Monthly Archives: August 2017

All across the United States, hundreds of wax cylinder recordings containing the voices of Native elders are decaying to the point of no return.

Ethnographer Frances Demsmore recording Mountain Chief, elder of the Blackfeet Nation.

Fortunately, recent innovations at Berkeley’s Lawrence Laboratories have made it possible to retrieve recordings that archivists feared were lost forever to mold and degradation. Using optical scanning technology, researchers have “read” the physical markings left on the old wax tubes (grooves similar to those on a phonograph record) and have translated them into digital reproductions of the sound they once encoded in analog ridges along the surface of the cylinders.

The results have been amazing. Berkeley linguist Andrew Garrett, who is working on a collection of Yurok stories, has found the recovered voices invaluable for reconstructing the verbal arts of the Yurok community. For Garrett, the new technology is a form of repatriation: “I see what we are doing as creating the possibility of digital repatriation of cultural heritage to the people and communities where the knowledge was created in the first place.”

A similar recovery effort is underway at Philadelphia’s American Philosophical society, which has been collecting and working to preserve Native American languages since the time of  its founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The APS is currently in the process of digitizing and extensively cataloging over 3000 hours of endangered Native American languages. These recordings include music, origin stories, historical accounts, linguistic material, and conversations with elders in both English and indigenous languages. Many of these recordings were originally made on obsolete technology such as wax cylinders, wire, or aluminum discs.

Lela Rhodes (Achumawi), “Mouse Brothers.” California Language Archive.

These efforts represent a form of repatriation.  By plucking these stories out of danger, scientists are making them available to a new generation of Native storytellers, linguists, and artists. In 2010, for example, the Unkechaug community of Long Island contacted the American Philosophical Society and requested a copy of the vocabulary list the Society had constructed from a recovered recording of the Unkechaug language in order to begin the process of its revitalization.

At Berkeley, young Native people like Rumsen Ohlone tribal member Louis Trevino can now access their traditional languages, many of which have not been spoken for several generations. As he explains in the National Science Foundation’s online magazine, Science Nation, “because we don’t have old timers who can sing the songs . . . for us, this is one of our sole resources. For that reason, it is especially precious to us.”

In this way, such efforts at recovering the indigenous sounds trapped on old wax cylinders exemplify how the work is repatriation is never just about the past. Digital versions of the recordings are clear, and now may speak again—to a present and future audience. They are reproducible and available to all those who are doing the hard work of language revitalization in their communities. The voices of past elders, whose knowledge once passed face-to-face to the next generation, although in a new form, still carry their messages of cultural continuity and continue to demonstrate the incredible resilience of indigenous ways of knowing.

Miguelito (Diné) making phonograph record. Copyright by Geoffrey O’Hara, New York, N.Y.. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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Occasionally, in searching archives for Native American materials, archivists uncover strange things.

This summer, for example, Brian Carpenter, Curator of Native American Materials at the American Philosophical Society (APS), reached out to me by email to find out if I knew anything about a broadsheet titled The Indian Phoenix.

The APS Curator of Printed Materials, David Gary, unearthed some old newspapers that were sitting neglected in an un-cataloged box. One of these was a newspaper called The Indian Phoenix. It appeared to have had one issue only: May 14, 1836. It was printed by someone named James Dickson in Washington, DC, who was concerned with promoting the “cause of the Indian.”

Masthead, “The Indian Phoenix.” American Philosophical Society.

Gary told me that, judging from a quick examination of the paper, it appeared that it was “likely only produced in one issue by James Dickson on May 14, 1836.” Its  contained anti-Mexican and anti-abolition sentiments, vehemently supported the Texan Revolution, and argued for the nobility and dignity of Native Americans. Gary also noted that “the paper’s manifesto hints at a quick decline as Dickson said ‘no subscription will ever be permitted to be received, nor a solitary number of the Gazette sold.'”

He checked with the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA and they said they had no record of such a publication,

The 1830s saw lots of short-lived publications on the “Indian Problem” like The Indian Phoenix, but I had never run into this one. It is especially interesting because of the Texas/Mexico materials. I asked Gary and Carpenter to send me a scan of the front page.

With a little digging, I discovered  that James Dickson was an associate of Sam Houston who had hidden out among the Cherokee after his failed 1829 attempt to secure an independent republic in east Texas, called “Fredonia.” To this David Gary added a few interesting details:  “He was arrested soon after starting what he called the “Texas Navy” on Lake Ontario in September 1836.  He bought a ship, got as far as Detroit, ran out of supplies, and had to requisition food.  The Michigan authorities arrested him for piracy, although the newspaper account seems to be exaggerating the charge.  He was trying to take recruits to Texas to fight Santa Ana.”

Apparently, Dickson saw the Cherokee as fellow travelers—slaveholders and anti-federal government types—and dreamed up a scheme of rounding up a pan-tribal army to wrest the area of Fredonia from Mexico and establish an independent republic. This newspaper was his recruitment tool and manifesto. The “Phoenix” of the title seems to have been his homage to the Cherokees with whom he stayed. Their national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was published from 1828-1837 in New Echota Georgia—until the Georgia militia destroyed the press and the federal government forced the Cherokees onto the Trail of Tears.

Dickinson’s efforts to establish Fredonia failed, and by the 1840s, he disappears from the historical record, having  embarked on an exploratory journey to the Rockies.

Yet even though this is not an “Indian” newspaper, it does shed some light on how Native peoples were coopted to the service of the American national imaginary, at precisely the moment that the federal government was forcibly routing them from their homes and forcing them to unpromising lands west of the Mississippi.

Poetry from the front page of the “Indian Phoenix.” American Philosophical Society.

The Indian Phoenix is simply one of the more outrageous examples of the appropriation  of indigenous peoples and issues for the purposes of advancing the cause of Euro-American colonial expansion. Dickinson, for example, defends the Indians by suggesting King David’s taking of many scalps from his enemies as a worthy precedent for frontier warfare in America. Such imagery draws much of its power from biblical typology, likening the actions of the leader of Israel to those of contemporary Native Americans. Dickinson asks his readers to see the hand of God in the Indians’ ways. Moreover, such a comparison plays into the popular American nationalist fantasy that cast the Native peoples of the continent as members of one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The entire front page is filled with doggerel raging against Mexican activities in Texas. Looking over the Valley’s Mexico, Dickson intones:

The power and the glory of the Aztec all gone;

Like the leaves in the forest in autumn are strewn,

Were the splendor and hope of that race overthrown.

But the day star is rising unclouded and bright

That shall clear and illumine long ages of night

And restore to that valley the Indian race,

And leave of their white lords no longer a trace.

These verses encapsulate the fundamental aesthetic of settler colonialism in the United States. The Indian, at once vanished and pitied, awaits the Euro-American forces of westward expansion who will unleash the revenge owed former colonial  armies, only to absorb the reclaimed “valley” into a new nation built upon the borrowed spiritual power of “the splendor and hope of that race overthrown.”

In addition to demanding recognition of Native peoples’ presence in the contemporary scene, repatriation also necessitates recollection of the deep time of indigenous occupation of the western hemisphere. For much of the past century, scientists were fixated on Beringia—the area in and around the Bering Strait—and the crossing of peoples into the Americas from Asia. As Dakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. observed, “Scientists . . . ,are committed to the view that Indians migrated to this country over an imaginary Bering Straits bridge, which comes and goes at the convenience of the scholar requiring it to complete his or her theory” (read more).

Recent archaeological discoveries have shown that the original Bering thesis vastly oversimplifies the peopling of this continent. The Bluefish Caves, located in northern Yukon near the Alaska border, contain animal bones associated with human habitation dating to some 30,000 years ago.

Striations on a mandible bone from the Bluefish site, demonstrating human presence. ((Lauriane Bourgeon/University of Montreal, for Archaeology, January 17, 2017).

It was only recently that these remains could be dated with such accuracy, and their antiquity suggests first and foremost that the Bering Strait was a homeland in its own right—much more than a land bridge to a future “North America” (Read more).

A dig at Monte Verde, Chile.

Signs of human occupation that stretch back 14, 000 years have been uncovered in caves in eastern Oregon. In Monte Verde Chile, archaeologists dated fires associated with stone tools to some 18, 500 years ago, pushing back the peopling of the Americas by another 4000 years (Read more). Along Buttermilk Creek in Texas, layers of clay have preserved some 19,000 pre-Clovis artifacts. Among them, “small blades bearing tiny wear marks from cutting bone to a polished chunk of hematite, an iron mineral commonly used in the Paleolithic world for making a red pigment” (Read more).

Mastodon bones showing breakage consistent with human use of tools.

Perhaps most startling of all, 130, 000 year old mastodon bones uncovered in 1992 during a southern California freeway project have been re-examined to provide evidence for what scientists in a recent issue of Nature describe as “the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production” (Read more).

What is most important about these revisions to older, conservative estimate of the presence of humans here—usually placed at 12, 000 years BP—is that Native communities have been saying they’ve been here for a lot longer for a long time. It is the way that these new empirical discoveries support tribal oral traditions that perhaps has the most impact on repatriation issues.

The best recent example of this comes from British Columbia, where ancient DNA from archeological sites in the Prince Rupert area of B.C. confirmed the Metlakatla First Nation’s assertion that they had lived in the region for much longer than scientists would accept. As reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Barbara Petzelt, an archaeologist with the Metlakatla First Nation who worked on the project sums up the situation perfectly:’It’s nice to have it explained in a way western culture can understand.” As with the remains of the Ancient One in Kenewick, Oregon, it sometimes takes the empiricism of western science to validate the oral tradition so that repatriations and tribal land claims can go forward. Again Barbara Petzelt explains, “Science is starting to be used to basically corroborate what we’ve been saying all along” (Read more).

The CBC story concludes with some observations by Kimberly TallBear, associate professor at the University of Alberta’s Native Studies:

I think it’s good, and I think it’s progress . . . But Western knowledge … [is] privileged over Indigenous knowledge . . . Most scientists are taught that those who are best suited to ask scientific questions are those who are least invested . . . But nobody is least invested. Nobody is asking those questions in a cultural vacuum.

Whether or not the marks  on the mastodon bones under a freeway in California turn out to be signs of human occupation 130, 000, the understanding of the peopling of this continent and the creation of homelands by indigenous peoples should always acknowledge and respect the traditions of their descendants who, living here today, have carried with them stories and song that are often every bit as accurate as an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer.