Fig. 116.—Ivory carving with records, Alaska; after Mallery.
- 1. A native with his left hand resting against a house. To the right is a “shaman stick” surmounted by the emblem of a bird, a “good spirit,” in memory of some departed friend (? of his wife).
- 2. A reindeer.
- 3. One man, the recorder, shot and killed another with an arrow.
- 4. A trading expedition with a dog sledge.
- 5. Is a sail boat, although the elevated paddle signifies that that was the manner in which the voyage was best made.
- 6. A dog-sled with the animal hitched up for a journey. Above is the sun.
- 7. A sacred lodge. The four figures at the outer corners of the square represent the young men placed on guard armed with bows and arrows, to keep away the uninitiated. Inside are the members of the band dancing; the fire-place is in the centre. The angled lines extending from the right side of the lodge to the partition line are a plan of the subterranean entrance to the lodge.
- 8. A pine tree, up which a porcupine is climbing.
- 9. A pine tree, from which a woodpecker is extracting larvæ for food.
- 10. A bear.
- 11. The recorder in his boat, holding aloft his double-bladed paddle to drive fish into a net.
- 12. An assistant fisherman driving fish into the net.
- 13. The net.
The figure over the man (No. 12) represents a whale, with harpoon and line attached, caught by the narrator.
6. Historical.—Colonel Mallery says: “It is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish in pictographs, or indeed orally, between historical and traditional accounts obtained from Indians.... The winter counts, while having their chief value as calendars, contain some material that is absolute and veritable tribal history.”
7. Biographic.—Pictographs are very common either of a continuous account of the chief events in the life of the subject of the sketch, or of separate accounts of some particular exploit or event in the life of the person referred to.
In this and in another memoir[117] Colonel Mallery calls attention to the fact that it is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of pictorial signs, but this becomes more difficult when the characters have become conventionalised. They may be classified under—1. Pictorial Signs; 2. Emblems; 3. Symbols.
1. The representation of any object when it is intended to express that object is a pictorial sign; for example, the figure of a fish in a pictograph would usually refer to fish in general or to some particular species of fish. The pictorial translation of a personal name, such as “Lean-Wolf” (Fig. [115], 1), comes under this heading.
2. Tribal signs, personal insignia, etc., are emblems; and these do not necessarily require any analogy between the objects representing and the objects or qualities represented, but may arise from pure accident. The representation of a totem belongs to this category, so that under certain conditions a drawing would not refer to any actual fish or that the individual was named “fish,” but that he belonged to the fish clan; it was emblematic of his clan or his family group, like most of our armorial bearings. Tribal signs among savage peoples are emblems in the same way that the rose, thistle, leek, and shamrock are the emblems of the main components of the British Islands. As Mallery points out, “After a scurrilous jest the beggar’s wallet became the emblem of the confederated nobles, the Gueux of the Netherlands; and a sling, in the early minority of Louis XIV., was adopted from the refrain of a song by the Frondeur opponents of Mazarin.”