378 ACCULTURATION IN SEVEN AMERICAN INDIAN TRIBES

cut prices ever so slightly, and pay just a trifle more for skins, and
he can cut out his Indian competitor. The Carrier show no na-
tional solidarity. 1

The Indian trading-companies or partnerships are often set
up across kinship lines, men combining because of their posses-
sion of some capital, or on the basis of friendship ties. The ex-
tended family as a codperative economic unit has been generally
fragmented into smaller family units.

Constant trading failures, curiously, have not developed any
defeatist attitudes. Rather, the Carrier, though expressing some
animosity toward the Whites for what they regard as a raw deal,
are concerned with beating the Whites at their own game. If
they could only learn to read and write, they feel they could
compete with the Whites. They have conducted some ineffectual
agitation for a school at Alkatcho. A school accessible to them at
Bella Coola is Protestant controlled, and therefore the Catholic
missionary, the Indians say, forbids their children to attend it.
The Catholic mission school at Williams Lake is too far away.

The economic change which has affected social relations most
strikingly has been the transfer of trap-line ownership from the
extended family, the sadeku, to the individual family. Each fam-
ily head is permitted to register his own trap-line. Even women
may register a trap-line. Not only has the Canadian government
established individual family trap-lines, but in the form of in-
heritance a relatively equal distribution of trap-lines among the
children, with a share also going to the widow, has displaced the
emphasis upon primogeniture. As a consequence of this land
policy the economic interdependence of the sadeku has been
broken down and social cohesiveness seriously weakened. ‘Today
no sadeku has a headman, and few family lines engage in any
kind of economic coéperation. Only the memorial potlatch brings
the sadeku together.

CHANGES IN SOCIAL RELATIONS

The most apparent social change among the Alkatcho Car-
rier has been the elimination of rivalrous potlatching and social
rank distinctions. Potlatches are still held in commemoration of