Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/69

Rh certain mutual rights and obligations. The totem is the crest or symbol of the clan. The bond uniting the clansmen to one another is that of blood: the tie of kinship. The questions raised by Dr. Boas concern the nature of the bond uniting the clansmen to the totem. "The members of a totem clan," says Dr. Frazer, generalising the information available up to 1887, "call themselves by the name of their totem, and commonly believe themselves to be actually descended from it." But among the tribes of British Columbia, Dr. Boas tells us, "it must be clearly understood that the natives do not consider themselves descendants of the totem." The characteristics of the totem, in fact, suggest relationship rather with the manitous of other North American tribes. When a youth belonging, for instance, to the Ojibways arrives at puberty, he undergoes certain religious rites, and fasts, until some supernatural being appears to him, generally in the form of an animal, and becomes his personal manitou, that is, his guide and protector for the rest of his life. Now the totem in British Columbia, according to Dr. Boas, would seem to be a personal manitou, become the hereditary manitou of a family. Miss Alice Fletcher, who has long lived in intimate converse with the Omaha of the United States, has been led independently to form the same opinion as to the origin of the totems among the Indians of the prairies. These opinions, if correct, will profoundly affect scientific speculation on savage religion and social polity. Though they cannot yet be considered as definitely established, we must accord them the respect due to opinions formed after long inquiry by competent and painstaking observers. At the same time, the legends related by Dr. Boas are hardly decisive of the exact relationship of the totem to the clan, as conceived by the peoples