You ask me to tell you the story of somebody’s life at Anvik, my home in Alaska. I will tell the story of the woman who gave me the moccasins I showed you—there is more to tell about a girl than a boy. But I shall have to tell about a boy, too, for you can’t tell about the girls without telling about the boys. When Cries-for-salmon was to be born, they called in Havetse-k?dtsa, Their-little-grandmother, an old woman of experience, to help. For three days after the birth Their-little-grandmother stayed by the side of the bed of skins, nor might the mother leave her bed without the permission of Their-little-grandmother. I don’t know much about these days because boys and men do not stay in the house at this time; they go to the kadjim (the men’s house). All I know is that the after-birth is wrapped in a cloth, and placed in the fork of a tree—the after-birth is a part of the body and you would not want to destroy it, just as when you cut yourself, you wipe off the blood with shavings and place the shavings in the fork of a tree. Even what is left of an old garment you would not destroy, you would not throw it into the fire as the white people do, but put it into a bag which in course of time you will place in a spruce tree. Whatever is put away in the woods is thought of as being still a part of the village, so that when a ceremonial circuit has to be made of the village, a half mile or so of woods is covered so that these things in the trees may be included.
The baby’s cord is tied around the wrist or the neck of the baby with sinew, and left on for two or three years. An ax head is placed on the body of a boy baby for a certain number of days—I don’t know how many, nor what they put on top of a girl. Should a white person come into the house at this time, the object is removed. If the child dies under three or four years of age the object, the ax or other thing, is put with the corpse. I don’t know why, and when I have asked the old men they would answer, “Who of us knows?” as they often answer when they do know but have not enough confidence in you to tell. Besides, young fellows are not338 expected to ask questions; you must learn by overhearing, and coming that way to understand.
For twenty days after Cries-for-salmon was born, her father had to stay at home, indoors, “under his smoke hole,” as people used to say when they lived in igloos or underground houses. Nowadays, all or almost all live in frame houses. During these twenty days a man is not to touch any object made by white people, more particularly things of steel or iron, knife or ax or ice pick. Copper, got in trade from the coast, which has been melted down and hand beaten, a man may use; and he would eat out of dishes of wood or bone. Work tools of any kind he would not handle, unless in a household emergency he had to go to the forest for wood or game, when he would first go to the dyiin, the shaman, to get a song to sing in the circumstances. For this song, as for other songs, the shaman would be paid loftak—skins, meat, or oil.
Even if a man goes out during the twenty days, he should be careful not to pass over the water of a stream or lake—it would be othlang, and the fish would cause a skin eruption in the child. Our skin is usually very smooth and clear, and whenever any one has an eruption or rash we know it is from othlang.
Had Cries-for-salmon been born in the spring, then the following fall her father would not go eeling—that too would be othlang and it would cause a dearth of eels. Nor would a man go eeling for a year after a death in his family. If you knew how much we depended on eels for food, you would understand why we have to be so careful. The first sign of the eel coming is the finding of an eel in the stomach of a lush, the fish which is our main food in winter. Some one may find an eel in a lush, miles away from the village, and then at once he sends word, and the men go out to the places on the river where the channel is narrow and there are good feeding grounds for the eel. Here they come so thick that they cause the water to rise, and you have but to throw them out on the bank with a stick. As people eel together in this way, every one would know if a man went eeling after a death or birth in his family.
As with work after a birth in his family, so with amusements—a man should not take part. He should sit quiet, with his head down, for at this time he is supposed to be in connection with his spirits. His spirits are not any stronger than the strongest songs he has, and 339 at this time a man must be watchful lest his songs lose their virtue or power, or lest from violations of the rules the baby die.
When Cries-for-salmon was restless as a little child, and cried, no doubt her mother called out to her, “Lia! the Evil One! Keep quiet!” to scare her. (To abuse any one, people will say, Li dená! Blood of the Evil One.) And when Cries-for-salmon was able to walk, she was watched all the time by her father or mother, for she had to be taught from the very beginning not to step on anything pertaining to the welfare of the family that might be lying on the floor. Should a stick be lying there, for example, that was being worked for an arrow or fish trap, the little girl would have to walk around it, not over it. The spirit of the boy is stronger than the spirit of the girl, so a boy may step where he pleases.
And the girl, as she grows a little older, has to be taught to be extremely careful about whatever she finds on the floor, of bits of food, of bone or feather or hair or skin. It is a rule that all such waste bits be put separately into baskets by the women, and carried to the haunts, in forest or on river, of the creatures to which the bits belonged. Cries-for-salmon would go along with her mother to see how she dumped into the river from her canoe the feathers of duck or goose or swan, that they might change back into birds such as they had come from—as the feathers drifted down the current, although invisible to her, Cries-for-salmon was told, they became birds again to return to feed in their old haunts of mud and goose grass. Similarly she saw her mother empty out fish bones to become fish, and she saw her take to the forest the bones of game animals. Were such bones left on the floor and stepped on, it would be othlang.
Sometimes, as men sit on the floor with their heels drawn back to the buttocks, or as they sit cross-legged, left leg over right, with a bowl of food propped on their legs, a bone may snap out on the floor instead of back from their fingers into the bowl. It is a spirit of the family, a hungry spirit, who is after the food. The spirit of the food goes to feed the family spirit, and although the particle is picked up and taken to the forest, it has lost its power, it will not become animal again.
When we men kill willow or ruffed grouse (ptarmigan), we take out some of the tail feathers and throw them on the ground, giving them back to the forest to become birds again. I remember that the 340 first time I shot a grouse I took out some feathers above the tail. The fellow with me laughed. “That is not right,” said he. “It is the tail feathers you must take.” In selling grouse to the Mission, people will first skin them, just as they will first pluck the geese or ducks they sell, and remove the entrails. Similarly, they skin and clean the rabbits they sell. (Before a ceremonial the men engage in a rabbit drive. They pick out an island or a point of land, and spread out, each man in sight of another. Each yells and beats on the trees to scare out the rabbits, and then they form the arc of a circle and close down to the water. They keep the rabbits for the feast, but a few they may sell.) Bear meat and lynx meat they would not sell at all to white people.
We do not eat rabbit meat in summer and no doubt Cries-for-salmon was told, as are other children, that it was wormy. She was told, too, never to eat in the dark, lest she swallow the eye of the Evil One, which in going back to the Evil One, would choke her. Nor in eating meat should she cut off a piece in her teeth. In pouring out tea or liquids, Cries-for-salmon was taught to be very careful to pour only to well below the brim, almost an inch below, not to risk spilling. If the cup ran over it would be othlang to the person served—he would fail to run down his game, to catch fish, or to do well in leadership—and to overcome the othlang he would have to go to the shaman for a song.
In all these particulars a girl has to learn how to behave, how to carry herself. A young man is rated by his ability in making snowshoes and in running down game, fox, deer and, before the portaging of the whites drove them out, caribou. A girl is rated by her ability in handicrafts and in providing food, but she is also esteemed for her household behavior. If she is gifted with strength, with virtue, as she grows old she is likely to have given into her keeping an old wooden bowl which has been passed down from generation to generation of women, within the same rank, to be used in ceremonies to honor hunters of distinction. Moreover, the presents of a careful woman are welcome. People hate to see a young man as he grows up wear things made by any or everybody. Were he to wear mittens or boots or parki (shirt) made by a careless woman, his own ability might be reduced and his spirits weakened.
341
Cries-for-salmon was taught, like other little girls and boys, never to sing or whistle when eating, and never to imitate at any time in the winter the birds of summer—that would prolong the winter, perhaps making it run into two winters (a frequent expression of the narrator meaning that the already short summer is further shortened), and so causing famine. Nor was Cries-for-salmon ever to make snowballs or snow images. There is but one time a snow man may be made—when people want a freezing spell in the spring. Travelers are afraid of being caught away from home by the spring floods. One early spring I remember that there were many traders at Anvik when it turned warm. The men had to get home to make their fish camps and set their fish nets. Some of them had a portage of twenty miles to make through tundra and woods. The soft snow in the woods and the slush would tire out their dogs. So they went to the shaman and got permission to make a snow man to face the north, and draw from it the cold winds. As image maker they chose an unmarried man who had been born in a month of changing weather.
Snow fights the children may not play, but they play at war in another way. Almost anything will start a sham fight. Perhaps a child will call the family of another child dirty or say, “My father has more skins than yours.” Then they gather fireweed, strip the stalks and use them for spears and darts. These weapons take the skin off your forehead, but the more you bleed the better you like it, and you never cry, no matter how hard hit. Two or three boys will pretend to be killed, the girls will set up a wail, they have a big feast, and they make friends again.
The boys play, too, at duck-hunting and deer-stalking. They will make a duck of grass and fasten it to a long, slender stick. Then they put it into a muddy place and throw short wooden spears at it. The game should be played only in the spring, for if it is played later it will cause famine. It is a very exciting game, and often, out of season, we boys would carry cans of water into the woods to make a duck pond out of sight of the old people.
To play deer-stalking, boys take a bunch of grass and make it into the figure of a deer. For the belly they insert strips of salmon. They set the figure up on sticks and then go off into a cover of stumps and grass. One boy says to the other, “I see a deer.” 342 “Where?” “Over there.” They creep up on it. They shoot, and the boy who sends his arrow nearest to the heart is deemed the killer. They skin the deer, talking all the while—“How fat it is, how limber.”—“It was hard to get.” They take out the dried fish, the killer cuts it up and, as would an adult, he sees to it that the food is divided up among the hunters. When a man returns from a long and successful hunt he goes to the kadjim, while his wife prepares the food and invites all the people to come and partake of it. She goes from house to house, saying, “Come and drink tea and eat meat.” (By “meat” she would always mean bear meat, as that being the most powerful meat, is called just meat. Other flesh she would call deer meat, porcupine meat, etc.) Similarly when a woman gets a full trap of fish all the people are invited to eat.
Little girls and boys together play at fishing and housekeeping. The boys will gather willows and make them into a great bundle, a foot and a half thick and fifteen feet long. They choose a shallow place in the river where there are little fish, and they lay the willow trap in an oval. After the catch the girls take the fish to cook, and boys and girls pair off together to make fish camps like their elders. Once when I was about ten, I paired off with Cries-for-salmon. She got roots to sew into a basket, and grasses to make a doll. She sang to the doll and pretended to nurse it. I went into the woods and gathered bark and wood. I shot a squirrel and a little bird with my bow and arrows, and Cries-for-Salmon skinned the squirrel and picked the bird and cooked. We even made a kadjim to have a feast in. In winter, we children built snow houses and snared rabbits and stole pieces of dried meat or salmon from home. It is not stealing unless we are caught. But our games in winter were cut down.
I wish I could tell you about the time when the children, girls and boys, are turned over to the shaman, that they may belong to the village, to be a part of the village. I know there is a ceremony at that time, but I don’t know much about it. At that time I was at the Mission house. The children are little—about four or five years old. Henceforward, should anything happen to the family, the village would look after the child, and the village is responsible for the child’s learning as much as possible about village custom. The old men talk to the boys, and the old women to the girls. They 343 tell them old stories to teach them what they may not have learned at home. Of course there are other stories that people tell; but these are never told except at night in the kadjim and in the early part of the winter before it is time to prepare for the big ceremonies, to make the masks and rehearse the songs. Many of these stories are about the bird nobody will ever kill, Raven, who can change himself into anything and who made the Yukon river by drawing a furrow with his feet, and the hills and mountains, by carrying earth. And many stories are about the beginnings of a town, of how it was started by a couple who survived a massacre and of what happened up to the present day.... It is improper to tell a story when nobody is listening, so every other sentence or two somebody must say “hen, hen” to show that there is a listener.
There is a ceremony for getting a name, too, which I know little about. Persons may be named according to what they do or according to their character. One girl I know is called Swollen-face; another, Pointing-at (she had a mean habit of pointing her finger [index finger of left hand] at people in scorn); another, Does-not-like-any-one (i. e. men; she would refuse suitors); another, One-the-Evil-One-does-not-like. This last girl got her name because she was never sick or subject to epidemics; she had good eyes; she was big at heart; she was a successful basket maker and net maker and rabbit snarer; she had a cheerful face and looked helpful, just the opposite of the kind of woman who hurts people by looking at them in scorn, and of whom people are afraid. I know a man called He-creeps-towards because his gait is stealthy, as if he were stalking something. Because of the way the name is given, and because it has so much meaning the name is little used. You go around it. A man will call out “Look here!” and his child will recognize his father’s voice and know it is he who is being called. When the Mission children call a village child by his name, it makes him very angry.
We go on now to when Cries-for-salmon is a big girl. When she first menstruated, she was placed in the corner of her father’s house to be out of sight of young men, and to stay so for a year, as we count by moons. The space assigned to Cries-for-salmon was just long enough to lie down in. In this corner Cries-for-salmon had to keep all the things she used, more particularly her own cup and bucket 344 of water. When no one was about, she went to fill the bucket, but, as with her other things, she had to be scrupulous about not leaving the bucket where young men could by any chance come in contact with it. Girls are supposed not to go outdoors at all; but if a girl has to go, she must walk with head bent so that if she passed by a young man her eyes would not get a direct line on his eyes, or his eyes on hers. That would be othlang. The man would lose his hunting and fishing powers and what I may call his community power. (For example, he would not know how to speak in meeting, where there are rules for speaking in order to cut out loose talkers.) Once I went to Cries-for-salmon’s house while she was in the corner. We do not knock on the door like white people, and I would have gone in, making the customary quavering sound of hihihihihihi and saying something perhaps about the weather, expecting to be told to sit down and to be served with food—a guest is never allowed to leave without food—but Cries-for-salmon’s father saw me approaching and met me at the door, saying, “Let us go to the kadjim.” I knew what that meant; he had a daughter in the corner; he was protecting me.
In the corner, a girl wears continually a beaded forehead band to which bear claws are attached. Her behavior during this time determines whether or not she is to be a worthy woman for life, and how skilled she will be in the domestic arts. For at this time she makes everything she is going to use after she marries—what I have heard the students here (at Hampton Institute) call a hope chest. She learns to sew, to make beadwork and porcupine-quill work, to make baskets, and fish nets. The first few months she is not allowed to cook, but towards the close of the period the cooking, the bulk of the housework, indeed, is put upon her. And it is then that suitors take notice of her work and accomplishments. They notice whether the seams of the boots and mittens she has made look strong and durable; whether her bead embroidery is fine, whether she is industrious and competent, how she carries herself. A man knows how important to his welfare the character of his wife is. A man has to run his chase, but, after he marries, that is all; his wife does all the hard work. She gets wood and water, she snares grouse and rabbits, she sets fish traps, and she prepares all the clothing and all the food,345 not only for the family but for the ceremonies at which the man is called upon to contribute.
But there is more to tell about the girl in her first stage, as well as about the feeling about women until they have a change of life, until they are old. If a girl goes into the corner in the summer, when we are all at the fish camp, her family, in returning to winter quarters, will probably have to cross the river or go along it. This happened, I recall, in the case of Cries-for-salmon. Her father had to go to the shaman. He went to Salmon-clubber, who lived with his two wives and several families who had followed him because of his services, to settle down twenty miles or so away from Anvik. Cries-for-salmon’s father gave Salmon-clubber what he asked for—several bundles of fish, some seal oil, and a deerskin. And then Salmon-clubber went into a trance and, as the feeling he had in it was good, he gave permission to the family to move. Cries-for-salmon had to stay in the bow of the canoe, crouched down that her head might not be above the gunwale, and her face had to be covered over. Had she not observed these rules, it is likely that some time later a rash would have come out on her face.
Salmon-clubber would have had to withhold permission had any men been out hunting ducks or geese, as they do hunt after the fishing season closes. The birds and animals are sensitive, as you would say, to girls “in the corner.” To have animals respect them, men must respect their songs. After I returned home in 1917, I went on a bird hunt—this was in the spring. I got only one goose and one crane, and the other five men got much less, too, than usual. On our return one of the old men said to me, “My son, are you thoroughly familiar with all our rules? I have been talking with the shaman and he has seen you bathing where the girls bathe. There are three girls in their first stage.” “How did you know?” “We have ways of knowing.” And he used one of the phrases the old men use which we do not understand. The old men talk to us, only on the outside of things. They tell us enough for us to understand if we think as they think. He went on, “It was because of that, you got so little on your hunt, and the snow fell and heavy northwest winds blew.... We could put you aside; but we think too much of you; and I speak to you as a friend.” Had I been stubborn or 346 not seen through what he meant at this time or another, I would have become known for it from one village to the other, and it would be hard for me to get a wife.
This old man knew, of course, that boys of the Mission were apt to be careless of the old rules. He may have seen the boys, for example, go into the basement of the girls’ dormitory, a violation of a strict rule, for, until a woman is old, she is, as we say, in an unfavorable state, and she should never be above the head of a man. In the spring, families move out to the fishing grounds where they open the season by making canoes or boats they will use. In cutting the wood they use a whipsaw. Now it is a rule that if a man and a woman are sawing together the man must always stand at the higher end of the saw, the woman below. Similarly, in putting away the fish in the cache, the post-built storeroom, the man must do the overhead work; a woman would never work on a rack above a man. In the kadjim, women sit on the floor, and men overhead on the benches which they also use to sleep on. Not only the Mission house, but other houses built on the American two-storied plan are making it difficult to follow this rule of overhead.[17]
Again, while a woman is still young she should not be present at a birth. Nor may she eat a certain species of duck or their eggs, and “meat” i. e. bear, she may not eat.[18]
During the menstrual periods, for about a week, were a young man to come into the house or a man to stay home, it would cause the woman pain at childbirth, so at these times a woman’s husband leaves their bed and goes to stay in the kadjim, sleeping there with the boys and young men. A boy leaves his mother, to live at the kadjim as soon as he has courage enough, perhaps at fourteen or fifteen. If plucky, he may go earlier; but if a weakling, he may not go until he is eighteen.
During her periods, a girl or woman will protect men against herself if she can. For example, if a boy starts to wrestle with a girl—to fuss her, as you say, only it is not done your way, a boy wrestles and throws a girl down, and tumbles about, it is much gayer 347and more lively—the girl, if she is in her period, will claw his face to make him leave her alone. The old people see him scratched up and they know why, and they laugh at him.... Once when Cries-for-salmon’s mother was in the kadjim at a ceremonial, she was called upon to dance on the skin she was giving to the shaman for a deceased relative. We saw her hesitate. “Go ahead. What’s the matter with you?” some one said. She was in her period. “That’s all right,” they said to her. “Stand on one corner of the skin. We’ll fix it up.” She took her place with Cries-for-salmon next to her, and they went through their own dance, their eyes on the ground, and making the motions with their arms that belonged to the dance.... In this way, you see, Cries-for-salmon learned the dance that belonged to her mother.
Like all dancers, the girl and her mother faced the doors of the kadjim—there are two doors, the outer of bearskin, meaning strength, the inner, about four feet away, of wolferene, meaning speed and skill. The space of about four feet, between the doors, allows for the first door to close on the person entering on all fours, and shut out Li, the Evil One, before the second door is opened. When masks are set out under their covers they, too, face the doors. The smoke hole of the kadjim has a cover of bear gut. Below it, in the center of the floor, is the fire. The kadjim is always warm. After the fire flares up, it is killed with split logs.
There is a ceremonial in the kadjim for a girl after she comes out from the corner. I know that she wears a new parki given to her by her parents or by her suitor; but I have never seen the ceremonial and I can’t tell about it.
As I said before, a girl may have a suitor while she is in the corner or before—that is a young man, who has noticed her and knows he wants her, has set to work for her family. He cuts wood for them and fetches water and gives them the bulk of his game. If he does enough to create an interest in him on the part of the old people, they will accept him. The girl herself has no say. Even if she likes him, if the old man does not like him, thinking he has not done enough, the young man can not get the girl. On the other hand, the girl may not like the young man whom the old man likes. As soon as she came out of the corner Cries-for-salmon was married to a man her father liked because he had done so much. This man,348 Thleg’athts’ox, Fish-skin-hat, after giving loftak, had also to get the consent of the shaman, or perhaps it was the chief of the village. Cries-for-salmon did not like Fish-skin-hat; and yet although his father is a miser, Fish-skin-hat himself is a good man of ability and power—songs had been bought for him and his name was one no ordinary fellow would have. (For such a name a man must have powers and must live up to them.)
Cries-for-salmon’s parents knew that since Cries-for-salmon would be a woman of ability, a good snarer and fisher, a woman who would be highly esteemed for the amount of fish she could cut up in a day, and for the skill and rapidity of her sewing, she should get a husband equally competent, one who would run his chase well, who would save his furs and trade. The old people knew, too, that unless Cries-for-salmon got a good husband, it would be a slave’s life for her. She would have to work for her husband’s relatives as well as for him. For the first two or three years, a girl will live on with her man in her parents’ home; but then he builds his own house and takes her to this house. It may be near her parents’ house, but it belongs to her husband. She will leave it, if she quarrels with him, and is scolded or beaten up by him, and she will return to her parents’ house, or to her grandmother’s or nearest relative’s, to stay there until he comes for her.
Fish-skin-hat belonged to Anvik, but Cries-for-salmon had seen little of him before he began to come in at night to visit her. Older boys and girls do not go about together in the day time; you never see them paddling together in a canoe. A girl would not speak to you on the road. If she wants to talk, it must be in the dark or under the cover of a roof—under cover because, as people say, “There is some one watching you.”
After the ice breaks up and people live in tents, when a man wants to take a girl, he will slip in at night under the tent wall to the side where he knows she sleeps, and he will slip out again when the birds begin to make noise. People of position see to it that nobody visits their daughter this way, except the man she is to live with openly after a while, i. e. marry. Parents would say to a girl, “You watch yourself.” If the wrong young man came in, the girl would know because he would not make the signs agreed upon, holding her perhaps in a certain way, and parents would expect the girl to cry out and wake 349 up the family. But—some people are careless, and there are young men who do browse about. Sometimes the family will so embarrass the young man that he has to marry the girl; they will say that the girl has conceived by him—“from him she has man inside.” A man who persisted in not marrying in these circumstances, would be shunned by the other girls.
At the ceremonies, young men see the girls in a............