Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/125

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MORGAN]
AMONG NORTHERN TRIBES.
103

Indian country, I have never seen an Indian woman eating with her husband. Men form the first group at the banquet, and women and children and dogs all come together at the next."[1] And Adair "for the men feast by themselves and the women eat the remains."[2] Herrera remarks that "the woman of Yucatan are rather larger than the Spanish, and generally have good faces, * * * but they would formerly be drunk at their festivals, though they did eat apart"[3] And Sahagun, speaking of the ceremony of baptism among the Aztecs, observes that "to the women, who ate apart, they did not give cacao to drink."[4] With these general references to the universality of the practice on the part of the men of eating first, and leaving the women and children to come afterwards, according to the manners of barbarism, we leave the subject.


  1. North American Indians, i, 202.
  2. History of the American Indians, p. 140.
  3. History of America, iv, 175
  4. Historia General, lib. iv, 36.