718 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



Dumont de Montigny ridicules the formality ascribed to Indian 

 education by Du Pratz. He says : 



I will merely state here in passing that no trust must be given in what that 

 author (Le Page du Pratz) has written regarding the education which the natives 

 of Louisiana give their children, and that what he says is false to the effect that 

 in each village there is an old man whose duty it is to educate the boys and an 

 old woman who takes care of the girls. As long as I have lived among these 

 savage nations, I avow that I have never seen anything like it. Each Indian 

 woman brings up her children as she desires, and as she considers right. Or 

 rather, they are not given any education. And one sees children six to seven years 

 old who are still nursed by their mothers. They always go with bare heads in 

 spite of the most intense heat, and although they bathe very often in the midst 

 of the roughest winter as well as in summer, they are not thereby neater or less 

 full of vermin. The manner in which the mothers clean themselves is more dis- 

 gusting still than the filth itself. When one says that among these savages the 

 young people are only given the occupation of drawing the bow, and that they are 

 never assigned any painful work for fear of wearying them, he is doubtless less 

 concerned with the instruction of the public than recounting marvels and follow- 

 ing in the footsteps of Xenophon in his imaginary relations of the advantageous 

 education given young people among the Persians. As for me who have never 

 known how to varnish the truth, I can inform my readers that from the time the 

 Indian boys are nine or ten, their commonest occupation is to accompany their 

 fathers to the hunt or in fishing, and to bring back afterward burdens I could 

 carry with difficulty myself. Nor are the girls spared any more. From this age 

 onward they are employed in crushing grain, in carrying hampers of grain or 

 fruit, and in many other painful duties proper to their sex. 



Moreover, the industry of these Indian girls and women is admirable. I have 

 noted elsewhere with what skill, with their fingers only and without a wheel, they 

 make all kinds of pottery. (Dumont, 1753, vol. 1, pp. 269-271.) 



We know, however, that the young people of every Creek clan or 

 clan association were disciplined by the most respected male member of 

 it, and Adair tells us the same of the Chickasaw. That there was a 

 corresponding old woman to instruct the girls is not so certain but Du 

 Pratz says little about this personage. For the most part the differences 

 between Dumont and Du Pratz are differences in points of view. 



Caddo usages are described in Buretiu of American Ethnology Bul- 

 letin 132 (Swanton, 1942, pp. 159-160 and 162-163). 



BURIAL CUSTOMS 



Among the Powhatan Indians, says Smith, 



for their ordinary burials, they digge a deep hole in the earth with sharpe 

 stakes, and the corp[s]es being lapped in skins and mats with their jewels, 

 they lay them upon sticks in the ground, and so cover them with earth. The 

 burial ended, the women being painted all their faces with black cole and oile, 

 doe sit 24 bowers in the houses mourning and lamenting by turnes, with such 

 yelling and howling as may expresse their great passions. 



But the bodies of chiefs were placed upon a raised platform in 

 the temple or ossuary (Smith, John, Tyler ed., 1907, p. 109). The 



