Among some tribes the name of a deceased person will be given to some surviving relative.[251] This is looked upon as an honour to be bestowed on the greatest friend of the deceased,[252] and thereafter this new name is considered his private name, and the one originally his thenceforth ceases to concern him in any way.
PLATE XXXIX.
BORO WOMEN CARRYING CHILDREN
With the naming of a child the formalities connected with its birth are at an end, and once the navel is healed the father’s share in the ceremonials is completed. With his return to ordinary life the infant reverts to the charge of the mother. Day and night the child remains with her. It is carried out into the fields when she sets forth on her day’s toil among the manioc and pines, and is brought back to the fireside at night when she returns to cook the evening meal. The Witoto women, in common with other tribes in the vicinity, carry their infants in a sling of beaten bark-cloth that is passed round the forehead and hung as a bag behind. At a less tender age they will seat them on the hip, and small girls may often be seen with a smaller brother or sister astraddle round their waists.
The Indian mother will suckle her young for three years, or even longer, and at least during the earlier nursing will have no connection with her husband. This long period of lactation is certainly due in a measure to the scarcity of food. There is no artificial supply or substitute obtainable in place of the natural provision. If the mother cannot feed it the child must starve. The child is fed wherever the mother’s duties may take her. On many occasions I have seen a child that is running about and playing, suddenly toddle up to the squatting mother intent on her cassava making, and still standing suck for a few moments and then toddle away. Not less remarkable is it to see the women milk themselves into a palm-leaf, a very usual custom after the children’s teeth develop. The leaf is rested on the palm of the hand, which gives it the necessary cuplike form, and from this the child is fed.
The prohibitions with regard to certain foods that affected the parents before and immediately subsequent to childbirth, continue in force afterwards so far as the children are concerned. Such tabus are more strictly enforced on the girls than on the boys; and their diet is neither plentiful nor seemingly of the most nourishing description. Cassava cakes and fruits are permitted them, and some of the smaller bony kinds of fish among fish-eating tribes, but none of the better kinds of fish, and no game, until they attain maturity.
There is no childhood as others know it for the little Indian. By this I mean no innocent childhood. These forest children from birth see all the life of their elders, hear all things openly discussed, and the very games and jests of the babies are tainted with what we should consider obscenity.
Children are primarily under the authority and protection of the father, but any authority on the parent’s part is very slight, and ceases to exist altogether where the boys are concerned once the age of puberty is reached. Of course even a married son shows respect to a father if they are living in the same house. Girls, as they are in the care of their mothers or some responsible elderly matron of the tribe until their marriage, must be more under authority; and virginity, as with us, is strictly protected so far as is possible.[253] But in the main it may be said that parental control is only a semblance, and filial piety, so characteristic of the Inca and the Chinese, is practically unknown: indeed, though the smaller children seem very fond of their parents, after a few years it appears to be almost fashionable to disregard parental authority entirely.