The Third and Fourth periods are also not readily distinguishable in Northwestern California. Yet here the rooting of these two eras in the Second is clearer. We have seen that all through northern California there exists the First-salmon Rite conducted by a prominent medicine-man of each locality; and we have referred the probable origin of this rite to the Second period. The modern Indians of Northwestern California consider their great dances of ten or twelve days’ duration as being essentially the showy public accompaniment of an extremely sacred and secret act performed by a single priest who recites a magical formula. His purpose in some instances is to open the salmon season, in others to inaugurate the acorn crop, in still others to make new fire for the community. But whatever the particular object, it is always believed that he renews something important to the world. He “makes the world,” as the Indians call it, for another year. These New-year or World-renewing functions of the rites of the modern Indians of Northwestern California thus appear to lead back by a natural transition to the First-salmon Rite which is so widely spread in northern California. Evidently this specific rite that originated in the Second Period was developed in the Northwest during the Third and Fourth eras by being broadened in its objective and having attached to it certain characteristic dances.
These dances are the Deerskin and Jumping Dances. They differ from those of the Central and Southern tribes in that every one may participate in them. There is no idea of a society with membership, and hence no exclusion of the uninitiated. In fact the dances are primarily occasions for displays of wealth, which are regarded as successful in proportion to the size of the audience. The albino deerskins, ornaments of woodpecker scalps, furs, and great blades of flint and obsidian which are carried in these dances, constitute the treasures of these tribes. The dances are the best opportunity of the rich men to produce their heirlooms before the public and in that way signalize the honor of ownership—which is one of the things dearest in life to the Northwest Californian.
Another feature of these Northwestern dances which marks them off from the Central and Southern ones is the fact that they can only be held in certain spots. A Kuksu dance is rightly made indoors, but any properly built dance house will answer for its performance. A Yurok or Hupa however would consider it fundamentally wrong to make a Deerskin Dance other than on the accepted spot where his great-grandfather had always seen it. The reason for this attachment to the spot seems to be his conviction that the most essential part of the dance is a secret, magical rite enacted only in the specified place because the formula recited as its nucleus mentions that spot.
In the Northwest we again seem to be able to recognize, as in the Central and Southern regions, an increasing contraction of area for each successively developed ritual. Whereas the First-salmon Rite of the Second Period covers the whole northern third of California and parts of Oregon, the Wealth-display dances and World-renewing rites of the Third and Fourth Periods occur only in Northwestern California. The Jumping Dance was performed at a dozen or more villages, the slightly more splendid Deerskin Dance only in eight ([Fig. 32]). This suggests that the Jumping Dance is the earlier, possibly going back to the Third Period, whereas the Deerskin Dance more probably originated during the Fourth.
162. Summary of Religious Development
The history of religious cults among the Indians of California seems thus to be reconstructible, with some probability of correctness in its essential outlines, as a progressive differentiation during four fairly distinct periods. During these four eras, the most typical cults gradually changed from a personal to a communal aim, ceremonies grew more numerous as well as more elaborate, influences from the outside affected the tribes within California, and local differences increased until the original rather close uniformity had been replaced by four quite distinct systems of cults, separated in most cases by transitional areas in which the less specialized developments of the earlier stages have been preserved. This history may be expressed in visual form, as on [page 314].
Periods of Religious Development in and about Native California.