HABITATIONS. 139

gines cannot be nomadic. If not nomadic, it is because they have fixed abodes,
Now will any one be so kind as to tell me where these are to be found?
There is not among them a single house, inhabited or not, of their own
building. They have not even a single regular rendez-vous, apart from the
trading posts, near which they will pitch their tents for a week or two. Who
can tell me of the whereabouts of any division of the tribe to-day? Now
camped in a place, the next thing you will hear is that they have moved
out, and are staying miles away from the spot where you may have seen
them. And they are fair representatives of all the mountain Dénés, the Beavers,
the eastern Nahanais, the Slaves, the Hares, in a word of all the eastern
groups when in their original state.

Yet we are assured by no less an authority than J. W. Powell, in a
most didactic work, “not only that the Indian tribes were in the main seden-
tary at the time history first records their Position, but that they had been
sedentary for a very long period”. Speaking of a tribe, to be sedentary is
to be settled in one place or condition. The reader knows to what extent
this applies to our Dénés.

These inaccurate statements seem to have originated in a misapprehen-
sion as to the real condition of things. I would add: ina regrettable looseness
of writing, were it not that the incriminated parties are too eminent and
careful not to have weighed their expressions. Because the natives generally
move within a given perimeter, which represents their ancestral territory,
instead of constantly changing their habitat (which they occasionally do),
they are represented as sedentary. The Tatars or Mongols may certainly be
taken for typical nomads; yet each of their bands has well defined bound-
aries, which it respects?

The only Déné tribes which are not perfectly nomadic, being in fact
semi-sedentary, are those settled in a way within the basin of the Pacific, the
Hupas and their neighbouring congeners, the Carriers, the Babines, the west-
ern Nahanais, and a few bands on the Yukon. These have agglomerations of
houses, which may be considered as villages, whither they periodically repair,
after they have passed much of their time in the woods without any
“fixed abodes”.

Summer Habitations of the Northern Dénés.

The original Dénés lived in semi-circular huts of evergreen boughs laid
over a frame-work of stout poles, mere shelters, in fact, rather than attempts

* Seventh Annual Report Bur. of Ethnology, p. 30.

* “The Tartars have no permanent abodes and never know where they may be the next
day, though every chief of a horde knows the bounds of his pasture grounds” (Rubruck,
St. Louis’ envoy to the Great Khan in 1253, in Relation des Voyages, Bergeron). “Quoique
les Tartares soient nomades et sans cesse errants de cédté et d’autre, ils ne sont pas libres
pourtant d’aller vivre dans un autre pays que le leur” (Huc’s Souvenirs d’un Voyage dans la
Tartarie, vol. 1, p. 271).