Bear feasts shift blame to outsiders and bar women and dogs from the carcass

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Key facts

• Hallowell describes the custom of telling the slain bear that its killers were not its killers, shifting responsibility to a fictitious agency: among the Ojibwa an Englishman, in Siberia the Russians.
• Blame may instead fall on a neighbouring tribe or on an animal: the Yukaghir place it on the Yakut or elk, and among the Gilyak the toad is the scapegoat in the bear festival.
• An attested song from a people of southwestern British Columbia asks the dead bear to send lesser animals to traps, snares and arrows and to bring luck in the gambling game Za-hal.
• Hallowell records that the skin of the first cub killed in the hunting season, stripped entirely from the carcass, was stuffed with the head and paws decorated with beads, quills and vermilion.
• Girls and married women without children left their dwellings when the bear was brought to camp, and dogs were ejected from the wigwam where the feast took place.
• Among the Mistassini, unmarried women had to cover their faces when the carcass entered camp, the animal was kept covered with a sheet until the feast, only married women helped skin it, and the hide was slit from the throat downward, the reverse of the procedure for other animals.
• An ethnographer described as one of the few white men to attend a Montagnais bear feast reports the roasted head and neck raised on a spit before the chief, torn by hand because no knife could touch the sacred piece, a bowl of grease passed around from which no one could take more than a small bite, and leftovers burned for absent dead hunters.
• Parts of the heart were burnt and given to the bear's spirit while the slayer ate the rest to absorb the victim's cunning and courage; women were forbidden the head and paws and men the rump.

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