While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Walam Olum. The sacred tribal chronicle of the
Lenape or Delawares. The name signifies 'painted tally' or 'red score,'
from walam, 'painted,' particularly 'red painted,' and olum,' a score or
tally.' The Walam Olum was first published in 1836 in a work entitled "The
American Nations," by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, an erratic French
scholar, who spent a number of years in this country, dying in
Philadelphia in 1840. He asserted that it was a translation of a
manuscript in the Delaware language, which was an interpretation of an
ancient sacred metrical legend of the tribe, recorded in pictographs cut
upon wood, which had been obtained in 1820 by a Dr Ward from the Delawares
then living in Indiana. He claimed that the original pictograph record had
first been obtained, but without explanation, until two years later, when
the accompanying songs were procured in the Lenape language from another
individual, these being then translated by himself with the aid of various
dictionaries. Although considerable doubt was cast at the time upon the
alleged Indian record, Brinton, after a critical investigation, arrived at
the conclusion that it was a genuine native production, and it is now
known that similar ritual records upon wood or birchbark are common to
several cognate tribes, notably the Chippewa.
After the death of Rafinesque his manuscripts were
scattered, those of the Walam Olum finally coming into the hands of
Squier, who again brought the legend to public attention in a paper read
before the New York Historical Society in 1848, which was published in the
American Review of Feb. 1849, reprinted by Beach in his Indian Miscellany
in 1877, and again in a later (15th) edition of Drake's Aboriginal Races
of North America. All of these reprints were more or less inaccurate and
incomplete, and it remained for Brinton to publish the complete
pictography, text, and tradition, with notes and critical investigation of
the whole subject, with the aid of native Lenape scholars, in " The Lenâpé
and their Legends, with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum,"
as No. 5 of his library of Aboriginal American Literature, Phila., 1885.
After sifting the evidence as to its authenticity,
Brinton concludes (p. 158): "It is a genuine native production, which was
repeated orally to some one indifferently conversant with the Delaware
language, who wrote it down to the best of his ability. In its present
form. it can, as a whole, lay no claim either to antiquity or to purity of
linguistic form. Yet, as an authentic modern version, slightly colored by
European teachings, of the ancient tribal traditions, it is well worth
preservation and will repay more study in the future than is given it in
this volume. The narrator was probably one of the native chiefs or
priests, who had spent his life in the Ohio and Indiana towns of the
Lenape, and who, though with some knowledge of Christian instruction,
preferred the pagan rites, legends, and myths of his ancestors. Probably
certain lines and passages were repeated in the archaic form in which they
had been handed down for generations."
