secret power for blessing or for bane.

Men and animals are closely akin. Each species of animal has its great
archetype, its progenitor or king, who is supposed to exist somewhere,
prodigious in size, though in shape and nature like his subjects.
A belief prevails, vague, but perfectly apparent, that men themselves owe
their first parentage to beasts, birds, or reptiles, as bears, wolves,
tortoises, or cranes; and the names of the totemic clans, borrowed in
nearly every case from animals, are the reflection of this idea.

[ This belief occasionally takes a perfectly definite shape. There was a
tradition among Northern and Western tribes, that men were created from
the carcasses of beasts, birds, and fishes, by Manabozho, a mythical
personage, to be described hereafter. The Amikouas, or People of the
Beaver, an Algonquin tribe of Lake Huron, claimed descent from the
carcass of the great original beaver, or father of the beavers. They
believed that the rapids and cataracts on the French River and the Upper
Ottawa were caused by dams made by their amphibious ancestor. (See the
tradition in Perrot, Memoire sur les Moeurs, Coustumes et Relligion des
Sauvages de l'Amerique Septentrionale, p. 20.) Charlevoix tells the same
story. Each Indian was supposed to inherit something of the nature of
the animal whence he sprung. ]

An Indian hunter was always anxious to propitiate the animals he sought
to kill. He has often been known to address a wounded bear in a long
harangue of apology. [ McKinney, Tour to the Lakes, 284, mentions the
discomposure of a party of Indians when shown a stuffed moose. Thinking
that its spirit would be offended at the indignity shown to its remains,
they surrounded it, making apologetic speeches, and blowing tobacco-smoke
at it as a propitiatory offering. ] The bones of the beaver were treated