Ten'a texts and tales from Anvik, Alaska / by John W. Chapman, with vocabulary by Pliny Earle Goddard.

  • Chapman, John W. (John Wight), 1858-1939.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ten'a texts and tales from Anvik, Alaska / by John W. Chapman, with vocabulary by Pliny Earle Goddard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the noise of talking and laughings which ])roceeded from many women. He went up (juietly and launched his spear, which passed through the parka of one of them. The rest turned into geese and flew away; but he captured this one and took her home. Fhe rest of the men be^'an to ^et wives in the same wav. khev i^ave their children food and clothes as they grew up, taught them different tongues, and sent them away, up and down the river, which they peopled. 77/ ird 1 cco ii n t. ^ He did not know of the name “Our Father” bein^ taim-ht before the missionaries came. The children \vere o taught that if they did anything wrong, some one who lives above would see it. Eating out of doors in winter was doing wrong. He believes that when the people, get to doing very wrong, God punishes them by taking away their food. Fhen they return to the right way. He says that there spring up right-minded men who lead the peojjle in the right paths. As to the origin of the world, he savs that at first there was nothinor but water about here, exce]:)t the mountains. Living things were made next, and afterwards a man and a woman were made. F'ood was provided for them. When they did wrong, their food was taken awav. As to the belief in the state of the dead, it seems to rest upon a story, which they accept as true, of a woman who was met by a spirit who supposed that she was also dead, and who took her to the abode of the spirits. The spirit is supposed to stop, on the wa)^ to its final abode, at different places where flies, mosquitoes, and other insects live. ' From the same village on the Chageluk, 1910. Isaac Fisher’s uncle, now the oldest man, gives this account.