Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/510

506 and introduced through the whites are: Cabbage, 'edible leaf plant'; cucumber, 'plant that grows on the ground wild'; oats, 'horses' food'; orange, 'big rose-hip' (the apricot, peach, pear, tomato, apple, are all named after the hip of the prairie-rose). The daughter of David McLaughlin, of the Lower Kootenay, a métis, who spoke only Kootenay, coined for the writer a new word on the spot. This was a name for the sunflower, which she called kākādlimū́kōwādlī́dl'it, which seems to be derived from the word for 'light.' The Indian Amelu was not nearly so ready to assign names to new things—it is probably true that women exceed men in this respect among some primitive races. When asked to name a strange plant Amelu would often reply simply, nōtlūkinē, 'it is strange (foreign, unknown),' or tsákō nána, 'it is small (a little thing),' or, again, hòk•ā ū́phaneē, 'I don't know.' Still Amelu did know a great many things, for one evening he reeled off 91 names of birds. On other occasions he had named over 100 species of plants, shrubs and trees, besides a large number of animals, fish, etc. Of every one of all these he was able to give brief descriptions.

When a scientific investigator first makes his appearance among a primitive people, it is often difficult to convince them that his advent is not connected with the attempts of white men to steal their land or ill use their women—these are the two chief sins laid to the charge of the 'superior' race. The writer once by accident intruded on what might be called the meeting of the 'sewing circle' of the Kootenays, but the shouts of the women immediately reminded him of breach of primitive etiquette he was committing by peering into the women's tent. One of the chief men of the Upper Kootenays, who was unfriendly to the writer's objects, resurrected a dead-letter law of the tribe by which the women were forbidden to talk English with the white men. When the writer overcame this difficulty by using the Chinook jargon, the same man used his influence to have the women forbidden to talk anything but Kootenay, but by that time he had learned enough Kootenay to make this prohibition of not much avail. Some of the Indians understood very readily the idea of having their language and their legends preserved by means of the white man's records, and took the utmost pains to secure accuracy and completeness. Amelu was so interested in the matter that he suggested a new method of procedure, viz., that the writer, if he really wanted to make the best possible investigations and record everything, should marry the niece of the old chief, who was about to resign office—the inheritance was in the female line—and thus become chief of the tribe, when he would be able to accomplish his heart's desire in the way of scientific knowledge. The ties of his own people, naturally, prevented this consummation, which certainly would have had its advantages for science, for as chief of the Lower Kootenays the writer might have accomplished much.