Fig. 164.—Penn wampum belt.
Mr. W. H. Holmes (c) gives an illustration of the well-known Penn wampum belt, reproduced here as Fig. 164, with remarks condensed as follows:
It is believed to be the original belt delivered by the Leni-Lenape sachems to William Penn at the celebrated treaty under the elm tree at Schackamaxon in 1682. Up to the year 1857 this belt remained in the keeping of the Penn family. In March, 1857, it was presented to the Pennsylvania Historical Society by Granville John Penn, a great-grandson of William Penn. Mr. Penn, in his speech on this occasion, states that there can be no doubt that this is the identical belt used at the treaty, and presents his views in the following language:
“In the first place, its dimensions are greater than of those used on more ordinary occasions, of which we have one still in our possession—this belt being composed of 18 strings of wampum, which is a proof that it was the record of some very important negotiation. 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.”
SECTION 4.
ORDER OF SONGS.
The Indian songs or, more accurately, chants, with which pictography is connected, have been preserved in their integrity by the use of pictured characters. They are in general connected with religious ceremonies, and are chiefly used in the initiation of neophytes to secret religious orders. Some of them, however, are used in social meetings or ceremonies of cult societies, though the distinction between social or any other general associations and those to be classified as religious is not easily defined. Religion was the real life of the tribes, permeating all their activities and institutions.
The words of these songs are invariable, even to the extent that by their use for generations many of them have become archaic and form no part of the colloquial language. Indeed, they are not always understood by the best of the shaman songsters, which fact recalls the oriental memorization of the Veda ritual through generations by the priests, who thus, without intent, preserved a language. The sounds were memorized, although the characters designating or, more correctly, recalling them, were not representations of sound, but of idea.
Practically, the words—or sounds, understood or not, which passed for words—as well as the notes, were memorized by the singers, and their memory, or that of the shaman, who acted as leader or conductor or precentor, was assisted by the charts. Exoteric interpretation of any ideographic and not merely conventional or purely arbitrary characters in the chart, which may be compared for indistinctness with the translated libretto of operas, may suggest the general subject-matter, perhaps the general course, of the chant, but can not indicate the exact words, or, indeed, any words, of the language chanted.
A simple mode of explaining the amount of symbolism necessarily contained in the charts of the order of songs is by likening them to the illustrated songs and ballads lately published in popular magazines, where every stanza has at least one appropriate illustration. Let it be supposed that the text was obliterated forever, indeed, the art of reading lost, the illustrations remaining, as also the memory to some persons of the words of the ballad. The illustrations, kept in their original order, would always supply the order of the stanzas and also the particular subject-matter of each particular stanza, and that subject-matter would be a reminder of the words. This is what the rolls of birchbark supply to the initiated Ojibwa. Schoolcraft pretended that there is intrinsic symbolism in the characters employed, which might imply that the words of the chants were rather interpretations of those characters than that the latter were reminders of the words. But only after the vocables of the actual songs and chants have been learned can the mnemonic characters be clearly understood. Doubtless the more ideographic and the less arbitrary the characters the more readily can they be learned and retained in the memory, and during the long period of the practical use of the mnemonic devices many exhibiting ideography and symbolism have been invented or selected.