iWANTcNi SOCIAL CUSTOM3 427 



the Haida ciilendai-. Four names, it will he seoii, correspond pre- 

 cisely ill 1)1)1 L lists, while live other iiaines are the same l)iit ai'e not 

 ajjplied to eorresponcliiig periods, and the names are sometimes inter- 

 preted differently. The Chilkat were said to count all the months 

 instead of naminj;' them. 



Few of the constellations or stars appear to have been named. The 

 Great Dipper, which used to serve as a guide at night, was called 

 YAXte', the Pleiades were called Weq! ("sculpin"). and three stars in 

 a line — probably the belt of Orion — were known as nA'sIginAx-tja 

 ("three-men-in-line"). Venus as morning star was called KeqiA'cAguLi' 

 ("morning-round-thing"). and Jupiter { ?) as evening star. Kluxdi'si, a 

 word which seems to mean "marten month" or •'marten moon.'' If 

 the morning star comes up over a mountain southeast of Sitka it means 

 bad weather; if well over in the east it means good weather. 



The clan divisions already treated ranked differently in the social 

 scale. Among the ver^' highest were the Ka'gwAntan, KiksA'di, 

 GfuiAXA'di. Luqa'xAdi. and Js'anyaa'yi; and the importance of these was 

 evidently due in the tirst place to the size of the towns to wliich they 

 belonged, and more remotelj' to the position of those towns relative 

 to trade routes. On the other hand, several of the smaller groups, 

 such as the TcukAne'di, were looked down upon as low caste, and the 

 same was true of certain persons within the large groups. 



Difference in caste was. of course, associated with etiquette and con- 

 fused with morality, so that actions that did not come up to the moral 

 standards of the majority of the people were spoken of as "low caste." 

 At the same time one of the writer's informants insisted that a per- 

 son of high birth would also be considered low caste if he did not 

 conform to these standards. According to the unwritten Tlingit law 

 it was incumbent upon evervone belonging to a phratry to house and 

 feed any other member of that phratry who should visit him, no 

 matter from how great a distance he might come. We can easily under- 

 stand that such hospitality might l)e very seriously abused, the guest 

 extending his visit so long as to become a great nuisance if not a 

 serious burden to his entertainer. For this reason such an exten- 

 sion of the visit was said to be the mark of a low-caste person, even 

 if made by a person of high caste, and such an indivitlual was called 

 b_v a special term of contempt, (n)itcka-qa'wu. When a person sat 

 down it was good etiquette not to lean back, but to keep the feet 

 togetiier and the body forward as if one were ever ready to move. A 

 disgraceful act was felt so keenh-by members of the offender's family 

 that he might be killed for it or, what was perhaps worse, degraded in 

 the eyes of all of his people. Moral standards were very different 

 from ours, so much so that their existence among Indian tribes has 

 often been denied, but so far as the Tlingit are concerned, it is easy to 

 see that verv well detined moral standards did exist, to which a high- 



