388 ANNUAL REPORT SRHTHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1940 



The evidence of ethnology is rather confusing. Several traits, nota- 

 bly weaving with loom and spindle, the sib and moiety system, and 

 the chewing of "tobacco" with lime, suggest a linkage with the south 

 and middle America. Others may have developed locally, e. g., plank 

 houses, special types of twined basketry, the caste stratification, and 

 the peculiar style of art. A few traits lead us northward; thus the 

 whaling practices of the Nootka, and the decorated lamplike vessels 

 of stone that were made by the Coast Salish, find their nearest if not 

 their only parallels among the Eskimo. Several traits, however, carry 

 us beyond the Eskimo right into Asia. There is slat armor, dis- 

 tributed almost continuously through Bering Strait (where it was 

 used in the first millennium A. D.) to Japan and China; woven hats, 

 a definitely Asiatic trait; curved fish knives, which recall East Asiatic 

 curved knives as well as the Eskimo ulo; a musical style that seems 

 altogether different from that of other American Indians, but, ac- 

 cording to Barbeau,^ so strongly Asiatic that certain songs practically 

 coincide with northeastern Siberian ones, while others closely re- 

 semble Chinese Buddhist chants; and a social organization based on 

 wealth rather than on descent or prowess as elsewhere in America, 

 an organization that expressed itself outwardly in a potlatch system 

 strongly reminiscent of Indonesia and Melanesia, and in totem poles 

 and grave monuments that, despite profound differences, instinctively 

 draw our eyes to the grave posts on the Amur River. Even the unique 

 art of this northwest coast may offer a clue, because, as Collins ' has 

 pointed out, its eye designs resemble those of the mysterious Old 

 Bering Sea Eskimo and also the eye designs on Chinese Shang Dy- 

 nasty bronzes of the second millennium B. C. Finally, we have such 

 close parallels in mythology between the northwest Indians and the 

 Palae-Asiatic tribes of Siberia that Jochelson went so far as to postu- 

 late a backward movement of tribes from America into northeastern 

 Asia. 



We might also add in this connection two other elements not found 

 on the Pacific coast itself but present among the Interior Salish In- 

 dians of the Eraser River Basin. One is the torpedo-shaped bark 

 canoe, known elsewhere only from the Amur River in Siberia. The 

 other is the semiunderground house, distributed all around the north 

 Pacific Basin from China to the Southwest of the United States but 

 in so many forms that the genetic relationship of them all is still 

 uncertain. 



We do not know, of course, the relative ages of all these traits com- 

 mon to Asia and the northwest coast of America. Some may be cora- 



• Barbean, Marlus, The Siberian origin of our northwestern Indians. Proe. 6th Pacific 

 Sol. Congr., vol. 4, pp. 2781-2784, 1933. 



• Collins, n. B., op. clt., p. 298. 



