118 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

evening, each of the hereditary “‘nobles,’’ members of
secret societies and the medicine-men then present,
issued from their respective abodes and brought on the
lawn either a crown of grizzly bear claws, a cedar bark
magic cincture, a painted wooden mask, a rattle of
the same material carved to the arms’ of the owner,
plus drums, ceremonial batons or gambling bones, in
a word, all that which called to mind the old order of
things which was thereby formally abolished.® All
these paraphernalia had soon formed a big heap on the
public place: and in the midst of the deepest silence, a
bonfire was made of them.’”

Quite a few readers may be unable to appreciate
the drastic nature of the proceeding. Father Morice
himself, with his archaeologist’s and _sociologist’s
tastes, confesses that he felt a pang at the sight of this
miniature museum going up in smoke. He wasacting,
however, in his capacity as a missionary from whom
the savant had disappeared. He was seeking the sal-
vation of souls for eternity through the abolition of
what does them harm, rather thanseeking to obtain his
own temporary satisfaction by retaining the material
evidences of a reprehensible organization! To have
tried to spare one of those condemned baubles would
have quickly defeated the reformer’s purpose. The
shrewd natives would have seen nothing wrong in
what the priest thought good enough to keep with a
safe conscience, nor in the particular institution which

? That is with the figure of the totem, or protective animal.

8 And which would have remained abolished if the extreme impru-
dence and ignorance of the real import of all these paraphernalia had not
prompted Father Morice’s successor (who never asked his advice on any
point) not only to unwittingly restore that old pagan system at Rocher
Déboulé, but even to introduce it in places where it had been forgotten
for many years: a disaster from every standpoint.

® Morice, Histoire de |’ Eglise catholique dans l’Ouest Canadien, vol.
IV, p. 368.