Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/341

 Reviews. 331

report we learn the kind of wigwam, or mamaieek, as they called it, in which these wild people housed. It was either circular or octagonal. The first kind seems to have been a rough temporary building used in the summer. The octagonal structure was stouter and more carefully built, to resist the snow and cold and the storms of winter. The fire was in the centre, and a hole in the structure above it (we can hardly say in the roof, because the hut was conical, being built with poles planted in the ground and carried to the apex, consequently there was no true roof) enabled the smoke to escape. From another source we are informed that around the fire there were small hollows, like nests, dug in the earth, apparently one for each person to sit or lie in.

The Beothuck were tall and well-built, though not gigantic, as they have been represented. They wore a mantle of deer- skin, and carried bow and arrows, a spear and a club. They did not scalp their enemies when killed ; they cut off their heads, and stuck them on poles. In this they di.ffered from the American aborigines of the mainland.

So much of their external life we know. But when we come to enquire into their institutions, their social arrangements, their beliefs and customs, our information is of the most fragmentary description. Shanawdithit, the last survivor, was questioned on these subjects by Mr. W. E. Cormack ; and the summary of what he obtained from her through the medium of her broken English was put into writing. The document is unhappily miss- ing from among his papers. It is not likely to have been very valuable, considering the difficulty of communicating with her, and the date at which it was written, when savage organization and ideas were little understood. We are therefore thrown back on chance fragments of information and on the examination of the graves.

The women seem to have been treated well. There was a belief in a life after death, in which the departed were not entirely debarred from communication with the survivors. At all events Shanawdithit believed herself to be from time to time visited by her deceased relatives. There may have been a belief in some sort of a divinity. Various vocabularies were compiled with the