[Dread and seclusion of menstruous women among the Chippeway Indians.]

Among the Chippeways and other Indians of the Hudson Bay Territory, menstruous women are excluded from the camp, and take up their abode in huts of branches.  They wear long hoods, which effectually conceal the head and breast.  They may not touch the household furniture nor any objects used by men; for their touch “is supposed to defile them, so that their subsequent use would be followed by certain mischief or misfortune,” such as disease or death.  They must drink out of a swan’s bone.  They may not walk on the common paths nor cross the tracks of animals.  They “are never permitted to walk on the ice of rivers or lakes, or near the part where the men are hunting beaver, or where a fishing-net is set, for fear of averting their success.  They are also prohibited at those times from partaking of the head of any animal, and even from walking in or crossing the track where the head of a deer, moose, beaver, and many other animals have lately been carried, either on a sledge or on the back.  To be guilty of a violation of this custom is considered as of the greatest importance; because they firmly believe that it would be a means of preventing the hunter from having an equal success in his future excursions."[232] So the Lapps forbid women at menstruation to walk on that part of the shore where the fishers are in the habit of setting out their fish;[233] and the Esquimaux of Bering Strait believe that if hunters were to come near women in their courses they would catch no game.[234]

[Dread and seclusion of menstruous women among the Tinneh or Dene Indians; customs and beliefs of the Carrier Indians in regard to menstruous women.]

But the beliefs and superstitions of this sort that prevail among the western tribes of the great Dene or Tinneh stock, to which the Chippeways belong, have been so well described by an experienced missionary, that I will give his description in his own words.  Prominent among the ceremonial rites of these Indians, he says, “are the observances peculiar to the fair sex, and many of them are remarkably analogous to those practised by the Hebrew women, so much so that, were it not savouring of profanity, the ordinances of the Dene ritual code might be termed a new edition ‘revised and considerably augmented’ of the Mosaic ceremonial law.  Among the Carriers,[235] as soon as a girl has experienced the first flow of the menses which in the female constitution are a natural discharge, her father believed himself under the obligation of atoning for her supposedly sinful condition by a small impromptu distribution of clothes among the natives.  This periodical state of women was considered as one of legal impurity fateful both to the man who happened to have any intercourse, however indirect, with her, and to the woman herself who failed in scrupulously observing all the rites prescribed by ancient usage for persons in her condition.