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of safety. Hence a woman whose husband or sons had gone on the war- 
path watched for any omen that might reveal their fate. 
“ When my great-grandfather was a baby his father joined a war-party against 
the Indians to the south. One day when the sky was almost cloudless a bolt of 
lightning set fire to a tree near the home camp. Then the people knew that the 
party was engaged in battle, and they named my great-grandfather Beskinelckwam> 
‘the thunder that sets things on fire’” (Fegahmagabow). 
For each relative who had gone away to war some women planted a 
small shrub (species now unknown) , which they watered every day. People 
might not pass between these plants and the sun lest in blocking the sun- 
light they should block also some message coming up from the south 
where the Ojibwa were fighting the Iroquois. A plant that withered had 
received such a message and the relative it symbolized was dead. 
The Parry Island Indian accepted death with stoicism. If he could 
no longer enjoy the pleasures of this earthly life, if his body were doomed 
to disappear, yet his soul and his shadow would continue to exist, and 
their afterlife would be happy rather than painful. At times a dying man 
would say to his kinsmen “ You will scatter over the land after I am dead, 
and my shadow will remain near my grave. But one day we shall all 
meet again in the land of souls.” Kinsmen often kept the surviving wife 
or husband away from the bedside lest sorrow or anxiety should becloud 
the last moments of life. 
Women relatives washed the dead man, braided his hair, dressed him 
in his finest clothes, painted his face to indicate his clan, or to show that 
he had been a mede or a wabeno, and placed at his side the things he had. 
most valued, even though some of them might not have been his personal 
possessions. Then the people gathered inside the wigwam and mourned. 
Most Indians were buried in the ground, sometimes within the area 
of the wigwam itself, which was then weighted down with stones and 
abandoned. More often the relatives dug a grave in the open and carried 
out the corpse, feet foremost, through a hole in the back wall; for they 
held that a man’s soul entered through the door of the wigwam when he 
was born, but that its departure in the same way might entice away other 
souls. At the graveside they wrapped the corpse in birch bark secured 
with basswood cord, and deposited it on its back with feet stretched out 
towards the east and head towards the west. Yet this arrangement was 
apparently altered in some cases, and the feet laid towards the west, or 
the body placed on its side with knees doubled up as in sleep. Tobacco 
was placed in the hand of the corpse to pay for the passage of its soul 
over the river of death, a little food deposited near the head to sustain 
the soul on its journey, and various objects set along the sides to supply 
its needs in the future life. While the grave was being filled in a kinsman 
abjured the soul not to linger near its kindred or to draw away the soul 
of some surviving relative, but to depart without delay. The mourners 
then laid over the mound rush mats and strips of birch bark weighted at 
the edges with stones; and when darkness descended they kindled a fire 
beside it to light the soul on its journey- All night they sat beside this 
fire eating and smoking, and they threw tobacco and food into the flames 
that for the last time the soul of the dead man might eat and smoke with 
