Part 32

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.

From that date a constant transfer of races from the Old to the New World has been taking place, alike by voluntary and enforced migration; with results involving a series of undesigned yet exhaustive ethnological experiments carried out on the grandest scale. There alike has been tested to what extent the European and the African are affected by migration to new regions, and by admixture with diverse races. There can now be witnessed the results of a transference, for upwards of three centuries, of indigenous populations of the Old World to a continent where they have been subjected to many novel geographical, climatic, and social influences. There, too, has taken place, on a scale without any parallel elsewhere, an intimate and prolonged intermixture of some of the most highly cultured races of Europe with purely savage tribes, under circumstances which have tended to place them, for the time being, on an equality as hunters, trappers, or explorers of their vast forest and prairie wilds.

The whole question of heredity, its phenomena and results, is now in process of review under the novel phases that affect anthropology; and in this view the illustrations which the New World supplies in reference to hybridity and absorption have a distinctive value. The anthropologist recognises various elements marking diversity of race in stature, colour, proportion of limbs, conformation of skull, colour and other characteristics of eye and hair. He also notes no less distinctively the diverse intellectual and moral aptitudes. Noticeable as are the diversities of national type in Europe, the range of variation is trifling when compared with the conditions under which the White, Red, and Black races have met and intermingled in the West Indies and in North and South America. The cultured and civilised races of Europe have there united their blood with the African negro and the native Indian savage; and both admixtures have been carried out on so great a scale as to furnish indisputable data for determining the question how far the half-breed is a mean between the two parents; or if there is any inevitable preponderance of one of them, with a tendency to revert to one or the other type. The intermarriage of fair and dark races of the Old World has gone on throughout the whole historic period, with apparently resultant intermediate types. The Iberians and “black Celts” of Western Europe, and the dark brunettes of the Mediterranean shores, stand out in marked contrast to the blondes of the Baltic shores. Whatever may be said of other diversities of race, Professor Huxley is led to the opinion that the Melanochroi, or dark whites, are not a distinct group, but the metis resultant from just such a mixture of his “Australioids” and his “Xanthocroi,” as has been going on for centuries on the American continent between the blondes of Europe and the native olive-skinned American, and between both of them and the dark African race.

Yet, on the other hand, many anthropologists insist on the survival of distinct types, even among approximate races, as shown in the remarkable persistency of the Jewish type, notwithstanding the modifications that have resulted from intermarriage with fair and dark races of many lands. Dr. F. von Luschan, in describing the Tachtadschy,[148] calls attention to the fact that the Greeks of Lycia represent a mixture of two distinct types. From this he draws the following inference: “At first glance it appears remarkable and hardly probable that two disparate types should remain distinct, although intermarriage has continued without interruption through thousands of years. But we must acknowledge that it would be just as remarkable if continued intercrossing should result in the production of a middle type (_Mischform_). It is true that at the present time the greater number of anthropologists appear to be of the opinion that middle forms originate wherever two distinct types live in close contact for a long time. If this is true at all, it is true only in a very limited sense, and still needs to be proven. _A priori_, we rather ought to expect that one or the other of these types would soon succumb in the struggle for existence. It would become extinct, and give way to the other type; or both types might continue to co-exist, although intercrossing might go on for centuries. They would undergo no other changes than those which each singly, uninfluenced by the other, would have undergone by the agency of physical causes.”

The evidence we possess of the physical characteristics of the succession of races in Europe from palæolithic times is already considerable; and in reference to neolithic and later periods is ample. Within the recent historic period of the decline and fall of Rome, and the influx of Northern and Asiatic barbarians, the evidence of admixture of race is abundant; and the physical, intellectual, and moral changes resulting therefrom have stamped their ineffaceable impress on history. But the conditions under which the meeting of the Aryans with Allophylians, Neolithians, or other prehistoric races took place in older centuries, can only be surmised; and the many analogies resulting from the intrusion of the European races on the aborigines of the western hemisphere are calculated to render useful aid in determining some definite results.

History has familiarised us with the idea of sovereign and subject races. The monuments of Egypt perpetuate the fact from its remote dawn, Punic, Roman, Gothic, Frank, Saracenic, and Scandinavian races, have in turn subdued others, and made them subservient to their will. Evidence of a different kind, but little less definite, points to the intrusion into Europe in prehistoric times of races superior alike in physical type, and in the arts upon which progress depends, to the Autochthones, or primitive occupants of the soil. Further indications have been assumed to point to the contemporaneous presence, in primeval Britain, as elsewhere, of races of diverse type, and apparently in the relation of lord and serf: a natural if not indeed inevitable consequence of the intrusion of a superior race of conquerors.

But in the New World the inaptitude of the native race for useful serfdom largely contributed to the introduction there of other and very diverse races from Africa and Asia; so that now within a well-defined North American area, indigenous populations of the three continents of the Old World are displacing its native races. Still more, all three meet there under circumstances which inevitably lead to their intermixture with one another, and with the native races.

Various terms, such as Iberian, Silurian, Canstadt, Cimbric, Finnish, and Turanian, have been applied to primitive types as expressive of the hypothesis of their origin. But on turning to the American continent we see vast regions occupied exclusively until a comparatively recent period by tribes of savage hunters, upon whom some of the most civilised races of Europe have intruded, with results in many respects so strikingly accordant with the supposed evolution of the Melanochroi of the Old World, that we seem to look upon a series of ethnological experiments prolonged through centuries, with synthetic results to a large extent confirmatory of previous inductions.

The intermingling of very diverse races at present taking place on the American continent includes some of widely diverse types. There is seen the Portuguese in Brazil; the Spaniard in Peru, Mexico, Central America, and in Cuba; the African in the West Indies and the Southern States; the Chinese on the Pacific; the Frenchman on the St. Lawrence; the German, the Italian, the Norwegian, the Icelander, the Celt, and the Anglo-Saxon: all subjected to novel influences, necessarily testing the results of a change of climate, of diet, and of social habits, on the ethnical character of each. There too, alike in the Red and the Black races, we can study the results of hybridity carried out on a scale adequate to determine many important points calculated to throw light on the origin and perpetuation of diverse races of mankind.

The growth of a race of hybrid African blood has been one of the results of the substitution at an early date of imported negro slaves to supply the place of the rapidly disappearing Indians who perished under the exactions of their taskmasters. According to careful data set forth in the United States census for 1850, the whole number of native Africans imported cannot have exceeded 400,000. At present the coloured race—hybrids chiefly—of African blood numbers nearly 7,000,000. In 1715 there were 58,000 negroes in British America; in 1775, when the revolution broke out, there were 501,102. After the epoch of independence the increase became more rapid. In 1790 the numbers were 757,208; in 1800, 893,041; in 1810, 1,191,364. At the date of emancipation in 1865 there were, in round numbers, in slavery, 4,000,000; and at the census in 1880 the negro population in the United States had risen to 6,580,793;[149] and in the returns thus far published relative to the later census of 1890, in the Southern States alone they are reported to number 6,996,116; so that with the added numbers of the Northern States and Canada they can fall little short of 8,000,000. Of this numerous intrusive race, the larger number are hybrids; and, as was inevitable, they include some small proportion of mixed negro and Indian blood.[150] But it is the Metis, or White and Red half-breed, that constitutes the subject of special interest here.

Various causes have tended to beget more friendly relations between the older colonists of New France, and at a later date between those of British America and the native Indian race, than have existed either in Spanish America or the United States.