SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE NASS RIVER INDIANS. 
27 
seem at all necessary. In other words, there is no doubt that 
the custom of what may be termed cross-phratric naming, 
once established, led to the habit of reading extra-phratric crest 
interpretations into names that may have originated quite differ- 
ently. This type of reinterpretation of names is analogous to other 
methods of reinterpreting names current among other American 
tribes, e.g. reading references to clan animals into names belonging 
to corresponding clans or reading mythological allusions into 
them. From a linguistic standpoint it is interesting to note 
that many Nass River names are really sentences consisting 
of several words, e.g. qaldtx-ma'q-t lo'la4tl %cbo-' “he-throws- 
behind-corpse-of-wolf,” (qaldc$- local particle “behind the houses” ; 
maq- verb stem “to put down, throw”; ~t third person subjective; 
lo’lafa- “corpse,” object of preceding verb; -l connective syn- 
tactic element, here showing that following noun is genitively 
related to preceding ; ktbo" “wolf”). Such sentence names are full 
ceremonial forms that undoubtedly appear much abbreviated in 
ordinary usage. It seems highly probable to me that many, 
if not all, such names arose from a desire to give a full legendary 
or crest-referring context to older simpler names (e.g. qaldcxma'qt 
“he throws behind”) that only implied or were secondarily 
made to imply such a reference. 
When Chief Derrick’s attention was called to the cross- 
phratric character of several of the names, he explained that 
such names were due to the fact that they were bestowed by the 
father, who, in a matrilineal society with phratric exogamy, 
necessarily belonged to a different phratry from his son or daugh- 
ter. Thus, in a name like ’ axgtpa'yuk w “Eagle-remains-on-a-tree- 
unable-to-fly,” borne by a Wolf man of the noble class, he stated 
specifically that the reference was to the crest of his Eagle father. 
Chief Derrick further connected the giving of a cross-phratric 
name with the fact that a child is born in a house belonging not 
to his own phratry, but to that of his father; when still young, 
however, he was sent away to be brought up at the house of his 
maternal uncle, where he would live with his family kinsmen. 
This custom of change of residence early in life finds its exact 
counterpart among the Haida. 
