Little girls and boys together play at fishing and housekeeping. The boys will gather willows and make them into a great bundle, a foot and a half thick and fifteen feet long. They choose a shallow place in the river where there are little fish, and they lay the willow trap in an oval. After the catch the girls take the fish to cook, and boys and girls pair off together to make fish camps like their elders. Once when I was about ten, I paired off with Cries-for-salmon. She got roots to sew into a basket, and grasses to make a doll. She sang to the doll and pretended to nurse it. I went into the woods and gathered bark and wood. I shot a squirrel and a little bird with my bow and arrows, and Cries-for-Salmon skinned the squirrel and picked the bird and cooked. We even made a kadjim to have a feast in. In winter, we children built snow houses and snared rabbits and stole pieces of dried meat or salmon from home. It is not stealing unless we are caught. But our games in winter were cut down.
I wish I could tell you about the time when the children, girls and boys, are turned over to the shaman, that they may belong to the village, to be a part of the village. I know there is a ceremony at that time, but I don’t know much about it. At that time I was at the Mission house. The children are little—about four or five years old. Henceforward, should anything happen to the family, the village would look after the child, and the village is responsible for the child’s learning as much as possible about village custom. The old men talk to the boys, and the old women to the girls. They tell them old stories to teach them what they may not have learned at home. Of course there are other stories that people tell; but these are never told except at night in the kadjim and in the early part of the winter before it is time to prepare for the big ceremonies, to make the masks and rehearse the songs. Many of these stories are about the bird nobody will ever kill, Raven, who can change himself into anything and who made the Yukon river by drawing a furrow with his feet, and the hills and mountains, by carrying earth. And many stories are about the beginnings of a town, of how it was started by a couple who survived a massacre and of what happened up to the present day.... It is improper to tell a story when nobody is listening, so every other sentence or two somebody must say “hen, hen” to show that there is a listener.
There is a ceremony for getting a name, too, which I know little about. Persons may be named according to what they do or according to their character. One girl I know is called Swollen-face; another, Pointing-at (she had a mean habit of pointing her finger [index finger of left hand] at people in scorn); another, Does-not-like-any-one (i. e. men; she would refuse suitors); another, One-the-Evil-One-does-not-like. This last girl got her name because she was never sick or subject to epidemics; she had good eyes; she was big at heart; she was a successful basket maker and net maker and rabbit snarer; she had a cheerful face and looked helpful, just the opposite of the kind of woman who hurts people by looking at them in scorn, and of whom people are afraid. I know a man called He-creeps-towards because his gait is stealthy, as if he were stalking something. Because of the way the name is given, and because it has so much meaning the name is little used. You go around it. A man will call out “Look here!” and his child will recognize his father’s voice and know it is he who is being called. When the Mission children call a village child by his name, it makes him very angry.
We go on now to when Cries-for-salmon is a big girl. When she first menstruated, she was placed in the corner of her father’s house to be out of sight of young men, and to stay so for a year, as we count by moons. The space assigned to Cries-for-salmon was just long enough to lie down in. In this corner Cries-for-salmon had to keep all the things she used, more particularly her own cup and bucket of water. When no one was about, she went to fill the bucket, but, as with her other things, she had to be scrupulous about not leaving the bucket where young men could by any chance come in contact with it. Girls are supposed not to go outdoors at all; but if a girl has to go, she must walk with head bent so that if she passed by a young man her eyes would not get a direct line on his eyes, or his eyes on hers. That would be othlang. The man would lose his hunting and fishing powers and what I may call his community power. (For example, he would not know how to speak in meeting, where there are rules for speaking in order to cut out loose talkers.) Once I went to Cries-for-salmon’s house while she was in the corner. We do not knock on the door like white people, and I would have gone in, making the customary quavering sound of hihihihihihi and saying something perhaps about the weather, expecting to be told to sit down and to be served with food—a guest is never allowed to leave without food—but Cries-for-salmon’s father saw me approaching and met me at the door, saying, “Let us go to the kadjim.” I knew what that meant; he had a daughter in the corner; he was protecting me.
In the corner, a girl wears continually a beaded forehead band to which bear claws are attached. Her behavior during this time determines whether or not she is to be a worthy woman for life, and how skilled she will be in the domestic arts. For at this time she makes everything she is going to use after she marries—what I have heard the students here (at Hampton Institute) call a hope chest. She learns to sew, to make beadwork and porcupine-quill work, to make baskets, and fish nets. The first few months she is not allowed to cook, but towards the close of the period the cooking, the bulk of the housework, indeed, is put upon her. And it is then that suitors take notice of her work and accomplishments. They notice whether the seams of the boots and mittens she has made look strong and durable; whether her bead embroidery is fine, whether she is industrious and competent, how she carries herself. A man knows how important to his welfare the character of his wife is. A man has to run his chase, but, after he marries, that is all; his wife does all the hard work. She gets wood and water, she snares grouse and rabbits, she sets fish traps, and she prepares all the clothing and all the food, not only for the family but for the ceremonies at which the man is called upon to contribute.
But there is more to tell about the girl in her first stage, as well as about the feeling about women until they have a change of life, until they are old. If a girl goes into the corner in the summer, when we are all at the fish camp, her family, in returning to winter quarters, will probably have to cross the river or go along it. This happened, I recall, in the case of Cries-for-salmon. Her father had to go to the shaman. He went to Salmon-clubber, who lived with his two wives and several families who had followed him because of his services, to settle down twenty miles or so away from Anvik. Cries-for-salmon’s father gave Salmon-clubber what he asked for—several bundles of fish, some seal oil, and a deerskin. And then Salmon-clubber went into a trance and, as the feeling he had in it was good, he gave permission to the family to move. Cries-for-salmon had to stay in the bow of the canoe, crouched down that her head might not be above the gunwale, and her face had to be covered over. Had she not observed these rules, it is likely that some time later a rash would have come out on her face.
Salmon-clubber would have had to withhold permission had any men been out hunting ducks or geese, as they do hunt after the fishing season closes. The birds and animals are sensitive, as you would say, to girls “in the corner.” To have animals respect them, men must respect their songs. After I returned home in 1917, I went on a bird hunt—this was in the spring. I got only one goose and one crane, and the other five men got much less, too, than usual. On our return one of the old men said to me, “My son, are you thoroughly familiar with all our rules? I have been talking with the shaman and he has seen you bathing where the girls bathe. There are three girls in their first stage.” “How did you know?” “We have ways of knowing.” And he used one of the phrases the old men use which we do not understand. The old men talk to us, only on the outside of things. They tell us enough for us to understand if we think as they think. He went on, “It was because of that, you got so little on your hunt, and the snow fell and heavy northwest winds blew.... We could put you aside; but we think too much of you; and I speak to you as a friend.” Had I been stubborn or not seen through what he meant at this time or another, I would have become known for it from one village to the other, and it would be hard for me to get a wife.
This old man knew, of course, that boys of the Mission were apt to be careless of the old rules. He may have seen the boys, for example, go into the basement of the girls’ dormitory, a violation of a strict rule, for, until a woman is old, she is, as we say, in an unfavorable state, and she should never be above the head of a man. In the spring, families move out to the fishing grounds where they open the season by making canoes or boats they will use. In cutting the wood they use a whipsaw. Now it is a rule that if a man and a woman are sawing together the man must always stand at the higher end of the saw, the woman below. Similarly, in putting away the fish in the cache, the post-built storeroom, the man must do the overhead work; a woman would never work on a rack above a man. In the kadjim, women sit on the floor, and men overhead on the benches which they also use to sleep on. Not only the Mission house, but other houses built on the American two-storied plan are making it difficult to follow this rule of overhead.[17]
Again, while a woman is still young she should not be present at a birth. Nor may she eat a certain species of duck or their eggs, and “meat” i. e. bear, she may not eat.[18]
During the menstrual periods, for about a week, were a young man to come into the house or a man to stay home, it would cause the woman pain at childbirth, so at these times a woman’s husband leaves their bed and goes to stay in the kadjim, sleeping there with the boys and young men. A boy leaves his mother, to live at the kadjim as soon as he has courage enough, perhaps at fourteen or fifteen. If plucky, he may go earlier; but if a weakling, he may not go until he is eighteen.