In Iroquois, the word kar or kare signifies “to paint” or “draw.” The initial k in Iroquois words is usually not radical, and so rarely enters into composite terms. The root of kar, is ar or are, which added to kaiata, or oiata, “living thing, person, body,” makes kaiatare, “image” or “likeness,” i.e. “pictured body,” or as a verb “to paint” or “depict anything.” To this is added the verbal suffix ta or tha, which occasionally becomes stha, and has different meanings, causative and instrumental. The Mohawk supplies such words and terms of art as ahyeyatonh, “to grave”; rahyatonhs, “an engraver”; ahyekonteke, “to paint”; rakonteks, “a painter”; s’hakoyatarha, “an artist”; rahkaratahkwas, “a carver”; rateanakerahtha, “a modeller,” or “one who models figures in clay.” In the Iroquois version of the Gospel of St. John, chap. viii. verse 6 reads thus: Nok tanon ne Iesos wathastsake ehtake nok rasnonsake (more correctly, rasnonkenh) warate wahiaton onwentsiake, lit. “But instead Jesus bent low and with hand used, wrote,” or “engraved, on the earth.” The version of the second commandment in the Mohawk Prayer-Book affords another illustration, in the holophrasm asadatyaghdoenihseroenyea. It is compounded of ahsonniyon, “make”; ahsadadonnyen, “to make for yourself”; kayadonnihsera, “an image” or “doll.” Toghsa asadatyaghdoenihseroenyea, shekonh othenouh taoesakyatayerea nene enekea karouhyakouh, neteas eghtake oughweatsyakonh, etc., lit. “Do not make an image or idol for yourself, even anything like above in the sky, nor below in the earth,” etc.
The word kaiata, or oiata, as already noted, signifies “a living thing, person,” or “body”; kakonsa or okonsa, is the “face” or “visage”; and from those come many derivatives. Bruyas gives gaiata, “a living thing”; gaiatare (or kaiatare) “image,” and as a verb, “to paint.” There is also gaiatonni, “a doll” or “puppet,” i.e. “a made person,” from oiata and konnis, “to make.” From the same root we may probably derive kiaton, “to write,” as in the Iroquois Gospels, wahaiaton, “wrote”; kahiaton, “it is written,” etc. The original meaning was, no doubt, picture-writing, i.e. making images of things. In the old Onondaga dictionary of the Jesuit Fathers is the word kiatonnion, “I keep writing.” The same authority also gives guianatonh (kianatonh), “I paint,” apparently from another root, oiana (kaiana) “track, walk, gait,” etc., which has many derivatives. The remarkable compass and minute nicety of expression which the Iroquois grammar had acquired in the various languages of the Six Nations, approximates to the wonderful expansion effected on the crude Anglo-Saxon verb by the evolution of the auxiliaries out of vague active verbs. This has been effected through the habitual resort to oratory as a source of combined action in the councils of the tribes, which constituted one of the most remarkable characteristics of this representative Indian stock. In this respect the expressive flexibility and rhetorical aptitude of the Iroquois languages stand out in striking contrast to the limited compass of grammatical discrimination in those of Europe’s Scandinavian and Teutonic races by whom the Roman empire was overthrown. They had indeed their “tun-moot,” the council meeting of the village community for justice and government; but the deliberations on the moot-hill, though they embodied the germ of all later parliaments, gave birth to no such development of language. It is when entering on the history of the grand constitutional struggle for a free parliament that Carlyle, in quaint irony, exclaims, or assigns to his apocryphal Dryasdust the exclamation: “I have known nations altogether destitute of printers’ types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old songs, monumental stone heaps and quipo-thrums to keep record by, who had truer memory of their memorable things. . . . The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a people as their neighbours; perhaps, for valour of action and true hard labour in this earth, since brave peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver any where or any when:—but also, it must be owned, in stupidity of speech they have no fellow!”[[146]] It suited the purpose of the satirist to ignore for the moment that Shakespeare came of that same speechless race. But in its earlier stage when any comparison with Indian nations is permissible the irony is not extravagant.
But apart from the great compass of the Iroquois verb as illustrative of grammatical development in the languages of unlettered nations, another characteristic feature is the distinction between masculine and feminine forms both in speaking of and to a man or woman. In the study of the minute niceties of the Iroquois verb I have been largely indebted to Dr. Oronhyatekha, and to the Rev. Isaac Bearfoot, both educated Mohawks. When tracing out the comprehensive power of the Mohawk verb, I had in view at the same time the recovery of evidences that the language might supply of an inherent recognition of the artistic faculty. This is much more strongly manifested in other American races in all stages of progress, from the ingenious Haidahs and Tawatins of British Columbia, and the Pueblo Indians of Arizona, to the semi-civilised nations of Mexico and the lettered races of Central and Southern America. Nevertheless the Iroquois recorded in primitive picture-writing the deeds of their departed braves, and have left records in the same crude hieroglyphics, such as the graven rock on Cunningham Island, Lake Erie. Their pipes were carved, and their pottery modelled into representations of familiar objects indicative of a habitual, though simple practice of imitative art that could not fail to beget some counterpart in their languages. Hence the choice of the verb kyadarahste, “to draw.” Kayadareh, or kyadareh, signifies “a body or form in,” e.g. “in a frame” or “group”; kyadarastonh, on the other hand, implies “a body” or “form transferred on to something,” e.g. a board or canvas. The latter is therefore the more expressive and correct term to use for drawing or painting, while it illustrates the process of augmenting the vocabulary to meet the requirements of novel acquisitions in art. But its chief value consists in its affording illustration not only of the inherent capacity of the language to express with minute nicety of detail the manifestations of an æsthetic faculty, as yet very partially developed, but of the compass of its grammar to indicate every distinctive variation of form expressive of time, place, action, object, or subject. The latest results of philological research in this direction are set forth in the Lexique and the Études philologique of Abbé Cuoq, and in an admirable résumé in Mr. Horatio Hale’s introduction to The Iroquois Book of Rites.[[147]] The systematic processes by which the moods and tenses are indicated, either by changes of termination or prefixed particles, or by both conjoined, are carefully indicated by Mr. Hale; but he adds: “A complete grammar of this speech, as full and minute as the best Sanscrit or Greek grammars, would probably equal, and perhaps surpass those grammars in extent. The unconscious forces of memory and of discrimination required to maintain this complicated intellectual machine, and to preserve it constantly exact, and in good working order, must be prodigious.” This tendency to elaborate niceties of discrimination is in striking contrast to that of the modern cultivated languages of Europe; and it is not without reason that it is spoken of as a “complicated intellectual machine.” The contrast, for example, between the Mohawk or other Iroquois verb, in all its complex variations, and the extreme simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon verb, with only its Indefinite and Perfect Tenses,—the former predicated either of the present, or of a future time, and the latter of any past time,—can scarcely fail to impress the thoughtful student who keeps in view the relative civilisation of the Iroquois, and of the English people at the period when Anglo-Saxon in its purely inflectional stage was still the national language. The English verb has since then acquired wonderful power and compass by means of the auxiliary verbs; but its whole tendency is at variance with the elaborations in number and gender of the Iroquois verb. These are only partially illustrated in the above example, and might easily have been carried further. For example, the rendering of the Active, Indicative, Past Progressive, with Feminine Object is really a verb in the passive voice. To realise the full inflectional niceties of such minute grammatical distinctions, the two genders should be given; and also a mixed gender, i.e. the two genders together, as the artists may consist of both sexes. This is indicated in the two forms of the Future Indefinite, by eas’hakodiyadarahste, “they (mas.) shall draw her,” eayaktodiyadarahste, “they (fem.) shall draw her.” But a study of the paradigm of the Mohawk verb will be found to illustrate in a variety of interesting aspects the process of unpremeditated grammatical evolution among an unlettered people, with whom the influence of oratory in the councils of the tribe was one of their most powerful resources as a preliminary to war.
The grand movement of the barbarian races of Northern Europe in the fifth and following centuries is spoken of as the wandering of the nations. The natural barriers of the continent seemed for a time to have given way, and the unknown tribes from beyond the Baltic and from the shores of the North Sea poured into the valley of the Danube, and swept beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees to the furthest shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The physical geography of the New World presents fewer barriers to be surmounted. But if the student of North American ethnology spread before him a map of the continent, and trace out the wanderings of the Huron-Iroquois, he must revert in fancy to that remote era when confederated Iroquois and Algonkins swept in triumphant fury through the wasted valley of the Ohio, and repeated there what Goth and Hun did for Europe, in Rome’s decline and fall. The long-settled and semi-civilised Mound-Builders fled before the furious onset, leaving the great river-valley a desolate waste. The barrier of an old-settled and well-organised community, which, probably for centuries, had kept America’s northern barbarians in check, was removed, and the fierce Huron-Iroquois ranged at will over the eastern regions of the continent, far southward of the North Carolina river-valleys, where the Nottoways and Tuscaroras found a new home. As to the Nottoways, they appear to have passed out of all remembrance as an Iroquois tribe; yet it is suggestive of a long-forgotten chapter of Indian history, that the name is still in use among the northern Algonkins as the designation of the whole Iroquois stock. The Nottawa saga is doubtless a memorial of their presence on the Georgian Bay, and the Notaway (Náhdahwe) river which falls into Hudson Bay at James Bay, is so named in memory of Huron-Iroquois wanderers into that Algonkin region.
Some portion of the ancient Huron stock tarried on the banks of the St. Lawrence, in what is known to us now as the traditional cradleland of those Canadian aborigines. Others found their way down the Hudson, or selected new homes for themselves on the rivers and lakes that lay to the west, till they reached the shores of Lake Erie; and all that is now the populous region of Western New York was in occupation of the Iroquois race. Feuds broke out between them and the parent stock in the valley of the St. Lawrence. They meted out to those of their own race the same vengeance as to strangers; and the survivors, abandoning their homes, fled westward in search of settlements beyond their reach. The Georgian Bay lay remote from the territory of the Iroquois, but the nations of the Wyandot stock spread beyond it, until the Niagara peninsula and the fertile regions between Lake Huron and Lake Erie were occupied by them, and the Niagara river alone kept apart what were now hostile tribes. But wherever the test of linguistic evidence can be obtained their affinities are placed beyond dispute. On the other hand, the multiplication of dialects is no less apparent, and in many ways helps to throw light on the history of the race.
The old Huron mother tongue still partially preserves the labials which have disappeared from all the Iroquois languages. The Mohawk approaches nearest to this, and appears to be the main stem from whence other languages of the Six Nations have branched off. But the diversities in speech of the various members of the confederacy leave no room to doubt the prolonged isolation of the several tribes, or “nations,” before they were induced to recognise the claims of consanguinity, and to band together for their common interest. Some of the noteworthy diversities of tongue may be pointed out, such as the r sound which predominates in the Mohawk, while the l takes its place in the Oneida. In the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, they are no longer heard. The last of these reduces the primary forms to the narrowest range; but beyond, to the westward, the old Eries dwelt, speaking, it may be presumed, a modified Seneca dialect, but of which unfortunately no record survives. As to the Tuscaroras and the Nottoways, if we knew nothing of their history, their languages would suffice to tell that they had been longest and most widely separated from the parent stock.
It is not without interest to note in conclusion that the main body of the representatives of the nations of the ancient Iroquois league sprung from the Huron-Iroquois stock of Eastern Canada,—after sojourning for centuries beyond the St. Lawrence, until the traditions of the home of the race had faded out of memory, or given place to mythic legends of autochthon origin,—has returned to Canadian soil. At Caughnawaga, St. Regis, Oka, and on the river St. Charles, in the Province of Quebec; at Anderdon, the Bay of Quinté, and above all, on the Grand river, in Ontario; the Huron-Iroquois are now settled to the number of upwards of 8000, without reckoning other tribes. If, indeed, the surviving representatives of the aborigines in the old provinces of the Canadian Dominion are taken as a whole, they number upwards of 34,000, apart from the many thousands in Manitoba, British Columbia, and the North-west Territories. But the nomad Indians must be classed wholly apart from the settlers on the Grand river reserves. The latter are a highly intelligent, civilised people, more and more adapting themselves to the habits of the strangers who have supplanted them; and they are destined as certainly to merge into the predominant race, as the waters of their ancient lakes mingle and are lost in the ocean. Yet the process is no longer one of extinction but of absorption; and will assuredly leave traces of the American autochthones, similar to those which still in Europe perpetuate some ethnical memorial of Allophylian races.
| [111] | Types of Mankind, p. 291. |
| [112] | The Jesuits in North America, p. 43. |