TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 741 



Manitu {Guardian Spirit). 



Very widely spread in North America was the belief in guardian spirits, which 

 appeared to young men in visions after prayer and fasting. It then became the 

 duty of the youth to seek until he should find the animal he had seen in his 

 trance ; when he found it, he must slay and preserve some part of it. In cases when 

 the vision had been of no concrete form, a symbol was taken to represent it : 

 this memento was ever after to be the sign of his vision, tlie most sacred thing he 

 could ever possess, for by it his natural powers were so to be reinforced as to give 

 liim success as a hunter, victory as a warrior, and even power to see into the 

 future. 



The guardian spirit was obtained in various ways by different American tribes, 

 but the dream apparition was the most widely spread. Dr. Frazer ' calls it 

 'individual totem'; Miss Fletcher speaks of the object dreamed of (the icahuhe 

 of the Omaha) as the 'personal totem' or simply as the 'totem'; it is termed 

 by the Aljronkin onanitu, by the Huron ohki, by the Salish Indians sulia, and 

 oiagual in Mexico. Perhaps it would be best to adopt either icahube or mayiitu 

 to express the guardian spirit. 



Miss Alice C. Fletcher finds that among the Omaha- those who have received 

 similar visions, that is, those who have the same wahuhe, formed brotherhoods 

 which gradually developed a classified membership with initiatory rites and 

 •other rituals. These religious societies acquired gi-eat power ; still later, according 

 to this observer, an artificial social structure, the ' gens,' was organised on the 

 lines of the earlier religious societies, hlach ' gens ' had its particular name, which 

 referred directly or symbolically to its totem, and its members practised exogamy 

 and traced their descent only through the father. 'As totems could be obtained 

 in but one way — through the rite of vision — the totem of a " gens " must have come 

 into existence in that manner, and must have represented the manifestation of an 

 ancestor's vision, that of a man whose ability and opportunity served to make 

 him the founder of a family.' Mr. C. Hill-Tout,^ in discussing the origin of the 

 totemism of the aborig'nes of British Columbia, states: — 'There is little room for 

 doubt that our clan totems are a development of the personal or individual totem 

 or tutelar spirit, as this is in turn a development of an earlier fetishism.' 



Dr. F. Boas points ouf* that the tribes of the northern portion of the North 

 Pacific group of peoples, such as the Tiingit, llaida, and Tsimshian, have a 

 maternal organisation with animal totems : the clans bear the rames of their respec- 

 tive totems and are exogamous. The central tribes, particularly the IVAvakiutl, 

 show a peculiar transitional stage. The southern tribes have a purely paternal 

 organisation, and their groups are simple village communities which are often 

 exogamic. 



Dr. Boas distinctly asserts '•' that ' the natives do not consider themselves 

 descendants of the totems; all endeavours to obtain information regarding the 

 supposed origin of the relation between man and animal invariably led to the 

 telling of a myth, in which it is stated how a certain ancestor of the clan in 

 question obtained his totem. ... It is evident that legends of this character 

 •correspond almost exactly to the tales of the acquisition of manitows among the 

 ■f astern Indians, and they are evidence that the totem of this proup of tribes is in 

 the main the hereditary manitow of a family.'' This analogy becomes still 



' Tofemium, 1887, pp. 2, e<3. 



^ ' The Import of the Totem,' Proc. Amcr. Assoc. Adr. Sci., Detroit Meeting, 1897, 

 pp. 325 n. 



' Trojis. Boy. Soc. Canada (2nd ser.), vii., feet. 2, 1901, p. 6. 



* liejyoTt U.S. Nat. Miis., 189.5 (1897), pp. 322, 323, 3:-)4. ^ L.c, p. 323. 



* But Mr. E. S. Hartiand points out {Folh-lore, xi. 1900, p. 61) that we have clear 

 •evidence from the legends of the descent at all events of some of the clans from 

 non-human ancestors; and Mr. Hill-Tout says: ' Among the Salish tribes it is 

 uniformly believed that in the early days, before the time of the tribal heroes or 

 great transformers, the beings who then inhabited the world jsartook of the character 

 of both men and animals assuming the form of either ap^mrently at will.' 



