Part 22

[148] Ethnology of the Kwakintl, 35th Ann. Rep. Bur Am. Ethn. p. 1292.

And in another mourning song[149]:

Hana, hana, hana. It broke down, the post of the world. Hana, hana, hana. It fell down to the ground, the post of the world. Hana, hana, hana. Our great chief has taken a rest. Hana, hana, hana. Now our past chief has fallen down. [149] Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnology, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology. Vol. III, p. 77.

In a feast-song the chief is compared to the salmon[150]:

The great one will not move, the greatest one, the great Spring Salmon. Go on, great one, hurt the young children, the humble sparrows who are being teased by you, great Spring Salmon.

[150] Ibid., p. 123.

In another feast-song the rivals are compared to insects[151]:

I am a chief, I am a chief, I am your chief, yours, who you are flying about. I am too great to be bitten by those little flies that are flying about. I am too great to be desired as food by those little horseflies that are flying about. I am too great to be bitten by those little mosquitoes that are flying about.

[151] Ibid., p. 129.

In still another song he is compared to a tree[152]:

A great cedar dancer is our chief, our tribes. It cannot be spanned, our great chief, our tribes. My chief here from long ago, from the beginning of the myth time, for you, tribes.

[152] Ibid., p. 197.

A number of sayings of the Tsimshian present also good cases of the use of metaphor. “A deer though toothless, may accomplish something”; “he is just sleeping on a deerskin” (i. e. not expecting approaching hardships); “it seems you think that Nass River is always calm” (i. e. that you will always be fortunate); “he is just enjoying the water lilies for a short time” (as a bear feeding on water lilies and about to be killed by the hunter who lies in ambush).[153]

[153] Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. 2 (1889), p. 285.

Examples of metaphor may be found here and there in songs and speeches. The Osage sing:

Ho! Toward what shall they (the little ones) direct their footsteps, it has been said in the house. It is toward a little valley they shall direct their footsteps. Verily, it is not a little valley that is spoken of, It is toward the bend of a river they shall direct their footsteps. Verily, it is not the bend of a river that is spoken of, It is toward a little house that they shall direct their footsteps.

The valley and the bend of the river represent the path of life which is pictured as crossing four valleys or as following the course of the river having four bends.[154] This concept also finds expression in the decorative art of the Indians of the Plains.[155]

[154] Francis La Flesche, The Osage Tribe, The Rite of Vigil, 39th Ann. Rep. Bur. Amer. Ethnology, Washington 1925, p. 258.

[155] A. L. Kroeber, The Arapaho, Bulletin Am. Uns. Nat. Hist. Vol. 18, Plate 16, p. 100; Clark Wissler, Decorative Art of the Sioux Indians, Ibid., p. 242, fig. 77.

Another metaphor is used in the following illustration:

Upon whom shall we slip off our moccasins? they said to one another, it has been said in this house. Toward the setting sun, There is an adolescent youth, Upon whom we shall always slip off our moccasins, they said to one another, it has been said in this house.

Here the slipping off of moccasins means the crushing and killing of the enemy, here personified in the adolescent youth.[156]

[156] Francis La Flesche, Ibid., p. 84.

In the speech containing the migration legend of the Creek, the head-chief Chekilli said: “The Cussetaws cannot yet leave their red hearts, which are, however, white on one side and red on the other”.[157]

[157] Albert S. Gatschet, A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians, Philadelphia, 1884; p. 251.

James Mooney records the following formula for success in hunting. obtained from the Cherokee.[158]

Give me the wind. Give me the breeze. Yu! O Great Terrestrial Hunter, I come to the edge of your spittle where you repose. Let your stomach cover itself; let it be covered with leaves. Let it cover itself at a single bend, and may you never be satisfied.

And you, O Ancient Red, may you hover above my breast while I sleep. Now let good (dreams?) develop; let my expressions be propitious. Ha! Now let my little trails be directed, as they lie down in various directions (?). Let the leaves be covered with the clotted blood, and may it never cease to be so. You two shall bury it in your stomachs. Yu.

[158] James Mooney, The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 369.

In this formula the gods of the hunt, fire and water are called upon. The Great Terrestrial Hunter is the river, its spittle the foam; the blood-stained leaves on which the game has been killed are to cover the surface of the water. The hunter asks that all the game may be assembled at one bend of the river which is supposed to long for evermore. In the second part, the Ancient Red is the fire. It hovers over the breast because the hunter rubs his chest with ashes. The blood-stained leaves are thrown into the fire and into the water which is expressed by having them buried in the stomach.

The contents of primitive narrative, poetry and song are as varied as the cultural interests of the singers. It does not seem admissible to measure their literary value by the standards of the emotions that they release in us. We ought to inquire in how far they are an adequate expression of the emotional life of the natives. To primitive man, hunger is something entirely different from what it is to us who ordinarily do not know what the pangs of hunger mean, who do not realize all the implications of starvation. If a people like the Bushmen or the Eskimo sing of their joy after a successful hunt and after a hearty meal, if the Orang Semang of the Malay Peninsula sing of the gathering of fruit and of the successful hunt, the connotation of these songs is no different from that of a harvest song. We are too easily mislead by the concreteness of the picture and assume that the emotional connotation that we require in poetry must be absent. Even among ourselves a graphic passage in a lyric poem does not by any means always release a definite, mental image but appeals rather through the feelings engendered by the descriptive terms. For this reason we must necessarily assume that the emotional setting of the picture is the essential poetic element for the singer, not the objective terms that alone appeal to us because we are not familiar with the emotions of every day native life. We feel only the graphic value of the words. The much-quoted Semang[159] song represents a good example:

Our fruit grows plump at the end of the spray. We climb along and cut it from the end of the spray. Plump, too, is the bird (?) at the end of the spray. And plump the young squirrel at the end of the spray.

[159] W. W. Skeat and C. O. Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, Vol. 1 (1906), p. 627.

This song which deals with plants and animals serving as food, should be compared with another one that is more readily appreciated by us:

The stem bends as the leaves shoot up. The leaf-stems sway to and fro. To and fro they sway in diverse ways. We rub them and they lose their stiffness. On Mount Inas they are blown about. On Mount Inas which is our home. Blown about by the light breeze. Blown about is the fog (?). Blown about is the haze. Blown about are the young shoots. Blown about is the haze of the hills, Blown about by the light breeze. etc.

If we feel the latter as a more poetic type it is presumably only because we cannot share the feelings aroused in the Orang Semang by the reference to the efforts in gathering fruit and in hunting animals. The effectiveness of poetry does not depend upon the power of expressive description that releases clear mental images, but upon the energy with which words arouse the emotions.

It is misleading to compare primitive poetry that has been recorded by collectors with the literary poetry of our times. The coarse sexual songs or drinking songs that do not form part of our polite literature, are quite on a par with the songs that may be heard in primitive society in the company of lusty young men or excited young women and their prevalence in existing collections is, in all probability, merely due to the inability of the collector to approach the natives in moments of religious devotion, of tender love, or poetic exaltation. In many cases it is quite obvious that some of the songs collected were made to make fun of the collector. It is not admissible to build on the meagre evidence that we possess, a system of development of lyrics in which the coarse forms, the exuberant spirits of every day life are mistaken for the expression of the highest poetic achievement. In all those cases in which fuller collections are available, as in America for instance from the Omaha, Eskimo, Kwakiutl, and from some of the southwestern tribes, there is ample evidence of poetic feeling that moves on higher planes.

Still, poetic susceptibility is not the same everywhere, neither in form nor in intensity. The local culture determines what kind of experiences have a poetic value and the intensity with which they act. I select as an example the difference between the descriptive style found in Polynesia and that of many Indian traditions. In the Fornander collection of Hawaiian tales we read: “They admired the beauty of his appearance. His skin was like to a ripe banana. His eyeballs were like the young buds of a banana. His body was straight and without blemish and he was without an equal.” In the story of Laieikawai it is said: “I am not the mistress of this shore. I come from inland, from the top of the mountain which is clothed in a white garment.” It would be a vain task to search for similar passages in the literature of many Indian tribes. The American Indians differ considerably among themselves in regard to this trait. Tsimshian tales are rich when compared to the barrenness of the descriptive tales of the Plateau tribes.

Poetic descriptions appear more frequently in songs. However even these are not found everywhere. The songs of the Indians of the Southwest suggest that the phenomena of nature have impressed the poet deeply, although it must be remembered that most of his descriptive terms are stereotyped ceremonial expressions.

As an example I give the following song of the Navaho:[160]

“On the trail marked with pollen may I walk, With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk, With dew about my feet may I walk, With beauty may I walk, With beauty before me, may I walk, With beauty behind me, may I walk, With beauty above me, may I walk, With beauty under me, may I walk, With beauty all around me, may I walk, In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk, In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk, It is finished in beauty.

[160] Washington Matthews, Navaho Myths, Prayers and Songs. University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 5, p. 48, lines 61-73.

Of similar character is the following song of the Apache:[161]

“At the east where the black water lies, stands the large corn, with staying roots, its large stalk, its red silk, its long leaves, its tassel dark and spreading, on which there is the dew.

“At the sunset where the yellow water lies, stands the large pumpkin with its tendrils, its long stem, its wide leaves, its yellow top on which there is pollen.”

[161] P. E. Goddard, Myths and Tales from the White Mountain Apache. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 24, 1910.

The following song of the Pima has also ceremonial significance:[162]

“Wind now commences to sing; Wind now commences to sing; Wind now commences to sing. The land stretches before me, Before me it stretches away.

Wind’s house now is thundering; Wind’s house now is thundering. Came the myriad-legged wind. The wind came running hither.

The Black Snake Wind came to me The Black Snake Wind came to me. Came and wrapped itself about, Came here running with its song.

[162] Frank Russell, The Pima Indians, 26^{th} Ann. Rep. Bur. Am. Ethn., p. 324.

The following Eskimo song which describes the beauty of nature is well known:[163]

“The great Kunak mount yonder south, I do behold it; The great Kunak mount yonder south, I regard it; The shining brightness yonder south, I contemplate. Outside of Kunak it is expanding, The same that Kunak towards the seaside doth quite encompass. Behold, how yonder south they shift and change. Behold, how yonder south they tend to beautify each other, While from the seaside it is enveloped in sheets still changing, From the seaside enveloped to mutual embellishment.”

[163] Henry Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimos, London, 1875, p. 68.

A song, provided it does not contain intelligible words, may be of purely formal esthetic value, which depends upon its melodic and rhythmic character. Even these forms may be attached to more or less different groups of ideas of emotional value. On the other hand the established significance of the song may vary materially when different sets of words are used with it. We observe this in our own culture, when diverse thoughts are expressed in the same metre or when distinct poems are sung according to the same tune,—as, for example, happened in the transfer of folksongs into religious songs. I do not know in how far this may happen in primitive poetry. Among the tribes that I know best there is a decided tendency to associate a certain rhythm with a certain set of songs. Thus the five part rhythm of the Northwest coast of America seems to be closely connected with the religious winter ceremonial; the mourning songs with slow regular beating.

The inherent relation between literary type and culture appears also clearly in narrative.

The motives of action are determined by the mode of life and the chief interests of the people, and the plots give us a picture of these.

In many typical tales of the Chukchee of Siberia the subject of the tale is the tyranny and overmastering arrogance of an athletic hunter or warrior and the attempts of the villagers to free themselves. Among the Eskimo a group of brothers often take the place of the village bully. Among both groups of people who live in small settlements, without any hard and fast political organization, the fear of the strongest person plays an important role, no matter whether his power is founded on bodily strength or on supposed supernatural qualities. The story uses generally a weak, despised boy as savior of the community. Although tales of overbearing chiefs do occur among the Indians they are not by any means a predominant type.

The principal theme of the Indians of British Columbia, whose thoughts are almost entirely taken up by the wish to obtain rank and high position in the community, is the tale of a poor man who attains high position, or of the struggles between two chiefs who try to outdo each other in feats that will increase their social standing. Among the Blackfeet the principal theme is the acquisition of ceremonies, possession and practise of which is a most important element in their life.

All these differences are not entirely those of content but they influence the form of the narrative, because the incidents are tied together in different ways. The same motive recurs over and over again in the tales of primitive people, so that a large mass of material collected from the same tribe is liable to be very monotonous, and after a certain point has been reached only new variants of old themes are obtained.

However, much more fundamental are the differences which are based on the general difference of cultural outlook. The same story told by different tribes may bear an entirely different face. Not only is the setting distinct, the motivation and the main points of the tales are emphasized by different tribes in different ways and take on a local coloring that can be understood only in relation to the whole culture. An example selected from among the tales of the North American Indians will illustrate this point. I chose the story of the star husband, which is told on the prairies, in British Columbia, and on the North Atlantic coast. The prairie tribes tell that two maidens go out to dig roots and camp out. They see two stars and wish to be married to them. The next morning they find themselves in the sky married to the stars. They are forbidden to dig certain large roots, but the young women disobey the orders of their husbands and, through a hole in the ground they see the earth below. By means of a rope they climb down. From here on, the story takes distinctive forms in different geographical areas. In one form the adventures of the women after their return are described, in the other the feats of the child born by one of them. The central view-point of the same story as told by the Indians of British Columbia is completely changed. The girls of a village build a house in which they play and one day they talk about the stars, how happy they must be because they are able to see the whole world. The next morning they awake in the sky, in front of the house of a great chief. The house is beautifully carved and painted. Suddenly a number of men appear who pretend to embrace the girls but kill them by sucking out their brains. Only the chief’s daughter and her younger sister are saved. The elder sister becomes the wife of the chief of the stars. Finally the chief sends them back with the promise to help them whenever they are in need. They find the village deserted and the star chief sends down his house and the masks and whistles belonging to a ceremony which becomes the hereditary property of the woman’s family. The tale ends with the acquisition of the house and the ceremony, matters that are the chief interest in the life of the Indians. In this way the story becomes one of the long series of tales of similar import, although the contents belong to an entirely distinct group.

As a second example I mention the story of Amor and Psyche which has been cast into a new mould by the Pueblo Indians. Here the antelope appears in the form of a maiden. She marries a youth who is forbidden to see the girl. He transgresses this order and, by the light of a candle, looks upon her while she is asleep. Immediately the girl and house disappear and the young man finds himself in the wallow of an antelope.

Equally instructive are the transformations of biblical stories in the mouths of the natives. Dr. Benedict and Dr. Parsons have recorded a nativity story of the Zuni in which Jesus appears as a girl, the daughter of the sun. After the child is born the domestic animals lick it, only the mule refuses to do so and is punished with sterility. The whole story has been given a new aspect. It is made to account for the fertility of animals, and tells how fertility may be increased, a thought uppermost in the minds of the Pueblos.

European fairy tales differ in this respect from those of primitive tribes, for in contents and form they embrace many survivals of past times. It is quite evident that the modern European fairy tale does not reflect the conditions of the State of our times, nor the conditions of our daily life, but that they give us an imaginative picture of rural life in semifeudal times, and that, owing to the contradictions between modern intellectualism and the ancient rural tradition, conflicts of viewpoints occur that may be interpreted as survivals. In the tales of primitive people it is otherwise. A detailed analysis of the traditional tales of a number of Indian tribes shows complete agreement of the conditions of life with those that may be abstracted from the tales. Beliefs and customs in life and in tales are in full accord. This is true not only of old native material but also of imported stories that have been borrowed some time ago. They are quickly adapted to the prevailing mode of life. The analysis of tales from the Northwest coast and from the Pueblos gives the same result. Only during the period of transition to new modes of life, such as are brought about by contact with Europeans, contradictions develop. Thus it happens that in the tales of Laguna, one of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the visitor always enters through the roof of the house, although the modern houses have doors. The headman of the ceremonial organization plays an important role in many tales, although the organization itself has largely disappeared. The tales of the Plains Indians still tell of buffalo hunts although the game has disappeared and the people have become tillers of the soil and laborers.

It would be erroneous to assume that the absence of survivals of an earlier time can be explained as due to the permanence of conditions, to a lack of historical change. Primitive culture is a product of historical development no less than modern civilization. Mode of life, customs, and beliefs of primitive tribes are not stable; but the rate of change, unless disturbances from the outside occur, is slower than among ourselves. What is lacking is the pronounced social stratification of our times that brings it about that the various groups represent, as it were, different periods of development. So far as my knowledge goes we find the cultural, formal background of the art of narrative of primitive people almost entirely determined by its present cultural state. The only exceptions are found in periods of an unusually rapid change or of disintegration. However, in this case also a readjustment occurs. Thus the stories of the modern negroes of Angola reflect the mixed culture of the west African coast. In the cultural background of the narrative, survivals do not play an important role, at least not under normal conditions. The plot may be old and taken from foreign sources, but in its adoption it undergoes radical changes.

These remarks relating to literature do not mean, of course, that in other aspects of life ancient customs and beliefs may not persist over long periods.

We have spoken so far of the structure of the elements of prose tales and songs. Important characteristics are found also in the manner of their composition. In the narratives of some people the episodes are anecdotally short; among others the wish for a more complex structure is felt. Often this is accomplished by the meagre device of concentrating all the anecdotes around one personage.