American Indian Culture and Research Journal

THE END OF INDIAN TIME Modern Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians insist that, in ancient times, everything used to be religious. Practical activities were ritualized and given a spiritual interpretation. The act of walking through the woods, for: example, was given shape through particular places where it was appropriate to rest, or to speak s ome specific words, or even just to drop a piece of twig, just as some wahgey had done. The Indians believed that they lived where the wahgey had lived, fished where the wahgey had fished, and spoke prayers and sang exactly as the wahgey did, only a few generations before. Traditionally, Indians in northwestern California neither felt that they had a human history nor believed that their customs had evolved gradually or through innovation; rather they supposed that they had inherited their lifestyle from this race of pre-human beings, the authors of their existence, and they strove to emulate their act ions out of a conviction that it was the right way to live. Departures from the wahgey lifestyle caused a "rottenness" or "pollution" to develop, and from this stemmed all human sickness and misery.