Identifier: labradorcountryp02gren (find matches)
Title: Labrador, the country and the people
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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great partridge. Cat, Miiish. Iron, Assukumdn â kettle-metal or material. Tin, Uapukuman â white-metal. Gun, Passigan â thunderer. Soap, Uapdkiigan â whitener. Spy-glass, Tushkdpitshigan â instrument for seeing far. The ending s or sh, as in wapush, rabbit, and miush,cat, is a diminutive. Such is Tshipshas (lake), LittleTshipshau, and Mistassinis, Little Mistassini. The lattername signifies Great Stone, from a large boulder on theshore of that lake, which is regarded as having occultinfluences. Almost all the names of fish and other crea-tures are plainly descriptive. It may be inferred that not much borrowing from otherlanguages has occurred for a long time. Considering howfew of our common names, such as horse, dog, cod, trout,not to mention names of inanimate objects, have anydescriptive meaning to us, as words, this survival of originalmeanings in the Indian emphasizes the compositeness, atleast, of our English tongue. Wa- as a prefix means white; was- or wash-, bright
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THE INDIANS 223 and shining Wash alone means sky; Washeshkundumeans blue, sky-colour. The language is mild in its cadences. Little conversa-tion accompanies serious occupation and travelling. Whenmaking camp, the young men toss their japes back and forth,and about the fire the women talk and laugh when by them-selves in the world-wide fashion. The religion of the country is professedly almost whollyChristian. The people trading around Hudson Bay areProtestants, while all the Montagnais are Catholics, caredfor spiritually by the various missions of the Gulf and theSaguenay. It is not to be supposed that the old beliefs are extinct;on the contrary, no reserve or gathering place is so changedin blood or so affected by white neighbourhood as not tohave among its members those who are priests of the oldertheology and can deal with at least some of the overpowersof earth and sky. The influence of these many spirits for oragainst the laymen is determined largely by the rites of themanitu lod

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