The old ethnology, like every science in its beginnings, was
speculative. The new ethnology is inductive. Fifty or sixty
years ago the attempt was first made to read the riddle of human
origins and substantiate the answer by facts. One student after
another—Spencer, Tylor, Morgan, and others—thought out a formula
that seemed a reasonable explanation of how some activity of human
civilization—institutional, religious, or inventive—began, developed,
and reached its present condition; and then ransacked the accounts of
travelers, missionaries, and residents among primitive tribes for each
bit of evidence favorable to his theory. Thus the origin of marriage
was plausibly traced back to the matriarchate and ultimate promiscuity,
of society to totemic clans, of the historic religions to a belief
in souls and ghosts, of pottery to clay-lined basketry. Twenty-five
years ago this theory fabrication was in full swing; and in many
non-scientific quarters it still enjoys vogue and prestige.
It is plain that the method of these evolutionary explanations was
deductive. One started with an intuition, a rationalization, a guess,
then looked for corroborative facts. Inevitably, all contrary facts
tended to be ignored or explained away. What was more, the evidence
being adduced solely with reference to whether it fitted or failed to
fit into the theory under examination, it was torn from its natural
relations of time, space, and association. This was very much as if a
selection of statements, made by an individual on a given topic, were
strung together, without reference to the circumstances under which he
uttered them and without the qualifications which he attached. By the
use of this method of ignoring _context_, a pretty good case might be
made out to show that the Kaiser was really a pacificist republican
at heart, Huxley a devout if not quite regular Christian, and Anthony
Comstock a tolerant personality. Roosevelt could be portrayed as
either a daring radical or as a hide-bound reactionary. Just such
contrary interpretations did emerge in the older ethnology. Totems,
for instance, were held by one “authority” to have had their origin
in magical rites concerned with food supply, by another in a sort
of nicknames, by a third in a primitive, mystic adumbration of the
concept of society itself.
Gradually it began to be recognized by students that this method might
be necessary in the law-courts, where each party advowedly contends for
his own interests, but that in science it led to exciting wrangling
rather more than to progress toward impartial truth. And so a new
ethnology modestly grew up which held for its motto: “All possible
facts first, then such inferences as are warranted.” “All facts” means
not only all items but also these items in their _natural_ order: the
sequence in which they occur, their geographical relation, the degree
to which they are associated.
The anthropologist no longer compares marriage customs from all over
the world as they come to hand. He realizes that marriage is likely to
be a different rite as it is practiced respectively among peoples, with
and without civil government, or among nations that have come under the
influence of a world religion or remain in a status of tribal ceremony.
The whole culture of the group must be more or less known before the
history and meaning of an institution can become intelligible. Detached
from its culture mass, a custom reveals as little of its functioning as
an organ dissected out of the living body.
Equally important for the interpretation of ethnic facts, are their
geographical associations, their distribution. Is a custom or invention
peculiar to one people or is it shared by many distinct peoples
occupying a continuous area? Such a question may seem trivial. But
the answer usually bears heavy significance. A unique institution, or
one found in various spots but in disconnected ones, is, other things
equal, either of recent and independent origin in each locality, or
it is a lingering survival of a custom that was once wide-spread. In
short, it represents the beginning or end of a process of development.
On the other hand, where we find an art or institution possessed in
common by dozens or hundreds of tribes situated without any gaps
between them on the map, it would be far-fetched to assume that each of
them independently evolved this identical phenomenon. Why presuppose a
hundred parallel causes, each operating quite separately, when one will
suffice, in view of the fact that human beings imitate each other’s
manners and borrow knowledge. We know that Christianity, gun-powder,
the printing press, were originated but once. Even with history wiped
out, we could infer as much, from their universality among the nations
of Europe.
Now this is just the situation as regards primitive peoples. Their
history _has_ been wiped out—it was never preserved by themselves or
their neighbors. But knowledge of the geographical occurrence of a
custom or invention, usually affords rather reliable insight into its
history, sometimes into its origin. When the available information
shows that Indian corn was grown by all the tribes from Chile and
Brazil to Arizona and Quebec, it is evident that the history of native
American agriculture is as much of a unit, essentially, as the history
of Christianity or of fire-arms. It is a story of _invention_ only
at its outset, of _diffusion_ and amplification through its greater
length. When pottery is further discovered to possess almost exactly
the same aboriginal distribution as maize, it becomes likely that
this art, too, was devised but once; and likely, further, that it was
invented at about the same time as maize culture and diffused with it.
By evidence such as this, reënforced by the insight gained from the
stratification of prehistoric objects preserved in caves and in the
ground, native, American history is being reconstructed for some
thousands of years past. The outline of this history runs about as
follows.
Eight, ten, or twelve thousand years ago, contemporary with the last
phase of the Old Stone Age of Europe or the opening there of the
New Stone Age, man, for the first time, entered the New World. He
came from Asia across Behring Strait, a narrow gap with an island
stepping-stone in the middle, and probably frozen over solidly in
midwinter. In race he was Mongoloid—not Chinese, Japanese, or Mongol
proper, but _proto-Mongoloid_; a straight-haired type, medium in
complexion, jaw protrusion, nose-breadth, and inclining probably to
round-headedness; an early type, in short, from which the Chinese, the
Malay, and the Indian grew out, like so many limbs from a tree. This
proto-Mongoloid stock must have been well established in Asia long
before. This is morally certain from the fact that the proto-Negroids
and proto-Caucasians were living at least ten to fifteen thousand
years earlier, as attested by their discovered fossils, Grimaldi man
and Cro-Magnon man.
Well, somewhere about 8000 B. C., then, bands of proto-Mongolians
began to filter in through the easy, northwest gate of America. Others
pushed them behind; before them, to the south, the country was ever
more pleasantly tempting, and life easier. They multiplied, streamed
down the Pacific coast, wandered across to the Atlantic, entered
the tropics in fertile Mexico, defiled through Panama, and slowly
overran South America. Separate groups of entrants into Alaska may
have brought distinct languages with them; or, if they all came with
one mother-tongue, their migrations to diverse environments and long,
long separations provided ample opportunity for differentiation into
dialects, languages, and families. The history of speech in the Old
World covered by records, is but little more than three thousand years
old, just a third of the ten thousand years with which we are dealing
in America. Multiply by three the difference between twentieth-century
English and ancient Sanskrit or one of its modern representatives such
as Bengali, and there is just about the degree of speech distinctness
that exists between the American language families, such as Siouan and
Algonkin, Aztec and Maya.
So with the racial type. Fundamentally, one physical type stretches
from Cape Horn to Alaska. Superficially, it is intricately
variegated—here with round heads, there with long—with short faces
or hooked noses or tall statures or wavy hair, in this or that group
of tribes. In fact, it might seem that during ten thousand years the
variety of climates and habitats might have succeeded in moulding
the Indian into racial types of even greater distinctness than we
encounter; until we remember that he found the two continents empty,
and was never subjected to mixtures with white or black or dwarf races,
to mixtures such as were experienced by many of the peoples of the
eastern hemisphere.
What the first immigrants brought with them in culture was rudimentary.
They kept dogs, but no other domesticated animal. They were not yet
agricultural, and subsisted on what they wrested from nature. They knew
something of weaving baskets and mats; clothed and housed themselves;
probably had harpoons and possibly bows; made fire with the drill; cut
with flint knives; and believed in magic, spirits, and the perpetuity
of the soul.
In and about southern Mexico they prospered the fastest, became most
numerous, acquired some leisure, began to organize themselves socially,
and developed cults of increasing elaborateness. They “invented”
maize-agriculture and pottery; architecture in stone; irrigation; cloth
weaving and cotton growing; the smelting and casting of copper, silver,
and gold; a priesthood, calendar system, picture-writing, pantheon of
gods, and sacrifices; and accustomed themselves to town life.
Gradually these amplifications of culture spread: slowly to the north,
more rapidly and completely to the south, into the similar environment
of Colombia and Peru. Not all of the civilization devised in Yucatan
and Guatemala, was carried into South America. Writing and time
reckoning, for instance, never squeezed through the Isthmus, and the
Incas got along with traditions and records of strings. On the other
hand the South Americans, also growing populous and wealthy, added some
culture elements of their own—bronze alloying, the hammock, the Pan’s
pipe, the balance scale, the surgical art of trephining the skull, the
idea of a vast, compactly organized empire.
In Peru then, and in Mexico, two nearly parallel centers of
civilization grew up during thousands of years; sprung from the same
foundation, differentiated in their superstructures, that of Mexico
evidently the earlier, and, at the time of discovery, slightly more
advanced. The Peruvian civilization, if we include with it those of
western Colombia and Bolivia, rayed itself out through the whole
southern continent, becoming feebler and more abbreviated with
increasing distance from its focus.
The South Mexican center similarly diffused its light through most
of the northern continent. First its influences traveled to northern
Mexico and the Southwest of the United States—Arizona and New Mexico,
the seat of the Cliff-dwellers. There they took new root and then
spread northward and eastward—altered, diluted, with much omitted.
We may compare Mexico to a manufacturing district, where capital,
inventiveness, resources and industry, flourish in mutual alliance;
the Southwest to one of its outlets, a sort of distributing point
or jobbing center, which imports, both for its own consumption and
for re-export; the articles of trade in this case being elements of
civilization—inventions, knowledge, arts.
Throughout, it was a flow of things of the mind, not a drift of the
bodies of men; of culture, not of populations. And the radiation was
ever northward, counter to the drift of the migrations which had begun
thousands of years before, and which, in part, seem to have continued
to crowd southward even during the period of northward spread of
civilization. It was much as in Europe fifteen hundred years ago, when
Goth and Vandal and Frank and Lombard pounded their way southward into
the Roman empire, but the civilization of Rome—writing, learning,
money, metallurgy, architecture, Christianity, laws—streamed ever
against the human pressure, until the farthest barbarians of the North
Sea had become, in some measure, humanized.
Thus the Southwest learned from Mexico to build in stone, to grow
and weave cotton, to irrigate, to obey priests, and in some rude
measure to organize the year into a calendar. None of these culture
elements traveled farther. But the maize-beans-squash agriculture,
pottery making, the organization of cult societies, the division of
the community into clans, reckoning descent from one parent only,
some tendency toward town life and the confederation of towns, all of
which the Southwest had also acquired from Mexico, it passed on to its
neighbors, notably to those of the Gulf States between Louisiana and
Georgia. Here, these institutions were once more worked over and, in
the main, reduced, and then some of them passed on northward, first to
the Mound-builders of the Ohio valley, and then to the Iroquois of New
York. From the Iroquois, in turn, some of their Algonkian neighbors and
foes were just beginning to be ready to learn certain betterments, when
the white man came and swept their cultures into memory.
We have thus, a series of culture centers—Mexico, Southwest, Southeast,
Iroquois, Atlantic Algonkins—of descending order of advancement, and
subsequent to one another in time. They constitute a ladder of culture
development, and, although undated, represent a real sequence of
history.
One area was but haltingly and sparsely infiltrated from the Southwest:
the North Pacific Coast, centering in British Colombia. In this mild
and rich environment a native culture grew up that, in the main, went
its own way. It did not attain to the heights of Mexico, scarcely even
equaled the Southwest. Pottery and agriculture failed to reach it.
But out of its own resources, it developed, independently, a number of
the arts and institutions which the remainder of North America drew
from Mexico: clan organization and cult societies, for instance, the
beginnings of a calendar and cloth weaving. And it added features, all
its own: plank houses, totem poles, a remarkable style of decorative
art, a society based on wealth. Here then we have a minor, but mainly
independent culture center of the greatest interest.
In a still smaller way, and without as great a freedom from southern
influences, the tribes of the treeless Plains, in the heart of the
continent, developed a little civilization of their own. This was
founded on what they had originally got from the Southwest and
Southeast, was remodeled on the basis of an almost exclusive dependence
on the buffalo, and underwent a brief and stirring efflorescence from
the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, after the Plains tribes
had got horses from the Spaniards. Here, then, grew up customs and
appliances like the tepee, the travois, the camp circle, warfare as a
game with “coups” as counters.
Similarly in the far north, along the shores of the Arctic, where the
Eskimo spread themselves. Here, almost nothing penetrated from Mexico,
but stern necessity forced a special inventiveness on the mechanical
side and the way was near for the entrance of influences from Asia,
some few of which may have diffused beyond the Eskimo to the North
Pacific Coast tribes.
Such, then, are the outlines of the history of the native, American
race and civilization. It is a long and complexly rich story, only
partly unraveled. Those who wish it in greater fullness will find it in
Wissler’s _The American Indian_. Only enough has been sketched here to
show that modern anthropology is an inductive science with a minimum of
speculation; that it aims at truly historical reconstructions and is
beginning to achieve them; and that it lies in the nature of its tasks
to distinguish and analyze the several native culture areas or local
types of Indians before proceeding to conclusions based on combinations.
Therefore it is, that many small items of ethnic knowledge acquire
considerable importance. From the average man’s point of view, it is
of little moment that the Zuñi farm and the Yurok and Nootka do not,
or that the former refuse to marry their dead wives’ sisters and the
latter insist on it. At best, such bits of facts have for the layman
only the interest of idle curiosities, of antiquarian fragments. To the
specialist, however, they become dependable means to a useful end, much
as intimate knowledge of the position of arteries and nerves serves the
surgeon.
But, just as the exact understanding of anatomy which modern medicine
enjoys, bulks to infinitely more than any one anatomist could ever
have discovered, so with ethnology. No one mind could ever observe
or assemble and digest all the cultural facts that are needed. Many
workers are busy, have been systematically busy for two or three
generations. Though they may, now and then, enliven their toil by a
scientific quarrel over this or that set of facts or interpretation,
they are inherently coöperating, laboring cumulatively at a great
joint enterprise. Sometimes, they divide their interests topically:
one specializes on social customs, another on material arts, a third
along lines of religion. But, in the main, the cultural context is so
important that it has been found most productive for each investigator
to try to learn everything possible about all the phases of culture of
a single tribe, or, at most, of two or three tribes.
To do this, he “goes into the field.” That is, he takes up his
residence, for a continuous period or repeatedly for several years,
among a tribe, on its reservation or habitat. He enters into as close
relations as possible with its most intelligent or authoritative
members. He acquires all he can of their language, reduces it to
writing, perhaps compiles texts, a dictionary or grammar. Day after
day he records notes from visual observation or the memory of the best
informants available on the industries, beliefs, government, family
life, ceremonies, wars, and daily occupations of his chosen people. And
with all this, there flow in his personal experiences and reactions.
The final outcome is a monograph—a bulky, detailed, often tedious,
but fundamental volume, issued by the government or a scientific
institution.
It is from intensive studies such as these, that the stories which
form the present volume have sprung as a by-product. Have sprung as a
sort of volunteer crop, it might be said, under the stimulus of the
editorial suggestion of Dr. Parsons. The monographs have a way of
sticking pretty closely to the objective facts recorded. The mental
workings of the people whose customs are described, are subjective, and
therefore much more charily put into print. The result is that every
American anthropologist with field experience, holds in his memory many
interpretations, many convictions as to how his Indians feel, why they
act as they do in a given situation, what goes on inside of them. This
psychology of the Indian is often expressed by the frontiersman, the
missionary and trader, by the man of the city, even. But it has been
very little formulated by the very men who know most, who have each
given a large block of their lives to acquiring intensive and exact
information about the Indian and his culture.
There is, thus, something new, something of the nature of an original
contribution, in each of these stories; and they are reliable. To many
of us, the writing of our tale has been a surprise and of value to
ourselves. We had not realized how little we knew of the workings of
the Indian mind on some sides, how much on others.
The fictional form of presentation devised by the editor has definite
merit. It allows a freedom in depicting or suggesting the thoughts and
feelings of the Indian, such as is impossible in a formal, scientific
report. In fact, it incites to active psychological treatment, else
the tale would lag. At the same time the customs depicted are never
invented. Each author has adhered strictly to the social facts
as he knew them. He has merely selected those that seemed most
characteristic, and woven them into a plot around an imaginary Indian
hero or heroine. The method is that of the historical novel, with
emphasis on the history rather than the romance.
There is but one important precedent for this undertaking,[1] and
that single-handed instead of collective, and therefore depictive of
one people only, the Keresan Pueblos. This is _The Delight Makers_ of
Bandelier, archæologist, archivist, historian, and ethnologist of a
generation ago; and this _novel_ still renders a more comprehensive and
coherent view of native Pueblo life than any scientific volume on the
Southwest.
The present book, then, is a picture of native American life, in
much the sense that a series of biographies of one statesman,
poet, or common citizen from each country of Europe would yield a
cross-sectional aspect of the civilization of that continent. France
and Russia, Serbia and Denmark, would each be represented with its
national peculiarities; and yet the blended effect would be that of a
super-national culture. So with our Indians. It is through the medium
of the intensive and special coloring of each tribal civilization, that
the common elements of Indian culture are brought out most truthfully,
even though somewhat indirectly.
There are only a few points at which the composite photograph, produced
by these twenty-seven stories, should be used with caution, and these
disproportions or deficiencies are unavoidable at present. The first
of them is religion. The book is likely to make the impression that
some sixty per cent, of Indian life must have been concerned with
religion. This imbalance is due to the fact that religion has become
the best known aspect of Indian life. Ritual and ceremony follow exact
forms which the native is able to relate with accuracy from memory,
long after the practices have become defunct. Moreover, once his
confidence is gained, he often delights in occupying his mind with the
matters of belief and rite that put an emotional stamp on his youth.
Social usages are much more plastic, more profoundly modified to suit
each exigency as it arises, and therefore more difficult to learn and
portray. The mechanical and industrial arts have a way of leaving but
pallid recollections, once they have been abandoned for the white man’s
manufactures; and to get them recreated before one’s eyes is usually
very time-consuming. Thus, through a tacit coordination of Indians and
ethnologists to exploit the vein of most vivid productivity, religion
has become obtruded; and some excess must be discounted. Yet the
over-proportion is perhaps all for the best. For the Indian is, all
in all, far more religious than we, and the popular idea errs on the
side of ignoring this factor. The stories are substantially truthful in
their effect, in that the average Indian did spend infinitely more time
on affairs of religion than of war, for instance.
On the side of economics and government, the book is underdone. It is
so, because ethnological knowledge on these topics is insufficient.
It is difficult to say why. Possibly ethnologists have not become
sufficiently interested or trained. But economic and political
institutions are unquestionably difficult to learn about. They
are the first to crumble on contact with Anglo-Saxon or Spanish
civilization. So they lack the definiteness of ceremonialism, and their
reconstruction from native memories is a bafflingly intricate task.
As regards daily life, personal relations, and the ambitions and ideals
of the individual born into aboriginal society, in other words the
social psychology of the Indian, we have done much better. In fact,
collectively we have brought out much that is not to be found anywhere
in the scientific monographs, much even that we had not realized
could be formulated. This element seems to me to contain the greatest
value of the book, and to be one that should be of permanent utility
to historians and anthropologists, as well as to the public which
is fortunately free from professional trammels. The exhibit of the
workings of the Indian mind which these tales yield in the aggregate,
impresses me as marked by a rather surprising degree of insight and
careful accuracy.
Only at one point have we broken down completely: that of humor. One
might conclude from this volume that humor was a factor absent from
Indian life. Nothing would be more erroneous. Our testimony would be
unanimous on this score. And yet we have been unable to introduce
the element. The failure is inevitable. Humor is elusive because its
understanding presupposes a feeling for the exact psychic situation of
the individual involved, and this in turn implies thorough familiarity
with the finest nuances of his cultural setting. We could have
introduced Indian jokes, practical ones and witty ones, but they would
have emerged deadly flat, and their laughs would have sounded made
to order. An Indian himself, or shall we say, a contemporary of the
ancients, may let his fancy play, and carry over to us something of his
reaction: witness Aristophanes, Plautus, Horace. But the reconstructor,
if he is wise, leaves the task unattempted. That prince of historical
novelists, Walter Scott, for the most part collapses sadly when he
tries to inject into his romances of the Middle Ages, the humor
that marks his modern novels of Scotland; and so far as he salvages
anything, it is by substituting the humor of his own day for the actual
mediæval one. _Hypatia_ is a superb picture of the break-down of Roman
civilization; but how silly and boring are its humorous passages! A
greater artist, in _Thaïs_, and another in _Salammbô_, have wisely
evaded attempting the impossible, and, at most, touched the bounds
of irony. Where the masters have succumbed or refrained, it is well
that we scientists, novices in the domain of fiction, should hold off;
though we all recognize both the existence and the importance of humor
in Indian life. This element, then, the reader must accept our bare
word for—or supply from his own discrimination and intuition.