The remainder of the ceremony is then conducted as in the manner described as pertains to the first degree of the Midē´wiwin.
[ SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES.]
[ PICTOGRAPHY.]
Before concluding, it may be of interest to refer in some detail to several subjects mentioned in the preceding pages. The mnemonic songs are in nearly every instance incised upon birch bark by means of a sharp-pointed piece of bone or a nail. The inner surface of the bark is generally selected because it is softer than the reverse. Bark for such purposes is peeled from the trunk during the spring months. On the right hand upper corner of [Pl. XIX] is reproduced a portion
of a mnemonic song showing characters as thus drawn. The specimen was obtained at White Earth, and the entire song is presented on [Pl. XVI, C]. A piece of bark obtained at Red Lake, and known to have been incised more than seventy years ago, is shown on the right lower corner of [Pl. XIX]. The drawings are upon the outer surface and are remarkably deep and distinct. The left hand specimen is from the last named locality, and of the same period, and presents pictographs drawn upon the inner surface.
Plate XIX. Sacred Birch Bark Records.
In a majority of songs the characters are drawn so as to be read from left to right, in some from right to left, and occasionally one is found to combine both styles, being truly boustrophic. Specimens have been obtained upon which the characters were drawn around and near the margin of an oblong piece of bark, thus appearing in the form of an irregular circle.
The pictographic delineation of ideas is found to exist chiefly among the shamans, hunters, and travelers of the Ojibwa, and there does not appear to be a recognized system by which the work of any one person is fully intelligible to another. A record may be recognized as pertaining to the Midē´ ceremonies, as a song used when hunting plants, etc.; but it would be impossible for one totally unfamiliar with the record to state positively whether the initial character was at the left or the right hand. The figures are more than simply mnemonic; they are ideographic, and frequently possess additional interest from the fact that several ideas are expressed in combination. Col. Garrick Mallery, U.S. Army, in a paper entitled “Recently Discovered Algonkian Pictographs,” read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Cleveland, 1888, expressed this fact in the following words: