ON THE ETHNOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA. 369 



to go and get the salmon for them, and thus help them to make peace 

 with their wives again. 



From this point the story closely resembles that told by the Pila'tlq 

 regarding the origin or presence of the salmon in their waters, which 

 I have recorded below. It will be unnecessary, therefore, to repeat it 

 here. 



The Tcil'Qe'uk seem to possess but few folk-tales, or else they have 

 forgotten them, the above being all I was able to gather from my dif- 

 ferent informants. They are, however, a most interesting people, and 

 the study of their customs, beliefs, and language has been both profitable 

 and instructive. 



LINGUISTIC. 



In Dr. Boas's brief notes on the HalkOme'lEm tribes of the Fraser he does not 

 treat of their language at all, except to call attention to the fact that it is dialecti- 

 cally allied to the Kaue'tcin of Vancouver Island, He remarks : 'The language as 

 spoken on Vancouver Island [i.e., the Kaue'tcin] and on the mainland shows slight 

 dialectic differences, the most striking ones being the general substitution of I for m, 

 and of tl for « on Fraser River.' ' In making this very general statement. Dr. Boas 

 is slightly in error. He has forgotten that a vocabulary of one of the most important 

 and extensive of the River tribes, the Kwa'ntlEn, has been given in the Comparative 

 Vocabularies of Dawson and Tolmie, in which this substitution finds no place at all as 

 far as the interchange of n and I is concerned, and very little as regards the vowels ; 

 and my own more detailed investigations confirm the accuracy of these investiga* 

 tions. There are more important dialectical differences, too, than the interchanges 

 mentioned by Dr. Boas. These will be brought out in their proper place in my 

 treatment of the HalkOme'lEm dialects. 



In choosing the Kwa'ntlEn and the Tcil'Qe'uk, as I have in this report, to illustrate 

 the speech of the HalkiDme'lEm tribes of the Lower Fraser, I was influenced by the 

 following considerations. In the first place, the Kwa'ntlEn are, or rather have been, 

 one of the most powerful and extensive of the River tribes, and their dialect seemed 

 to present some special and interesting features worthy of attention ; and in the 

 second, the Tcil'Qe'uk were reported to have formerly spoken a non-Halkome'lEm 

 tongue. It seemed wise to me, in view of this fact, to search for linguistic evidence 

 of this report, as a confirmation of it might throw light incidentally upon other 

 important questions. 



I may remark in passing tliat thus far no systematic attempt to elucidate the 

 dialectical peculiarities of the HalkOme'lEm speech, outside of my own efforts, has 

 been made as far as I have been able to learn . A few hymns and prayers in Yale 

 and Tcil'Qe'uk have been printed by missionary effort ; but these, fashioned as they 

 are for the most pp.rt rigidly on English lines, do not always afford the student a 

 correct or satisfactory view of the language, or give him any grasp of its syntactical 

 principles and peculiarities. The phonology, too, employed in these productions is 

 painfully lacking in uniformity, as well as otherwise falling short of what one could 

 desire. 



In this connection I would like to suggest that the Indian Department at Ottawa 

 might lay linguistic science under a deep debt of gratitude if it would adopt the 

 phonetics of the Reports on the North-Western Tribes of Canada, published in the 

 annual Reports of the Birtish Association, which are employed in these studies, and 

 which have proved themselves to be fairly adequate to their task, and print and 

 circulate them among the missionaries who have charge of the spiritual welfare of 

 the Indians throughout the Dominion. I am given to understand that the Depart- 

 ment has asked certain missionaries in British Columbia to make vocabularies of the 

 speech of the tribes amongst whom they labour, and these vocabularies would be 

 infinitely more valuable if an adequate and uniform system of phonetics were 

 adopted and employed bj' the compilers of them. 



In the compilation of these notes I have followed my usual practice and emplo3'ed 

 two or three Indians together. I have found this to be imperatively necessary. 

 The personal difference in articulation and enunciation, through loss of teeth or 



190-^ 



' See Ninth Bepoit on the N.«W. Tribes of Canada, B.A.A.S., 1894. 



B B 



