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useful wife and a fertile mother, so that the houses might be filled with 
children and the village maintain its prosperity and strength. But the all- 
pervading idea of system had taken hold of the people and education had 
to fall into Une. 
So it came about that among the western Carriers, those who were 
most subjected to west coast influences, education was divided into two 
parts or courses, which ran concurrently and in many ways overlapped. 
One was a secular education, the other ethical and religious. It will be 
convenient to discuss the two separately, beginning with the former. 
Secular training, or geretne, as it was called, was instruction in the 
various manual tasks that the children would have to perform when they 
grew up. With a girl this meant the carrying of wood and water, the 
curing and cooking of fish, meat, and berries, the tanning of skins, the 
designing and sewing of clothing, the making of birch-bark baskets, sinew 
thread, etc.; with a boy it involved such things as house-building, the 
manufacture of tools and weapons, woodcraft, and the methods of hunting 
and fishing. For, as in most communities, whether savage or civilized, 
the man provided the necessities of the home, the woman organized them 
and worked them up for use. 
Secular education of this kind was imparted mainly by the parents 
and grandparents while the child was very young; later the mother’s 
brothers and sisters played an important role, inheritance and descent 
now following the maternal line. Just as in those earlier times when the 
Carriers hunted east of the Rocky mountains, the girls helped their kins- 
women in the house and carried wood and water, while the boys followed 
the men to the fishing and hunting, or played in the open spaces around the 
villages; only now there was more conscious supervision of their move- 
ments, and more direct instruction in their work and play. For example, 
boys were not allowed to run downhill, only uphill, so that they might- 
gain endurance for the chase. At Hagwelget, the most western of the 
Carrier villages, several trails lead down a steep cliff to the foot of a canyon, 
and the boys were trained to race one another from the bottom to the top 
of this cliff. 
The second course in the education of a western Carrier was religious 
instruction. Here the method adopted was the folk-tale, gidete, narrated 
by the head of the long house after the evening meal. Nearly every story 
carried with it either the explanation of some phenomenon — like the 
moaning of the trees beneath the wind or the flatness of the beaver’s tail- 
or else a moral, such as the penalty involved in the violation of a certain 
taboo; for religious instruction went hand in hand with instruction in 
manners and morals. Breaches of etiquette or of the moral code might be 
punished with an occasional thrashing, administered usually by the 
mother’s brother. More often the offence was allowed to pass without 
remark until the evening. Then, when the inmates of the house were 
preparing to retire for the night, the old head man from his couch at the 
back would begin a story to which everyone lent respectful attention. 
Gradually developing its plot until it applied to the present occasion, he 
would turn to the culprit and ask “Did you do such and such a thing 
today?” The boy was bound to confess. Then the old man would resume 
