30 THE BELLA COOLA INDIANS

sively when the villages in which the dances are taking place
are adjacent or separated by such a short distance that envoys
cannot meet e7 rouile.

A word may be said about the attitude of the Bella Coola
to the dances of other coastal tribes. They know that the
Bella Bella, Rivers Inlet, Kwakiutl, and Kitkatla people have
kusiut societies, but until recently their members were con-
sidered to be uninitiated, as Bella Coola were when they visited
foreign tribes. A few years ago the Bella Coola, Bella Bella,
and Rivers Inlet people decided that their rites were sufficiently
akin to permit membership in one tribe to carry with it mem-
bership in the others:

“We have now one repository,” they say.

This development is due to ease of communication and
diminution of population in the three tribes. None the less,
the Bella Coola recognize differences between their own rites
and those of their neighbours. They say that no other tribe
has repositories; also that in the other tribes the kusiut society
is more intimately connected with the chiefs, in fact, that in
Bella Bella and Fort Rupert the Cannibals are the chiefs,
whereas in Bella Coola even a poor man, uninfluential in every
other respect, can be one.

Theorization is out of place in a descriptive monograph
such as this, but the writer gives it as his personal opinion that
the Bella Coola have adopted much, if not all, of the kusiut
ceremonial from other coastal tribes, though they have pro-
foundly altered it in respect to certain ancient beliefs connected
with localized guardian spirits and the patrons of ancestral
families. He further believes that it will be found that this
Bella Coola technique has in its turn affected the Bella Bella
and Rivers Inlet Indians. There seems little doubt that the
Bella Coola are correct in saying that the society is more im-
portant among them than among their neighbours, and the
writer feels that dances and rituals of different types have cer-
tainly been adapted to the kuszut pattern of the Bella Coola.

8Except a few individuals who had inherited foreign prerogatives.