341 
designs in the decoration of the house, and to enjoy other privileges 
of a similar character, there was naturally a strong disinclination to 
cheapen all these rights by opening too widely the door to member- 
ship; and the obvious way to restrict their diffusion was to discourage 
marriage outside the clan. Thus the same social features that gave 
rise to a class of “ royal ” families among the matrilineal Tsimshian 
who possessed rigidly exogamous phratries, created among the bi- 
lateral Bella Coola a shift towards endogamy and the stressing of 
descent through the male line rather than through the female. 
In other ways, too, the Bella Coola differed from the Tsimshian. 
Tsimshian chiefs had more individual authority, and were more 
jealous of their positions. At feasts and potlatches they had definite 
seats according to their rank; a man who usurped the place of a 
superior, or of one who considered himself superior, immediately 
stirred up a feud. Bella Coola chiefs were not so carefully graded; 
they willingly moved aside at feasts to make room for fellow chiefs. 
Rank depended on the number of potlatches a man had given, and 
any one could give a potlatch who possessed the necessary wealth and 
could claim descent from one of the mythical founders of the clans. 
A man who gave four potlatches, and revived at each a new ancestral 
title (after a period of seclusion in the back of his house), became 
one of the society of chiefs who controlled all the activities in the 
villages. Such a potlatch was highly spectacular. Its giver, with the 
help of his kinsmen, dramatized the myth from which he derived his 
new title, and in most cases arranged also for a fictitious visit from 
the dead ancestor whose place he was resurrecting for himself in the 
community. 
Most potlatches took place in the autumn, after the people had 
stored away their food and before the secret society began its winter 
dances. Among the Bella Coola the secret society was theoretically 
founded on the curious belief that every year, at the beginning of 
winter, all the miscellaneous host of supernatural beings who haunt 
this world returned to their real home in the sky^ and held a series 
of dances or dramatic performances for the entertainment of the 
sky-god. The initiated Bella Coola claimed to reproduce these per- 
formances in their houses, under the direct patronage, the laity 
believed, of the supernatural beings themselves, some of whom tem- 
1 Thither go iilso, the Hdla Coola believeil, the stjols of the dead, wliile Iheir shadows depart to an 
underworld. 
