Note 13.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

The horizon of savage interests among the neighbouring Dene or Ten’a of the Yukon Valley is thus defined by an experienced missionary: “The activity of their minds is commonly confined within a narrow circle, as is evidenced by their favourite subjects of conversation. Food, hunting and fishing, with their attendant circumstances, family happenings, health and disease, devils and their actions, sexual propensities—such are the topics which practically sum up the encyclopædia of their conversation.” “The Ten’a mind,” he says in another place, “is anything but speculative, and its imaginative powers have not been turned to building theories of its belief, but rather to excogitate a variety of ways whereby this belief perseveringly asserts itself.” The native’s “dogmas are very nebulous and undefined, and he has never heard them explicitly formulated, nor even attempted to state them distinctly to himself.” Consequently, “whereas there is a certain uniformity in the practices, and an overabundance of them, there are very few points of belief common to several individuals, and these are of the vaguest kind.”13.1