Casalis noticed the similarity between South African and Red Indian
opinion about kinship with vegetables and beasts. The difficulty
in treating the Red Indian belief is chiefly found in the abundance
of the evidence. Perhaps the first person who ever used the word
"totemism," or, as he spells it, "totamism," was (as we said) Mr.
Long, an interpreter among the Chippeways, who published his
Voyages in 1791. Long was not wholly ignorant of the languages, as
it was his business to speak them, and he was an adopted Indian.
The ceremony of adoption was painful, beginning with a feast of
dog's flesh, followed by a Turkish bath and a prolonged process of
tattooing.[1] According to Long,[2] "The totam, they conceive,
assumes the form of some beast or other, and therefore they never
kill, hurt, or eat the animal whose form they think this totam
bears". One man was filled with religious apprehensions, and gave
himself up to the gloomy belief of Bunyan and Cowper, that he had
committed the unpardonable sin, because he dreamed he had killed
his totem, a bear.[3] This is only one example, like the refusal
of the Osages to kill the beavers, with which they count cousins,[4]
that the Red Man's belief is an actual creed, and does influence
his conduct.


[1] Long, pp. 46-49.

[2] Ibid., p. 86.

[3] Ibid., p. 87.

[4] Schoolcraft, i. 319.