Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/285

 The Natives of New Caledonia. 259

for years, used to visit the tombs of his children, bringing yams, and weeping bitterly.

It never occurred to me, who had only heard of the Bear, Buffalo, and Tortoise totems of the Red Indians, to ask whether the natives here are Totemists. But one day, while two natives, Junoba and Jericha, were sitting with me, one of my servants killed a lizard. As soon as Junoba saw the unlucky creature, his whole manner changed. After upbraiding my servant thus, "Why did you kill it? It is my dead father," he put the creature reverently within some leaves, and hid it away in the bush. After a silence he said, " We w^ere talking of my dead father, and he came." " How is he your dead father ? " I said, seriously. " They come to us in our sleep, and tell us to look out for them in that shape," he replied. On the other hand, the totem (if it can be called a totem) of Jericha is a mouse. Some men have pigeons and other animals in this relationship to them, and it is taboo to eat the creature in each case. I was shown a woman whose face was covered with sores, in consequence of breaking this taboo.

[These facts, it will be observed, do not amount to com- plete evidence of totemism. Mr. Atkinson does not say, for example, that men who have the mouse, or the lizard, or the pigeon, for " father," may not marry women who have the same " father." I can find nothing in Moncelon about Exogamy in New Caledonia. As far as our very scanty information goes, the religion is rather of the Melanesian than of the Australian type. Dr. Codrington found no totems in Melanesia, and, except for the missionary's evidence, we have no hint in New Caledonia of anything like the Australian Baiame, the creative being. M. Moncelon is clearly wrong when he says that the New Caledonians " do not believe in a future life," though they are afraid of ghosts. The evidence of Pindi and of others who visited the Land of the Dead (like Montezuma's aunt^ and the founder of the new Sioux religion) is decisive. — A.L.]

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