Abstract
This volume forms an important supplement to that which preceded it, giving a collection of bardic chronicles and songs illustrating the beliefs and customs of the Kwakiutl, a fishing-tribe on the coast of Vancouver Island. It has been compiled by Mr. G. Hunt, a member of the tribe, and the text is given in the tribal dialect with an English translation. It is not easy reading, but the report in the preceding volume supplies an adequate commentary. It, forms an impressive picture of life in the lower culture. We have traces of totemism in the shape of paintings of animals on the sides of the house door and posts erected with special ceremonies. Much of the ritual consists of orgiastic dances, performed by men and women in a state of nudity, wearing masks, their faces being painted with charcoal, on which swan-down is stuck, their heads and necks adorned with pieces of red cedar. It also assumes a more brutal form. In one account we read: “The Rich-Woman carried in her arms a body, leading the Cannibal; and the Tamer went on the right-hand side of the Cannibal, and the One-Who-Presses-Down went on the left-hand side of the Cannibal, and each of the four eats part of the corpse—that is, the Cannibal and the Rich-Woman, and the Fire-Dancer and his Grizzly-Bear-of-The-Door.” Scattered through the book are interesting accounts of the initiation of novices, the magical effect of names, magical songs sung to secure the capture of salmon, pre-nuptial incontinence, marriage by purchase and the levirate, burial in trees, magical transformation of men into animals, and much other matter of interest to anthropologists. It is well that these facts should have been recorded, as the tribe is rapidly coming under “civilised” influence. In one list of gifts we read of blankets, canoes; jewellery, forty sewing-machines, and twenty-five phonographs.
Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
1913–1914. In 2 Parts. Part 2. Pp. viii + 795–1481. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921.)
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Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution . Nature 110, 176 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/110176b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/110176b0