are often reserved for sévignés and necklaces. Indians are aware of the aversion with which the pale faces regard this barbarity. Near Alkali Lake, where there was a large Dakotah "tipi" or encampment of Sioux, I tried to induce a tribesman to go through the imitative process before me; he refused with a gesture indignantly repudiating the practice. A glass of whisky would doubtless have changed his mind, but I was unwilling to break through the wholesome law that prohibits it.
It is not wonderful that the modern missionary should be unable to influence such a brain as the Prairie Indian's. The old propagandists, Jesuits and Franciscans, became medicine-men: like the great fraternity in India, they succeeded by the points of resemblance which the savages remarked in their observances, such as their images and rosaries, which would be regarded as totems, and their fastings and prayers, which were of course supposed to be spells and charms. Their successors have succeeded about as well with the Indian as with the African; the settled tribes have given ear to them, the Prairie wanderers have not; and the Europeanization of the Indian generally is hopeless as the Christianization of the Hindoo. The missionaries usually live under the shadow of the different agencies, and even they own that nothing can be done with the children unless removed from the parental influence. I do not believe that an Indian of the plains ever became a Christian. He must first be humanized, then civilized, and lastly Christianized; and, as has been said before, I doubt his surviving the operation.
As might be expected of the Indian's creed, it has few rites and ceremonies; circumcision is unknown, and it ignores the complicated observances which, in the case of the Hindoo Pantheist, and in many African tribes, wait upon gestation, parturition, and allactation. The child is seldom named.[1] There are but five words given in regular order to distinguish one from another. There are no family names. The men, after notable exploits, are entitled by their tribes to assume the titles of the distinguished dead, and each fresh deed brings a new distinction. Some of the names are poetical enough: the "Black Night," for instance, the "Breaker of Arrows," or the "War Eagle's Wing;" others are coarse and ridiculous, such as "Squash-head," "Bull's-tail," "Dirty Saddle," and "Steam from a Cow's Belly;" not a few bear a whimsical likeness to those of the African negroes, as "His Great Fire," "The Water goes in the Path," and "Buffalo Chips"—the "Mavi yá Gnombe" of Unyamwezi. The son of a chief succeeding his father usually assumes his name, so that the little dynasty, like that of the Pharaohs, the Romuli, or the Numas, is perpetuated. The women are not unfrequently called after the parts and properties of some admired or valued animal, as the White Mar-
- ↑ The Ojibwa and other races have the ceremony of a burnt-offering when the name is given.
