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both in Canada and the United States it has been illegal to sell or give spirits to an Indian.

Section IV.-Language, Manners, and Customs of the

Indians

Language.

Little can be said of a satisfactory kind of the Indian languages. Sioux and Crees cannot understand each other speaking, though the general structures of their languages have points of resemblance. Cree and Ojibway, however, can hold converse together. The Indian languages seem to have been derived from the Malayan, though since the branching off the Malayan has been greatly developed. This would indicate an ancient date for the peopling of this continent.

The Indian languages are not isolating or monosyllabic like the Indo-Chinese group, nor inflexional like the Semitic and Aryan. They are more like the Ural-Altaic, having agglutinative characteristics. Philological and archæological features of the American Indians and the races of Mongolia and Siberia in north-eastern Asia are, according to Hrdlicka, pointing to identification of language and customs. Much scholarly study is now being carried on among the Indian languages in the Anthropological Departments at Washington and Ottawa.

Immediately upon the arrival of the whites in America, intelligent men among them began to study, classify, and reduce to a written form the various Indian dialects. Eliot, the famous missionary, and Heckewelder, of Bethlehem, have preserved for us the dialects of the Indians on the Atlantic coast, who are now extinct. For the languages of the tribes of Canada, we consult the vocabularies in the works of Baron De Lahontan (1690), J. Long (1791), Mackenzie (1801), Jonathan Carver (1774), Daniel Harmon (1820), Keating (1824), and especially the magnificent works of Henry Schoolcraft (1834); recently the Ojibway Dictionary of Bishop Baraga (1879), the Cree Dictionary of Father Lacombe (1873), and the Dakota Dictionary of Dr. Riggs.

One of the most remarkable linguistic phenomena in this connection is the Indian jargon among

Chinook.

the tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains. This is a combination of Chinook and Clatsop words with French and English introduced among them. It is used in barter all along the Pacific slope. It resembles in its use the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, or the "Pidgin-English " of China. The jargon originated about the beginning of last century, and chiefly from the meeting of the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies with the Indians.

Some of the words in use are worthy of notice. "Pusspuss" is the Chinook for cat; "King-Chautshman" is a King George man or Englishman; "Boston" designates an American; "Potlatch" is a gift; "Pasiooks" is a Frenchman; Piah-ship" is a steamer, a corruption of "fire-ship"; "Cosho" is a pig, from the French "Cochon"; "Tahla" is a dollar, and so on.

Picturewriting.

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The mode of representing his ideas in a pictorial manner is a marked peculiarity of the Indian. Numerous writers have given examples of this. The totem" of the Indian is an illustration of it. It is some object, generally an animal, used as a crest. On the "Roches Percées," a group of remarkable rocks on the prairies, along the forty-ninth parallel, between the United States and the North-West Territories, are figured moose, horse, sturgeon, buffalo-heads, and the like as the totems or "symbols" of visitors, who have cut them on the rocks, as tourists to Niagara Falls and elsewhere do.

Very ingenious uses are made of picture-writing by the Indians. The writer has in his possession a drawing by Mawintopaness, chief of the Rainy River Indians, representing himself as an Indian in the centre, with one eye turned to the right to the missionary to see the way he points out, and the other to the trader on his left to show the necessity of also having an eye toward business ; and the poor Indian is divided between the two opposing forces.

The same chief keeps a perfectly accurate account of what the Government gives him from year to year on a sheet of foolscap in pictures. A barrel of pork is a picture of a barrel with a rude drawing of a pig upon it; a box of tea is a square with steam puffing out of one corner of it; oxen and cattle, plough, harrow, saws, etc., are easily recognizable.

The Syl

In connection with Indian writing a most interesting system, called the syllabic character, was invented in 1840 by the Rev. James Evans, then labic." a missionary on Hudson Bay. It consists in using triangles, circles, hooks, and other characters as symbols for syllables. It is now extensively used by the Crees of the Saskatchewan, who write letters with it on birch-bark to one another. It may be learned by an intelligent Indian in an afternoon or two, being quite simple.

The British and Foreign Bible Society, the Church of England, and the Roman Catholics use this character in printing Indian books. When Lord Dufferin was in North-Western Canada in 1878, he heard of this character for the first time, and remarked that distinguished men had been given a place in Westminster Abbey for doing less than the inventor of the syllabic characters had done.

Among the Indians it has been the custom to record events by the use of wampum belts or by knots of particular kinds. The Indians have a considerable skill in geography and astronomy, though, like all savage peoples, they regard celestial phenomena with awe. The divisions of time are carefully noted by the various tribes. Some of the nations, such as the Blackfeet, regard the sun as a "Manitou," and worship him. A number of the constellations are known to the Indians.

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The mode of reckoning time is by "nights" rather than by days. The greater divisions of time are counted by moons or months. Among the Crees the months are as follows: May, "Frog-moon"; June, the moon for birds laying eggs; July, the moulting month; August, the moon when the young birds fly; September, the

month when the moose casts his horns; October, rutting moon; November, hoar-frost or ice-moon; December, whirlwind moon; January, very cold month; February, big moon or old moon; March, eagle moon; April, 66 goose moon."

A people so devoted to a wandering life as the Indians must become noted for excellence in violent and Sports.

exciting games. It is true the restless ten

dencies of the Indian tribes found an outlet in the frequent wars carried on. When the young men of the tribe became wearied with "inglorious ease" at home, a warparty was organized, and frequently wars were undertaken with no other motive than that with which a Russian autocrat is said to incite a European war, viz. for the purpose of creating a public interest.

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But athletic sports of various kinds are earnestly followed in times of peace. Chief among them is the game of ball, which has been preserved in what may be called the Canadian national sport, that of "lacrosse." In this the ball is thrown by a stick," some four feet long, made of tough wood, bent round at the top, and the hooped part of the instrument, which is ten or twelve inches wide, covered by a network of strong thongs of buffalo or other skin. Among some of the tribes the game is played by each player having a stick in each hand; among others, by the player only carrying one. Any number of chosen players can engage in the game. In the great camps of the western plains as many as 800 players take part in the game. The contestants are divided into two equal parties, and the object is to pass the ball through the opposing goals, which are made by two poles some ten or twelve feet high, with a bar extending across the top. The game is one of the most exciting that can be imagined.

Violent encounters are constantly occurring, in which, amidst the dust and confusion, the ball is for the time entirely lost from sight. Tripping, pushing, and the roughest jostling all seem a part of the game. At times serious conflicts take place at which blood is drawn. The

writer has seen a Caughnawaga Iroquois receive a blow with a stick on the face that split his nose completely

open.

At times the game of ball with the sticks described, or with instruments resembling those used in the British game of "shinty," is played upon the ice, and creates great interest, though skill is not so easily manifested in the management of the ball as in true lacrosse. Competitions with bow and arrows are common, and these weapons are handled with great skill in shooting at marks. Races on foot are frequent among the Algonquin and Iroquois young men, but on the western prairies, where horses are abundant in the Indian camps, horse-racing is one of the most absorbing sports, and feats of horsemanship perfectly astounding to the white onlookers are performed.

Gambling.

High-spirited, and excitable as the Indians are, almost all their games afford the opportunity for taking 66 wagers -a custom in which too often the white man in his sports has not succeeded in escaping the savagery of the redman whom he follows. The ballplay, the foot-race, and the horse-race were formerly marked by the men, women, and children of the camp, and even whole tribes, wagering wampum belts, household utensils and possessions, tents, robes, and even horses, with one another. Wives were at times in the excitement of the game bartered off by their husbands.

Leaving the athletic sports of the Indians and coming to the amusements of the camp in quieter times, it may be stated that the Indians are inveterate gamblers. Some element of chance makes almost every game of absorbing interest to the redman. The game of "plum-stones" consists in painting one side of each stone, of one particular colour, and then gambling with the parti-coloured stones as dice are used. The game of seeds consists of taking some hundreds of pieces of seeds of the same size, separating them into groups, and selecting in order to obtain a certain lucky number. Another game among the Crees is that of hiding any small object in one of several

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