In their marriages, the Indians, as did the ancient Jews, uniformly buy their wives by giving presents—and in many tribes, very closely resemble them in other forms and ceremonies of their marriages.
In their preparations for war, and in peace-making, they are strikingly similar. In their treatment of the sick, burial of the dead and mourning, they are also similar.
In their bathing and ablutions, at all seasons of the year, as a part of their religious observances—having separate places for men and women to perform these immersions—they resemble again. And the custom amongst the women, of absenting themselves during the lunar influences, is exactly consonant to the Mosaic law. This custom of separation is an uniform one amongst the different tribes, as far as I have seen them in their primitive state, and be it Jewish, natural or conventional, it is an indispensable form with these wild people, who are setting to the civilized world, this and many other examples of decency and propriety, only to be laughed at by their wiser neighbours, who, rather than award to the red man any merit for them, have taken exceeding pains to call them but the results of ignorance and superstition.
So, in nearly every family of a tribe, will be found a small lodge, large enough to contain one person, which is erected at a little distance from the family lodge, and occupied by the wife or the daughter, to whose possession circumstances allot it; where she dwells alone until she is prepared to move back, and in the meantime the touch of her hand or her finger to the chief’s lodge, or his gun, or other article of his household, consigns it to destruction at once; and in case of non-conformity to this indispensable form, a woman’s life may, in some tribes, be answerable for misfortunes that happen to individuals or the tribe, in the interim.
After this season of separation, purification in running water, and annointing, precisely in accordance with the Jewish command, is requisite before she can enter the family lodge. Such is one of the extraordinary observances amongst these people in their wild state; but along the Frontier, where white people have laughed at them for their forms, they have departed from this, as from nearly everything else that is native and original about them.
In their feasts, fastings and sacrificing, they are exceedingly like those ancient people. Many of them have a feast closely resembling the annual feast of the Jewish passover; and amongst others, an occasion much like the Israelitish feast of the tabernacles, which lasted eight days, (when history tells us they carried bundles of willow boughs, and fasted several days and nights) making sacrifices of the first fruits and best of everything, closely resembling the sin-offering and peace-offering of the Hebrews.[41]
These, and many others of their customs would seem to be decidedly Jewish; yet it is for the world to decide how many of them, or whether all of them, might be natural to all people, and, therefore, as well practiced by these people in a state of nature, as to have been borrowed from a foreign nation.
Amongst the list of their customs however, we meet a number which had their origin it would seem, in the Jewish Ceremonial code, and which are so very peculiar in their forms, that it would seem quite improbable, and almost impossible, that two different people should ever have hit upon them alike, without some knowledge of each other. These I consider, go farther than anything else as evidence, and carry, in my mind, conclusive proof that these people are tinctured with Jewish blood; even though the Jewish sabbath has been lost, and circumcision probably rejected; and dog’s flesh, which was an abomination to the Jews, continued to be eaten at their feasts by all the tribes of Indians; not because the Jews have been prevailed upon to use it, but, because they have survived only, as their blood was mixed with that of the Indians, and the Indians have imposed on that mixed blood the same rules and regulations that governed the members of the tribes in general.
Many writers are of opinion, that the natives of America are all from one stock, and their languages from one root—that that stock is exotic, and that that language was introduced with it. And the reason assigned for this theory is, that amongst the various tribes, there is a reigning similarity in looks—and in their languages a striking resemblance to each other.
Now, if all the world were to argue in this way, I should reason just in the other; and pronounce this, though evidence to a certain degree, to be very far from conclusive, inasmuch as it is far easier and more natural for distinct tribes, or languages, grouped and used together, to assimilate than to dissimilate; as the pebbles on a sea-shore, that are washed about and jostled together, lose their angles, and incline at last to one rounded and uniform shape. So that if there had been, ab origine, a variety of different stocks in America, with different complexions, with different characters and customs, and of different statures, and speaking entirely different tongues; where they have been for a series of centuries living neighbours to each other, moving about and intermarrying; I think we might reasonably look for quite as great a similarity in their personal appearance and languages, as we now find; when, on the other hand, if we are to suppose that they were all from one foreign stock, with but one language, it is a difficult thing to conceive how or in what space of time, or for what purpose, they could have formed so many tongues, and so widely different, as those that are now spoken on the Continent.