The Snow Leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

In the rain, all day, the Tibetans come to look at us, and again I am struck by the resemblances between our native Americans and these Mongol peoples. Most Dhorpatan Tibetans have the small stature, small hands and feet and noses of the Eskimo, the Mongoloid eye-fold, dark copper skin, and crow-black hair: even the low red-trimmed boots of hide and wool are very similar in appearance and design to the Eskimo mukluks. Their ornaments of turquoise and silver, on the other hand, suggest the Pueblo Indians and the Navajo, while the beads, braids, and striped blankets flung over bare shoulders evoke nothing so much as old pictures of the Plains tribes, an effect enhanced by the squalor of their encampments and the quarrelsome dogs. When travelling, these people use hide tents, children are carried papoose-fashion, and the basis of their diet is a barley or maize meal known as tsampa; no real kinship has been demonstrated between native American and Asiatic tongues, yet a similar farina of the Algonkian tribes of my own region is called “samp”. Such similarities are doubtless superficial, but others are more than remarkable in cultures so widely separated in time and space. The animistic kinship with the world around that permeates the life of the Gurung and other tribes in the corners of these mountains (including some that have taken up modern religions), as well as that of the Chukchi Eskimos and other remnant hunter-gatherers of eastern Asia, differs little in its spirit am...