Forty-Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1930-1931, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1933.
History
Forty-Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1930-1931, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1933.
Indexes
The texts so treated are the Cayuga version of the founding of the
League of the Iroquois as dictated by the late Chief Abram Charles;
the version of the Eulogy of the Founders as dictated by Chief Jacob
Hess in Cayuga, and also his versions of the addresses introducing
the several chants; also, four of the myths of the Wind and Vegetable
Gods which are usually represented by wooden faces and husk faces
(which are customarily misnamed masks, although their chief purpose
is to represent, not to mask). The Onondaga texts of these myths were
in great need of careful revision, for their relator was extremely
careless in his use of the persons and the tenses of the verbs,
frequently changing from the third to the second person and from
past to future time by unconsciously employing the language of the
rites peculiar to the faces; and also the decipherment of a set of
pictographs or mnemonic figures, designed and employed by the late
Chief Abram Charles, of the Grand River Reservation in Canada, to
recall to his mind the official names and their order of the 49 federal
chiefs of the Council of the League of the Iroquois, in chanting the
Eulogy of the Founders of the League; and also to recall the 15
sections or burdens of the great Requickening Address of the Council of
Condolence and Installation; this paper with illustrations is nearly
ready for the printer; and also a critical study of the matter of the
Onondaga and the Cayuga texts, giving the several variant versions of
the events attending the birth and childhood and work of Deganawida.
He was born of a virgin mother, which indicated that underlying them
there appeared to be an ideal figure, although of course unexpressed.
This discovery showed the need for thorough search in the field for
a living tradition in which this ideal is fully expressed. Further
search was deferred to field work. It was clear that such an ideal
enhanced the beauty of the birth story of Deganawida and made more
interesting the historicity of such a person. Mr. Hewitt had the great
satisfaction of recovering such a tradition in his subsequent field
researches. He found that the inferiority complex had precluded his
present informants from expressing themselves during the lifetime of
other informants, whose recent deaths opened their mouths without the
fear of contradiction. The death of Abram Charles within the year made
these shy informants vocal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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