"
[Footnote: The word _Eskimo_ is Algonquin, meaning to eat raw
fish, _Eskumoga_ in Micmac, and people who eat raw flesh, or
_Eskimook_, that is, _eski_, raw, and _moo-uk_, people.
This word recalls _in-noo-uk_, people, and spirits, in Eskimo,
_Innue_, which has the same double meaning. This was all suggested
to me by an Indian.]
These Eskimo brought from the Old World that primeval gloomy Shaman
religion, or sorcery, such as is practiced yet by Laplanders and
Tartars, such as formed the basis of the old Accadian Babylonian
cultus, and such as is now in vogue among all our own red Indians. I
believe that it was from the Eskimo that this American Shamanism all
came. In Greenland this faith assumed its strangest form; it made for
itself a new mythology. The Indians, their neighbors, borrowed from
this, but also added new elements of an only _semi_-Arctic
character. Thus there is a series of steps, but every one different,
from the Eskimo to the Wabanaki, of Labrador, New Brunswick, and Maine,
from the Wabanaki to the Iroquois, and from the Iroquois to the more
western Indians. And while they all have incidents in common, the
character of each is radically different.
It may be specially noted that while there is hardly an important point
in the Edda which may not be found, as I have just shown, in Wabanaki
legends, there is very little else in the latter which is in common
with such Old World mythology as might have come to the Indians since
the discovery by Columbus.
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