A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American IndiansYarrow, H. C. (Harry Crécy)
History
A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians
Yarrow, H. C. (Harry Crécy)
Indians of North America -- Funeral customs and rites
The Clallams and Twanas, an allied tribe, have not always followed
canoe-burial, as may be seen from the following account, also written by
Mr. Eells, who gives the reasons why the original mode of disposing of
the dead was abandoned. It is extremely interesting, and characterized
by painstaking attention to detail:
I divide this subject into five periods, varying according to time,
though they are somewhat intermingled.
(_a_) There are places where skulls and skeletons have been plowed
up or still remain in the ground and near together, in such a way as
to give good ground for the belief which is held by white residents
in the region, that formerly persons were buried in the ground and
in irregular cemeteries. I know of such places in Duce Waillops
among the Twanas, and at Dungeness and Port Angeles among the
Clallams. These graves were made so long ago that the Indians of the
present day profess to have no knowledge as to who is buried in
them, except that they believe, undoubtedly, that they are the
graves of their ancestors. I do not know that any care has ever been
exercised by any one in exhuming these skeletons so as to learn any
particulars about them. It is possible, however, that these persons
were buried according to the (_b_) or canoe method, and that time
has buried them where they now are.
[Illustration: FIG. 25.--Posts for Burial Canoes.]
(_b_) Formerly when a person died the body was placed in the forks
of two trees and left there. There was no particular cemetery, but
the person was generally left near the place where the death
occurred. The Skokomish Valley is said to have been full of canoes
containing persons thus buried. What their customs were while
burying, or what they placed around the dead, I am not informed but
am told that they did not take as much care then of their dead as
they do now. I am satisfied, however, that they then left some
articles around the dead. An old resident informs me that the
Clallam Indians always bury their dead in a sitting posture.
(_c_) About twenty years ago gold mines were discovered in British
Columbia, and boats being scarce in the region, unprincipled white
men took many of the canoes in which the Indian dead had been left,
emptying them of their contents. This incensed the Indians and they
changed their mode of burial somewhat by burying the dead in one
place, placing them in boxes whenever they could obtain them, by
building scaffolds for them instead of placing them in forks of
trees, and in cutting their canoes so as to render them useless,
when they were used as coffins or left by the side of the dead. The
ruins of one such graveyard now remain about two miles from this
agency. Nearly all the remains were removed a few years ago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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