The facts then warrant this tentative conclusion: that the Girls’ Rite is representative of the oldest stratum of religion that can be traced among the Indians of California—their “First Period.” The Victory Dance would presumably be of nearly but not quite the same antiquity.
156. The Second Period: Mourning Anniversary and First-salmon Rite
Pursuing the same method farther, let us look for rituals that are less widely spread than these but yet not confined to small districts. The outstanding one in this class is the Mourning Anniversary. This is a custom of bewailing each year, or at intervals of a few years, those members of the tribe who have died since the last performance, and the burning of large quantities of wealth—shell money, baskets, and the like—in their memory. Each family offers for its own dead, but people of special consideration are honored by having images made of them and consumed with the property. Until the anniversary has been performed, the relatives of the dead remain mourners. After it, they are free to resume normal enjoyment of life; and the name of the deceased, which until then has been strictly taboo, may now be bestowed on a baby in the family.
The Mourning Anniversary as here outlined is practised with little variation, less than the Girls’ Rite shows, throughout southern California and a great part of central California, especially the Sierra Nevada district. Its distribution thus covers more than half of the state. But it has not spread elsewhere except to a small area in southern Nevada and western Arizona.
In northern California the Mourning Anniversary is lacking. It is not that the Indians here fail to mourn their dead. In fact they frequently bewail them for a longer time than most civilized peoples think necessary. They may bury or burn some property with the corpse. But they do not practise the regular public commemoration of the southerly tribes. They do not assiduously accumulate wealth for months or years in order to throw it into a communal fire at the end. And they do not make images of their dead. In fact, they would be shocked at the idea as indelicate, if not impious. Is there anything in this northern part of California that takes the place of the anniversary?
Not as a psychological equivalent; but as regards distribution, there is. This is the custom, established in northern California and parts of Oregon, for a leading shaman or medicine-man to conduct a ceremony at the beginning of each year’s salmon run. Until he had done this, no one fished for salmon or ate them. If any got caught, they were carefully returned to the river. When the medicine-man had gone through his secret rites, he caught and ate the first fish of the year. After this, the season was open. To eat salmon no longer brought illness and disaster, as it was thought it would a few days earlier. Moreover, the prayers or formulas recited by the shaman propitiated the salmon and caused them to run abundantly, so that every one had plenty. There is clearly a communal motive in the rite, even though its performance was entrusted to an individual.
The one specific element common to the Mourning Anniversary and this First-salmon Rite is their connection with the natural year, the cycle of the seasons, a trait necessarily lacking in the Girls’ Rite with its intimately personal character. Because of this common feature; because, also, neither of these two rituals is as widespread as the Girls’ Rite and yet between them they cover the whole of California with substantially mutual exclusiveness, it seems fair to assume that they both originated at a later time than the Girls’ Rite, but still in fairly remote antiquity. They may therefore be provisionally assigned to a Second Period of the prehistory of California.
157. Era of Regional Differentiation
It is now necessary to return to the four regional divisions or sub-culture-areas of the modern tribes of California. Since the Northwestern one affiliated with the extensive North Pacific culture, and those of Southern California and the Colorado River with the great culture of the Southwest, many of their customs must have originated in those parts of these two culture-areas which lie outside of California. Even if the northern and southern Californians “lent” as well as “borrowed” inventions and institutions, they must on the whole have received or learned or imitated more in the interchange than they imparted. This is clear from the fact that the Indians of British Columbia are more advanced in their manufacturing ability, richer in variety of tools and utensils, and more elaborate in their organization of society, than those of Northwestern California; and a similar relation of superiority and priority exists between the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona and the Southern California tribes (§ [87]). In other words, a stream of civilizational influences has evidently run from southern Alaska and British Columbia southward along the coast as far as Northwestern California, and another from the town-dwelling Pueblos to the village-inhabiting tribes of Southern California, in much the same way that civilization flowed from ancient Babylonia into Palestine, from Egypt into Crete, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Gaul and Britain, from western Europe to the Americas after their discovery, and from the Christian to the non-Christian nations of to-day. Somewhere in the unraveling of the prehistory of California the first indications of these streams from the outside should be encountered.