Innumerable Ethnological Resemblances

(23) It would need several articles to enumerate all the ethnological points of contact between the Maori and the British Columbian. Niblack draws a parallel between the page 61Maori and the Haidah: "The political organisation of the tribe, their ownership of land, and their laws of blood-revenge are similar. The men tattoo with designs intended to identify them with their sub-tribe or household, and they ornament their canoes, paddles, house-fronts, and so forth in somewhat the same manner." But he continues his parallel only to show how these likenesses spring from the like tendencies of the human mind under the same external conditions. And Ratzel, after again and again showing how the culture of the British Columbian coast has an echo in it of Polynesia, and especially New Zealand, reluctantly abandons the effort to find where the community could have come in.

(24) A few more instances of likeness may be given; the importance attached to witchcraft and dreams, the introduction of incantations into the cure of disease, the revenge for deaths believed to be due to witchcraft, the cutting of the hair and the laceration of the body in mourning, the tendency to elongate the heads of children into a cone, the love of painting the body, the house, and most other things with red, the piercing and elongation of the earlobes, the making of cloth from the bast inside the bark of trees, the absence of any intoxicating drink and of the use of salt, the appetite for oil and oily foods, sporadic and half-suppressed cannibalism, the worship of ancestors and the fear of the spirits of the dead, the importance attached to oratory and the recitation of legends and genealogies, and the development of a type of dancing that makes less use of the legs than of the other limbs.

(25) But these two critics went on the assumption that the Polynesians all came from the south of Asia. A study of the northern megalithic route, and its trend into the islands of the Pacific, would have put them on the right track, and led them to see that racial elements in both British Columbians and Polynesians had once had proximity page 62and intercourse, if not intermingling, on the north-east coast of Asia.