besides those already referred to. According to M. Cuoq, an able
philologist, who has laboured for many years as a missionary among the
Iroquois of the Province of Quebec, the sounds are so simple that he
considers an alphabet of twelve letters sufficient for their indication:
_a_, _e_, _f_, _h_, _i_, _k_, _n_, _o_, _r_, _s_, _t_, _w_. The
transliterations noticeable in the various Iroquois dialects, follow a
well-known phonetic law. Thus the _l_ and _r_ are interchangeable, as
_ronkwe_, “man,” in the Mohawk, becomes in the Oneida _lonhwe_; _raxha_,
“boy,” becomes _laxha_; _rakeniha_, “my father,” becomes _lakenih_, etc.
The same is seen throughout the compound numerals from “eleven” onward.
The Cayuga and Tuscarora most nearly approach to the Mohawk in this use
of the _r_. A characteristic change of a different kind is seen in the
grammatical value of the initial _r_ in the Mohawk in relation to
gender. For example, _onkwe_ is applied to mankind, as distinguished
from _karyoh_, “the brute.” It becomes _ronkwe_, “man,” _yonkwe_
“woman.” So also _raxah_, “boy,” changes to _kaxha_, “girl”;
_rihyeinah_, “my son,” to _kheyenah_, “my daughter,” etc. The change of
gender is further illustrated in such examples as _raohih_, his apple;
_raoyen_, his arrow; _ahkohih_, her apple; _ahkoyen_, her arrow;
_raonahih_ (masc.), _aonahih_ (fem.), their apples; _raodiyenkwireh_
(masc.), _aodiyenkwireh_ (fem.), their arrows, etc. But this arrangement
of the formative element as a prefix is characteristic of American
languages, though not peculiar to them. Thus _Seshatsteaghseragwekough_,
Almighty God (literally, “Thou who hast all power, or strength”),
becomes, in the third person, _Rashatsteaghseragwekough_.
The vowel sounds are very limited. No distinction is apparent in any
Huron-Iroquois language between the _o_ and the _u_. In writing it the
_e_ and _u_ sounds are also often interchangeable. Where, for example,
_e_ is used in one set of the Tuscarora numerals supplied to me, another
substitutes _u_ for it wherever it is followed by an _n_; e.g. _enjih_,
_unjih_; _ahsenh_, _ahsunh_; _endah_, _undah_, etc. So also the word for
“man” is written for me in one case _onkwe_, and in another _unkweh_. It
requires an acute and practised ear to discriminate the niceties of
Indian pronunciation, and a no less practised tongue to satisfy the
critical native ear. Dr. Oronhyatekha, when pressed to define the value
of the _t_ sound in his own name, replied “It is not quite _t_ nor _d_.”
The name is compounded of _oronya_, “blue,” the word used in the
Prayer-Book for “heaven,” and _yodakha_, “burning.” In very similar
terms, Asikinack, an educated Odahwah Indian, when asked by me whether
we should say Ottawa, or Odawa—the Utawa of Morris’s “Canadian Boat
Song,”—replied that the sound lay between the two,—a nicety
discernible only by Indian ears.
The euphonic changes which mark the systematic transitions in the Mohawk
language, though by no means peculiar to it, cannot fail to awaken an
interest in the thoughtful student, who reflects on the social condition
of the people among whom this elaborated vehicle of thought was the
constraining power by means of which their chiefs and elders swayed the
nations of the Iroquois confederacy with an eloquence more powerful and
persuasive than that of many civilised nations. They have been
illustrated in the verb; but the same systematic application of euphonic
change through all the transitions of their vocabulary is seen in the
elaborate word-sentences, so characteristic of the extreme length to
which the incorporating mode of structure of the Turanian family of
languages is carried in many of those spoken by the American nations.
The habitual concentration of complex ideas in a single word has long
been recognised, not only as giving a peculiar character to many of the
Indian languages, but as one source of their adaptability to the aims of
native oratory. From the Massachusetts Bible of Eliot, Professor Whitney
quotes a word of eleven syllables; and Gallatin produces from the
Cherokee another of seventeen syllables. This frequently embodies a
descriptive holophrasm, and so aids the native rendering of novel
objects and ideas into a language, the vocabulary of which is
necessarily devoid of the requisite terms. But in such cases the
agglutinative process is obvious, and the elements of the compounded
word must be present to the mind of speaker and hearer. The English word
“almighty” is itself an example of the process. It becomes in the Mohawk
Prayer-Book _seshatsteaghseragwekonh_, from _seshatsteh_, “you are
strong,” and _ahkwekonh_, “all,” or “the whole.” When the missionaries
first undertook to render into the Mohawk language the Gospels and
Service-Books for Christian worship, it may be doubted if many of their
converts had ever seen a sheep. But they had to reproduce in Mohawk this
general confession: “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost
sheep.” They did it accordingly in this fashion:
_Teyagwaderyeadawearyesneoni yoegwathaharagwaghtha tsisahate tsiniyouht
yodiyadaghtoeouh teyodinakaroetoeha_, which may be literally rendered:
“We make a mistake, and get off the track where your road is, the same
as strayed animals with small horns.” The extreme literalness of the
rendering may probably strike the mind of the English reader in a way
that would not occur to the Indian, familiar with such descriptive
holophrasms. But it illustrates a difficulty with which Eliot was very
familiar when engaged on his Massachusetts Indian Bible. In translating,
for example, the song of Deborah and Barak, where the mother of Sisera
“cried through the lattice,” the good missionary looked in vain in the
Indian wigwam for anything that corresponded to the term. At length he
called an Indian and described to him a lattice as wicker-work, and
obtained in response a rendering of the text which literally meant: “The
mother of Sisera looked through an eel-pot.” It was the only kind of
wicker-work of which the Indian had any knowledge.
Evidences of an exceptional development of the æsthetic faculty among
the nations of the New World have already been noted; but the Iroquois
cannot be included among those specially noticeable for their imitative
powers, or in other ways furnishing evidence of any highly developed
artistic faculty. They cannot compare in this respect with the Zuñi or
others of the Pueblo Indians, among whom the arts of long-settled
agricultural communities have been developed for purposes of ornament as
well as utility; nor is their inferiority less questionable when we
compare them with some of the tribes of the north-west coast and the
neighbouring islands. Their languages confirm this; for while, as Mr.
Cushing has shown, the Zuñi language possesses many words relating to
art-processes, the Iroquois and Algonkin dialects supply such terms for
the most part only in descriptive holophrasms, and not in primitive
roots.
In Iroquois, the word _kar_ or _kare_ signifies “to paint” or “draw.”
The initial _k_ in Iroquois words is usually not radical, and so rarely
enters into composite terms. The root of _kar_, is _ar_ or _are_, which
added to _kaiata_, or _oiata_, “living thing, person, body,” makes
_kaiatare_, “image” or “likeness,” _i.e._ “pictured body,” or as a verb
“to paint” or “depict anything.” To this is added the verbal suffix _ta_
or _tha_, which occasionally becomes _stha_, and has different meanings,
causative and instrumental. The Mohawk supplies such words and terms of
art as _ahyeyatonh_, “to grave”; _rahyatonhs_, “an engraver”;
_ahyekonteke_, “to paint”; _rakonteks_, “a painter”; _s’hakoyatarha_,
“an artist”; _rahkaratahkwas_, “a carver”; _rateanakerahtha_, “a
modeller,” or “one who models figures in clay.” In the Iroquois version
of the Gospel of St. John, chap. viii. verse 6 reads thus: _Nok tanon ne
Iesos wathastsake ehtake nok rasnonsake_ (more correctly, _rasnonkenh_)
_warate wahiaton onwentsiake_, lit. “But instead Jesus bent low and with
hand used, wrote,” or “engraved, on the earth.” The version of the
second commandment in the Mohawk Prayer-Book affords another
illustration, in the holophrasm _asadatyaghdoenihseroenyea_. It is
compounded of _ahsonniyon_, “make”; _ahsadadonnyen_, “to make for
yourself”; _kayadonnihsera_, “an image” or “doll.” _Toghsa
asadatyaghdoenihseroenyea, shekonh othenouh taoesakyatayerea nene enekea
karouhyakouh, neteas eghtake oughweatsyakonh_, etc., lit. “Do not make
an image or idol for yourself, even anything like above in the sky, nor
below in the earth,” etc.
The word _kaiata_, or _oiata_, as already noted, signifies “a living
thing, person,” or “body”; _kakonsa_ or _okonsa_, is the “face” or
“visage”; and from those come many derivatives. Bruyas gives _gaiata_,
“a living thing”; _gaiatare_ (or _kaiatare_) “image,” and as a verb, “to
paint.” There is also _gaiatonni_, “a doll” or “puppet,” _i.e._ “a made
person,” from _oiata_ and _konnis_, “to make.” From the same root we may
probably derive _kiaton_, “to write,” as in the Iroquois Gospels,
_wahaiaton_, “wrote”; _kahiaton_, “it is written,” etc. The original
meaning was, no doubt, picture-writing, _i.e._ making images of things.
In the old Onondaga dictionary of the Jesuit Fathers is the word
_kiatonnion_, “I keep writing.” The same authority also gives
_guianatonh_ (_kianatonh_), “I paint,” apparently from another root,
_oiana_ (_kaiana_) “track, walk, gait,” etc., which has many
derivatives. The remarkable compass and minute nicety of expression
which the Iroquois grammar had acquired in the various languages of the
Six Nations, approximates to the wonderful expansion effected on the
crude Anglo-Saxon verb by the evolution of the auxiliaries out of vague
active verbs. This has been effected through the habitual resort to
oratory as a source of combined action in the councils of the tribes,
which constituted one of the most remarkable characteristics of this
representative Indian stock. In this respect the expressive flexibility
and rhetorical aptitude of the Iroquois languages stand out in striking
contrast to the limited compass of grammatical discrimination in those
of Europe’s Scandinavian and Teutonic races by whom the Roman empire was
overthrown. They had indeed their “tun-moot,” the council meeting of the
village community for justice and government; but the deliberations on
the moot-hill, though they embodied the germ of all later parliaments,
gave birth to no such development of language. It is when entering on
the history of the grand constitutional struggle for a free parliament
that Carlyle, in quaint irony, exclaims, or assigns to his apocryphal
Dryasdust the exclamation: “I have known nations altogether destitute of
printers’ types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old
songs, monumental stone heaps and quipo-thrums to keep record by, who
had truer memory of their memorable things. . . . The English, one can
discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a people as their neighbours;
perhaps, for valour of action and true hard labour in this earth, since
brave peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver any
where or any when:—but also, it must be owned, in stupidity of speech
they have no fellow!”[146] It suited the purpose of the satirist to
ignore for the moment that Shakespeare came of that same speechless
race. But in its earlier stage when any comparison with Indian nations
is permissible the irony is not extravagant.
But apart from the great compass of the Iroquois verb as illustrative of
grammatical development in the languages of unlettered nations, another
characteristic feature is the distinction between masculine and feminine
forms both in speaking of and to a man or woman. In the study of the
minute niceties of the Iroquois verb I have been largely indebted to Dr.
Oronhyatekha, and to the Rev. Isaac Bearfoot, both educated Mohawks.
When tracing out the comprehensive power of the Mohawk verb, I had in
view at the same time the recovery of evidences that the language might
supply of an inherent recognition of the artistic faculty. This is much
more strongly manifested in other American races in all stages of
progress, from the ingenious Haidahs and Tawatins of British Columbia,
and the Pueblo Indians of Arizona, to the semi-civilised nations of
Mexico and the lettered races of Central and Southern America.
Nevertheless the Iroquois recorded in primitive picture-writing the
deeds of their departed braves, and have left records in the same crude
hieroglyphics, such as the graven rock on Cunningham Island, Lake Erie.
Their pipes were carved, and their pottery modelled into representations
of familiar objects indicative of a habitual, though simple practice of
imitative art that could not fail to beget some counterpart in their
languages. Hence the choice of the verb _kyadarahste_, “to draw.”
_Kayadareh_, or _kyadareh_, signifies “a body or form _in_,” _e.g._ “in
a frame” or “group”; _kyadarastonh_, on the other hand, implies “a body”
or “form transferred _on_ to something,” _e.g._ a board or canvas. The
latter is therefore the more expressive and correct term to use for
drawing or painting, while it illustrates the process of augmenting the
vocabulary to meet the requirements of novel acquisitions in art. But
its chief value consists in its affording illustration not only of the
inherent capacity of the language to express with minute nicety of
detail the manifestations of an æsthetic faculty, as yet very partially
developed, but of the compass of its grammar to indicate every
distinctive variation of form expressive of time, place, action, object,
or subject. The latest results of philological research in this
direction are set forth in the _Lexique_ and the _Études philologique_
of Abbé Cuoq, and in an admirable _résumé_ in Mr. Horatio Hale’s
introduction to _The Iroquois Book of Rites_.[147] The systematic
processes by which the moods and tenses are indicated, either by changes
of termination or prefixed particles, or by both conjoined, are
carefully indicated by Mr. Hale; but he adds: “A complete grammar of
this speech, as full and minute as the best Sanscrit or Greek grammars,
would probably equal, and perhaps surpass those grammars in extent. The
unconscious forces of memory and of discrimination required to maintain
this complicated intellectual machine, and to preserve it constantly
exact, and in good working order, must be prodigious.” This tendency to
elaborate niceties of discrimination is in striking contrast to that of
the modern cultivated languages of Europe; and it is not without reason
that it is spoken of as a “complicated intellectual machine.” The
contrast, for example, between the Mohawk or other Iroquois verb, in all
its complex variations, and the extreme simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon
verb, with only its Indefinite and Perfect Tenses,—the former
predicated either of the present, or of a future time, and the latter of
any past time,—can scarcely fail to impress the thoughtful student who
keeps in view the relative civilisation of the Iroquois, and of the
English people at the period when Anglo-Saxon in its purely inflectional
stage was still the national language. The English verb has since then
acquired wonderful power and compass by means of the auxiliary verbs;
but its whole tendency is at variance with the elaborations in number
and gender of the Iroquois verb. These are only partially illustrated in
the above example, and might easily have been carried further. For
example, the rendering of the Active, Indicative, Past Progressive, with
Feminine Object is really a verb in the passive voice. To realise the
full inflectional niceties of such minute grammatical distinctions, the
two genders should be given; and also a mixed gender, _i.e._ the two
genders together, as the artists may consist of both sexes. This is
indicated in the two forms of the Future Indefinite, by
_eas’hakodiyadarahste_, “they (mas.) shall draw her,”
_eayaktodiyadarahste_, “they (fem.) shall draw her.” But a study of the
paradigm of the Mohawk verb will be found to illustrate in a variety of
interesting aspects the process of unpremeditated grammatical evolution
among an unlettered people, with whom the influence of oratory in the
councils of the tribe was one of their most powerful resources as a
preliminary to war.
The grand movement of the barbarian races of Northern Europe in the
fifth and following centuries is spoken of as the wandering of the
nations. The natural barriers of the continent seemed for a time to have
given way, and the unknown tribes from beyond the Baltic and from the
shores of the North Sea poured into the valley of the Danube, and swept
beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees to the furthest shores of the
Mediterranean Sea. The physical geography of the New World presents
fewer barriers to be surmounted. But if the student of North American
ethnology spread before him a map of the continent, and trace out the
wanderings of the Huron-Iroquois, he must revert in fancy to that remote
era when confederated Iroquois and Algonkins swept in triumphant fury
through the wasted valley of the Ohio, and repeated there what Goth and
Hun did for Europe, in Rome’s decline and fall. The long-settled and
semi-civilised Mound-Builders fled before the furious onset, leaving the
great river-valley a desolate waste. The barrier of an old-settled and
well-organised community, which, probably for centuries, had kept
America’s northern barbarians in check, was removed, and the fierce
Huron-Iroquois ranged at will over the eastern regions of the continent,
far southward of the North Carolina river-valleys, where the Nottoways
and Tuscaroras found a new home. As to the Nottoways, they appear to
have passed out of all remembrance as an Iroquois tribe; yet it is
suggestive of a long-forgotten chapter of Indian history, that the name
is still in use among the northern Algonkins as the designation of the
whole Iroquois stock. The Nottawa saga is doubtless a memorial of their
presence on the Georgian Bay, and the Notaway (_Náhdahwe_) river which
falls into Hudson Bay at James Bay, is so named in memory of
Huron-Iroquois wanderers into that Algonkin region.
Some portion of the ancient Huron stock tarried on the banks of the St.
Lawrence, in what is known to us now as the traditional cradleland of
those Canadian aborigines. Others found their way down the Hudson, or
selected new homes for themselves on the rivers and lakes that lay to
the west, till they reached the shores of Lake Erie; and all that is now
the populous region of Western New York was in occupation of the
Iroquois race. Feuds broke out between them and the parent stock in the
valley of the St. Lawrence. They meted out to those of their own race
the same vengeance as to strangers; and the survivors, abandoning their
homes, fled westward in search of settlements beyond their reach. The
Georgian Bay lay remote from the territory of the Iroquois, but the
nations of the Wyandot stock spread beyond it, until the Niagara
peninsula and the fertile regions between Lake Huron and Lake Erie were
occupied by them, and the Niagara river alone kept apart what were now
hostile tribes. But wherever the test of linguistic evidence can be
obtained their affinities are placed beyond dispute. On the other hand,
the multiplication of dialects is no less apparent, and in many ways
helps to throw light on the history of the race.
The old Huron mother tongue still partially preserves the labials which
have disappeared from all the Iroquois languages. The Mohawk approaches
nearest to this, and appears to be the main stem from whence other
languages of the Six Nations have branched off. But the diversities in
speech of the various members of the confederacy leave no room to doubt
the prolonged isolation of the several tribes, or “nations,” before they
were induced to recognise the claims of consanguinity, and to band
together for their common interest. Some of the noteworthy diversities
of tongue may be pointed out, such as the _r_ sound which predominates
in the Mohawk, while the _l_ takes its place in the Oneida. In the
Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, they are no longer heard. The last of
these reduces the primary forms to the narrowest range; but beyond, to
the westward, the old Eries dwelt, speaking, it may be presumed, a
modified Seneca dialect, but of which unfortunately no record survives.
As to the Tuscaroras and the Nottoways, if we knew nothing of their
history, their languages would suffice to tell that they had been
longest and most widely separated from the parent stock.
It is not without interest to note in conclusion that the main body of
the representatives of the nations of the ancient Iroquois league sprung
from the Huron-Iroquois stock of Eastern Canada,—after sojourning for
centuries beyond the St. Lawrence, until the traditions of the home of
the race had faded out of memory, or given place to mythic legends of
autochthon origin,—has returned to Canadian soil. At Caughnawaga, St.
Regis, Oka, and on the river St. Charles, in the Province of Quebec; at
Anderdon, the Bay of Quinté, and above all, on the Grand river, in
Ontario; the Huron-Iroquois are now settled to the number of upwards of
8000, without reckoning other tribes. If, indeed, the surviving
representatives of the aborigines in the old provinces of the Canadian
Dominion are taken as a whole, they number upwards of 34,000, apart from
the many thousands in Manitoba, British Columbia, and the North-west
Territories. But the nomad Indians must be classed wholly apart from the
settlers on the Grand river reserves. The latter are a highly
intelligent, civilised people, more and more adapting themselves to the
habits of the strangers who have supplanted them; and they are destined
as certainly to merge into the predominant race, as the waters of their
ancient lakes mingle and are lost in the ocean. Yet the process is no
longer one of extinction but of absorption; and will assuredly leave
traces of the American autochthones, similar to those which still in
Europe perpetuate some ethnical memorial of Allophylian races.
-----
[111] _Types of Mankind_, p. 291.
[112] _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 43.
[113] _The Indian Races of North and South America_, p. 286.
[114] _Magazine of American History_, vol. x. p. 479.
[115] _Archæologia Americana_, vol. ii. p. 173.
[116] _Indian Migrations_, p. 17.
[117] _Whitney’s Study of Language_, p. 348.
[118] _The Tutelo Tribe and Language_, p. 9.
[119] _Relation_, 1641, p. 72.
[120] _Peter Jones and the Ojibway Indians_, p. 31.
[121] _The Life and Growth of Languages_, p. 259.
[122] Hale’s _Indian Migrations as evidenced by Language_, p. 3.
[123] _Anthropology_, by Dr. Paul Topinard: Eng. Trans., p. 480.
[124] “The Huron Race and Head-form:” N. S. _Canadian Journal_, vol.
xiii. p. 113.
[125] _Crania Americana_, p. 195.
[126] _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 47.
[127] _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, p. 78.
[128] _Ibid._, pp. 21, 22.
[129] _League of the Iroquois_, p. 4.
[130] _Notes on the Iroquois_, p. 51.
[131] _Lectures on the Science of Language_, 5th ed. p. 58.
[132] _Notes on the Iroquois_, p. 52.
[133] _Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts_, p. 4.
[134] _Pioneers of France in the New World_, p. 367.
[135] _League of the Iroquois_, p. 76.
[136] _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 441 note.
[137] _History of the Indian Tribes_, vol. ii. p. 78.
[138] “Huron Race and Head-form,” _Canadian Journal_, N. S., vol. xiii.
p. 113.
[139] “Some American Illustrations of the Evolution of new Varieties of
Man,” _Journal of Anthropology_, May 1879.
[140] The Huron vocabulary prepared by the Jesuit Father, Chaumonot, is,
as I have recently learned, still in existence, and will, I hope, be
speedily published under trustworthy editorial supervision.
[141] _The League of the Iroquois_, p. 2.
[142] _Archæologia Americana_, vol. ii. p. 79.
[143] _Indian Migrations_, p. 22.
[144] _Life and Growth of Language_, p. 261.
[145] _Lectures on the Science of Language_, 2nd series, p. 162.
[146] Cromwell’s _Letters and Speeches_, Introduction.
[147] See p. 110.
VII
HYBRIDITY AND HEREDITY
FOUR centuries have now completed their course since the discovery of
America revealed to Europe an indigenous people, distinct in many
respects from all the races of the Old World. There, as in the older
historic areas, man is indeed seen in various stages: from the rudest
condition of savage life, without any knowledge of metallurgy, and
subsisting solely by the chase, to the comparatively civilised nations
of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, familiar with some of the most
important arts, skilled in agriculture, and with a system of writing
embodying the essential germs of intellectual progress.
The western hemisphere, which was the arena of such ethnical
development, had lain, for unnumbered centuries, apart from Asia and
Europe; and so its various nationalities and races were left to work out
their own destinies, and to develop in their own way whatever inherent
capacities for progress pertained to them. But this done, it was
abruptly brought into intimate relations with Europe by the maritime
discoveries which marked the closing years of the fifteenth century.