fell with the fish still in its claws. He quickly secured both and returned to his daughter with them. By means of this fish and bird they were enabled to sustain themselves for some time longer, and by the time this food was consumed a great change began to take place. The snow at last stopped falling and the sun appeared, and a great and rapid thaw set in. In a short space of time the great white covering of snow sank down, and the long-hidden trees, and streams, and rivers, and land were seen once more. The man now took his daughter to wife, and from those two the land was in course of time once more repeopled. Times of plenty came back, and the people learned to forget the terrible punishment the Great Spirit had sent upon their forefathers.
But once again a dreadful misfortune befell them. This time it happened in this wise. One salmon season the fish were found to be covered with running sores and blotches, which rendered them unfit for food. But as the people depended very largely upon these salmon for their winter’s food supply, they were obliged to catch and cure them as best they could, and store them away for food. They put off eating them till no other food was available, and then began a terrible time of sickness and distress. A dreadful skin disease, loathsome to look upon, broke out upon all alike. None were spared. Men, women and children sickened, took the disease and died in agony by hundreds, so that when the spring arrived and fresh food was procurable, there was scarcely a person left of all their numbers to get it. Camp after camp, village after village, was left desolate. The remains of which, said the old man, in answer to my queries on this head, are found today in the old camp sites or midden-heaps over which the forest has been growing for so many generations. Little by little the remnant left by the disease grew into a nation once more, and when the first white men sailed up the Squamish in their big boats, the tribe was strong and numerous again. Following Vancouver’s advent four generations have come and gone, the second of which was his own.3
What follows from this point is not of any particular interest, but before concluding my paper I desire to say that the name of this first Squamish man, as handed down by tradition, Kalana, suggests some thoughts for the ethnologist’s consideration. The Haida term for God closely resembles it, viz., Shalana, the initial consonants being interchangeable throughout the tongues of this area. But if we go outside the district and language of British Columbia, and examine the genealogies of the Hawaiians, we there find this name Kalana, or Kalani, occurring again and again. For example, we have a fragment of a chant entitled “Kaulu-a-Kalana,” which in English runs thus: “I am Kaulu, / The child of Kalana, / Etc., etc.” This Kaula-Kalana was a celebrated navigator. And Fornander, in his first volume of The Polynesian Race (pp. 199-200), writes thus: “It is almost certain that a number of names on the ‘Ulu’ line were those of chiefs in some of the southern groups who never set foot on Hawaiian soil, but whose legends were imported by southern emigrants. . . . The Maui legends, the Maui family of four brothers, and their parent, a-Kalana, Karana or Taranga, are found upon all those groups in slightly different versions. . . . It is just to conclude, therefore, that the Maui family and legends were not only not indigenous to Hawaii soil or contemporary with any chiefs of the ‘Nanaula’ line, but it is very questionable whether their origin does not date back to the pre-Pacific period of the Polynesian race.”
This view of Fornander’s receives a striking accession of evidence from the use of these seemingly identical terms in British Columbia. I have shown that the term stands for God among the Haidas. It is also seen in the compound name of one of their ancient deities, Het-gwalana; and from information supplied me by the Rev. H. H. Gowen, who was a missionary for some years among the Hawaiians, this term is used by the Polynesians in the same sense. “Everyone,” he writes me, “of the Kamehameha line had the name Kalani forming part of his or her full designation. It appears to have been equivalent to ‘exalted,’ ‘heavenly,’ ‘divine.’” Again, we find a remarkable resemblance to this term Kalana or Kalani in the name of the great chief who led the Yuehchi across the Indus and conquered India about 20 B.C., whose name, as given by the Chinese historians, is Karranos, or Kalanos.
These facts will receive an accession of interest when I state that my studies of the languages of the natives of this province have resulted in yielding evidence of intercourse or relationship of some kind between the Kwakiutl-Nootka and Salish stocks and the Malay-Polynesians, between the Haida-Tlingit and the Japo-Corean, and between the Dene, or Athapascan, and the Chinese and cognate races. Of the Dene tongue it is no exaggeration to say that 50 per cent of its radicals are pure archaic Chinese. I append a short comparative vocabulary of these:
| English | Chinese | Dene |
| water | tsui | thu, tsoo |
| face | men | nin |
| feet | gea | khe |
| mouth | how | fwa |
| skin | p | eve |
| mountain | tsan | tsal |
| stone | tse | tse |
| grass | to | tlo |
| corpse | kle-zie | ezie |
| sky | hen | ya |
| star | slen,sen | shen, sen |
| snow | sbeat | tsi |
| bird | dea, tea | ta |
| a fly | yain | tain |
| wood | chi | chin |
| tree | tsi | tsel |
| small | thlo | tsol |
| wet | tsil | tsil |
| arrow | chi | kie |
I might extend this list almost indefinitely, but I think enough radicals have been given to show the marked lexicographical similarities between these two languages.4 Nor are these Chinese similarities confined to the vocabulary; they extend to the morphology of the language as well; and the characteristic methods of denomination in Chinese find their exact counterpart in the first three of the four classes of nouns into which, according to Father Morice — than whom there is no higher authority — the nouns in the Dene language may be divided.5
It is my intention to offer a fuller paper on these Asian affinities later. Our lack of analytical knowledge of the language of British Columbia makes it difficult at times to proceed and be sure of one’s ground. The Dene radicals here offered are some of those given by Father Morice, and may, therefore, be considered correct. The Chinese terms are either from Edkins or from local Cantonese, the dialect of which, as Edkins has pointed out, is a purer and more archaic form of Chinese than the court or literary forms.6
“Eleven of these photographs have been preserved in the Vancouver Centennial Museum.” (Vane. Mus. photo)
1 Reprinted with acknowledgement, from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 2nd. series, 3 (1897) Section II, pp. 85-90. The paper was communicated to the 23 June 1897 meeting by Dr. G. M. Dawson on Hill-Tout’s behalf.
2 Mulks, according to Louis Miranda, never had an “English name.” He was Miranda’s mother’s father’s younger brother. See Kennedy and Bouchard Utilization of Fish, Beach Foods, and Marine Mammals (1976) p. x. Dominic Charlie told Oliver Wells in 1965 that Mulks lived just behind the mission church in a “little shack" which had been there before the church. He describes Mulks and his wife, both blind, paying a visit to English Bay by canoe. Information from Louis Miranda’s 1978 transcription of the Wells tape, with acknowledgement to the B.C. Indian Language Project and Marie Weeden.
3 Oliver Wells read Mulks’ version of the three catastrophes to August Jack Khahtsahlano, who commented on it; see Squamish Legends (1966) p. [12]. Boas obtained a brief version from Chief Joseph [Capilano?] in 1888, where fire, flood, smallpox, and deep snow were sent as a punishment by Qais; see Indian-ische Sagen (1977 typescript, p. 58). The punishment aspect is absent in other versions, e.g. Dan Milo’s in Oliver Wells Myths and Legends of the Staw-loh Indians (1970) p. 19; Harry Uslick’s in Lerman Legends of the River People (1976) pp. 23-25; and Baptiste Ritchie’s in Bouchard and Kennedy Lillooet Stories (1977) pp. 10-12. Overpopulation is the reason given by Old Pierre,
