[Footnote 185:  Only the easternmost part of this island is occupied by Melanesian-speaking Papuans.]

As with race, so with culture.  Particularly in more primitive levels, where the secondarily unifying power of the “national"[186] ideal does not arise to disturb the flow of what we might call natural distributions, is it easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated.  Totally unrelated languages share in one culture, closely related languages—­even a single language—­belong to distinct culture spheres.  There are many excellent examples in aboriginal America.  The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of.[187] The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas—­the simple hunting culture of western Canada and the interior of Alaska (Loucheux, Chipewyan), the buffalo culture of the Plains (Sarcee), the highly ritualized culture of the southwest (Navaho), and the peculiarly specialized culture of northwestern California (Hupa).  The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves.[188] The Hupa Indians are very typical of the culture area to which they belong.  Culturally identical with them are the neighboring Yurok and Karok.  There is the liveliest intertribal intercourse between the Hupa, Yurok, and Karok, so much so that all three generally attend an important religious ceremony given by any one of them.  It is difficult to say what elements in their combined culture belong in origin to this tribe or that, so much at one are they in communal action, feeling, and thought.  But their languages are not merely alien to each other; they belong to three of the major American linguistic groups, each with an immense distribution on the northern continent.  Hupa, as we have seen, is Athabaskan and, as such, is also distantly related to Haida (Queen Charlotte Islands) and Tlingit (southern Alaska); Yurok is one of the two isolated Californian languages of the Algonkin stock, the center of gravity of which lies in the region of the Great Lakes; Karok is the northernmost member of the Hokan group, which stretches far to the south beyond the confines of California and has remoter relatives along the Gulf of Mexico.

[Footnote 186:  A “nationality” is a major, sentimentally unified, group.  The historical factors that lead to the feeling of national unity are various—­political, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sometimes specifically religious.  True racial factors also may enter in, though the accent on “race” has generally a psychological rather than a strictly biological value.  In an area dominated by the national sentiment there is a tendency for language and culture to become uniform and specific, so that linguistic and cultural boundaries at least tend to coincide.  Even at best, however, the linguistic unification is never absolute, while the cultural unity is apt to be superficial, of a quasi-political nature, rather than deep and far-reaching.]