USA > Alaska > Peerless Alaska, our cache near the pole > Part 10
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The poor natives are suffering the terrible penalties for those evils into which they were betrayed by the serpent who intruded into their primitive paradise, to say nothing of the barbaric inheritance which they re- ceived from their ancestors in the twin practices of witchcraft and slavery, with their attendant and nameless cruelties, which are only repressed by legalized force.
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PEERLESS 'ALASKA.
Though slaves to intoxicants, as very many of the na- tives are, they realize their degradation and their help- lessness, and are anxious to extirpate the infliction and the original cause of it. For years they have protested in vain against its sale and manufacture. They are carn- est Prohibitionists on principle. They are ready to co- operate with any instrument or authority which can break it up. In every effort of repression or crusade against rum they are prone to assist. The Indian police are very efficient. Since 1882 they have broken up the manufacture of hoochinoo entirely. Indian policemen are earnestly recommended for appointment over all na- tive villages. By the respect for authority which imbues their people, they will not only promote cleanliness, so- briety and good order among them, but through these they will insure the work of missionaries for permanent good.
From the personal knowledge which I possess of South- eastern Alaska, I can say with true satisfaction that, on account of its physical formation, the field is not a diffi- cult one to comprehend or provide for. Its needs and its neglects are obvious at sight. It is the easiest place in the world to reform and hold subject to sumptuary obligations. Remedies for exogenous evils, like antidotes which grow with the bane, are at hand ready for use and application, while the obstacles to success are insig- nificant, and may be surmounted with comparative ease. Its people are gathered chiefly into villages and com- munities all along the coast, so that they are easily acces- sible. They are tractable, industrious, peaceable, consci- entious, and eager to learn and apply themselves.
The degradation of the Alaskan women is notorious and deplorable. The cultivation and improvement which they receive at the schools only serves too often to en- hance their commercial value. Missionary John Brady declares that the natives knew nothing of bodily diseases, nor of intoxicants, before the soldiers came.
When the Russians transferred their wards, the na- tives, to the United States, they stipulated in Article 3d of the Treaty of Cession that they should have all the priv- ileges and immunities of citizens of the United States ; so that these people stand in a different relation to the government from a majority of the red aborigines. One of these stipulated rights is protection; and the best
,
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THE MISSION FIELD.
sumptuary protection is from sin and the opportunity to sin. Take away the grog, and the men and women will grow without taint. Although temporarily under stress, they can be redeemed. Careful Christian training of the children among them, and a conservation of the unblem- ished adults from contamination, will restore their pris- tine vigor and manliness. The examples of proficiency among the pupils are really remarkable, instances being common where youth and adults have been able to write grammatical English in letters and composition within a year from the time of their entering the kindergarten as untutored heathen. They are most deft at all manner of handiwork-braiding, embroidering, carving in wood, ivory, bone and stone, engraving on metals, painting, and making exquisite fabrics of feathers and fur, weav- ing, etc., etc .; and in such estimation are their domestic wares held by collectors and merchants that shrewd speculators keep them on sale at the bazaars of San Francisco, New York, Washington, and other cosmo- politan centres, where they realize six times the prices obtained in Alaska. The women have comely features, though inclined to adipose fullness. They are modest in their demeanor and attire, even when they are most de- praved. In the large towns their dress is modern, and sometimes almost up to the mode, being made of woolen and cotton stuffs, supplemented, in a few instances, by store bonnets. A very few cling to their old-time lip ornaments (pins and labrettes), tho' the use of paint is not uncommon. Nevertheless, they emerged from their primitive habits two generations ago; that is, they adopted European costumes and modes of living ; and at present they are as well informed of the intrinsic worth of trinkets and tinsel as the traders themselves. In all the principal stores at Sitka, Wrangell, Juneau, Oona- lashka, and the other large settlements on the coast 10 the northward, may be found assortments of goods equal to those of the average store in New England. These embrace even the latest patterns in garments, bonnets, and finery, and there is as much of a flutter over a new invoice there as there would be over a millinery opening at the East. In many families modern utensils and furniture are found.
MEDICINE AND MYTHOLOGY
While cruising in the Alaskan archipelago the voyager often discovers, on some lone islet or low-lying point pro- jecting from a headland, what appears to be a miniature house, half hidden by a luxurious undergrowth. Sometimes it is whitewashed and sometimes it is painted in gaudy col- ors. Occasionally it has a little window in the side. As a rule it is remote from settlement of any kind, and affords the only suggestion of human occupation which is seen for miles. Only towering mountain peaks, pine-clad and snow-capped, and tortuous water channels intervene, and there is usually such an absence of animal life, owing to the physical formation of angular heights and fathomless depths, that even the scream of a gull seldom disturbs the solitude.
The stranger wonders at the apparent preference for isolation for any purpose whatsoever ; but, after having been duly informed, he learns to take it for granted whenever he sees them, that each of these diminutive tenements is the mortuary abode of some "Shaman" or Indian magician, whose supposed supernatural powers have not availed to avert the inevitable grip. Having completed the mortal period of his allotment for good or evil, whichever suits his individual caprice, he has been summarily shelved, as it were, by those who care to have nothing more to do with him or his occult dealings. They have swathed his poor body in cerements of sail-cloth and mats, covered it with a dance blanket, and laid it away like a discarded bundle whose usefulness is done. There it will dry into a mummy, or molder into decay. Nevertheless, he has been scrupu- lously provided for by his credulous subjects, who have care- fully placed beside him, within his wooden domicile, all the properties and appurtenances of his craft-his magic charms, hideous masks, grotesque wooden rattles, fantas- tic toggery, and nameless implements, which it is believed will serve him in some new embodiment which he is expected to assume. Formerly these relics were held in superstitious awe by the natives, and even the burial site was shunned.
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But in these days of modern civilization and vandalism the graves are plundered of their contents, not only by ethno- logical students and visitors in search of curios, but by the natives themselves, whose cupidity has overcome the scruples of bygone days of abject barbarism.
The Shaman,* or medicine man, is an omnipresent living conundrum to his unsophisticated people. He is a mystery which they can not comprehend, and a terror always, for while he is a handy sort of a personage to have in a com- munity, and is supposed to have power to heal the sick, he is, nevertheless, believed to be in league with the devil. The malign influence of his spells is a constant menace, and no one can tell when or upon whom it may fall. This is a hard reputation to have, but the Shaman promotes it. He is a self constituted bugaboo, having duly qualified himself for the role by a course of trying ordeals by fire, water, famine and direst torture. It is probably his attested ability to survive inflictions which in ordinary course would cause death, rather than absolute immunity from any physical injury, which inspires his people with a superstitious fear. At the same time he is himself in constant apprehension of some clandestine influence at work to counteract his own. If his incantations and mummeries fail of success, he charges the failure and its blame to whomever he chooses. Many an innocent life has expiated an alleged interference in days gone by. Happily, his supremacy is now at an end. His sway was incontinently cut short by Capt. Beardslee, in 1879, when he interposed to prevent the murder of a woman who had been accused by a vengeful medicine man of being a witch. A witch used to have no more show in Alaska, than she did in the days of our disreputable Pilgrim forefathers.
It is the professional business of the Shaman to scare people and to keep them scared. It pays. Whenever he wants money, instead of "holding a man up," he shakes his rattle at him. One shake will impoverish an ordinary Siwash, two will clean him out. It is the same with bodily ailments. As a medical practitioner he despises the use of nostrums, and discards all physic. His method is to frighten disease away. When summoned in a case of sickness he rigs himself out in a garb that would scare a hobgoblin and in -· crease the pallor of a ghost. An invalid must be in great extremity indeed when he will consent to send for a doctor.
" Shaman " is the name applied to the sorcerer or magician among the Kalmuks and other tribes of Northern Asia, and the word, therefore, adds another evidence to confirm the belief that the Pacific coast tribes have an Asiatic origin
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PEERLESS ALASKA.
An appointment with a nightmare would not require half the nerve. The patient knows just what to expect. He has prepared himself to be frightened by a long course of mental enervation, and he feels that it is merely a toss-up which shall stand the infernal racket the longer himself or the ailment. In fact if he should fail to be frightened at all, the enchantment is kultus-no good-and the doctor with- draws, a mortified and disgruntled Shaman.
Such dilemma is alarming, but the medicine man is pre- pared to wrestle with it. He at once dons a frightful head- gear of mountain-goat horns, with a mask of hideous device ; and down his naked spine a row of horns, jet black and polished, extends in abnormal development to the very base. Long pendants made of dried skunk-skins and as- sorted intestines dangle from his head, armlets and anklets equally repulsive encircle his shriveled limbs, and his whole body glows with ocher of green, yellow and red. Armed with a huge wooden rattle, fash- ioned in the form of a stork, with a demon carved on its back pulling out a man's tongue with its teeth, or some other collateral symbol still more repulsive, and carrying a long mystic rod or wand in his hand, he advances into the room with a series of postures and jerks, which impressively emphasize his aggressiveness, overpowering the patient and leaving him limp and paralyzed with terror. If, however, the disease should prove recalcitrant, the Shaman seats him- self on the earth in the center of the room with his back to the fire, and proceeds to beat the ground with his stick, shaking his rattle and singing with all his might. He seems in dead earnest, and, if there is any thing in the logic of sympathy, the patient ought to get well instanter. But death too often plays the stronger hand, carrying off the victim and the malady together, much to the disgust of the doctor, who is very apt to make some outsider the scapegoat of his bad luck. Quite likely he marvels that men should die at all, and it must be even a greater surprise to him when he is called to shuffle off his own mortal coil ; for a magician so capable to heal, and to forefend death, would be likely to suppose himself exempt from the common fate. But the inevitable end comes, and, in view of his peculiar relation- ship as middleman between mortality and the devil, it is little wonder that he is buried apart from his people, and that the site of his grave is shunned. In something of the strain sung of an abdicated monarch,
He sleeps his last sleep, he has sprung his last rattle, No call can awake him to mischief again,
III
MEDICINE AND MYTHOLOGY.
On the Alaska coast the reputable dead used to be cremated, and the bones collected into a box and preserved. The calcined remains are carefully placed in miniature houses like the Shaman's ; but, instead of being isolated from each other, the houses are grouped in a common cemetery, as in civilized communities. The sites are chosen with respect to picturesque attraction on grassy islands, shapely ridges of land, and curves of the shore. On a burial island near Metlahkahtla the Indians have fashioned a number of fir trees into very artistic patterns. At Sitka there is a long ridge lined with several score of these mortuary receptacles painted in gaudy colors and arranged in parallel rows, inter- spersed with fanciful totem poles in quaint devices, on the apex of each one of which is a bear, a raven, or an eagle, denoting the clan to which the deceased belonged. These houses are seldom more than five or six feet cube, with a pyramidal roof, sometimes surmounted by a carved image, and are very creditable bits of architecture, considering that the boards have been split with an ax and smoothed with an adze. There are cemeteries elsewhere which are inclosed with neat whitewashed palings, and you often see small jackstaffs with pennants of white and colored cotton cloth standing by the graves. This is where the method of interment has been adopted from the whites, the bodies being placed in the earth and carved slabs set up in lieu of headstones. There are no less than four other modes of sepulture in Alaska, namely, burial in tents and in canoes raised on staddles out of reach of animals, burial in trees, aquatic burial beneath the waves, and in canoes turned adrift.
Tree-burial is more in vogue in the interior than on the coast, a dry goods box, shoe box, or even a cask obtained from some trader, being a good enough coffin for the defunct remains. One of these improvised burial caskets, which I saw in the forks of a tree, retained the original manufacturer's mark [D W] in the customary place of the coffin plate, an inscription which might have been appro- priately translated to mean " dead weight."
With so many various methods in vogue in the same region, one hesitates to lay as much stress as some ethnolo- gists do upon the assumed significance of mortuary rites and burial as indicating the religious belief of those who practice them. It depends much upon circumstances and present convenience, as well as the liability to subsequent disturbance, how Indians, or any other people, bury their dead. However, it may be said with regard to cremation,
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PEERLESS 'ALASKA.
which has long been the popular form in Alaska, that the natives believe that the souls of those who are cremated turn into ravens. The raven is consequently a sacred bird all over the country, and is never molested. He is known as "tillikum " (friend), and it is considered a good omen when one of the dismal creatures is in attendance at a cremation.
In Sitka, ravens are as numerous as buzzards are in some Southern cities, so that the natives have no lack of family associations. One would think they were dead heroes, sure enough, or " hyas-tyees," from the way in which they strut about the place, and the independent airs they assume ; yet it is not obvious at first thought what especial advantage there may be to the evicted spirits in securing the embodi- ment of this ill-favored bird. What becomes of the souls of those who are not cremated does not appear. Doubtless they abide in that intangible middle ground which only a few mortals have ever been permitted to explore. Two years ago the Indian "ranche " at Sitka was in a chronic state of disquietude because of a ghost with teeth three inches long, which was said to have been seen along the Indian river, and many were willing to offer a hundred blankets to anyone who would capture this terrible ghost, which was believed to be that of an Indian lately drowned there, who belonged to another tribe, and whose body was not crema- ted but buried. A dead slave is not considered worthy of any ceremony whatever, the corpse often being thrown into the sea. There was a death and obsequies when I was in Sitka, and I walked one morning down to the end of the Indian "ranche, " as it is called, which constitutes the out- skirts of every white settlement on the coast, to examine the remains of the funeral pile where the cremation had taken place. I found nothing but a small quantity of charred coals. The unconsumed brands had all been carefully car- ried away, while the bones of the corpse had been picked out and wrapped in a mat and laid away in a dead-house. Some of these houses have compartments, and are the receptacles of as many as a dozen separate bundles of bones.
There is very little ceremony now at a cremation, but in earlier times a bereaved widow was subjected to a good deal of cruelty, being repeatedly thrown upon the pyre by sym- pathizing friends or demonstrative mourners, and seldom escaping without serious burns. Very few had courage to inflict the sacrificial torture upon themselves. Other near relatives displayed their sincerity of grief by various bar- barous mutilations.
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TOTEM-POLES.
(Note the head of elephant on left-hand pole. )
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MEDICINE AND MYTHOLOGY.
Previous to the cremation there is a good deal of formality at the house of mourning. In. Alaskan houses a dais or plat- form runs around the four sides of the interior, which is a single compartment or reception room, opening into small staterooms on the side opposite the entrance. A brick or flagged hearth occupies the center of the quadrangle, the smoke from the fire escaping through a flat cupola in the roof, there being no chimneys. Four totem poles of fantas- tic carving, and color, showing the genealogy of the de- ceased and the clan to which he belonged, are set up at the four corners of the court. They are kept covered while the body sits in state, for the dead Indian is not laid out on a bier, but is set up on the dais opposite the entrance, with his face painted red, a fanciful crown on his head, and a blanket over his shoulders, as if living. The wall behind him is appropriately draped and sometimes festooned with small American flags.
On the evening of the day before the funeral the totem poles are uncovered and the wailing begins. The whole space between the dais and the central fire is crowded with mourners of both sexes, clad in their best blankets, who beat the ground with sticks in time with a doleful chant. This lugubrious singing and shaking of rattles and beating of the floor with long staffs is kept up all night. When the hour of cremation comes the body is hoisted out through the roof and carried to the funeral pile. A corpse is never taken out of the door of a house. It would be " bad medicine," and defile the temple. Some tribes of Indians burn the bark or skin lodge whose inmate dies therein, or they set up the lodge apart from habitations and place the dead body in it, occupying it no more as a dwelling. But this practice would be expensive where the houses are substantial and hard to build, as is the case with most of the winter resi- dences in Alaska. As a matter of belief a house in which an Indian dies is defiled, and this notion is as old as the Mosaic Law, for proof of which see Old Testament, book of Numbers, Chap. XIX., verse 14.
The funeral pile is made of resinous spruce poles of the proper length, built up in cob-house fashion, with fat pine sticks placed inside of the crib, on which the body is laid wrapped in its blanket. Logs are then added above the body, crossing other logs at the corners, and then the whole is set on fire. An intense heat and conflagration results, and a few of the Indians remain to keep the fire alive with their long poles, while a bevy of sad women contemplate the ghastly procedure from their seats on the grass not far
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PEERLESS ALASKA.
away. When every thing is consumed the relations will cull out the whitened bones and level the ashes decorously. There is no odor, and every thing is done silently, decently, and in order.
It is customary to place the dead man's property beside the bundle of bones, which represents all that he was cor- poreally, and occasionally his canoe is drawn up beside the tomb, allegorically to continue the voyage of life, but in fact to remain until it falls to decay. Of late years inquisi- tive visitors, as well as avaricious vandals, have robbed the dead houses of all their contents, and even despoiled them of their bones. The canoes have been cut up or stolen, and the sepulchers otherwise shamefully desecrated. Grass and weeds have grown up inside to their very roofs, and if a chance stranger attempts to explore the violated precincts, he finds a satisfactory inspection prevented by an almost impenetrable jungle of undergrowth. And all this neglect and disorder is done and suffered at the capital of the ter- ritory, and there seems to be no official authority to interdict or protest.
Some writers on Alaska topics who aim to be sensational, are very fond of printing in their books engravings of totem poles and idols, and obsolete things which the young natives of the present generation regard with much the same interest that we do the calashes and warming pans of our grandmothers, or the "one horse shay," and credulous readers are apt to infer therefrom that the religious condi- tion of the people is but one remove from heathenism, whereas it is not impossible to find Christianity in some localities nurtured and propagated exclusively by native efforts. We who took umbrage at the travesties of Charles Dickens ought not to underrate or misrepresent the poor Siwash. For myself, I prefer to write in behalf of an " improved order of red men," quite content to leave the archæology and mythology of Alaska to the antiquarians. Doubtless there is a sort of morbid interest in tracing out the hieroglyphs upon a T'linket dance-blanket, and an enthusiast may even fancy that he has unraveled some pious analogies from their mystic woof, but he who is accus- tomed to read the heroics of the red men of the plains as they are pictured on the rocks and sketched with pigments on their robes, and shields, and tepees, will find in the T'linket blanket but a simple analogue and repetition of the oft-told story of vaunted prowess ; or perhaps a shad- owy suggestion of some familiar thoughts or objects or practices like those we see on the bronzes, fans, and screens
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MEDICINE AND MYTHOLOGY.
of Japan and China. But there is not enough dust of an- tiquity between the blanket-folds to blind the ingenuous searcher after knowledge. Doubtless some progressive savage in these modern days has traced our spiritual lineage in the patterns of our Wedgewood ware, and discovered rev- elations of deepest human import in our Holland delf. Students of composite zoology may amuse themselves by the day, or month, in deciphering the intricacies of the em- blazoned totem poles ; and some of the most pedantic will point out to you the " all seeing eye," the " thunder-bird," identical with the Aztec " bird of the sun," and the " light- ning-fish," which simple natives, it is said, believe to be the authors of those profound phenomena of the air. Yet is it more absurd to attribute the noise of thunder to the cleav- ing wings of a supposititious bird, or the lightning-flash to the darting fish which stirs the phosphorescence of the sea, than it is to explain the sound of thunder as being caused by the swift passage of the electrical bolt ? Verily, the sub- limity of ignorance is as profound as the depth of wisdom. To the untutored savage mind the structural idea of swift- ness, courage, strength, and brain, and all the mental and physical attributes of man and divinity, are best expressed and comprehended through external objects which he makes symbolical. Their modes of thought, and the notions they have respecting departed spirits, are illustrated in their rude way. The natives of Alaska have thought that the crows control the eruptions of volcanoes, and that they have power over the Spirit of Evil which incites them. They believe in transmigration, and in the supernatural powers of the bear and raven, which are prominent on all their insig- nia. Probably the essence of their religious belief is out- lined in the following legend connected with Mt. Edgecumbe, once an active volcano. It is the most significant of all the legends of the Deluge. It was printed in the Century. The story runs : " A long time ago the earth sank beneath the water, and the water rose and covered the highest places, so that no man could live. It rained so hard that it was as if the sea fell from the sky. All was black, and it became so dark, that no man knew another. Then a few people ran here and there and made a raft of cedar logs ; but noth- ing could stand against the white waves, and the raft was broken in two.
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