Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/416

 REVIEWS.

The Thompson Indians of British Columbia, By James Teit. Edited by Franz Boas. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. II., Anthropology. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition.

A SHORT time since I reviewed in these pages Dr. Boas' mono- graph on The Mythology of the Bella Coola. Another of the publications of the Jesup Expedition is now before me. Complete in itself, and forming no insignificant part of the results of that expedition, it is also supplementary to Mr. Teit's admirable col- lection of Traditions of the Thompson River Indians, published in 1898 by the American Folklore Society.

The tribe of the Thompson River was formerly called Couteau or Knife Indians. It is a branch of the Salishan stock. Since the settlement of British Columbia it is of course decreasing in numbers, and a few years will probably see its extermination, owing principally to the ravages of epidemic diseases introduced by Europeans, and to consumption. The present work, therefore, offers the best account we can hope to get of the social condition, arts, and superstitions of an interesting people. The author begins with an account of the physical and mental characteristics of the tribe. He then passes to its manufactures, the houses and house- holds, clothing and ornaments, subsistence, including of course the manner of obtaining it and the instruments employed, trade, travel, and transportation, warfare, games and pastimes, sign-language, social organisation and festivals, the principal epochs of life, birth, childhood, puberty, marriage and death, religion, medicine, charms and current beliefs ; and Dr. Boas himself contributes a final chapter on the art of the tribe, and sums up the evidence as to the general culture of the people, its character and the influences which have made it what it is.

The bare enumeration of these subjects exhibits the importance of the work to students of folklore. It is profusely illustrated both