Say ye,
A Grandson of Blackboy is coming.
Their speech is sometimes metaphorical to an extent which conveys an opposite meaning: “Friend, thou art a fool; thou hast let the Ojibwa strike thee,” is the highest form of eulogy to a brave who has killed and scalped a foe; possibly a Malocchio-like fear, the dread of praise, which, according to Pliny, kills in India, underlies the habit.
The funerals differ in every tribe; the Sioux expose their dead, wrapped in blankets or buffalo robes, upon tall poles—a custom that reminds us of the Parsee’s “Tower of Silence.” The Yutas make their graves high up the kanyons, usually in clefts of rock. Some bury the dead at full length; others sitting or doubled up; others on horseback, with a barrow or tumulus of earth heaped up over their remains. The absence of grave-yards in an Indian country is as remarkable as in the African interior; thinness of population and the savage’s instinctive dislike to any memento mori are the causes. After deaths the “keening” is long, loud, and lasting: the women, and often the men, cut their hair close, not allowing it to fall below the shoulders, and not unfrequently gash themselves, and amputate one or more fingers. The dead man, especiallly a chief, is in almost all tribes provided with a viaticum, dead or alive, of squaws and boys—generally those taken from another tribe—horses and dogs; his lodge is burned, his arms, cooking utensils, saddles, and other accoutrements are buried with him, and a goodly store of buffalo meat or other provision is placed by his side, that his ghost may want nothing which it enjoyed in the flesh. Like all savages, the Indian is unable to separate the idea of man’s immaterial spirit from man’s material wants: an impalpable and invisible form of matter—called “spirit” because it is not cognizable to the senses, which are the only avenues of all knowledge—is as unintelligible to them as to a Latter-Day Saint, or, indeed, as to the mind of man generally. Hence the Indian’s smoking and offerings over the graves of friends. Some tribes mourn on the same day of each moon till grief is satisfied; others for a week after the death.
A remarkable characteristic of the Prairie Indian is his habit of speaking, like the deaf and dumb, with his fingers. The pantomimeTHE INDIAN PANTOMIME. is a system of signs, some conventional, others instinctive or imitative, which enables tribes who have no acquaintance with each other’s customs and tongues to hold limited but sufficient communication. An interpreter who knows all the signs, which, however, are so numerous and complicated that to acquire them is the labor of years, is preferred by the whites even to a good speaker. Some writers, as Captain H. Stansbury, consider the system purely arbitrary; others, Captain Marcy, for instance, hold it to be a natural language similar to the gestures which surd-mutes use spontaneously. Both views are true, but not wholly true; as the following pages will, I believe, prove, the pantomimic vocabulary is neither quite conventional nor the reverse.
The sign-system doubtless arose from the necessity of a communicating medium between races speaking many different dialects, and debarred by circumstances from social intercourse. Its area is extensive: it prevails among many of the Prairie tribes, as the Hapsaroke, or Crows, the Dakotah, the Cheyenne, and the Shoshonee; the Pawnees, Yutas, and Shoshoko, or Diggers, being vagrants and outcasts, have lost or never had the habit. Those natives who, like the Arapahoes, possess a very scanty vocabulary, pronounced in a quasi-unintelligible way, can hardly converse with one another in the dark: to make a stranger understand them they must always repair to the camp fire for “powwow.” A story is told of a man who, being sent among the Cheyennes to qualify himself for interpreting, returned in a week, and proved his competence: all that he did, however, was to go through the usual pantomime with a running accompaniment of grunts. I have attempted to describe a few of the simpler signs: the reader, however, will readily perceive that without diagrams the explanation is very imperfect, and that in half an hour, with an Indian or an interpreter, he would learn more than by a hundred pages of print.
The first lesson is to distinguish the signs of the different tribes, and it will be observed that the French voyageurs and traders have often named the Indian nations from their totemic or masonic gestures.
The Pawnees (Les Loups) imitate a wolf’s ears with the two forefingers—the right hand is always understood unless otherwise specified[79]—extended together, upright, on the left side of the head.
[79] The left, as a rule, denotes inversion or contradiction.
The Arapahoes, or Dirty Noses, rub the right side of that organ with the forefinger: some call this bad tribe the Smellers, and make their sign to consist of seizing the nose with the thumb and forefinger.