Sign Language Among North American Indians 19

Sign Language Among North American Indians 19

The result of the collation and analysis of the large number of signs

collected is that in numerous instances there is an entire discrepancy

between the signs made by different bodies of Indians to express

the same idea, and that if any of these are regarded as rigidly

determinate, or even conventional with a limited range, and used

without further devices, they will fail in conveying the desired

impression to any one unskilled in gesture as an art, who had not

formed the same precise conception or been instructed in the arbitrary

motion. Few of the gestures that are found in current use are, in

their origin, conventional. They are only portions, more or less

elaborate, of obvious natural pantomime, and those proving efficient

to convey most successfully at any time the several ideas became

the most widely adopted, liable, however, to be superseded by more

appropriate conceptions and delineations. The skill of any tribe and

the copiousness of its signs are proportioned first to the necessity

for their use, and secondly to the accidental ability of the

individuals in it who act as custodians and teachers, so that the

several tribes at different times vary in their degree of proficiency,

and therefore both the precise mode of semiotic __EXPRESSION__ and the

amount of its general use are always fluctuating. Sign language as a

product of evolution has been developed rather than invented, and yet

it seems probable that each of the separate signs, like the several

steps that lead to any true invention, had a definite origin arising

out of some appropriate occasion, and the same sign may in this

manner have had many independent origins due to identity in the

circumstances, or if lost, may have been reproduced.

 

The process is precisely the same as that observed among deaf-mutes.

One of those unfortunate persons, living with his speaking relatives,

may invent signs which the latter are taught to understand, though

strangers sometimes will not, because they may be by no means the

fittest __EXPRESSION__s. Should a dozen or more deaf-mutes, possessed

only of such crude signs, come together, they will be able at first to

communicate only on a few common subjects, but the number of those and

the general scope of __EXPRESSION__ will be continually enlarged. Each one

commences with his own conception and his own presentment of it,

but the universality of the medium used makes it sooner or later

understood. This independent development, thus creating diversity,

often renders the first interchange of thought between strangers

slow, for the signs must be self-interpreting. There can be no natural

universal language which is absolute and arbitrary. When used without

convention, as sign language alone of all modes of utterance can be,

it must be tentative, experimental, and flexible. The mutes will also

resort to the invention of new signs for new ideas as they

arise, which will be made intelligible, if necessary, through the

illustration and definition given by signs formerly adopted, so that

the fittest signs will be evolved, after rivalry and trial, and will

survive. But there may not always be such a preponderance of fitness

that all but one of the rival signs shall die out, and some, being

equal in value to express the same idea or object, will continue to

be used indifferently, or as a matter of individual taste, without

confusion. A multiplication of the numbers confined together, either

of deaf-mutes or of Indians whose speech is diverse, will not decrease

the resulting uniformity, though it will increase both the copiousness

and the precision of the vocabulary. The Indian use of signs, though

maintained by linguistic diversities, is not coincident with any

linguistic boundaries. The tendency is to their uniformity among

groups of people who from any cause are brought into contact with each

other while still speaking different languages. The longer and closer

such contact, while no common tongue is adopted, the greater will be

the uniformity of signs.

 

Colonel Dodge takes a middle ground with regard to the identity of

the signs used by our Indians, comparing it with the dialects and

provincialisms of the English language, as spoken in England, Ireland,

Scotland, and Wales. But those dialects are the remains of actually

diverse languages, which to some speakers have not become integrated.

In England alone the provincial dialects are traceable as the legacies

of Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Danes, with a varying amount of Norman

influence. A thorough scholar in the composite tongue, now

called English, will be able to understand all the dialects and

provincialisms of English in the British Isles, but the uneducated

man of Yorkshire is not able to communicate readily with the equally

uneducated man of Somersetshire. This is the true distinction to

be made. A thorough sign talker would be able to talk with several

Indians who have no signs in common, and who, if their knowledge of

signs were only memorized, could not communicate together. So also, as

an educated Englishman will understand the attempts of a foreigner to

speak in very imperfect and broken English, a good Indian sign expert

will apprehend the feeble efforts of a tyro in gestures. But Colonel

Dodge's conclusion that there is but one true Indian sign language,

just as there is but one true English language, is not proved unless

it can be shown that a much larger proportion of the Indians who

use signs at all, than present researches show to be the case, use

identically the same signs to express the same ideas. It would also

seem necessary to the parallel that the signs so used should be

absolute, if not arbitrary, as are the words of an oral language, and

not independent of preconcert and self-interpreting at the instant of

their invention or first exhibition, as all true signs must originally

have been and still measurably remain. All Indians, as all gesturing

men, have many natural signs in common and many others which are now

conventional. The conventions by which the latter were established

occurred during long periods, when the tribes forming them were

so separated as to have established altogether diverse customs and

mythologies, and when the several tribes were with such different

environment as to have formed varying conceptions needing appropriate

sign __EXPRESSION__. The old error that the North American Indians

constitute one homogeneous race is now abandoned. Nearly all the

characteristics once alleged as segregating them from the rest of

mankind have proved not to belong to the whole of the pre-Columbian

population, but only to those portions of it first explored. The

practice of scalping is not now universal, even among the tribes

least influenced by civilization, if it ever was, and therefore the

cultivation of the scalp-lock separated from the rest of the hair

of the head, or with the removal of all other hair, is not a general

feature of their appearance. The arrangement of the hair is so

different among tribes as to be one of the most convenient modes for

their pictorial distinction. The war paint, red in some tribes, was

black in others; the mystic rites of the calumet were in many regions

unknown, and the use of wampum was by no means extensive. The wigwam

is not the type of native dwellings, which show as many differing

forms as those of Europe. In color there is great variety, and even

admitting that the term "race" is properly applied, no competent

observer would characterize it as red, still less copper-colored. Some

tribes differ from each other in all respects nearly as much as either

of them do from the lazzaroni of Naples, and more than either do

from certain tribes of Australia. It would therefore be expected,

as appears to be the case, that the conventional signs of different

stocks and regions differ as do the words of English, French, and

German, which, nevertheless, have sprung from the same linguistic

roots. No one of those languages is a dialect of any of the others;

and although the sign systems of the several tribes have greater

generic unity with less specific variety than oral languages, no one

of them is necessarily the dialect of any other.

 

Instead, therefore, of admitting, with present knowledge, that the

signs of our Indians are "identical" and "universal," it is the more

accurate statement that the systematic attempt to convey meaning by

signs is universal among the Indians of the Plains, and those still

comparatively unchanged by civilization. Its successful execution is

by an _art_, which, however it may have commenced as an instinctive

mental process, has been cultivated, and consists in actually pointing

out objects in sight not only for designation, but for application and

predication, and in suggesting others to the mind by action and the

airy forms produced by action. To insist that sign language is uniform

were to assert that it is perfect--"That faultless monster that the

world ne'er saw."

 

 

FORCED AND MISTAKEN SIGNS.

 

Examination into the identity of signs is complicated by the fact that

in the collection and description of Indian signs there is danger lest

the civilized understanding of them may be mistaken or forced. The

liability to those errors is much increased when the collections

are not taken directly from the Indians themselves, but are given

as obtained at second-hand from white traders, trappers, and

interpreters, who, through misconception in the beginning and their

own introduction or modification of gestures, have produced a jargon

in the sign, as well as in the oral intercourse. An Indian talking in

signs, either to a white man or to another Indian using signs which he

never saw before, catches the meaning of that which is presented and

adapts himself to it, at least for the occasion. Even when he finds

that his interlocutor insists upon understanding and presenting a

certain sign in a manner and with a significance widely different from

those to which he has been accustomed, it is within the very nature,

tentative and elastic, of the gesture art--both performers being on an

equality--that he should adopt the one that seems to be recognized

or that is pressed upon him, as with much greater difficulty he

has learned and adopted many foreign terms used with whites before

attempting to acquire their language, but never with his own race.

Thus there is now, and perhaps always has been, what may be called a

_lingua-franca_, in the sign vocabulary. It is well known that all the

tribes of the Plains having learned by experience that white visitors

expect to receive certain signs really originating with the latter,

use them in their intercourse just as they sometimes do the words

"squaw" and "papoose," corruptions of the Algonkian, and once as

meaningless in the present West as the English terms "woman" and

"child," but which the first pioneers, having learned them on the

Atlantic coast, insisted upon treating as generally intelligible.

 

The perversity in attaching through preconceived views a wrong

significance to signs is illustrated by an anecdote found in several

versions and in several languages, but repeated as a veritable Scotch

legend by Duncan Anderson, esq., Principal of the Glasgow Institution

for the Deaf and Dumb, when he visited Washington in 1853.

 

King James I. of England, desiring to play a trick upon the Spanish

ambassador, a man of great erudition, but who had a crotchet in his

head upon sign language, informed him that there was a distinguished

professor of that science in the university at Aberdeen. The

ambassador set out for that place, preceded by a letter from the King

with instructions to make the best of him. There was in the town

one Geordy, a butcher, blind of one eye, a fellow of much wit and

drollery. Geordy is told to play the part of a professor, with the

warning not to speak a word; is gowned, wigged, and placed in a chair

of state, when the ambassador is shown in and they are left alone

together. Presently the nobleman came out greatly pleased with the

experiment, claiming that his theory was demonstrated. He said: "When

I entered the room I raised one finger to signify there is one God. He

replied by raising two fingers to signify that this Being rules

over two worlds, the material and the spiritual. Then I raised three

fingers, to say there are three persons in the Godhead. He then

closed his fingers, evidently to say these three are one." After this

explanation on the part of the nobleman the professors sent for the

butcher and asked him what took place in the recitation room. He

appeared very angry and said: "When the crazy man entered the room

where I was he raised one finger, as much as to say I had but one eye,

and I raised two fingers to signify that I could see out of my one eye

as well as he could out of both of his. When he raised three fingers,

as much as to say there were but three eyes between us, I doubled up

my fist, and if he had not gone out of that room in a hurry I would have knocked him down."