of British Columbia”, p. 8). Those Indians then took forcible possession of
the fishery near the mouth of the river, which had previously belonged to a Tsimpsian tribe,
and have kept it ever since. Some difficulty having lately arisen between the two races, the
question of the right to the fishery was brought to the attention of the Agent, when the
Babines unblushingly and very loudly protested that the disputed grounds had always been
theirs. In the course of a generation or two, what is now known to be false will probably be
honestly regarded as the merest expression of truth.