1()6 MASKS AND LABRETS 



eacb side. The whole is brilliantly colored with a variety of 'colors. 

 Precisely similar head-dresses are represented in old Mexican pictures 

 reproduced in the Anales of the Mnseo Rationale of Mexico. The exact 

 meaning of these and analogous articles used by the Zuni Indians we 

 shall probably learn eventually from the report of Frank N. Cushing, 

 who has given some inklings of their nature in his recent articles in the 

 ( (i,i in > Magazine. 



MASKS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE COAST AND ISLANDS OF 

 WESTERN NORTH AMERICA, FROM WASHINGTON TERRITORY TO 

 PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND. 



The products of this region must be taken together for our present 

 purposes, since it is well known that their customs, as regards masks, 

 &c., are essentially similar, and also that it is a regular matter of trade 

 for Indians of one locality and linguistic stock to make masks for sale 

 to and final decoration by people of other stocks and habitat; so the es- 

 sential features of a mask used by a Makah or Tlinkit Indian may have 

 been designed and executed by a member of the Haida nation. 



Among the Haida and Tlinkit especially, the style of ornamentation 

 is artistic and characteristic, though in the last few years beginning to 

 lose its purity before the march of civilization. It comprises a rather 

 wide range of conventional figures, which are applied to many different 

 articles beside masks, maskettes, and the totem-posts, considered as 

 maskoids. The shamanic paraphernalia includes masks as a principal 

 item, one for each of his familiar spirits, or at least different masks or 

 maskettes, which are put on with strict reference to the particular 

 power to be appealed to. In combination with them the rattle is a 

 particular and essential item, and may be regarded as, in some sort, the 

 shamanic scepter. 



In Their dances, of which Swan has given us the best, though a too- 

 evideutly incomplete idea, masks play, perhaps, the most important 

 part ; and here the invention of the Indian finds its widest scope. I 

 have described a large number of the more interesting specimens in the 

 National Museum, which, in this department, is richer for Northwest 

 America than any other in the world. 



They are divisible into dancing masks and head-dresses of which a 

 maskette forms the most conspicuous part; helmets and shamanic 

 masks of varied patterns, 1 and decoys. 2 



'Cook speaks of the great variety and grotesqueness of the masks used at Nutka 

 and the rattles used by tbe medicine-iuau and at dances. He also devotes a quarto 

 plate to figures of them. (See Cook's Third Voyage, vol. ii, London, 1784, p. 306, 

 pi. 10. 



- Ai i ording to Meares, the people of Nutka had in 1786 a dress for war, composed 

 of thick moose skin, which was "accompanied with a mask representing the head of 



