submit supplications and make great sacrifices through a mediator to the Great Spirit, he will pray, occasionally, to the Small Spirit without any intercessor or formalities or sacrifices. He dare not pray direct to the Great Spirit, but will, recognizing his own innate baseness, go through almost anything in order to secure the interest of a mediator or intercessor, who he trusts will have more influence with the Great Spirit, or Manitou, than has his unworthy self. It is in the selection of this mediator that the influence of dreams, in all ages and climes a great and powerful agent in their operation on men’s minds, comes into force. These mediators must themselves be spirits, and only can reveal themselves to man in dreams, or sometimes they have been known to possess the insane, or mentally afflicted. These latter, however, are often possessed by the Matchee-Manitou, and then the evil spirit must be driven out, resulting in the barbarities familiar to us, when a human being is supposed to have a Weh-ta-ko, or Wehtigo. The Indian believes that his own influence with Manitou is as good as anyone’s except a Spirit’s. What is then his definition of a Spirit? It is hard to define, but the explanation of the term according to the Cree and Blackfoot is this. It is the invisible essence that formerly animated the body of a human being or animal when living, also it is reflected in and by the shadow cast by inanimate objects when the sun shines. This latter idea appeals to me as a very beautiful and poetic one. We know that all things above ground change and go through their appointed periods of bloom and decay. Nothing in nature is everlasting, the very face of the world itself alters, and that even within a single lifetime, so that when the Indian says, “Must there not be a spirit or soul in inanimate things as well as in those bodies which we deem endowed with life,” it is not an extravagant or even a peculiar thing that he should believe that there is a spirit of a stick, a rock, the prairie grass, or the mountains. He will therefore attach as much importance to the revelations conveyed to him by dreams of these objects as he will to those of his dead fellow creatures, dreams of his dead forefathers or relations, or of any animals or creatures which we call living creatures.
All of these spirits alike were called into being by Manitou and are being recalled into his presence as one by one they die or depart from mortal ken.
Now if the Indian dreams frequently on any object dead, or inanimate, that is to say, of any person or animal dead or any object above ground that casts a shadow, he believes that the spirit of that particular person, animal, or thing casting a shadow, as the case may be, has either some power for him, or some message for him or perhaps that the spirit wishes to signify to him that he or it will protect and patronize him by presenting his petitions to Manitou. The spirits themselves have no personal power except only that they are acceptable mediators between the poor Indian and Manitou. Therefore it is to these spirits of which the Indian has frequently dreamed that he will address his prayers, devout supplications and sacrifices in order that Manitou may be pleased to send to the suppliant power to gratify his wishes, whether they be for success in haunting or in the council tent, or for power to work harm to his enemies or for whatever particular thing it may be that at the time is most earnestly desired. Even though he may be dying the Indian will not even presume to make these prayers or sacrifices more than twice a year, as he fears to intrude so unworthy a being as he feels himself to be upon the notice of his patron spirits more often, and is afraid to be so presumptuous as to have a petition from him presented to the Great God more frequently than this, owing to the reverent fear in which he holds his very idea.
Let me go back for a moment. I found that among the older so-called Pagans, the Lesser Spirit, or Matchee-Manitou, is a being that they would hardly consider seriously, although they believed in his existence firmly. They seemed to attach little importance to the power of the Evil Spirit who they thought was held strictly in subjection to Manitou, and they apparently only used Matchee-Manitou as a sort of figure-head on which to lay the blame for any misfortune that might overtake them. In fact they would always try to turn aside my inquiries with a laugh, when I asked them about Matchee-Manitou. I need not perhaps refer to him again, as it is only very rarely that an Indian will pray for power to do evil, to this ideal of everything that is bad, called Matchee-Manitou, and, as already pointed out, they would never invoke the aid of an intercessor, or make any sacrifice to obtain the power he might have to bestow. But their silence and refusal to answer my questions may, nevertheless, be due to fear.
You will observe that the so-called Pagans are great believers in dreams which they regard as an intimation from some spirit which desires the dreamer to make use of it as intercessor or mediator with the God who is so holy in comparison with the suppliant, that he would otherwise be unapproachable. Therefore the Indians relate to one another the dreams that visit them, and when it becomes known that a man or woman often has the same dream, the others recognize that individual as being under the protection of the spirit of the object dreamed of. In this way a large number of them, to us incomprehensible names so common among them, have arisen. They are named after the spirit or thing or person or animal they have dreamed of so frequently. This of course only applies to some of their names, which do not descend from father to son.
If by any chance you should happen to see one of these mis-named Pagan Indians at his devotions (and it is only by chance that you will do so) and should ob-serve that he apparently addresses himself to a tree, a rock or to nothing that is discernible, remember that he is only doing as the Roman Catholics do, that is, asking his patron spirit to approach in his behalf the very same Great God that we believe in, but whom the Indian, so poor and vile a creature does he believe himself to be, dare not, and will not directly address. Protestants believe only in one mediator, one intercessor, one ever-living though once dead, sacrifice — Jesus Christ. The Pagan Indian knows nothing of Him and is inclined to regard the story of His incarnation as a flight of the imagination. There is this to be said, that once the postulate is granted in the matter of the Spirit or immortal essence permeating what we call inanimate things — and this is not a matter that would seem difficult to me — there is nothing in the so-called Pagan’s creed which demands the surrender of his reason, or the great and child-like faith which Christians deem necessary. That it is necessary I believe myself, not from any superior knowledge given to me compared to that granted to an Indian, but merely because I recognize in myself so much that is contrary to my reason and yet so much that I accept as true, without anything in the way of evidence.
Though the Christian gospel may not appeal to the Indian’s reason, the effect or result of Christianity does appeal to him, and in no attractive light either. For what does he find? Civilization, which must follow Christianity, has been a blight on the Cree, the Blackfoot and on all Indian nations. This is a truism, but the fact remains that civilization has acted and reacted upon the Indians very much as the introduction of a city sewer would do upon a clear and limpid mountain lake, polluting from underneath, insidiously, the various strata of the Indian’s life, affecting first the young, the vain, and the foolish and at last, as the older generations die off, slowly obliterating the last trace of the purity and beauty that formerly was its boast.
It may be said, “Is Christianity to blame for this?” but the Indian does not try to draw the distinction between Christianity and civilization, he concerns him-self only with the effect of either, or both, he cares not which, upon his own and his nation’s well-being.
All “old-timers” will bear me out when I say that the Pagan Indian is an honest and God-fearing a man as ever lived, that there is less immorality according to the ideas which prevail among them, I mean less personal meanness, and almost no petty thievery among the Indians, where they have been fortunate enough to escape the evil influences which the arrival of white men among them has invariably produced. This may seem to some extravagant language, but it is my experience at all events, more particularly among the Mountain Stoneys, who have in a great measure preserved their much-despised Pagan principles of right dealing, honesty and general uprightness. They are Methodists now, and as far as I could see they had but to make a slight change after all in their beliefs, and no change in their daily lives. They believe now in God, the Trinity, and have eliminated the mediation of every spirit but that of Jesus Christ and seem to have found that their old conception of Manitou differs in no important particular with that of their new-found Father Almighty, the same all-good Power that they have always acknowledged to be
