Ojibwe Singers

by Michael D. McNally : Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion

It's about Ojibwe hymn singers, who usually show up at wakes and funerals to sing Christian hymns in Ojibwe. Never heard of that before? Me either.

This is from 2000, so things may have changed. Most of the singers were older, and it wasn't clear then if youth would aspire to joining the singers, who held a position of respect in the community by their willingness to be there for others in this ritual. I know none of these people, though people I know might know somebody who knows.

Ancient Ojibwe traditions in music have the drum as a central (and spiritual) component. Songs typically have few words with much repetition and vocalisms, many are sacred, and many come from dreams. Catholic and Epicopalian missionaries judged that providing Christian hymns to them in their own language was essential for discipleship. They and gifted converts did their best. Some concepts don't have easy analogs in the other language – even "spirit" isn't simple, since the closest analog in Ojibwe seems to have a primary meaning of "mystery."

From the book:

The way the holy prophets went
The road that leads from banishment
The King's highway of holiness
I'll go, for all His paths are peace

Re-translated back into English from Ojibwe:

The way they were going, those who were wise
The little path that leads straight there
I, too, will go off on it
On the little path that is greatly pitied/blessed

The religious situation on the reservations is complicated: some are adamantly pagan/animist, some are Catholic, some Episcopalian, some various other denominations (Baptist, Pentacostal, etc), and some, to judge from the gang activity, have invested their faith in drugs and guns. Many looked on the hymns as impositions by the whites when they were introduced, and still do over a century later.

But in the meantime singing Ojibwe hymns a capella has become a tradition of its own, most especially among "those who pray" but recognized by the rest as well. So much so, indeed that the author cites:

When one Ojibwe man heard hymns at a ceremony honoring a new drum, for instance, he whispered his opinion that such "Christian" music was disrespectful to the drum. For this man, hymn singing stood in opposition to the other music of Ojibwe tradition in that hymns do not involve a drum. The irony of this particular interchange is also instructive. The drum in question was being initiated or welcomed into the community by entrusting it to the safekeeping and discretionary use of the White Earth singers.

The hymns are often sung very differently, though often the original European tune can be discerned, with much more stress on the individual syllables than either the tune or the lyrics as such. They are sung (not "performed") in a ritual, almost liturgical way, with a clear starting and ending hymn but much variation of songs and silences in between.

The author seemed most interested in the things that made the hymn singing specifically Ojibwe and traditional, and seemed to overlook a different aspect: the hymns are a way of saying two things at once: "This is our tribe's" and "We are also part of a bigger tribe."

The author (and apparently others) found no evidence that there was any intent to subvert the meaning of the hymns in any sort of anti-colonial push. Of course the mere fact that they were in Ojibwe during the era when the government was trying to suppress the language might have been a bit of push-back.

If the subject and its history sound interesting, by all means read it, but be prepared: it is painful to read. Not just the history part – plowing through sociological jargon was not fun at all. (Can you possibly say this in five words instead of a hundred words referencing two different other sociologists?) But his personal experiences and observations made it worth it for me.

And yes, one of the White Earth singers was non-native, but he lived like them and next to them, learned the language, and met the standards of hospitality and respect.

New World metallurgy

I'd heard it proposed that the presence of so much native copper in Michigan, and trading so widespread, meant that there was no great pressure to learn smelting. Tin ores are quite scarce, so bronze wasn't going to be made locally north of Mexico. Meteoric iron could be found, of course, and seems to have been used here and there.

South, though: Jonathan Hall's post is quite extensive, and if he's correct it looks like Peru had an impressive metallurgical culture, which spread north into Mesoamerica; but apparently the trade in metal goods didn't go further north into the modern USA. The absence of tin would explain why nobody bothered to try to smelt bronze, and the easy availability of native copper removes the need to smelt copper, but why wouldn't there be some trade? Did the North have nothing the Mesoamericans wanted, or were the desert stretches that great a trade barrier? There's always the coastlines and raft-boats -- unless there really was nothing they wanted.

Time

I'm helping beta-read a novel, and one aspect of it headed me down a rabbit hole about time, to a 31-year-old paper presented to the NCTE about "Indian time." "Indian time" is mythic, based on appropriateness of action ("I eat when I'm hungry, I drink when I'm dry, and if whiskey don't kill me I'll live til I die."), while "linear time" contributes to dislocation and illness. As is typical, the author cites special relativity without showing the remotest understanding of it.

The problems attributed to "linear time" and "technology" are curable with "mythic time" and simplicity, of course. Patton seems to be unacquainted with Christian traditions about materialism. And Mander's comparison tables, cited in the Appendix, are not just invidious but inaccurate. Some tribes did in fact work to produce surplus for trade, and trade networks could be extensive.

You can tell that the paper is old; it doesn't try to attribute wickedness to whites, just to "technology." It probably would run into a lot of flack today.

At any rate, I didn't find what I was hunting: anything like the (surprisingly late!) idea of returning to the past. Stories of one-way time travel to the future are very old.

Of course, after making a bit of fun of the paper, I need to give an example of what she means. When I lived in Liberia, people referred to Liberian Standard Time, which in practice meant "whenever:" Maybe half an hour after the hour specificed, maybe the next day. Things happened, and meetings ran long, and part of business was maintaining relationships. And land line telephones weren't that common. When I returned, cell phones were ubiquitous, and often interrupted things. It seemed that the rule that "a meeting lasts as long as it lasts" was now something of an exception. Was maintaining relations still such a large part of business? I wasn't there long enough to find out.

Argentine Armadillo Abattoir Question

AVI found a report about what looks like 19,000BC butchery in far South America. Why, he asks, did such early humans not do in the megafauna, as later ones seem to have done (though there are claims for climate change and meteors, and possibly all-of-the-above)?

I've seen a few artists' reconstructions showing fur-clad proto-Indians doing in mammoths. The weapons are generally spears, and spear points show up in mammoth bones. I don't recall seeing any images that included another tool, developed about 21,000BC (perhaps not in time for the earliest waves into the Americas): dogs.

I'd think it would be much safer and more effective to go after a mega-critter with a spear after it has been nicely tired out by your own private wolf-pack, or while it is confused which foe to face first.

I wonder how you'd estimate the effectiveness of hunting a lone mammoth (not going to have much success attacking a herd) with and without dogs to chivvy it. Without practicing various tactics on elephants, of course.

UPDATE: Found a picture.

Tribal land

"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" Attributed to Andrew Jackson, who may not have actually said it, though in a letter he says something similar. The decision was Worcester v Georgia. Oddly enough, given Jackson's record in the subsequent Cherokee eviction, the matter at issue was "Did a State have the right to pass a law requiring that a non-Indian visiting tribal land had to get a permit from the State first?" The law aimed at protecting the Indian tribes' rights, and the Supreme Court ruling removed that protection.

The Court's decision was almost certainly right--relations between nations are what the Constitution envisioned, and a State doesn't function as a nation. The Feds didn't prove more honorable than Georgia, though.

Winnebago history

I'm mostly interested in the Wisconsin Winnebago tribes.

The article I read begins

For as long as anyone can remember, the Winnebago lived in the vicinity of Green Bay in northeastern Wisconsin. The most powerful tribe in the region, they dominated the western shore of Lake Michigan from Upper Michigan to southern Wisconsin. As part of major climatic change in North America sometime around 1400, three closely related tribes - Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Ottawa - began moving west along the shore of Lake Huron ...

Read the article for yourself. Apply a little "temporal symmetry" to the wars and alliances and counter-alliances--the past before records was probably like the past after records were made.

Smallpox has been blamed, but the Winnebago say the disease turned their people yellow suggesting it was something else.

The Winnebago emerged from this with less than 1,500 warriors and 4,500 people. They were also starving since war and epidemic had made it impossible to harvest their crops. As mentioned, the hostility between the Illinois and Winnebago must have existed for many years before the refugees began to arrive. Perhaps motivated by a need to form an alliance against the newcomers who were also overrunning their territory, or even pity for an old enemy fallen on hard times, the Illinois sent 500 warriors and food to help the Winnebago. This proved a serious mistake. The Winnebago welcomed and held a feast for them, but in the midst of the dancing and celebration, they secretly cut the Illinois' bowstrings. Then they fell upon their benefactors and killed all of them to appease the spirits of Winnebago warriors killed earlier by the Illinois.

It took the Illinois some time to learn what had happened. In the meantime, the Winnebago had anticipated retaliation and retreated to an island in the middle of a lake where they built a fort. A sensible precaution, since it was impossible for the Illinois to bring their heavy dugout canoes overland with them to attack the Winnebago. The Illinois proved patient and waited a year to take revenge. When the lake froze that winter, a large Illinois war party crossed over the ice to attack the village only to find the Winnebago were absent on their winter hunt. After a six-day pursuit, they caught up with the Winnebago and, during the slaughter which followed, almost annihilated them. Few Winnebago escaped to find refuge with the Menominee. About 150 Winnebago prisoners were taken back as slaves to the Illinois villages and, after several years of hard usage, released to return to Wisconsin. Less than 500 Winnebago survived to provide a future for their people, but their near-extermination was the second serious mistake made by the Illinois. Despite the circumstances which had caused it, the Winnebago never forgave or forgot what had happened.

---

UPDATE from Winnebago stories

"The Winnebagoes always encouraged one another to die on the warpath, because, if one dies in battle, the person would not really lose consciousness, but simply live right on in the spirit, and death would seem to him as if he had stumbled over some object. So they would say. If you wish to have a happy life as a spirit, do not die in your house. If you die in your house, your soul will wander over all the earth in want, and when people eat the four-nights' wake, you will not get anything. If they drink water, you will remain thirsty. It is said that people not dying on the warpath will, as spirits, have to content themselves by pointing to food and drink, and licking their fingers.

Those that die in battle have a village four days' distant from the general village the souls. They are in need of nothing, as they plant and raise their own food, and have so many clothes that they look as if they were covered with furs. They play ball and have lots of fun, ride horseback, and dance. If any of them should desire to return to the earth and become alive again, they can do so. The wounds, however, from which they died, remain with them in the spirit world. Those who lost their scalps are without scalps. Some are without heads, and some without scalplocks. They can see their relatives here on earth whenever they with to."

American grapes

I don't remember hearing about grapes when we went to Cahokia, but they, and many other tribes, used grapes. Raw, dried, as jam, as medicinal tea, a drink thickened with cornmeal--one variety even was used for a snakebite remedy and an emetic. Another was supposed to strengthen women and increase fertility.

One familiar use is not in the list.(*) I'm not sure why--perhaps the North American varieties didn't have enough sugar to make it easy. Some people make wine from American heirloom grapes, but I notice that they include as "heirloom" the crosses between the Old World Vitis vinifera and the American varieties. I suspect they would maybe be a bit more selective if the native varieties were as good.

Idle curiosity--I'm not into wine myself.

(*) The Zuni made wine from grapes. (The Kwakiutl made an alcoholic drink with elderberries, molusks, and tobacco. Yikes.)

Walam Olum and other stories

A book on Ojibwe culture and history confidently cites the Walam Olum as part of their history, testifying to their antiquity in the land. There are reasons to believe the document is a hoax, among which is something I hadn't thought of: "The typical Native American mythology assumes that 'the people' have always lived here, or emerged from one or more worlds underneath the earth. For this reason, many traditionalist Native Americans regard the Asian land bridge migration theory in the same way that fundamentalist Christians feel about Darwinism."

Fake? On one hand an Ojibwe chief's son endorsed it and Schoolcraft said it matched "transcripts I have obtained from bark scrolls." On the other, modern Lenape speakers found it puzzling, and that it used English idioms translated into Lenape--and Rafinesque's original manuscript shows evidence that the translation was really English to Lenape. I'm not persuaded that modern scholars automatically have better insights than earlier ones, but the manuscript evidence seems damning.

And the description of the journey to the midwest from the east doesn't mention plagues.

---

The actual Ojibwe book says the tribal stories are of three kinds, for amusement, for history, and for morals--and that they want the student to infer the message rather than have it Aesop-explicit. So when you're trying to use a legend in your own novel, you should figure out which category it is. I think we're OK with a slight variation...

---

One of the searches this evening turned up wendigo psychosis.

According to Algonquian reports, the following symptoms were signals of a potential witiko condition: stupor; catatonia; depression; paranoia; anorexia or the inability to hold down food; nausea and vomiting; emaciation; awry or glazed-looking eyes; swelling of the face, trunk, or limbs; and violence and shouting—in some cases with unusual vocal sounds.

...

others—particularly children or relatives—appear as animals that were normally hunted for food (such as beavers, moose, or game birds). The most diagnostic indications of witiko, however, were cannibal impulses and the subjective perception of a freezing heart or formation of ice in the chest or viscera, as reported by the victim or perceived by eyewitnesses.

Liquid animal fat might be a cure, but in practice the majority of victims (of 70 reported cases) were killed to keep them from attacking others.

It's interesting how culture can so strongly shape mental illness.

Rabbit trails on seasonings

Following up on the obvious question from a few days ago I looked at some AmerIndian recipes, and ran across this recipe: three sisters soup. The 3 sisters are of course corn (support), squash (keeps down weeds and pests), and beans (climbs on corn, helps nitrogenate the soil). FWIW, using modern strains for these plants may not work very well--the corn grows taller than it used to, I suppose, and you need to use pole beans rather than bush beans.

There is no one authentic recipe for this soup : it can be made, and is made, in a variety of ways, with different combinations of ‘sisters’. Recipes have been passed down through generations in tribes, and have become more modernized in the process. My version uses chicken broth and fire roasted tomatoes for a flavorful broth, potatoes for their satisfaction factor, jalapeño and chipotle powder for a little kick of heat, and black eyed peas because I love them. FYI tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers are all indigenous crops, native to the Americas.

The tomatoes and potatoes didn't make it up from Central America until after Columbus, of course. I'm not sure why--maybe the intervening territory wasn't great for them? Just for fun, look at the ingredient list. Generations of tribal cooks were adaptable.

1. olive oil: olives came from Syria
2. garlic: there were wild species harvested here
3. onion: wild species harvested here
4. chicken broth: Asia, no chickens (or no surviving ones) until Columbus
5. fire roasted tomatoes: South America and Mexico, only made it north after Columbus
6. red potatoes: South America, only made it north after Columbus
7. zucchini and/or summer squash: Central America, squash widely cultivated
8. corn: Central America-- reached Great Plains before 1000AD, widespread
9. black-eyed peas: Africa (other beans were native: green, wax, lima, pinto, etc)
10. jalapeño: Mexico, some trading and cultivation in southwest but not elsewhere
11. chipotle powder: see jalapeno
12. bay leaf: Asia, there's a distantly related species in Oregon
13. cumin: western Asia
14. salt: AmerIndians made or traded for this
15. pepper: India

There's apparently some dispute, but given that most of pre-Columbian North American Indians didn't have cookware suitable for oil frying, it seems likely that frying was an innovation. They could easily have come up with vegetable or animal oils--and did. They traded fish oil in the NorthWest (and made slave raids to get workers to process the oil).

What on that list, that was actually indigenous to the Americas, could be easily traded? Dried peppers, the Oregon laurel, and salt. Other things known to have been used as seasonings: juniper berries, dried roots of wild ginger, dried ramps, but some of these have easy equivalents. Salt's essential, though, and not always easily gotten--that we know they did trade.

But getting back to the question about empires, what did the Cahokians eat? Lots of kinds of meat, and quite a variety of plants--though some of the relics in the pit may have been from plants they used. corn, bottle gourd, squashes, sunflower, sumpweed, lambsquarters, maygrass, knotweed, several kinds of nuts and fruits--grapes, persimmons, strawberry, plum, bramble, elderberry, black haw, mulberry, and nightshade... And amaranth, purslane, "panicoid grasses" (a huge family), carpetweed, and spurges--ok, they wouldn't have eaten that one, except as medicine and I'd be dubious of it even then. I'd never heard of a lot of these, but I think most of them are local to the Cahokia area. Seasonings probably wouldn't have been used in sufficient quantities to show up in the relics. Maybe one day we'll find residues in pots. The Cahokians didn't write any cookbooks. Even if they'd been literate, they might not have needed to. They were big, but not that big.

Little barley? I've seen that stuff. I remember reading about wheat when I was very young and asking my parents if the stuff in the yard was wheat. It wasn't.

Treatment of the elderly

The book on the Dakotas "as they were" when they were still hunters makes for fairly grim reading. They were typically strong and tough--or rather, the survivors were. Hunting, even with firearms, was an arduous project, and since an area was easily hunted-out, they had to migrate--and that could often be an ordeal. The infant mortality rate was very high, hunters could be injured, and deadly conflicts with neighboring tribes regularly killed a few. (Not many--large scale wars were logistically quite difficult and dangerous.) The high death rate is known in popular mythology as "living in harmony with nature."

When food ran short--"The aged were, however, generally treated kindly." But not always.

According to their own testimony, a usage formerly prevailed among the Dakotas ... their singular way of disposing of those who were superannuated and unable to keep along with hunting parties. They were unable or unwilling to carry them, and had some scruples about killing them without ceremony or leaving them to perish by slow degrees; so they compromised the matter, and did what they called “making enemies” of them. The old men were armed with guns or bows and arrows and were allowed to defend themselves as well as they could, while the young men killed them with clubs. They thus gave them an opportunity to die with honor on the field of battle, and satisfied their scruples of conscience about killing them. This custom has long been obsolete,

He cites two stories they told of old women left behind to die. In one a young man rescued her, carried her on his back despite the mockery of the rest of the group, and even defended her against enemy attack when the rest of the group fled. Offered honor for his bravery, he proposed that they honor the old woman instead, which they did. In the other story, a woman was left behind to die in the fall, and in spring some passing near the place thought to bury her bones. They found her alive and well--a kindly stranger had, despite some difficulties, provided for her all winter. The hunters from her own group killed her and stole her provisions.

Rabbit tracking about mammoths

The note below reports that the Dakota worshipped mammoths, though they thought them water creatures. Hmm.

Mammoth diet seems to have been grasses and small plants (heavy on some flowers), and steppe-based. OK, though maybe they frequented sinkholes sometimes? And elephants are known to snorkle to cross rivers.

The Dakota said they had come from much farther north, and showed some familiarity with the ways of the Inuit. So... Do the Inuit have stories about mammoths?

Tracking that down isn't easy. There allegedly are stories of huge creatures with tusks that lived underground. But the stories may not be that old. In 1885 a naturalist was on a ship which met some Inuits with mammoth tusks and bones. They said the relics were not from living animals, and Townsend showed them a picture of a skeleton, and drew for them what a reconstruction would look like. That picture would undoubtedly have been widely described, if not circulated, and probably copied.

And when was the legend recorded? I haven't found that, though the Dakota's story is older than 1885.

Pity. It would be fun to find some more ten thousand year old legends.

More from "as they were"

The religion of the Dakotas consisted principally, but not wholly, in the worship of visible things of this world, animate and inanimate. Their chief object of worship was Unkteri, the mammoth, though they held many erroneous opinions concerning that extinct species of elephant, and did not know that the race was extint. They had seen bones of the mammonth, pieces of which they had in their possession, and they were too well acquainted with comparative anatomy not to know that it was a quadruped. ... as they were not seen on land and their bones were found in low and wet places, they concluded that their dwelling was in the water.

They also worshipped a thunderbird, and "Taku-Shkan-Shkan", that which moves. "men affirmed that they had seen stones which had moved some distance on level ground, leaving a track or furrow behind them." And sometimes they worshipped ghosts. They learned from Europeans: Wakantanka was the Great Spirit, but was still just the God of the foreigners. Sacred rocks were often painted red.

The hunter or traveler, stopping to smoke would fill his pipe and holding it up would say, "Here, ghosts, take a smoke and give us a good day."

And

I once traveled several days on foot with a chief, and when we encamped at night he made the figure of a turtle in the earth and prayed to it for good weather. ... At our next encampment ... but this time the turtle failed to respond. ... he was in a bad humor, spoke very disrespectfully of turtles, and declared that he would be revenged on the next one he met.

Advice, which has evidently been almost universally followed:

If anyone wishes to construct a consistent system of Indian mythology, such as will be satisfactory to the public, the best way for him to do it is to form a theory of his own, adopt some Indian notions, reject others, invent some himself, and not ask the Indians too many questions.

UPDATE:

The great mass of the people evidently believed in a superintending, overruling Providence, by which the world is governed and men often rewarded according to their deeds. ... They were also accustomed to point out examples where great sins had been followed by severe punishments. These retributions they did not ascribe to any of the gods who they ordinarily worshipped in public. ... The punishment of the wicked was ascribed to Taku-wakan, that is, some supernatural or divine power, though Taku-wakan is not a proper name and had no personal signification.

When the half-breed interpreter was asked by an inquuisitive visitor what the Indians thought about another world (the land of spirit), he did not like to tell how little he knew about the matter; but he chose rather to conceal his ignorance, and to gratify the inquirer at the same time, by giving such an answer as he knew would be more satisfactor than the true one. The writer speaks from experience, having been himself thus imposed on.

---

The only one of Pond's reports: he was the brother of the Samuel Pond, whose book I was referencing. Also, Unktehi wasn't universally worshipped.

"As they were in 1834"

"Scott Campbell no longer sits smoking his long pipe, and conversing in low tones with the listless loungers around the old Agency House; but who that resided in this country thirty or forty years ago can pass by the old stone houses near Fort Snelling and not think of Major Taliaferro and of his interpreter?"

He was skillful as an interpreter, and perhaps more skillful as mis-interpreter. When translating for Major Taliaferro, he gave a true rendering of what was said, for the major knew the Dakota language too well himself to be deceived by an interpreter; but for those who were ignorant of the language he sometimes used his own discretion in the choice of what to say. The words of the speaker, whether Dakota or English, lost all their asperity, and often much of their meaning, in passing through his interpretation. He told what he thought the speaker should have said rather than what he did say, and frequently a good understanding seemed to have been restored, simply because there had been no understanding at all. The grievous words which stir up strife might go into his ears but did not come out of his mouth, especially when it was for his interest to restore peace between contending parties. This readiness to substitute his own language for that which he professed to translated might not be the best qualification for an interpreter, and sometimes it proved mischievous; but he doubtless intercepted many harsh and passionate words, which, if they had reached their destination, would have done more harm than good.

Perhaps, but I think truth is better.

Seen in Saugatuck

In a tiny grass spot next to the city hall is a boulder with a plaque:

"In Memory of The First Indian Burying Ground 1800 to 1850"

There's a story there, right?

Per Waymarking: "The remains of the Indian cemetery were excavated during some construction, in 1930, at the Saugatuck centennial celebration, a boulder with a bronze plaque in "Memory of the First Indian Burying Ground, 1800 to 1850" was dedicated and a few remains were reburied in a mound nearby."

OK, that makes sense. I didn't see any mound, though; not by the new City Hall or the Cook Park entrance or the yacht club.

Nope, no mound. Per "Between thirty and fifty burials were encountered during excavation work for the construction of a new community hall." There should have been something to see.

The bones which were found in the burial grounds were gathered together and reinterred beneath a small mound of earth near the southwest intersection of Butler and Culver Streets across from the Village Hall. Nearby a stone "to the memory of the old Indian burying ground..." was dedicated with ceremony at the 1930 celebration of the centennial of Saugatuck. Johnson Fox, then just a boy, remembers being the one who actually spoke the words of dedication dressed in an Indian outfit made by his mother. The burial mound was leveled during street widening in the 1970s, and for a few years only the curved sidewalk which had gone around the mound showed its former position. Eventually even that was removed, although the memorial rock remains.

The artifacts on the second floor of the Saugatuck Village Hall were on display for several years. but, according to old-timers, since the museum was totally unsupervised, many were stolen. The rest were eventually, according to the newspapers, given to the brother-in-law of one of the town officials who was a collector of such things.

Ottawa, though sometimes there were Potawatomi in the area, in case you were interested.

Some people meant well.

Coppicing

When watching a video about ancient forest management in England, I got to wondering if the Chippewa (Anishinaabe) had gone in for coppicing. They used a lot of small branches, and that would seem like a good way to make sure you got a good stock of the right size.

But... The population density around here wasn't that high, so maybe forraging was easy enough. And how would they cut the trees without metal tools? Pounding the bejabbers out of a trunk with a stone axe seems like a way to induce rot, not new growth, in the stump. So maybe they didn't.

But reading around tells me that it was done in central America, and in California they had "Fire, Pruning, and Coppice Management of Temperate Ecosystems for Basketry Material".

I hadn't thought of fire, but that could work. So maybe they did. I'll ask if somebody knows.

Along the way I found Plants Used by the Bois Fort Chippewa Indians, which describes food, medicinal herbs, intoxicating herbs, and a revolting recipe for seasoning wild rice: though some of us buy kopi luwak and Black Ivory Coffee.

One finds the strangest rabbit holes sometimes. About hazel: "If you have never tasted a hazelnut, there is no way I can describe it.... Softly erotic, it's like making love in a sauna, heated by burning birch." Maybe the hazelnuts I ate weren't the special ones.

Fossils and Indians

Native peoples were the first discoverers of the remains and tracks of dinosaurs on this continent and, in some instances, it was they who brought the bones, teeth, and tracks to the attention of people of European descent living here.

Edward Taylor, a minister and poet from Westfield, Massachusetts, recalled stories told to him by local Native people of these monsters but he didn’t believe the stories until 1705, when he was privileged to see the huge teeth, most likely of a mastodon, that had been found along with skeletal remains protruding from the banks of the Hudson River in Claverack, New York. Various Iroquoian and Algonquian groups believed these bones and teeth were from giant naked or hairless bears with huge heads. The Abenaki referred to them as “Gici Awas” (also here) and they were called “Nyah-Gwaheh”, among other names, by the Iroquoian peoples.

Cats and chickens and words

I figured cats were introduced to the Americas by Europeans, and so it was. A post here discusses names for cat in different Amerindian languages. Generally these are borrow words.

How quickly did the Amerindians start keeping cats once they showed up?

I didn't find anything old, but "Prior to Columbus we kept domestic dogs, but according to the stories told by my great grandmother we Comanches also kept tamed birds, opossums (she had one as a girl), and tarantulas. We acquired cats at the same time we acquired horses. I have seen old pictures of relatives of mine riding horseback with a cat on one shoulder. We kept all these animals despite being nomadic. I imagine sedentary tribes kept even more animals."

At a guess, such useful creatures were adopted very quickly.

---

Did Polynesians bring chickes to South America before Columbus? Hard to be sure--one study doesn't quite convince me. A linguistic study suggests chickens showed up very early--this one presumes the Europeans brought them, but it's consistent with earlier arrivals too. The study finds almost no borrow words--so the tribes acquired them before the arrival of a lot of Europeans. That would be either very quick dissemination of escapees, or the birds were there well before.

Dice game followup

In the post on a dice game, I didn't explain the meaning of the graphs.

A player has about a 50/50 chance of winning some points in her turn. That's in a good range--not too rare, not too often. But one attractive feature of the "losing turn" is that it isn't a one-and-done. There's a little tension: "I missed once, will I miss the second time too?" It makes the game a trifle slower, but the dramatic advantage should compensate for that. Clever.

Getting multiple points in a turn is common enough to make that something to hope for--and even getting a winning throw isn't so rare that the women wouldn't see it every few games. This also helps cultivate a little drama.

The more biased the chips are, the more likely early players are to win, but the effect isn't that dramatic for reasonable estimates of unfairness. If the chips are dramatically unfair, players will notice and quit using them. So it seems to be a pretty fair game.

The prize (some yard goods that she would give to a man in exchange for something of equal value) was something easily provided by the other women, something the man had to supply, and an exchange which emphasized the reciprocal obligations of men and women in the tribe. And--probably now and then an unmarried winner used it for signaling interest.

I'll work up some estimates for how many women can play the game before it gets too unfair. If there are 1000 women playing, the winner will appear in the first few hundred and the last ones will pretty much never get a turn. If you've only got 2 players, the odds are close to even for them both.

---

UPDATE:

Actually, this is a terrible game. Below see the table for the number of women playing and the relative odds of the last woman in the group to those of the first woman in the group. If you can randomly pick who goes first, who second, and so on, you're OK, but otherwise the first players have quite an advantage.

# players	win rate ratio of last to first
2	0.86
3	0.78
4	0.73
5	0.66
6	0.62
7	0.58
8	0.53

UPDATE:

The easiest way to fix this is to skip the "first past the post" rule, and allow points to keep accumulating. The first past woman with 10 or more points marks the final round, which continues until all are done; then the woman with the highest number of points wins--with tie-breaker rounds as needed. Of course, that's a different game then, but probably similar enough.

Women's dice game

Menominee women's dice game as seen in the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Six of the dice were thin circular disks; one was carved in the form of a turtle, and one represented a horse's head. They were formerly made of buffalo rib, but horse ribs were common in later times. One surface of each die was colored blue or sometimes red, and the other was left white. The bowl was held with both hands and the dice were shaken to the far side of the bowl. Then the bowl was given one flip and set on the floor and the score was counted, as follows:

• All of similar color except 2: 1 point
• All of similar color except 1: 3 points
• All of similar color except turtle: 5 points
• All of similar color except horse: 10 points
• All of similar color: 8 points
• All of similar color except turtle and horse: 10 points

The scoring varied according to each tribe, and each woman kept her own score using beans in front of her. Each woman shook until she missed twice and then passed the bowl in clockwise rotation. The first to score ten points won the game, and her prize-a piece of yard goods-was given to one of the men spectators, who in turn was obliged to reciprocate with a gift of equal value in the future.

OK, obviously the lady can score more than 10 points in a turn, though that won't happen often. If the chips (not really dice) were fair, the probability of red or white would be 0.5, but it might vary a bit. If they were fair, how much would a woman score in a turn--on the average? I made a stupid typo in my program, and I wanted to use the exercise to learn some python plotting I wasn't familiar with, so this took longer than it should have, but for your interest:

And if you want to know how things change if the chips aren't fair (systematically), that's here:

The award scheme is clever. The woman probably didn't need any "yard goods" herself--that was the sort of thing women made anyway. But she got to make a forced exchange with a man for something the men provided.