red man's religion. One of the stanzas in the Thanksgiving rite is:
For all that He has Created and should offer thanks,
For all the things from below up to himself in the sky-world,
We who are here gathered in assembly thank our Creator,—
Yea, all his creatures who are living here in this earth-world.
Most of the members of the various Iroquois tribes,—the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida and the Mohawk are now Christians, living as white men do. But so great a hold have the old rites and religion of their ancestors upon some that the old beliefs still hold among a considerable portion of the Onondagas and Senecas in New York state and Canada.
The Senecas of the old belief hold their religious rites in their Long Houses, the Temples of their Faith. Here the honest student may observe these rites and determine whether a people whose religious heritage is what we have described may be called "pagan" or not. Is there not something racialy heroic in this stand of the Senecas to preserve that which is distinctive of their people? Yet, slowly, but surely the old life is fading and in time it will all be gone. The Senecas will have succumbed to the heat of the melting pot.
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