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1898-99. | ON THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF THE DENE TRIBES. -79 
his dictionary he gives even slight idiomatic or local peculiarities 
affecting the Chippewayan or Hare languages, he never quotes more 
than one Loucheux dialect. Major Powell himself gives but one 
: Kutchin or Loucheux tribe, though he writes some years after Mr. Dall. 
“Father Morice objects to this (Mr. Dall’s) list,” says Dr. Campbell, 
who adds, “ But what shall we say of his own list followed by the form 
in each case of the word for man?” * Thus the main burden of his 
criticism in my case is not that my classification of the northern tribes 
is inaccurate or incomplete—indeed he seems almost to find it too 
complete, since he objects to the presence therein of one tribe—but that 
’ which he seeks for 
the purpose of his attempts at identification. For he speaks further on 
of my “deliberate avoidance of personal names,” and regrets that 
it does not supply him with those “tribal names’ 
“being able to enlighten our darkness in this matter,” I “should decline 
to lift the veil.” I confess that, through the dozen or more pages I 
devoted in the most important of my essays tT to the classing of the 
Déné tribes, I thought I had left very little unsaid on the subject. I am 
told I was mistaken, and must therefore hasten to make out for my 
omission. 
The reason [ did not give any name the different tribes call themselves 
by is that, as a rule, tere zs none. They have, of course, some kind of 
vocable by which they are differentiated by outsiders; but, as these 
names vary according to the dialect of the speaker, which one was I to 
choose? Thus the Carriers, who are Arejne to the Tsé’Ke’hne, are 
*Kutcene to the Babines ; the TsifKoh’tin would become Tse; Kwah’tinni 
for the Babines, TsejKaht’genne for the Tsé’Kéhne, etc., unless those 
various tribes chose to give them an altogether different name. 
As I stated in my first communication to the Canadian Institute, 
which Dr. Campbell has certainly seen, the different tribes simply call 
themselves “men,” and that for two reasons. The mental vision of the 
Indian is proverbially limited ; collectivity is generally beyond its grasp. 
It is also dim and blunt; hence its difficulty in taking in abstraction. 
But the tribe is an aggregate of septs, and septs a collection of clans, 
I do not speak of the family ; among our natives it does not exist as a 
unit. The father belongs to one clan or gens, the mother and the 
offspring to another. You ask an Indian to what tribe he belongs and 
he answers at once by the name of his clan. If you force him into 
giving a more comprehensive division, he may furnish you with the 
* The Dénés of America identified with the Tungus of Asia, p. 173. 
t Notes . . onthe Western Dénés. Trans. Can. Inst., Vol. iv.. pp. 10-17 and pp. 22-32. 
