Mourners among all of our local tribes wailed aloud and brought gifts for the dead. Women, especially the older ones, mourned vigorously. To quote Garth again on Atsugewi, of their mourning he states:
“The deceased’s close relatives mourned the hardest, but friends might also mourn——‘to make them feel better.’ Mourners cried and rolled on the ground, throwing dirt and hot ashes in their faces and hair. Some, in their grief, tried to commit suicide, and a close watch had to be kept over them to prevent their doing so. Favorite methods were to swallow small bits of (obsidian) or to eat a certain kind of spider. Mourners were warned not to cry around the house near the body but to go to the hills to cry, and also not to look down when crying or to cry too much. Otherwise they were subject to bad dreams in which spirits would plague them and possibly kill them. A mourner might acquire power at this time. A widow, with possibly a sister to help her, would wail for a time at daybreak and again in the evening. This lasted for two or three months, sometimes longer. A widower seldom cried more than two or three weeks. The widow visited places at which she had camped with her husband, broke up utensils left there, burned down the brush where he was accustomed to cut wood, and piled up rocks where they had slept together. A widower behaved in similar fashion.... If death occurred in a village, no entertainments could be held for a time; otherwise relatives of the deceased had the right to break things up and throw them around. A man would not sing or attend a ‘big time’ gathering until at least a year after death of a close relative.”
If the lodge were to be lived in again, after a person had died in it, Atsugewi brought in juniper boughs, and these were burned to purify the house. Bark huts, however, were always burned down after an occupant had died.
Mountain Maidu children were kept away from the dead and from the funeral proceedings. In that tribe and probably among all local tribes, if the deceased were rich the funeral would be much larger and more pretentious than if the person had been poor. In the former case the ceremony was followed by a feast. Other tribes buried the dead in the evening generally within twenty-four hours after death, but Yana waited three or four days. Mountain Maidu grave diggers put grass in their mouths. Small shallow graves sufficed for poor people, in fact, among Atsugewi, at least, poor people were often buried in small depressions in lava flows and covered over with convenient rocks.