Part 27

Until recently the tendency has been to assume an underlying unity of speech for the whole American languages, based on the polysynthetic or holophrastic characteristic ascribed to the whole; just as by an exaggerated estimate of the prevalence of a predominant head-form, one physical type was long assumed to characterise the American race from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps, so far as language is concerned, the present tendency is towards the opposite extreme. Major Powell, the chief of the Ethnographical Bureau at Washington, recognises eighty groups of languages in North America, between which no affinity is thus far apparent. Fifty-five of those he believes to be satisfactorily determined as distinct stocks. On the other hand, Professor Whitney, after noticing the complexity of the inquiry when directed to the native American languages, thus proceeds: “Yet it is the confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a fundamental unity lies at the base of all these infinitely varying forms of speech; that they may be, and probably are, all descended from a single parent language.”[117]

Here then is a field for much useful research, with the promise of valuable results. The subject is rendered more important owing to the fact that, of nearly all the nations of the North American continent, their languages are the only surviving memorials of the race. Already, under the efficient supervision of the Ethnographic Bureau of the United States, systematic contributions are being secured for this important branch of knowledge, so far as their own geographical area is concerned. A no less important area is embraced in the Dominion of Canada, and the attention of the Government is now directed to the necessity for timely action in this matter. In the North-West, and in British Columbia, languages are disappearing and races becoming extinct. Mr. Hale has contributed to the American Philosophical Society’s _Transactions_ a valuable monogram on the Tutelo tribe and language, derived mainly from Nikonha, the last full-blood Tutelo, who survived till upwards of a hundred years of age. He was married to a Cayuga woman, and lived among her people on their Grand river reserve. “My only knowledge of the Tuteloes,” says Mr. Hale, “had been derived from the few notices comprised in Gallatin’s _Synopsis of the Indian Tribes_, where they are classed with the nations of the Huron-Iroquois stock. At the same time the distinguished author, with the scientific caution which marked all his writings, is careful to mention that no vocabulary of the language was known. That which was now obtained showed, beyond question, that the language was totally distinct from the Huron-Iroquois tongues, and that it was closely allied to the language of the Dakota family.”[118] But for the timely exertion of a philological student, this interesting link in the history of the Huron-Iroquois relations with affiliated tribes would have been lost beyond recall.

The history of the Huron-Iroquois race, and especially of the Six Nation Indians, since the settlement of the main body for the past century on their reserves on the Grand river, in the Province of Ontario, curiously illustrates the pertinacity with which they have cherished the dialectic varieties of a common tongue. But while the essential differences of language everywhere constitute one of the most obvious distinctions of race, it is interesting to note the recognition by the Indians of affinities of dialects, and even remote kinship based on such evidence; as in the readmission of the Tuscaroras to the Iroquois family of nations. According to Brebeuf, the kinship of the Attiwendaronks of the Niagara peninsula was recognised by the Hurons in that designation which classed them as a “people of a language a little different.”[119] Peter Jones Kahkewaquonaby, a civilised Ojibway, adopted into the Mohawk nation, in speaking of the traditions of the Indians as to their own origin, says: “All the information I have been able to gain in relation to the question amounts to the following. Many, many winters ago the Great Spirit, Keche-Manedoo, created the Indians. Every nation speaking a different language is a second creation, but all were made by the same Supreme Being.”[120]

Among the races of the northern continent, none east of the Rocky Mountains more fitly represent their special characteristics than the great Huron-Iroquois family. Their language is remarkable for its compass and elaborate grammatical structure; and the numerous dialects of the common mother tongue furnish evidence of migration and conquest over a wide region eastward of the Mississippi. To such philological evidence many inquirers are now turning for a clue to the origin of the races of the New World, and for the recovery of proofs of their affinity to one or other of the Old World stocks. Professor Whitney, after dwelling on the “exaggeratedly agglutinative type” of the ancient Iberian language, and its isolation among the essentially dissimilar languages of Aryan Europe, thus proceeds: “The Basque forms a suitable stepping-stone from which to enter the peculiar linguistic domain of the New World, since there is no other dialect of the Old World which so much resembles in structure the American languages”[121]; not indeed, as he adds, that they are all of accordant form; for he pronounces the grouping of them in a single great family as “a classification of ignorance.” The possibilities of ancient communication between the opposite shores of the Atlantic, and the migration of colonists of the New World from the Mediterranean Sea, have already been discussed in dealing with the legend of the Lost Atlantis. Great indeed as is the interval of time therein implied, it would not suffice to erase all traces of affinity of languages. But it would be vain to hope for any historical guidance recoverable from the oldest of Iroquois legends. If, moreover, Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phœnician, or other of the world’s gray fathers, transplanted to America the germs of its long indigenous stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilisation north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it by any means an established truth that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great antiquity. Their metallurgy was at a crude, yet suggestive, stage at which it was not likely to be long arrested. The same may be said of their hieroglyphic records; though they certainly present some highly significant analogies to the Chinese phase of word-writing, calculated, along with other aspects of resemblance to that stage of partial, yet long-enduring, civilisation of which China is the Asiatic exemplar, to modify our estimate of the possible duration of Central and Southern American civilisation. Nevertheless the assumption of an antiquity in any degree approximating to that of Egypt seems wholly irreconcilable with the evidence. Their architecture was barbaric, though imposing from the scale on which their great temples and palaces were built. In Central America especially, the aggregation of numerous ill-lighted little chambers, like honey-comb cells excavated out of the huge pile, is strongly suggestive of affinity to the Casas Grandes, and the Pueblos of the Zuñi; and this is confirmed by the correspondence traceable between many of their architectural details and the ornamentation of the Pueblo pottery.

The astronomy and the calendars, both of Mexico and Peru, with their detailed methods of recording their divisions of time, are all suggestive of an immature phase of civilisation in the very stage of its emergence from barbarism, modified, in some cases, by the recent acquisition of certain arts. As to the peculiar phase of Mexican art, and whatever other evidence of progress Mexico supplies, they appear to me no more than natural products of the first successful intrusion of the barbarians of the northern continent on the seats of tropical civilisation. Certain it seems, at least, that if an earlier civilisation had ever existed in the north, or if the representatives of any Old World type were present there in numbers for any length of time, some traces of their lost arts must long since have come to light.

But the conservative power of language is indisputable; and if the kinship now claimed for the polysynthetic languages of both hemispheres be correct, we are on the threshold of significant disclosures. The Huron-Iroquois tongue, in its numerous ramifications, as well as some of the native languages that have outlived the last of the races to which they belonged, may preserve traces of affinities as yet unrecognised. But in no respect are the Huron-Iroquois more correctly adducible as a typical race of American aborigines than in the absence of all evidence of their ever having acquired any of the arts upon which civilisation depends. We look in vain in their vocabularies for terms of science, or for names adapted to the arts and manufactures on which social progress depends. But they had developed a gift of oratory, for which their language amply sufficed, and from which we may infer the presence in this race of savages of latent powers, capable of wondrous development. “Their languages show, in their elaborate mechanism, as well as in their fulness of expression and grasp of thought, the evidence of the mental capacity of those who speak them. Scholars who admire the inflections of the Greek and Sanscrit verb, with their expressive force and clearness, will not be less impressed with the ingenious structure of the verb in Iroquois. It comprises nine tenses, three moods, the active and passive voices, and at least, twenty of those forms which in the Semitic grammars are styled conjugations. The very names of these forms will suffice to give evidence of the care and minuteness with which the framers of this remarkable language have endeavoured to express every shade of meaning. We have the diminutive and augmentative forms, the cis-locative and trans-locative, the duplicative, reiterative, motional, causative, progressive, attributive, frequentative, and many others.”[122] To speak, indeed, of the Iroquois as, in a consciously active sense, the framers of all this would be misleading. But it unquestionably grew up in the deliberations around the council fire, where the conflicting aims of confederate tribes were swayed by the eloquence of some commanding orator, until the fiercest warrior of this forest race learned to value more the successful wielding of the tongue in the _Kanonsionni_, or figurative Long House of the League, even than the wielding of the tomahawk in the field. At the organisation of the confederacy, the Canyengas or Mohawks were figuratively said to have “built a house,” _rodinonsonnih_, or rather to have “built the long house” in which the council fire of the Five Nations was kindled. Of this the Senecas, lying on the extreme west, were styled the “door-keepers,” and the Onondagas, whose territory was central, were the custodians. The whole usage is rhetorical and figurative. Under such influences the language of the Huron-Iroquois was framed, and it grew rich in emotional and persuasive forms. It only needed the evolution of a true alphabet out of the pictorial symbolism on their painted robes, or the grave-posts of their chiefs, to inaugurate a literature which should embody the orations of the Iroquois Demosthenes, and the songs of a native Homer, for whom a vehicle of thought was already prepared, rich and flexible as poet could desire.

So far as the physical traits of the American aborigines furnish any evidence of ethnical affinity they unquestionably suggest some common line of descent with the Asiatic Mongol; and this is consistent with the agglutinate characteristics common to a large class of languages of both continents. But, on the other hand, the characteristic head-form of the Huron-Iroquois, as well as that of Algonkin and other northern tribes, deviates alike from the brachycephalic type of the southern Indians and from that of the Asiatic Mongols. Humboldt, who enjoyed rare opportunities for studying the ethnical characteristics of both continents, but to whom, nevertheless, the northern races, with their dolichocephalic type of head were unknown, dwells, in his _American Researches_, on the striking resemblance which the American race bear to the Asiatic Mongols. Latham classes both under the common head of Mongolidæ; and Dr. Charles Pickering, of the American Exploring Expedition, arrived at the same conclusion as the result of his own independent study of the races of both continents. Nevertheless, however great may be the resemblance in many points between the true Red Indian and the Asiatic Mongol, it falls short of even an approximate physical identity. The Mongolian of Asia is not indeed to be spoken of as one unvarying type any more than the American. But the extent to which the Mongolian head-form and peculiar physiognomy characterise one widely diffused section of the population of the eastern continent, gives it special prominence among the great ethnical divisions of the human race. Morton assigns 1421 as the cranial capacity of eighteen Mongol, and only 1234 as that of 164 American skulls other than Peruvian or Mexican. Dr. Paul Topinard, in discussing the American type, adds: “If we are to rely on the method of cubic measurement followed by Morton, the American skull is one of the least capacious of the whole human race.”[123] But Dr. Morton’s results are in some respects misleading. The mean capacity yielded by the measurements of 214 American skulls in the Peabody Museum of Archæology, including a considerable number of females, is 1331; and with a carefully selected series, excluding exceptionally large and small crania, the results would be higher. Twenty-six male California skulls, for example, yield a mean capacity of 1470. The Huron-Iroquois crania would rank among such exceptional examples.[124] The forehead is, indeed, low and receding, but the general cerebral capacity is good; and Dr. Morton specially notes its approximation to the European mean.[125]

But the assumption of uniformity in the ethnical characteristics of the various races of North and South America is untenable. All probabilities rather favour the idea of different ethnical centres, a diversity of origin, and considerable admixture of races. All evidence, moreover, whether physical or philological, whatever else it may prove, leaves no room for doubt as to a greatly prolonged period of isolation of the native races of the New World. Whether they came from the Mediterranean, in that old mythic dawn the memory of which survived in the legend of a submerged Atlantis; or the history of their primeval migration still lingers among fading traces of philological affinity with the Basques; or if, with the still more remote glimpses which affinite Arctic ethnology has been assumed to supply, we seek to follow the palæolithic race of Central Europe’s Reindeer period in the long pilgrimage to Behring Straits, and so to the later home of the American Mongol; this, at least, becomes more and more obvious, that they brought with them no arts derived from the ancient civilisations of Egypt or of Asia. So far, at least, as the northern continent is concerned, no evidence tends to suggest that the aborigines greatly differed at any earlier period from the condition in which they were found by Cartier when he first entered the St. Lawrence. They were absolutely ignorant of metallurgy; and notwithstanding the abundance of pure native copper accessible to them, they cannot be said even to have attained to that rudimentary stage of metallurgic art which for Europe is spoken of as its “Copper Age.” Copper was to them no more than a malleable stone, which they fashioned into axes and knives with their stone hammers. Their pottery was of the most primitive crudeness, hand-fashioned by their women without the aid of the potter’s wheel. The grass or straw-plaiting of their basket-work might seem to embody the hint of the weaver’s loom; but the products of the chase furnished them with skins of the bear and deer, sufficient for all purposes of clothing. They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the neolithic savage of Europe’s Stone age when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they were abruptly brought into contact with its cultured arts. The gifted historian, Mr. Francis Parkman, who has thrown so fascinating an interest over the story of their share in the long-protracted struggle of the French and English colonists of North America, says of them: “Among all the barbarous nations of the continent the Iroquois stand paramount. Elements which among other tribes were crude, confused, and embryotic, were among them systematised and concreted into an established polity. The Iroquois was the Indian of Indians. A thorough savage, yet a finished and developed savage. He is perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging from his primitive condition of the hunter.” Yet with this high estimate of the race as pre-eminent among Red Indian nations, he adds: “That the Iroquois, left under their institutions to work out their destiny undisturbed, would ever have developed a civilisation of their own, I do not believe.”[126] They had not, in truth, taken the first step in such a direction; and, were it not for the evidence which language supplies, it would be conceivable that they, and the whole barbarian nations of which they are a type, were Mongol intruders of a later date than the Northmen of the tenth century; who, it seems far from improbable, encountered only the Eskimo of the Labrador coast, or their more southern congeners, then extending to the south of the St. Lawrence. The prevalence of a brachycephalic type of head among southern Indian tribes, while dolichocephalic characteristics are common to the Eskimo and to the Huron-Iroquois and other northern nations, lends countenance to the idea of an intermixture of Red Indian and Eskimo blood. The head-forms, however, though both long, differ in other respects; and a divergence is apparent on comparing the bones of the face, with a corresponding difference in their physiognomy.

Dr. Latham recognised the Iroquois as one of the most typical families of the North American race, and Mr. Parkman styles them “the Indian of the Indians.” The whole Huron-Iroquois history illustrates their patient, politic diplomacy, their devotion to hunting and to war. But their policy gave no comprehensive aim to wars which reduced their numbers, and threatened their very existence as a race. Throughout the entire period of any direct knowledge of them by Europeans, there is constant evidence of feuds between members of the common stock, due in part, indeed, to their becoming involved in the rivalries of French and English colonists, but also traceable to hereditary animosities perpetuated through many generations. The strongly marked diversities in the dialects of the Six Nations is itself an evidence of their long separation, prior to their confederation, in the earlier half of the fifteenth century. By far the most trustworthy narrative of this famous league is embodied by Mr. Horatio Hale in _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, a contribution to aboriginal American literature of singular interest and value. Among the members of this confederacy the Tuscaroras occupy a peculiar position. They were reunited to the common stock so recently as 1714, but their traditions accord with those of the whole Huron-Iroquois family in pointing to the Lower St. Lawrence as their original home; and the diversity of the Tuscarora dialect from those of the older nations of the league furnishes a valuable gauge of the significance of such differences as evidence of the length of period during which the various members of the common stock had been separated. On the other hand, the manner in which, in the absence of any hereditary feud, the Iroquois respected the bonds of consanguinity, and welcomed the fugitive immigrants from North Carolina, throws an interesting light on the history of the race, and the large extent of country occupied by it in the time of its greatest prosperity.

The earliest home of the whole Huron-Iroquois stock was within the area of Quebec and Eastern Ontario, and they have thus a claim on the interest of Canadians as their precursors in the occupation of the soil; while, in so far as its actual occupancy by the representatives of the common stock is concerned, the Hurons were welcomed to a friendly, if fatal, alliance with the early French colonists; and the Iroquois of the Six Nations have enjoyed a home, under the protection of England, on the western Canadian reserves set apart for their use upwards of a century ago.