vmcush es psi’ taba as aetna A PESTLE SEA 2 NET ERA LOPE OL:

1898-99. [ ON THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF THE DENE TRIBES. 79

his dictionary he gives even slight idiomatic or local peculiarities
affecting the Chippewayan or Hare languages, he never quotes more
than one Loucheux dialect. Major Powell himself gives but one
Kutchin or Loucheux tribe, though he writes some years after Mr. Dall.

“Father Morice objects to this (Mr. Dall’s) list,” says Dr. Campbell,
who adds, “ But what shall we say of his own list followed by the form
in each case of the word for man?” *. Thus the main burden of his
criticism in my case is not that my classification of the northern tribes
is inaccurate or incomplete—indeed he seems almost to find it too
complete, since he objects to the presence therein of one tribe—but that
it does not supply him with those “tribal names” which he seeks for
the purpose of his attempts at identification. For he speaks further on
of my “deliberate avoidance of personal names,” and regrets that
“being able to enlighten our darkness in this matter,” I “should decline
to lift the veil.” I confess that, through the dozen or more pages I
devoted in the most important of my essaysT to the classing of the
Déné tribes, I thought I had left very little unsaid on the subject. I am
told I was mistaken, and must therefore hasten to make out for my
omission.

The reason | did not give any name the different tribes call themselves
by is that, as a rule, cheve zs none. They have, of course, some kind of
vocable by which they are differentiated by outsiders; but, as these
names vary according to the dialect of the speaker, which one was I to
choose? Thus the Carriers, who are Aretne to the Tsé’Ke’hne, are
‘Kutoene to the Babines ; the TsifKoh’tin would become Tse;K wah’tinni
for the Babines, Tse;Kaht’qenne for the Tsé’Kéhne, etc., unless those
various tribes chose to give them an altogether different name.

As I stated in my first communication to the Canadian Institute,
which Dr. Campbell has certainly seen, the different tribes simply call
themselves “men,” and that for two reasons. The mental vision of the
Indian is proverbially limited ; collectivity is generally beyond its grasp.
It is also dim and blunt; hence its difficulty in taking in abstraction.
But the tribe is an aggregate of septs, and septs a collection of clans,
I do not speak of the family ; among our natives it does not exist as a
unit. The father belongs to one clan or gens, the mother and the
offspring to another. You ask an Indian to what tribe he belongs and
he answers at once by the name of his clan. If you force him into
giving a more comprehensive division, he may furnish you with the

* The Dénés of America identified with the Tungus of Asia, p. 173.

t Notes . . onthe Western Dénés. Trans. Can. Inst., Vol. iv.. pp. 10-17 and pp. 22-32.