ALEUTIAN MASKS. 



As Las elsewhere beeu stated the Aleuts or Unfingun, protected and 

 isolated by their insular habitat from an extremely distant period, seem 

 to have developed in particular directions to a greater extent than any 

 other known branch of the Inuuit stem. This is especially evident in 

 their language, religious exercises, and certain details of handiwork, 

 such as embroidery, and grass-fiber weaving. 



The early advent of bigoted and fanatical priests, whose promotion 

 to a more congenial sphere depended in part on the number of converts 

 and communicants they were able to report, aided by brutal and un- 

 sympathetic traders as masters of all, resulted in a total break-up of 

 everything resembling their original state of culture, except such 

 branches of it as related to hunting and daily labor. 



For fifty years the Aleuts were treated as slaves. Hundreds of them 

 were lost in long journeys at sea in their frail skin canoes. Their wom- 

 en were taken from them to serve the purposes of their brutal mas- 

 ters (being first baptized that lust might not be defiled by relations 

 with paganism, a practice in vogue with some of the Eussiaus in the 

 Yukon region 1 as lately as 1867 to my personal knowledge). In every 

 way they were ground to the earth. The priests when they came bap 

 tized them ; subjected them to tithes ; prohibited their festivals and 

 pantomimic dances as heretical and blasphemous; taught them that 

 their forefathers, being all pagans, were eternally damned, and that 

 everything appertaining to them and their shamanism and other cus- 

 toms, as well as their very tombs and dead bodies savored of hell-fire. 

 So thoroughly were they taught this lesson that to-day the ethnologist 

 may rifle their fathers' graves in the sight of all, and the only emotion 

 it excites in their minds is astonishment that any one will risk eternal 

 torment by touching the accursed remains. About 1830 Veniaminoff 

 came, and in seven years spread the gospel and taught the Aleuts for 

 the first time that Christianity was not necessarily the symbol of things 

 brutal, licentious, selfish, cruel, and depraved. The race had imbibed 

 a sort of melancholy, in strange contrast to their original light-hearted- 

 ness, and of this they have not yet shaken off the evidences. But, 

 with a living example of love, care, piety, generosity and self denial 

 before them in the person of Veniaminoff, for seven years, a new life 

 arose in the minds of the people. From the hunters they turned to the 

 church for solace, aesthetic gratification, and leadership, and, as a peo- 



'This knowledge refers not to the Aleuts who have all heen "Christians" since 

 1830, but to wild Indians of the interior. It was formerly equally true of the Aleuts. 



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