SRE GE NER react i

70 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 30, 1928

Dénés,°8 I took to task for his statements concerning the distribu-
tion of the Déné no less a savant than the late Dr. D. G. Brinton,
that great anthropologist, not only took my word for it (which he
might well have declined to do), but he actually wrote to thank
me and presented me with two of his works for having corrected
him. It would seem that today’s anthropologists do not all belong
to Dr. Brinton’s school, for, in the teeth of my categorical, though
I think courteous, exposé of McLeod’s oversight, that gentleman
ineffectually attempts to answer me by a ézt quogue argument,
and manages to write four long pages of more or less relevant
matter without the least, even indirect, admission of his mistake.

Now let it be distinctly understood that, even if we had not
the word of Harmon for it, nay, though that trader had written
that the Sékanais used to burn their dead as well as the Carriers,
instead of expressly stating the contrary as he has done, I would
still claim, and proclaim with the greatest emphasis, that they
did not. I have been long enough with them and the Carriers to
be sure of this. I have seen with my own eyes some of the scaffold-
ings on which the former’s dead rested, no less than a few of the
funeral posts supporting the boxes which contained the charred
bones which had escaped the action of the flames in the course of
Carrier cremation.?® No amount of bickering can alter these facts,
any more than it can destroy the information collected from
natives who had been the contemporaries of Harmon and Mc-
Pean2°

Useless for my present critic to speak of “any trait of culture
as characteristic of the Sikanni,’’ whether these be Yutsutqenne
(he means Yutsut’genne) or others, nor is it to the point to bring
into relief as he does the would-be “important fact” that among
them “summer was the season of secret society and other festi-
vals.’”3!

Though that gentleman will perhaps “not find it in Harmon,”
let him be assured that the Sékanai never had any but the crudest

culture, with absolutely no secret societies, or even clans or gentes,

*8 Trans. Can. Inst., 4: 14-15,
*9 No such relics have existed within the Carrier territory for a good many years.

5° It must not be forgotten that my work with the Sékanais dates from 1885,
31 AMER, ANTHROPOLOGIST, 28: 567.