10

cause diseases, often also to foresee the future. Nearly every-
where, too, youths fasted for weeks and months to obtain a
supernatural guardian who would help them in times of crises.
Of higher deities they had only feeble and conflicting ideas.
They paid considerable reverence to a sky-god, vaguely com-
bined in the north with a sun-spirit, a moon-spirit, or a spirit
of the dawn; and in some districts they made offerings to a
female deity who supposedly controlled the supply of game.

Nearly every tribe held elaborate funeral ceremonies for
its dead, believing that they would be reincarnated in the next
generation or the generation next but one. During the nine-
teenth century, indeed, some Indians in the south elevated their
Chief of the Dead to the rank of a sky-god and identified him
with the Christian Jehovah.

Pirate VI

Coiled baskets of southern British Columbia.

ART

The sculpture and painting that flourished so vigorously
on the Pacific coast faded away in the Cordillera region, where
art expressed itself mainly in two forms, porcupine-quill