A Narrative of the Ten’a of Anvik, Alaska. 
71 
The deceased is referred to as “the one who has gone from us”. The 
term for dead is used only of animals. Once I referred to some one as dead. 
They said, “What! He is not a dog 1 . You are referring to a human being”. 
Nor is the name of the dead ever mentioned; but people think of them, 
and whenever they think of them they turn to the North and breathe out. 
[A prolonged, gentle expiration, as the narrator showed me.] So on return 
from a hunt, passing the cemetery, a man will take a berry, eat half, and 
throw half in the direction of the cemetery, to some chief dying in a good 
season, and then look to the North and breathe out. I recall a visit up river 
I paid to Shagrhk where lives my mother’s sister. “My grandmother”, I said 
to her. “Whose blood is this addressing me”? she asked. When she knew 
me she began to wail, looking to the North, she was recalling my mother. 
“My sister, my sister, and here is my blood come again to me!” — People 
think that if ever they said anything disrespectful about the dead, they would 
be laughing, as we say, at their own corpse. [In thinking of the dead, people 
appreciate in advance the experience awaiting them.] 
About Christmas time there are ceremonials for the dead for three or 
four days. Persons who have lost their relatives in the past year are called 
upon by the shaman to contribute the bulk of the feast. “Who will contri 
bute so many bundles of salmon?” asks the shaman, “so many sacks of seal 
oil, so many seal skins or caribou skins, so many cords of sinew (for sewing), 
the oesophagus of a white whale (used in trimming)?” People eat to their 
heart’s content. Sometimes they eat for the dead, sometimes they set aside 
the food — the best that can be got from the woods and waters. 
The missionaries are told that these are merely social feasts. But many 
of the old ceremonies have indeed been cut out at Anvik. If a ceremonial 
can not be performed fully,, in the proper way, people do not want it per 
formed at all. Yet it is much against the wish of the people to go without 
their ceremonials. The “feasts”, as I have told the missionary, are the only 
amusements of the people, and they would like to keep on with them just 
as they do at the conservative village of Shagruk. 
<B $> 
1 [Possibly this is an Americanism since] people believe that the spirits of dogs survive 
after death, in their own village of the dead on the side of the great mountain opposite the 
side where the human dead go, at the head of the Yukon ... Nobody will kill a dog, at least 
not his own (cp. “On Ten’a Folk-Lore”, 365). When dogs howl people say that the dogs’ an 
cestors are calling them.