RPMS:

TS

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

and cremation of the dead instead of aerial burying, labretifery,
histrionic masks and other customs proper to more or less seden-
tary people.

“Copied from the adjoining tribes,” have I said of those
practices when seen among the westermost Déné. The grounds
for this contention, to me the most undisputed of facts, being
again indirectly challenged by a writer apparently unfamiliar
with my earlier writings,*° I must be allowed to give here, along
with new data, the substance of part of my paper on Carrier
sociology, today little accessible to students,*! to which I have,
however, to refer the reader desirous of a clearer, because more
extended, exposé of the question.

Perhaps the greatest characteristic of the Déné stock is its
unparalleled receptiveness. This is illustrated in the far south by
the manners and customs, as well as the mythology, of the Navaho
and other cognate tribes. In the north, we ‘cannot fail to remark
that the representatives of that race are ever readily, nay eagerly,
manifesting it in our own days by assimilating the religious notions
of the whites and copying such of their manners as are COMBUSTION
with the mode of life imposed on them by nature.

“They are remarkably fond of the white people,” said of the
Carriers Harmon himself, or the scribe who wrote at his dictation,”
while the explorer Sir John Franklin, improving on the fur trader,
has it of the eastern Déné that they “strive at an imitation of
the manners of the voyagers and traders.’ Another explorer,
Thomas Simpson, wrote somewhat later, but in the same strain,
of the Great Bear Lake Déné: “They soon became attached to
the white men, and are fond of imitating their manners.’’#4 Accord-

40 “Father Morice .. . . still insists that the mourning customs associated with
Carrier cremation are fhe result of diffusion from the Tsimshian”; W. C. McLeod,
Am. ANTHR., 28: 569.

“a Tern, Roy. Soc. Can.

# Op. cit., 243.

ao Newmtive of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, 1: 156 of the 4° ed.
London, 1823.

“A Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America, 243; London,
1843,

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