Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/185

 llic On'oiii of Exogamy and TotcDiisni. 1 69

to themselves, sayinj^, " We are the people who, when we mean 'No,' say ' Wonghi"''^. That seems to me hardly credible ! Much more probably tribes who used Kaniil or Kabi for "No" gave the name of Woughi to a tribe who used WongJii in place of their Kamil or Kabi. In that case the tribes, as tribes, have adopted names given from without.

Again, I consider that the feelings of that noble savage, the Red Indian, are at least as sensitive to insult as those of Mr. Howitt's blacks. Now it so happens that the Black- foot Indians of North America, who apparently have passed out of totemism, have " gentes, a gens being a body of con- sanguineal kinsmen in the male line," writes Mr. G. B. Grinnell.--^ These clans, now no longer totemic, needed names, and some of their [new] names, at least, are most insulting nicknames. Thus we have Naked Dogs, Skunks, They Don't Laugh, Buffalo Dung, All Crazy Dogs, Fat Roasters, and — Liars ! No men ever gave such names to their own community. In a diagram of the arrangement of these clans in camp, made about 1850, we find \}i\Q gentes of the Pi-kun'-I under such pretty titles as we have given.-* (Other instances are given at the close of the chapter.)

If we want to discover clans of fiery Celts adopting and glorying in names which are certainly, in origin, derisive nicknames, we find Clan Diarmaid, whose name, Campbell, means " Wry Mouth," and Clan Cameron, whose name means "Crooked Nose."-'

Moreover, South African tribes believe that tribal sacred animals, siboko, as Baboon and Alligator, may, and did, arise out of nicknames ; for their myths assert that nick- names are the origin of such tribal and now honourable names. I cannot prove, of course, that the process of adopting a name given from without occurred among

'■^' Blackfoot Lodge Talcs, p. 20S.

-* Op. lit., pp. 208, 225.

-' Macbain, An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, p. 357.