76 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. VI. 
might be divided into two classes: there are the cabinet and the field 
investigators. On the other hand, ethnological classifications, especially 
of the American races, are based on language. Now, of the five different 
Déné tribes whose habitat lies entirely or partially within the northern 
part of British Columbia, I understand the dialects of three and speak 
that of the fourth with more facility than English. Within the last three 
months, my travels have brought me in contact with all or numerous 
members of the five tribes ; so that should I have the faintest doubt 
about the ethnic status of any division of the Déné family, established 
in the extreme northwest of this continent, nothing would be more easy 
for me than to satisfy my curiosity. This by way of explaining my 
assurance in dealing with such questions. 
Nor is this all. I belong toa religious Order which, for the last forty 
years or more, has had in hand the evangelization of all the Northern 
Déné tribes, and, through the numerous letters and essays contained in 
the pages of a private review published by said Order, I was enabled to 
study the various divisions of our aborigines long before I came here to 
become, as it were, one of them. One of the ablest and most regular 
contributors to that periodical which, I repeat, does not circulate among 
outsiders, was at one time the Rev. E. Petitot, who passed well nigh 
twenty years of his life in studying the Dénés critically. Now, most of 
what I ever wrote on the Eastern Dénés was based on his investigations, 
and in every case due credit was given him. It must be admitted that 
the opinion of such a scholar who personally knows the different tribes, 
should outweigh that even of travelers like Hearne and MacKenzie, who, 
for all their information, were entirely at the mercy of their interpreters 
and who were doomed occasionally to misunderstand and be misunder- 
stood.* The linguistic data, names of tribes, etc., emanating from such 
a source are especially subject to caution in connection with languages 
of so delicate sounds as the Déné. For even such a dull-eared explorer 
as Sir John Richardson—who seriously derived the word Lsqucmaux 
from the would-be French “ ceux qui mzaux” (lege: “ miaulent)—has 
confessed that “the sounds of the Tinné language can hardly be 
expressed by the English alphabet, and a great many of them are ofa 
pronunciation absolutely tmpossible to an Englishman.’ + 
Prof. Campbell quotes three different classifications of the Déné 
tribes, the first of which is Major G. W. Powell’s. Of this he merely 
* It is, therefore, a little surprising that, while noting obscure authors in his synonomy of the 
“ Athapaskan” or Déné family, Major Powell should have omitted, in 1888, the name Déné-Dindjié, which 
had been publicly given to that aboriginal group by Petitot ever since 1875. 
t Quoted in French by Petitot in his Monographie des Déné-Dindjié, p. xx. 
