Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/69

Rh After careful examination, with the assistance of explorers and linguists, I reassert my statement, published twelve years ago, that no tribe or body of Indians, before missionary influence, entertained any formulated or distinct belief in a single, overruling "Great Spirit," or any being corresponding to the later Israelite or the Christian conception of God. All the statements of the missionaries and early travelers to the opposite effect are erroneous. Even some of the earliest writers discovered this truth. Lafiteau says that the names "Oki" and "Manito" were given to various spirits and genii. Champlain said that Oki was a name given to a man more valiant and skillful than common. Manito signifies "something beyond comprehension." A snake was often a manito, and seldom were snakes molested. "Hawaneu," reduced to correct vocables, only means loud-voiced—i.e., thunder. "Kitchi Manito" is not a proper name for one god, but an appellation of an entire class of great spirits. So with the Dakota term "Wakan," which means only the mysterious unknown. A watch is a wakan. The Chahta word presented as "God" for two centuries is now found to mean a "high hill."

Some Indians, perhaps, had a vague idea of some good spirit or being whom they did not worship and to whom they did not pray. They prayed and sacrificed to the active daimons, concerning whom they had many myths. In their various cosmologic myths there was sometimes a vague and unformulated being who started the machinery by which the myth proceeded; but when once started no further attention was paid to such originator. Perhaps some modern advanced thinkers have no clearer definition of a great first cause.

Praise has been lavished upon the Indians because they did not take the name of God in vain. The true statement, however, has a different significance. They did not, according to the best linguistic scholars, have any word corresponding with the English "God" either to use or misuse, and they deserve no more praise for avoidance of profanity than for their total abstinence from alcoholic drinks before such had been invented or imported. The terms too liberally translated as "Master of Life" and "Maker of Breath" were epithets merely. Perhaps there was an approach to a title of veneration when the method of their clan system was applied to supernatural persons, among whom there would naturally be a chief or great father of the "beast gods," on the same principle as there was a chieftaincy in tribes.

The missionaries who have persistently found what did not exist are not without excuse. Wholly independent of any design to force welcome answers, an interviewer who asks a leading question of an Indian can always obtain the answer which is supposed to be desired. The sole safe mode of reaching the Indian's