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How American Indians Love, a non-fiction book by Henry Theophilus Finck |
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How "Indian Stories" Are Written |
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_ Here we have seven love-stories as romantic as you please and full of sentimental touches. Do they not disprove my theory that uncivilized races are incapable of feeling sentimental love? Some think they do, and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such stories as proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the same under all circumstances. The above tales are taken from the books of a man who spent much of his life among Indians and issued a number of works about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published under the auspices of the United States Government. This expert--Henry R. Schoolcraft--was member of so many learned societies that it takes twelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expressly assures us[196] that "the value of these traditionary stories appears to depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, in their original forms of thought and expression," the obvious inference being an assurance that he has so left them; and he adds that in the collection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the great advantages of seventeen years' life as executive officer for the tribes, and a knowledge of their languages.
Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his tales for the first time I came across numerous sentences and sentiments which I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreign to Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no more have uttered than they could have penned Longfellow's _Hiawatha_, or the essays of Emerson. In the stories of "The Red Lover," "The Buffalo King," and "The Haunted Grove,"[197] I have italicized a few of these suspicious passages. To take the last-named tale first, it is absurd to speak of Indian "fairies who love romantic scenes," or of a girl romantically sitting on a rocky promontory,[198] or "gathering strange flowers;" for Indians have no conception of the romantic side of nature--of scenery for its own sake. To them a tree is simply a grouse perch, or a source of fire-wood; a lake, a fish-pond, a mountain, the dreaded abode of evil spirits. In the tale of the "Buffalo King" we read of the chief doing a number of things to win the affection of the refractory bride--telling the others not to displease her, giving her "the seat of honor," and going so far as to fast himself, whereas in real life, under such circumstances, he would have curtly clubbed the stolen bride into submission. In the tale of the "Red Lover" the girl is admired for her "slender form," whereas a real Indian values a woman in proportion to her weight and rotundity. Indians do not make "protestations of inviolable attachment," or "pledge vows of mutual fidelity," like the lovers of our fashionable novels. As Charles A. Leland remarks of the same race of Indians, "When an Indian seeks a wife, he or his mutual friend makes no great ado about it, but utters two words which tell the whole story." But there is no need of citing other authors, for Schoolcraft, as I have just intimated, stands convicted by his own action. In the second edition of his _Algic Researches_, which appeared after an interval of seventeen years and received the title of _The Myth of Hiawatha and other Oral Legends of the North American Indians_, he seemed to remember what he wrote in the preface of the first regarding these stories, "that in the original there is no attempt at ornament," so he removed nearly all of the romantic embroideries, like those I have italicized and commented on, and also relegated the majority of his ludicrously sentimental interspersed poems to the appendix. In the preface to _Hiawatha_, he refers in connection with some of these verses to "the poetic use of aboriginal ideas." Now, a man has a perfect right to make such "poetic use" of "aboriginal ideas," but not when he has led his readers to believe that he is telling these stories "as nearly as possible in their original forms of thought and expression." It is very much as if Edward MacDowell had published the several movements of his Indian Suite as being, not only in their ideas, but in their (modern European) harmonies and orchestration, a faithful transcript of aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft's procedure, in other words, amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystification; and unfortunately he has had not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologists and students of the evolution of love.
[FOOTNOTE 198: In another of these tales (_A.R._, II., 165-80) Schoolcraft refers to a girl who went astray in the woods "while admiring the scenery."] [FOOTNOTE 199: Schoolcraft's volumes include, however, a number of reliable and valuable articles on various Indian tribes by other writers. These are often referred to in anthropological treatises, including the present volume.]
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