Rest Days; A Sociological Study 27 



by chance some one should happen to die during this time, famine 

 is inevitable, for a strict law forbids the performance of any 

 kind of work during the days of mourning."-® According to one 

 account the Innuit, from the head of Bristol Bay to the Arctic, 

 require the survivors to refrain from work for twenty days after 

 a death in the family.-' This is probably too broad a statement 

 which does not allow for minor divergencies of custom through- 

 out so extensive an area. On the lower Kuskokwim River the 

 Alaskan villagers abstain from work on the day of a death, and 

 in many instances, on the day following such an event. None 

 of the relatives of the deceased may perform any labor during 

 tlie period, four or five days in length, when the shade is believed 

 to remain with the body.-* The rule requiring no work in a 

 village on the day when a person dies prevails generally among 

 the Bering Strait Eskimo. Relatives of the deceased must ab- 

 stain from activity during the three following days.-^ One ob- 

 server tells of a Point Barrow woman who declined to sew on 

 clothing, even at his house, because there was a dead man in the 

 village who had not yet been carried to the cemetery. She 

 feared " he would see her." But after consultation with her 

 husband she concluded that it was possible to protect herself from 

 "him" by tracing with a snow knife a circle about herself on the 

 floor. Within this area she did the sewing required, being very 

 careful to keep all her work inside it.^" 



Remarkably similar customs prevail among some of the Asiatic 

 Eskimo and incidentally reinforce the argument for the trans- 

 mission of cultural elements between northwestern America and 

 northeastern Asia. The Reindeer Chukchee forbid any kind of 

 woman's work with needle and scraper during the period of the 

 funeral ceremonies. This rule refers to all the houses of the 



''^ Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 427. Cf., also, 614. 

 =' H. W. Elliott, Our Arctic Province, New York, 1887, p. 389. 

 "'Nelson, in Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American 

 Ethnology, 319. 

 -° Nelson, op. cit., 312. 

 * Mnrdock, in Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 424. 



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