182 
that carried off their kinsmen. European trappers and traders dis- 
regarded with impunity regulations and taboos that had been 
scrupulously observed for untold centuries, and branrled as idle 
superstition things that had been held most sacred from the remotest 
antiquity. It was useless to pretend (as the more conservative 
natives still do in certain places) that the Indian and the white man 
m 
A Kwakiiitl house with leyeiulary figures ])aiiite(l ou its front. (Photo htj (7. ,U. Dnirson.) 
wei’e radically different, that the religion that was good for the one 
might not be good for the other, anrl that each race ought to follow 
in the footsteps of its forefathers. Both the economic aiul the social 
conditions had changed. It was the white man, not the supernatural 
beings of the old-time Indian’s world, who no\v controlled many of 
the necessary and desirable things of life, firearms and ammuni- 
tion, steel knives and hatchets, glass bearls, woollen cloth, and all 
the gew-gaws of civilization. The Indian who followed in his fore- 
father’s footsteps, who clung to the old religion and observed all the 
old ceremonies and taboos, seriously handicapped himself in the 
competition with his fellow-tribesman who imitated the dress and 
customs of the new rulers of the land and from conviction or self- 
