Walam Olum

The Walam Olum (also Walum Olum or Wallam Olum), usually translated "Red Record" or "Red Score", is a purported historical narrative of the Lenape (Delaware). It was published in 1836 by the botanist and antiquarian Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, who said it was translated from pictographs on wooden tablets. Its authenticity was debated from the start. Ethnographic fieldwork among Lenape elders in the 1980s and analysis of Rafinesque's manuscript in the 1990s led most scholars to conclude that Rafinesque fabricated it. The Delaware Tribe of Indians withdrew an earlier endorsement of the text in 1997 after Lenape speakers questioned its language.

Content

Rafinesque's 183 verses, fewer than 3,000 words in English, include a creation story, a flood story, and an account of migrations. The Great Manitou creates the universe, the earth, the first people and other creatures, while an evil manitou creates harmful beings such as flies. An evil being then brings sickness, disaster and death. A great snake attacks the people and floods the land; the survivors ride out the flood on a giant turtle. Afterward, in a cold land, they learn to build houses and hunt, then cross a frozen sea eastward from "the land of the Turtle" to "the land of the Snake".

From this point the text names a succession of chiefs, each briefly characterized. According to Rafinesque, the list reaches back to about 1600 BCE. Part of the nation, allied with the northern Talamatan, conquers the Talegawi; the Talamatan later turn hostile and are subdued. The people expand east until they reach another sea, where white men arrive in ships, and the text ends.

Rafinesque also published a "Fragment" carrying the story from about 1600 to his own time. It names the original composer as Lekhibit and survives only as a purported translation by a John Burns, who has never been satisfactorily identified.

Provenance

Rafinesque said the narrative was recorded in pictographs on bark or on cedar tablets or sticks, explaining that olum meant "a record, a notched stick, an engraved piece of wood or bark." He wrote that "the late Dr. Ward of Indiana" obtained the objects in 1820 from a Lenape patient as payment for a cure and later passed them to him, and that the Lenape-language verses explaining the pictographs came from a different source in 1822. After publication he said the originals were lost. No evidence other than Rafinesque's own statements shows that they existed; unsold items from his collections appear to have been destroyed after his death in 1840.[citation needed]

The Indiana Historical Society's 1954 study tentatively identified Ward as John Russell Ward, a Kentucky physician who died in 1834, on the basis of Rafinesque's notes and a family tradition. In 1986 William Barlow and David O. Powell proposed instead Malthus A. Ward (1794–1863), a physician who spent part of his early career in Indiana. Proponents of this identification point to Ward's presence on the White River, where Rafinesque placed the Lenape group, and to his supplying botanical specimens to Rafinesque. Malthus Ward was alive when Rafinesque wrote; he later practised medicine in New England and from 1831 was professor of natural history at the University of Georgia. His notebooks (1814–1860) are held by the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia.

Manuscript

Rafinesque's October 1834 essay on the Lenape language does not mention the Walam Olum. He submitted a supplement about it two months later, shortly after acquiring John Heckewelder's list of authentic Lenape names. His manuscript sets each pictograph beside the Lenape verse explaining it. It is held at the University of Pennsylvania and has been digitized.

Reception

19th century

Despite early doubts, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists long treated the Walam Olum as genuine. E. G. Squier republished it in 1849, accepting it partly on internal evidence and partly because the Ojibwe writer George Copway (Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh), shown the manuscript, "unhesitatingly pronounced it authentic". Historian Terry Barnhart notes that Copway, though knowledgeable about Ojibwe and wider Algonquian tradition, was no expert on Delaware language or tradition. On 16 February 1849 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft wrote to Squier that the text was supported by comparison with bark scrolls and the carved boards he called "music boards". Andrew Newman, however, describes Schoolcraft's response to Squier as skeptical: he regretted that the material had passed through Rafinesque's hands and noted that no record of comparable extent was known from America north of Mexico.

In 1885 the ethnologist Daniel G. Brinton published a new translation. He argued that in several places the pictographs fit his corrected readings better than Rafinesque's, suggesting Rafinesque had received both text and figures from others. James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee (1900) cites the Walam Olum's Tallige'wi as an early name for the Cherokee.

20th century

In 1939 Erminie Voegelin looked for parallels to the narrative in independent Lenape sources and found them inconclusive. In 1952 archaeologist James Bennett Griffin said he had no confidence in the text, and historian William A. Hunter also considered it a hoax.[citation needed] Archaeologist John Witthoft identified linguistic errors and suspicious matches with 19th-century Lenape–English word lists, concluding that Rafinesque compiled the text from printed sources; a follow-up project he announced in 1955 never took place.

The Indiana Historical Society's multidisciplinary 1954 study offered a new translation and called the Red Score "a worthy subject" for study. Reviewer Richard Woodbury observed that the team could not identify Dr. Ward and that the document's origins remained clouded. Anthropologist Della Collins Cook later described its essays as framing contradictory conclusions to avoid offending the sponsor. August Mahr defended Rafinesque's integrity in 1957.

Selwyn Dewdney, in his 1975 study of Ojibwe birch-bark scrolls, treated the Walam Olum as a genuine Delaware record, reporting that a Delaware elder had interpreted it for Copway and judging its imagery to predate European influence. Reviewing the book, anthropologist Edward S. Rogers criticized Dewdney's ethnographic and ethnohistorical generalizations as outdated. Joe Napora's 1992 translation likewise treated the text as genuine and related it to the Mide scrolls.

Pictographic context

Archaeology has confirmed that pictographic birch-bark records predate Rafinesque. In 1965 Kenneth Kidd reported incised birch-bark pieces from two sites in the Head-of-the-Lakes region of Ontario, some resembling Midewiwin scrolls; one has been dated to about 1560 ± 70 CE. Critics note that the existence of genuine pictographic records does not resolve the textual and ethnological problems of the Walam Olum.

Identification as a hoax

By the 1980s ethnologists had gathered enough independent information to discount the Walam Olum as Lenape tradition. Lenape specialist Herbert C. Kraft argued that it conflicted with the archaeological record. A 1985 survey by David M. Oestreicher and James Rementer found that traditional Lenape elders had never heard of it and found its text puzzling; Oestreicher's review of the Lenape text with fluent speaker Lucy Parks Blalock found frequent English idioms. In 1991 Stephen Williams grouped it with other well-known archaeological frauds.

Oestreicher's work from 1994 onward found that Rafinesque's manuscript is full of Lenape words crossed out and replaced with others that better fit the English, indicating translation from English into Lenape rather than the reverse. He traced the Lenape vocabulary to published sources, including those of the American Philosophical Society, and argued that the pictographs blend published Egyptian, Chinese and Maya signs. Barnhart agrees that the pictographs resemble nothing in Lenape rock art of Lenapehoking, and suggests Rafinesque created the text to support his theories of the peopling of America and perhaps to compete for the Prix Volney. Oestreicher's findings are summarized by Kraft and by Jennifer M. Lehmann.[citation needed] Oestreicher reports that when he presented his evidence to Napora, Napora accepted that the text is a hoax. Newman records that he later received, through a reader, a forwarded message attributed to Napora stating that he had never recanted; Napora did not answer Newman's inquiry.

Andrew Newman notes that Oestreicher's detailed analyses have reached a limited audience but allow study of how earlier scholars handled evidence of fabrication. In On Records (2012), Newman treats the Walam Olum as part of a wider history of how Delaware and colonial communities recorded and remembered the past. He finds Oestreicher's attribution to Rafinesque persuasive, but examines why the text has repeatedly been revived, retranslated and republished, arguing that its reception was driven by national pride and by a wish to credit Native Americans with writing. Newman also suggests that "hoax" may misstate Rafinesque's intent, describing the text as a possibly sincere but naive attempt at what Rafinesque called "historical palingenesy", the reconstruction of lost records, and notes that Rafinesque opposed Indian removal. Rafinesque scholar Charles Boewe accepts that the text is spurious but has argued that Rafinesque may have been the victim of another hoaxer rather than its author. He notes that Dennis Tedlock suspected doubts about the text were driven partly by a broader skepticism about Native literacy, and concludes that some hostility to it may indeed have been Eurocentric, although the skeptics were vindicated.

Newman's study also discusses the Delaware leader Teedyuscung, who in 1756 accused the Pennsylvania proprietors of fraud in the Walking Purchase. In the treaty conferences that followed during the French and Indian War, Teedyuscung asked that his speeches be written down and read aloud and that he have his own clerk to check the official minutes, demands that ran against colonial stereotypes of purely oral Indian communication.

Rafinesque's biographer Leonard Warren concludes that Rafinesque wrote the Walam Olum, believing it true because it matched his theories, and calls it a "culpably dishonest act".

Lenape response

Many traditional Lenape hold that their people have always lived in their homeland in present-day New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.[citation needed] The Delaware Nation of Anadarko, Oklahoma, endorsed David McCutchen's 1993 translation The Red Record by resolution. The business committee of the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville also passed a resolution supporting the text, none of whose members spoke Lenape. According to James Rementer, as reported by Newman, the tribe's Culture Committee had that support withdrawn after Lenape speakers, including Lucy Blalock and Nora Thompson Dean, raised serious doubts about the text's language. Oestreicher dates the withdrawal to 11 February 1997. Barnhart, placing the burden of proof on proponents of authenticity, writes that the text's place in the history of American anthropology is secure regardless.

In literature

Paula Gunn Allen's 1982 poetry collection Shadow Country alludes to the "Red Score" in the poem "Another Long Walk", contrasting its count of years with recorded history.[citation needed]

  1. 1 2 3 Rafinesque, C. S. (1836). The American Nations; or, Outlines of Their General History, Ancient and Modern. Philadelphia. p. 124.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Jackson, Brittany; Rose, Mark (4 December 2009). "Walam Olum Hokum". Archaeology.
  3. 1 2 Warren, Leonard (2005). Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: A Voice in the American Wilderness. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2316-5.
  4. 1 2 3 Newman 2012, p. 48 and pp. 207–208 n. 86.
  5. 1 2 3 Oestreicher, David M. (2005). "Tale of a Hoax". In Swann, Brian (ed.). Algonquian Spirit. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 23–24. ISBN 978-0-8032-9338-0.
  6. 1 2 3 Oestreicher, David M. (1996). "Unraveling the Walam Olum". Natural History. 105 (10): 14–21.
  7. ↑ Leopold, Joan (1999). Early Nineteenth-Century Contributions to American Indian and General Linguistics: Du Ponceau and Rafinesque. Springer Netherlands. p. 315. ISBN 978-0-7923-2506-2.
  8. 1 2 Brinton, Daniel G. (1885). The Lenâpé and Their Legends: With the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum. Philadelphia.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  9. 1 2 Weer, Paul (1954). "History of the Walam Olum Manuscript and Painted Records". In Voegelin, Charles F. (ed.). Walam Olum; or, Red Score. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society. p. 264.
  10. ↑ Barlow, William; Powell, David O. (1986). ""The Late Dr. Ward of Indiana": Rafinesque's Source of the Walam Olum". Indiana Magazine of History. 82 (2): 185–193. JSTOR 27790973.
  11. ↑ SOURCE NEEDED – published work (e.g. Barlow & Powell, with page numbers) stating these points
  12. ↑ "Malthus Ward (1794â€"1863)". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Georgia Humanities / University of Georgia Press.
  13. ↑ "Malthus Augustus Ward notebooks, 1814â€"1860 (ms51)". Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries.
  14. ↑ "Wallam-Olum: first and second parts of the painted and engraved traditions of the Linnilinapi". Translated by C. S. Rafinesque. University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Ms. Coll. 700, Item 217.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  15. 1 2 Barnhart, Terry A. (2005). Ephraim George Squier and the Development of American Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 130–131. ISBN 978-0-8032-1321-0.
  16. ↑ Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe. "Letter to E. George Squier, 16 February 1849" (PDF). National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. NAA MS 4475.
  17. ↑ Newman 2012, p. 44.
  18. ↑ Brinton 1885, p. 157.
  19. ↑ Mooney, James (1900). Myths of the Cherokee. Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pt. 1. Washington.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) Reprinted, ed. Duane King, New York: Barnes & Noble, 2007, pp. 4–10.
  20. ↑ Voegelin, Erminie W. (1939). "Cultural Parallels to the Delaware Walam Olum". Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. 49: 28–31.
  21. ↑ Witthoft, John (1955). "The Walam Olum Project". International Journal of American Linguistics. 21: 194.
  22. ↑ Woodbury, Richard B. (1955). "Review of Walam Olum or Red Score". American Antiquity. 21 (2): 191–192. doi:10.2307/276869. JSTOR 276869.
  23. ↑ Buikstra, Jane; Beck, Lane, eds. (2006). Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains. Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-369541-3.
  24. ↑ Mahr, August C. (1957). "Walam Olum, I, 17: A Proof of Rafinesque's Integrity". American Anthropologist. New Series. 59 (4): 705–708.
  25. ↑ Dewdney, Selwyn (1975). The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway. Glenbow Museum and University of Toronto Press. p. 128.
  26. ↑ Rogers, Edward S. (1975). "Review of The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway". Ethnohistory. 22 (1): 81–85.
  27. ↑ Napora, Joe (1992). The Walam Olum. Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review Press. ISBN 0-912678-82-8.
  28. ↑ Kidd, Kenneth E. (1965). "Birch-bark Scrolls in Archaeological Contexts". American Antiquity. 30 (4): 480.
  29. ↑ Rajnovich, Grace (1994). Reading Rock Art: Interpreting the Indian Rock Paintings of the Canadian Shield. Dundurn Press. ISBN 0-920474-72-1.
  30. 1 2 Williams, Stephen (1991). Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  31. ↑ Vansina, Jan (1985). Oral Tradition as History. James Currey. pp. 54–55. ISBN 0-85255-007-3.
  32. ↑ Oestreicher, David M. (1994). "Unmasking the Walam Olum: A 19th-Century Hoax". Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey. 49: 1–44.
  33. ↑ Barnhart 2005, p. 140.
  34. ↑ Kraft, Herbert C. (2001). The Lenape-Delaware Indian Heritage: 10,000 BC to AD 2000. Lenape Books.
  35. ↑ Oestreicher, David M. (1995). "Text Out of Context: The Arguments that Created and Sustained the Walam Olum". Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey. 50: 44.
  36. ↑ Newman 2012, p. 48 and p. 207 n. 85.
  37. ↑ Newman, Andrew (2010). "The Walam Olum: An Indigenous Apocrypha and Its Readers". American Literary History. 22 (1): 26–56. doi:10.1093/alh/ajp055.
  38. ↑ Newman, Andrew (2012). On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 27, 39–41. doi:10.5250/9781496245410. ISBN 978-0-8032-3986-9.
  39. ↑ Newman 2012, pp. 41–42.
  40. ↑ Newman 2012, p. 41.
  41. ↑ Newman 2012, pp. 50–51.
  42. ↑ Newman 2012, p. 21.
  43. ↑ Newman 2012, p. 168.
  44. ↑ "The Matter of Records (review of Newman, On Records)". Common-place.
  45. ↑ Barnhart 2005, p. 149.