Garrick Mallery

“ In painting and rock writing the efforts of the Southern Indians were confined to the fanciful and profuse ornamentation of their own persons with various colors, in [23] which red, yellow, and black predominated, and to marks, signs, and figures depicted on skins and scratched on wood, the shoulder blade of a buffalo, or on stone. The smooth bark of a standing tree or the face of a rock was used to commemorate some feat of arms, to indicate the direction and strength of a military expedition, or the solemnization of a treaty of peace. ”

“ The squaws being the persons who generally use the boats during the course of their labors in collecting wood along the river banks, or in ferrying their warriors across the water, have need of this illustration of their husbands’ prowess as a matter of social status, it being also a matter of pride. The entire tribe being intimately acquainted with the courage and bravery of any individual, imposition and fraud in the delineation of any character are not attempted, as such would surely be detected and the impostor would be ridiculed if not ostracised. ”

“ The women, especially among the Ackawoi, who use more body-paint than other ornament, are more fond of blue-black than of red; and one very favorite ornament with them is a broad band of this, which edges the mouth, and passes from the corners of that to the ears. Some women especially affect certain little figures, like Chinese characters, which look as if some meaning were attached to them, but which the Indians are either unable or unwilling to explain. ”

“ A medicine lodge filled with the presence of the Great Spirit, who, it is affirmed, came down with wings to instruct the Indians in these ceremonies. The meda, or priest, sings, “The Great Spirit’s lodge—you have heard of it. I will enter it.” While this is sung, and repeated, the priest shakes his shi-shi-gwun, and each member of the society holds up one hand in a beseeching manner. All stand, without dancing. ”

“ At the head of the grave a tabular piece of cedar, or other wood, called the adjedatig, is set. This grave-board contains the symbolic or representative figure which records, if it be a warrior, his totem; that is to say, the symbol of his family, or surname, and such arithmetical or other devices as serve to denote how many times the deceased has been in war parties, and how many scalps he had taken [200] from the enemy; two facts from which his reputation is essentially to be derived. It is seldom that more is attempted in the way of inscription. ”

“ As I before remarked, almost all of the Indian women of the northwest coast have tattoo marks on their hands and arms, and some on the face; but as a general thing these marks are mere dots or straight lines, having no particular significance. With the Haidas, however, every mark has its meaning; those on the hands and arms of the women indicate the family name, whether they belong to the bear, beaver, wolf, or eagle totems, or any of the family of fishes. As one of them quaintly [69] remarked to me, “If you were tattooed with the design of a swan, the Indians would know your family name.” ”

“ The top arm, covering the heart, is the east wind, coming from the seat of life and love. The foot is the burning south wind, indicating as it is worn the seat of passion and fiery lust. The right is the gentle west wind, blowing from the spirit land, covering the lungs, from which at last the breath goes out. The center of the cross is the earth and man, sometimes indicated at that point by a circle surrounding a dot. On the upper arm an arrow is sometimes drawn, on the left a heart, on the right a star, and on the lower a sun. ”

“ It is not believed that any considerable information of value in an historical point of view will be obtained directly from the interpretation of the pictographs in North America. The only pictures which can be of great antiquity are rock-carvings and those in shell or similar substances resisting the action of time, which have been or may be found in mounds. The greater part of those already known are simply peckings, etchings, or paintings delineating natural objects, very often animals, and illustrate the beginning of pictorial art. ”

“ Tattooing or any other permanent interference with the surface of the skin by way of ornament is practiced only to a very limited extent by the Indians; is used, in fact, only to produce the small distinctive tribal mark which many of them bear at the corners of their mouths or on their arms. It is true that an adult Indian is hardly to be found on whose thighs and arms, or on other parts of whose body, are not a greater or less number of indelibly incised straight lines ”

“ Another mode of evincing a desire to turn away the wrath of an approaching enemy, and induce him to open negotiations, is to tie up in his path a couple of goats, sometimes also a gong, with the universal symbol of peace, a palm leaf planted in the ground hard by. ”

“ At first the writer suspected that the medicine men had manufactured some pretended portent out of a fœtus taken from a real cow, but the Dakotas have long believed in the appearance from time to time of a monstrous animal that swallows human beings. This superstition was perhaps suggested by the bones of mastodons, often found in the territory of those Indians; and the buffalo being the largest living animal known to them, its name was given to the legendary monster, in which nomenclature they were not wholly wrong, as the horns of the fossil Bison latifrons are 10 feet in length. ”

“ Fig. 209.—Symbols of the cross.
The author, with considerable naiveté, has evidently determined that the form of the cross was significant of a high state of religious culture, and that its being succeeded by effigies, which he calls idols, showed a lapse into idolatry. The fact is simply that, next to one straight line, the combination of two straight lines forming a cross is the easiest figure to draw, and its use before art could attain to the drawing of animal forms, or their representation in plastic material, is merely an evidence of crudeness or imperfection in designing. ”

“ The waved or spiral lines denote crazy.
White-Cow-Killer says, “Paints-his-Chin’s-lodge-all-killed winter.”
When a warrior desires to make up a war party he visits his friends and offers them a filled pipe, as an invitation to follow him, and those who are willing to go accept the invitation by lighting and smoking it. Any man whose courage has been proved may become the leader of a war party. ”

“ The Shaman or priest pretends to control by incantations and ceremonies the evil spirits to whom death, sickness, and other misfortunes are ascribed. This form or stage of religion [191] is so prevalent among the North American Indians that the adoption of the term Shaman here is substantially correct, and it avoids both the stupid expression “medicine-man” of current literature and the indefinite title priest, the associations with which are not appropriate to the Indian religious practitioner. ”

“ I received unexpected aid by the plates in Habel’s Investigations in Central and South America. I have shown them to Indians of various coast tribes at various times, and they all recognize certain of those pictures. No. 1, Plate 1, represents a priest cutting off the head of his victim with his stone knife. They recognize this, because they always cut off the heads of their enemies slain in battle; they never scalp. The bird of the sun is recognized by all who have seen the picture as the thunder bird of the coast tribes. ”

“ These terms, therefore, practically form the names actually used by Indians amongst themselves. But an Indian is just as un [172] willing to tell his proper name to a white man as to an Indian; and, of course, between the Indian and the white man there is no relationship the term for which can serve as a proper name. An Indian, therefore, when he has to do with a European, asks the latter to give him a name, and if one is given to him, always afterwards uses this. ”

“ To partly express the distinction, nearly all of the characters in the Dakota Winter Counts are regarded as pictorial signs, and the class represented by tribal signs, personal insignia, etc., is considered to belong to the category of emblems. There is no doubt, however, that true symbols exist among the Indians, as they must exist to some extent among all peoples not devoid of poetic imagination. Some of them are shown in this paper. The pipe is generally a symbol of peace, although in certain positions and connections it sometimes signifies preparation for war, and again subsequent victory. ”

“ In the next place, in the center of the belt, which is of white wampum, are delineated in dark-colored beads, in a rude but graphic style, two figures—that of an Indian grasping with the hand of friendship the hand of a man evidently intended to be represented in the European costume, wearing a hat; which can only be interpreted as having reference to the treaty of peace and friendship which was then concluded between William Penn and the Indians, and recorded by them in their own simple but descriptive mode of expressing their meaning, by the employment of hieroglyphics. ”

“ The Indians frequently incorporate the false hair with their own so as to lengthen the latter without any marked evidence of the deception. Nevertheless the transverse fastenings with their gum attachments are present. The Arikara have adopted this custom of late, and they have obtained it from the Hidatsa, who, in turn, learned it of the Absaroka.
In picture-writing this is shown upon the figure of a man by the presence of parallel lines drawn downward from the back of the head, with cross lines, the whole appearing like small squares or a piece of net. ”

“ The device generally adopted by the Dakotas to signify that an object drawn in connection with a human head or figure was a name totem or a personal name of the individual, is to connect that object with the figure by a line drawn to the head or more frequently to the mouth of the latter. The same tribes make a distinction in manifesting that the gesture-sign for the object gestured is intended to be the name of an individual, by passing the index forward from the mouth in a direct line after the conclusion of the sign for the object. ”