116 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

able things as the precepts of Christ and what is
nothing else than native American paganism. There
is at the base of that system, properly understood, a
concept which borders on idolatry, since it attributes
to animals regarded as patrons, or protectors, a_
consideration which is nothing if not superstitious. —

Moreover, those ritual feasts, or distributions, im-
mensely impoverish those who give them and deprive
their families of their legitimate due, while they are the
source of the greatest disorders, not only from a
Christian, but from a secular, standpoint. They are
the exhibition of a pride which is simply phenomenal.
The deeds of the ones excite the jealousy of the others,
and, as we have seen in our preceding chapter, will at
times prompt even those who should be social models
to the most shameful pilfering. Hence ensued enmi-
ties, quarrels and recriminations, fights and unending
feelings of spite and resentment, most un-Christian
dispositions, without counting the usual adjuncts of
the same, gambling and immorality, together with a
total neglect of religious duties.

This is so true that the native innocence of the
Sékanais, who never knew the potlatch, is in most
striking contrast to the looseness of morals proper to
the original Carriers and Babines. Hence the ful-
minations against those ancestral festivities which all
enlightened missionaries launched at them, fulmina-
tions in which concurred even the civil authorities of
British Columbia, through a law enacted to do away
with them within that province, the only one where
they are known.

By this time (1901), the river Babines, that is,
those of Rocher Déboulé and of Moricetown, were
the only ones who, after sixteen years of insistence on
the part of their spiritual guide, had not yet yielded

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