The Supreme Being of the Eskimos was a goddess rather than a god:  a mother of all things who lived under the sea.  On the other hand, most of the Amerindian tribes believed in one great God of the Sky—­Manito, as He was called by the peoples of Algonkin stock, Nainubushan by the Siou and their kindred.  This Being was usually kindly disposed towards man; but they also (in most cases) believed in a bad Manito, who was responsible for most of the harm in the world.  But sometimes the Great Manito was capricious, or apparently made many mistakes which he had afterwards to rectify.  Thus the Siou tribes of Assiniboia believed that the Supreme Being (whom they called Eth-tom-e) first created mankind and all living things, and then, through some oversight or mistake, caused a great flood to cover the earth’s surface.  So in a hurry he was obliged to make a very large canoe of twigs and branches, and into this he put a pair of every kind of bird and beast, besides a family of human beings, who were thus saved from drowning, and began the world afresh when the waters subsided.  This legend was something like the story of Noah’s ark, but seems in some form or another to have existed in the mind of all the North-American peoples before the arrival of Christian missionaries.  Much the same story was told by the Ojibwes about the Great Hare-God, Nainiboju.

The Siou and the Ojibwe (and other tribes also) believed that after death the soul lay for a time in a trance, and then found itself floating towards a River which must be crossed.  Beyond the River lay the Happy Hunting Grounds, the Elysian fields; but to oppose the weary soul anxious to reach this paradise there ramped on the other side a huge, flaming-red bison bull, if it had been ordained by the Great Spirit that the soul’s time was not yet come, this red bison pushed it back, and the soul was obliged to re-enter the body, which then awoke from its trance or swoon and resumed its worldly activities.

Suicide was regarded as the most heinous of crimes.  Any man killing himself deliberately, fell into the river of the ghost world and was never heard of again, while women who hanged themselves “were regarded as the most miserable of all wretches in the other world”.

Their belief in spirits—­even ancestral spirits—­taking up an abode in the bodies of beasts, birds, or reptiles, or even in plants or stones, caused them to view with respect of a superstitious kind many natural objects.  Some one thing—­a beast, bird, reptile, fish, plant, or strange stone had been fixed on as the abode of his tutelary spirit by some father of a family.  The family grew into a clan, and the clan to a tribe, and the object sacred in the eyes of its father and founder became its “totem”, crest, or symbol.  As a rule, whatever thing was the totem of the individual or the clan was held sacred in their eyes, and, if it was an animal, was not killed, or, if killed, not eaten.  Many of the northern Indians would refrain from killing the wolf or the glutton, or if they did so, or did it by accident, they would refuse to skin the animal.  The elder people amongst the Athapaskan Indians, in Hearne’s day, would reprove the young folk for “speaking disrespectfully” of different beasts and birds.