On account of their want of employment in the winter and their inability to read, probably the sinfulness of this sin is not so great with them as with whites. Some good, prominent Indian workers have thought that it was hardly right to proscribe a Christian Indian from gambling. I learned of one Protestant church which admitted Indians without saying any thing on this subject, but which tried to stop it after they were in the church; but I could never bring myself to think that a church full of gambling Indians was right, and this became one of the test questions with the men in regard to admittance into the church.
When I first saw the infatuation the game possessed for them I felt that nothing but the gospel of Christ would ever stop it. Among the Clallams off of the reservation none except the Christians have given it up. On the reservation within the
POTLATCH HOUSE, SKOKOMISH.
40 ft. x 200.
last few years so many of the Indians have become Christians that public opinion has frowned on it, and there is very little, if any, of it, though some of the Indians who do not profess to be Christians, when they visit other Indians, will gamble, although they do not when at home.
The Potlatch is the greatest festival that the Indian has. It is a Chinook word, and means “to give,” and is bestowed as a name to the festival because the central idea of it is a distribution of gifts by a few persons to the many present whom they have invited. It is generally intertribal, from four hundred to two thousand persons being present, and from one to three, or even ten, thousand dollars in money, blankets, guns, canoes, cloth, and the like are given away. There is no regularity to the time when they are held. Three have been held at Skokomish within fifteen years, each one being given by different persons, and during the same time, as far as I know, a part or all of the tribe have been invited to nine others, eight of which some of them have attended.
The mere giving of a present by one person to another, or to several, is not in itself sinful, but this is carried to such an extreme at these times that the morality of that part of them becomes exceedingly questionable. In order to obtain the money to give they deny themselves so much for years, live in old houses and in so poor a way, that the self-denial becomes an enemy to health, comfort, civilization, and Christianity. If they would take the same money, buy and improve land, build good houses, furnish them, and live decently, it would be far better.
But while two or three days of the time spent at them is occupied in making presents, the rest of the time, from three days to two and a half weeks, is spent in gambling, red and black tamahnous, and other wicked practices, and the temptation to do wrong becomes so great that very few Indians can resist it.
When some of the Alaska Indians, coveting the prosperity which the Christian Indians of that region had acquired, asked one of these Christians what they must do in order to become Christians, the reply was: “First give up your potlatches.” It was felt that there was so much evil connected with them that they and Christianity could not flourish together. Among the Twanas, while they are not dead, they are largely on the wane. Among a large part of the Clallams they still flourish.