74 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

CHAPTER V.

Personal Adornment and Deformation.

Care of the Hair.

It is hardly possible that any absolutely uniform style of wearing the
hair should have ever obtained among such widely spread tribes as are the
Dénés. However, it can be broadly stated that, except the western Nahanais,
all of them, male or female, wore it full length, unless mourning or a state
of servitude forced them to have it short. In its normal condition, it was very
generally tied in a knot behind the neck; but various additional fashions pre-
vailed according to the different tribes.

In the north, the Loucheux mode of dressing the hair obtained among
many. When first met by Mackenzie, the eastern portion of that group sepa-
rated in two tufts that which grows on the temples or the forepart of the
head. The hair of the crown or of the posterior part thereof was similarly
treated, after which the four resulting queues were united on the back of the
neck by means of a thin cord very neatly worked with artificially coloured
hair. The women, and indeed some of the men as well, let their hair hang
loose on their shoulders, whether it be long or short.

Further west in the same group, the process was less complicated, though
marked by more richness, as richness went among those primitive peoples.
According to Richardson, the hair was tied behind in a queue bound round
at the root with a fillet of shells and beads, but left loose at the end. “This
cue is daubed by the tribes on the Yukon with grease and the down of geese
and ducks, until, by repetitions of the process continued from infancy, it
swells to an enormous thickness; sometimes so that it nearly equals the neck
in diameter, and the weight of the accumulated load of hair, dirt, and orna-
ments, causes the wearer to stoop forwards habitually. The tail feathers of
the eagle and fishing-hawk are stuck into the hair on the back of the head,
and are removed only when the owner retires to sleep, or when he wishes
to wave them to and fro in a dance’’!.

1 “Arctic Searching Expedition”, vol. I, p. 381. Richardson adds: “Mr. Murray, when he
went among these people, found that they attached nearly as much honour to the possession
of these cues as the Chinese do to their pigtails”.