Aboriginal American Authors

by Daniel G. Brinton

Indeed, it will be a surprise to many to learn that any members of these rude tribes have manifested either taste or talent for scholarly productions. All alike have been regarded as savages, capable, at best, of but the most limited culture.

Such an opinion has been fostered by prejudices of race, by the jealousy of castes, and in our own day by preconceived theories of evolution. That it is erroneous, can, I think, be easily shown.

Let us first inquire into the existence of

Section 2. The Literary Faculty in the Native Mind.

This faculty is indicated by a vivid imagination, a love of narration, and an ample, appropriate, and logically developed vocabulary. That, as a race, the aborigines of America possessed these qualifications to a remarkable degree, is attested by many witnesses who have lived intimately among them; and is only denied by those whose acquaintance with them has been superficial, or derived from second-hand and doubtful sources.

The red man peoples air, earth, and the waters with countless creatures of his fancy; his expressions are figurative and metaphorical; he is quick to seize analogies; and when he cannot explain he is ever ready to invent. This is shown in his inappeasable love of story telling. As a raconteur he is untiring. He has, in the highest degree, Goethe's Lust zu fabuliren. In no Oriental city does the teller of strange tales find a more willing audience than in the Indian wigwam. The folk lore of every tribe which has been properly investigated has turned out to be most ample. Tales of talking animals, of mythical warriors, of giants, dwarfs, subtle women, potent magicians, impossible adventures, abound to an extent that defies collection.[1]

Nor are these narratives repeated in a slip-shod, negligent style. The hearers permit no such carelessness. They are sticklers for nicety of expression; for clear and well turned periods; for vivid and accurate description; for flowing and sonorous sentences. As a rule, their languages lend themselves readily to these demands. It is a singular error, due wholly to ignorance of the subject, to maintain that the American tongues are cramped in their vocabularies, or that their syntax does not permit them to define the more delicate relationships of ideas. Nor is it less a mistake to assert, as has been done repeatedly, and even by authorities of eminence in our own day, that they are not capable of supplying the expressions of abstract reasonings. Although pure abstractions were rarely objects of interest to these children of nature, many, if not most, of their tongues favor the formation of expressions which are as thoroughly transcendental as any to be found in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft.[2]

Their literary faculty is further demonstrated in the copiousness of their vocabularies, their rare facility of expression, and their natural aptitude for the acquisition of other languages. Theophilie Gautier used to say, that the most profitable book for a professional writer to read is the dictionary; that is, that a mastery of words is his most valuable acquirement. The extraordinarily rich synonomy of some American tongues, notably the Algonkin, the Aztec, and the Qquichua, attests how sedulously their resources have been cultivated. Father Olmos, in his grammar of the Aztec, gives many examples of twenty and thirty synonymous expressions, all in current use in his day. A dictionary, in my possession, of the Maya, one of the least plastic of American tongues, gives over thirty thousand words, and scarcely a hundred of them of foreign extraction.

This linguistic facility is shown also in the ease with which they acquire foreign languages. "It is not uncommon," says Dr. Washington Matthews, speaking of the Hidatsa, by no means a specially brilliant tribe, "to find persons among them, some even under twenty years of age, who can speak fluently four or five different languages."[3] Mr. Stephen Powers tells us that, in California, he found many Indians speaking three, four, five or more languages, generally including English;[4] and in South America, both Humboldt and D'Orbigny express their surprise at the same fact, which they repeatedly observed.[5]

But the most tangible evidence of both their linguistic and literary ability is the work some of these natives have accomplished in European tongues. It does not come within the limits of my plan to enter fully into an examination of this branch of literature; but it is worth while mentioning some of the more prominent native writers, who have composed in European languages, as their productions are an easy test of what the faculties of the red race are in this direction.