Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/154

134 for particular dealing with it. Our common sympathetic references to the natives of the vanished and the vanishing tribes, attribute to the aborigines a lingering and profound attachment to the burial-places of their ancestors. That this sentiment has been intensely strong in some of the tribes is proved by the fact, that, when either by voluntary or forced removals they leave their old homes for new ones, they have reverently gathered up the bones of their kindred to be taken with them. The commemorative rites and festivals of some of the tribes draw them to their burial-grounds for lament and song, and to rehearse the achievements of their departed braves. The most ancient of these burial-places afford inviting fields for the explorations of the archæologists, though little has been yielded up by them to increase or modify our knowledge or views about the Indian sepulchral rites as ever having been essentially different from what they have been in recent times. Burial in upright, or sitting, or recumbent postures in the ground, or a disposal with coverings of skins on trees, scaffolds, or platforms, or in an old canoe, indicating a purpose of removal of the bones; the placing of weapons, trophies, and articles of apparel or food near the defunct; the marking, protecting, and respecting the resting-place, — are perpetuated among the aborigines now from pre-historic times.

The first impression which Europeans received from contact and intercourse with the aborigines, and which they reported in their earliest narratives and descriptions, was that they had no religion whatever, — that their minds were a blank on all religious subjects. The French monarch came to the conclusion that they had no souls. The epithet “heathen,” applied by all Europeans to the Indians, was a term which covered alike the lack of any religion and the belief of any other than a true one. But extended and familiar intercourse soon proved to the Europeans that the natives were by no means without what served them for