The Red Record

[shkaakwus]

Ed:

No point continuing this exchange.  You've presented your case, but none of it makes sense, to me, so it's best we agree to disagree.  After reading the views presented, I sincerely hope the powers that be, here, will transfer this thread to Frauds--in accordance with the current weight of scholarly opinion on this subject. 

[E.P. Grondine]

Ed:

No point continuing this exchange.  You've presented your case,

No, I haven't really presented my case yet. I've just told you what's coming.

but none of it makes sense, to me,

Don't feel all alone. I'm used to people not understanding what I tell them.

For example, I passed on traditions of the Holocene Start Impacts in "Man and Impact in the Americas", and for a long time people could not accept the traditions I passed on. Often they were simply dismissed a myths or nonsense.

Among those traditions I passed on were Lenape traditions from the Walam Olum, so I have a particular interest in this. IF OESTREICHER CAN CONVINCE ME THAT RAFINESQUE MADE THEM ALL UP, THEN THEY"LL BE REMOVED.

ITS SIMPLY THAT HE HAS NOT DONE THAT YET.

so it's best we agree to disagree.  After reading the views presented, I sincerely hope the powers that be, here, will transfer this thread to Frauds--in accordance with the current weight of scholarly opinion on this subject. 

While its true we disagree, I would ask that they don't close this one off yet. "You're wrong, everyone agrees with me, I win, game over." - I don't think so.

Oestreicher has offered no explanation of how Rafinesque dreamed up the stockades at Cahokia, Angel Mounds, and elsewhere, some 130 years before they were discovered by excavation. I just managed to locate  my briefcase with my copies from Anderson, Indiana, and I plan to check through them in the morning when I have good light, and post some hard citations here for you.

Personally I find it irritating that I can't remember the old Lenape word for medewiwin.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[wolfhawaii]

Ed:

No point continuing this exchange.  You've presented your case, but none of it makes sense, to me, so it's best we agree to disagree.  After reading the views presented, I sincerely hope the powers that be, here, will transfer this thread to Frauds--in accordance with the current weight of scholarly opinion on this subject. 

Scholarly opinion has a tendency to drift over time; at one time it was thought by scholars that nonwhites were subhuman and the earth was flat. There is a long history of academics who have hidden or destroyed archeological evidence that did not support their pet theories. Is the Walum Olum real? I don't know. But I do not see a need to move this topic to Frauds....let the discussion continue among those who can add something.

[educatedindian]

Since there's still a lot more to be discussed on this, it should be kept under Research. I don't think scholarly opinion is unanimous at all. Ostreicher gets pretty close to hysterical and unbalanced sometimes in his denunciations. His target is not so much the WO as it is any claim that oral tradition can be relied on, or even listened to at all. That, plus that the WO contradicts the BS Theory.

A few years ago I asked Bee Neidlinger, a Munsee woman and oldtime AIMster who runs the yahoo group Ancient Native Heritage. She thinks the WO is just one more different account, but it contradicts some of what she knows from Munsee traditions. There were old written records, but they were carved in trees themselves, not detached pieces of bark.

[shkaakwus]

wolfhawaii writes:

"Scholarly opinion has a tendency to drift over time; at one time it was thought by scholars that nonwhites were subhuman and the earth was flat. There is a long history of academics who have hidden or destroyed archeological evidence that did not support their pet theories. Is the Walum Olum real? I don't know. But I do not see a need to move this topic to Frauds....let the discussion continue among those who can add something."

Please name those scholars, in the list of those who've commented on Oestreicher's work, who believe non-whites are subhuman, and those who believe the Earth is flat, and those who have hidden or destroyed archaeological evidence that did not support their pet theories.  If you can't, you're point is irrelevant to this discussion.  "At one time" is a phrase that can be employed to dredge up the insupportable beliefs of any people, at a particular time in their history. This argument is a red herring.

[shkaakwus]

E.P. Grondine writes:

"Oestreicher has offered no explanation of how Rafinesque dreamed up the stockades at Cahokia, Angel Mounds, and elsewhere, some 130 years before they were discovered by excavation."

Huh?  I can't find any mention of stockades, Cahokia or Angel Mounds in my copies of the Walam Olum.  Please cite the reference.

[bullhead]

Shkaakwus your right the WO is a fraud.
I would like to point to one bit of evidence,it comes from a book "RED EARTH WHITE LIES " by vine Deloria,jr. pages 72,73.what i am refering to is a doctor Thomas Lee [an anthropologist] of canada.preliminary evidence indicated the site might be between 30,000 and 100,000 years old.
The evidence not only conflicted with accepted doctrine,it would have made it necessary to revise estimates of the stages of North American glaciation.The scientific establishment went after Lee.He lost his position at the museum and some of his papers on the discovery were lost.

[shkaakwus]

educatedindian writes:

"Since there's still a lot more to be discussed on this, it should be kept under Research. I don't think scholarly opinion is unanimous at all."

Where can one read the opinions of scholars who support the authenticity of the Walam Olum, now that Oestreicher has published his findings?  
 

"Ostreicher gets pretty close to hysterical and unbalanced sometimes in his denunciations."

Can you give an example?


"His target is not so much the WO as it is any claim that oral tradition can be relied on, or even listened to at all."

This is simply not true.  Oestreicher has worked with numerous Lenape traditionalists, and has recorded some of their traditional stories and cultural knowledge, himself.  He has a great regard for the people and their traditional knowledge.  The Walam Olum is not a part of Lenape oral tradition, although, as I said, before, Rafinesque did incorporate some genuine bits of the oral tradition, which he lifted from Heckewelder.  Whether or not the Lenape migration stories of the late 18th-century are folklore or history is a matter of opinion.  Whatever opinion he holds on this has no bearing on whether or not the Walam Olum is authentic.


"That, plus that the WO contradicts the BS Theory."

Where?  Rafinesque used it as a proof of his out-of-Asia theory!  In truth, these stunted, cryptic sentences of the Walam Olum can be seen to "prove" any migration theory you like, depending on how you choose to interpret them!
 
 

[shkaakwus]

Shkaakwus your right the WO is a fraud.
I would like to point to one bit of evidence,it comes from a book "RED EARTH WHITE LIES " by vine Deloria,jr. pages 72,73.what i am refering to is a doctor Thomas Lee [an anthropologist] of canada.preliminary evidence indicated the site might be between 30,000 and 100,000 years old.
The evidence not only conflicted with accepted doctrine,it would have made it necessary to revise estimates of the stages of North American glaciation.The scientific establishment went after Lee.He lost his position at the museum and some of his papers on the discovery were lost.

I guess this first sentence is either a mistake or sarcasm, since it doesn't jive with the rest of your post, which seems to be supporting the post of wolfhawaii.  How do you know Dr. Thomas Lee's "evidence" was correct?  Vine Deloria, Jr. was a very astute social commentator and I agree with a lot of what he had to say, such as his support for the 1/4 Indian BQ as a standard for recognition.  A paleontologist he was not.  He believed Indians hunted dinosaurs, which may caution us on equating oral traditions with history!  But, again, this is drawing us far afield from the subject of this thread.

[bullhead]

Nope it was not a mistake shkaakwus ,it is not sarcasm.I meant what I said
I knew a lenape man here in my area didn`t know him well but knew him well enough and just as important I knew his reputation as a highly respected lenape man .he had commented on the WO and said it wasn`t accurate.
the way I took wolfhawaii post was that he was making a general statement.

I don`t know that Dr. Lees evidence "was correct" but when some of his papers come up missing ,he gets fired,and if you would or could read further down pg 73 ,you would find out that he was black balled for 8 years he couldn`t get a job.he was attacked from both sides of the border.
in my mind he was on to something,more importantly he scared the shit out of them.so they put him in his place.
I am gratefull for all of your research that you have posted here.

[shkaakwus]

bullhead:

Thanks for clarifying that!

[E.P. Grondine]

I'm sitting here with very little sleep, stroke damage, and a very very nasty chest cold, but I have real problems with Oestreicher's analysis. Let me start by noting Oestreicher's biases, and the uses to which they are being put today.

For someone so good with Algonquin, Oestreicher confusingly reads Tallege/wi (in Lenape), the Tchiliga/tha/we, the Talega/tha/wi Shawnee division, as being the (Ani) Tsulagi (Cherokee), and further he dismisses Trowbridge's report that the Shawnee claimed to have built the mounds on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all. (NJAS article, pg 37, footnote 27.) 

While I can accept Oestreicher's assertions that the Lenape attacked the Cherokee with firearms during the contact period, and that they used "Tallega" variants to speak of the Cherokee (ani tuslagi) I don't think that the Cherokee were the people referred to in the Heckewelder fragment of the Lenape oral tradition of their migration, nor by Rafinesque.

The astronomical traditions of the Shawnee (The Principle Narrative) align well with the structures in Ohio. As this has significant consequences today, I simply can not let Oestreicher's work go uncommented.

Further, speaking to the same footnote, while its true that the Shawnee were Algonquin speakers, they far preceded the Lenape in central North America; the archaeological continuity through to contact era Shawnee villages of the "Fort Ancient" cultures is well known, a fact which Oestreicher is either unaware of, or ignores.

By comparison, a minor question is Oestreicher's assertion that the Lenape Chief's name "Wapushuwi", "White Lynx",  incorporates the Swedish morpheme "poes", as "piasi" variants for "cat" exist in other algonquin languages. While I have little knowledge of how ellision works in Lenape, why does "Wapushuwi" have to incorporate a Swedish morpheme, and the Chief be "historical"? That's one of the things which lead me to question Oestreicher's contact era identifications from Heckewelder's personal name list, which he did not evidence in the article; perhaps he did in his thesis.

Now as to the pictographs. Oestreicher notes Rafineque's claim in his 1834 Prix Volney essay that "pictographic records among the Delaware, a phenomenon common to other North American tribes, "can cite occurrences as far back as 300 years"'. While Oestreicher notes Rafinesques' claim in 1834 that he had Lenape pictographic records, he then goes on to ignore it.

Where could these records have come from? My guess is from Chief Anderson who could not be "mede",  (as recorded by English speakers; I was wrong in remembering what the Lenape called their Mediwiwin) via Dr. Ward (Cook) of Virginia, an early resident of Pendleton, Indiana, who most likely acquired his land there in 1820. (The land records were destroyed by a fire in the 1880's). As a botanist/pharmacist Rafinesque may have had contact with Dr. Ward (as he was usually known) in Lexington on his trip from Virginia to Indiana to acquire his land.

The tough part for me in all of this is that while I can agree with some of Oestreicher's conclusions about Rafinesque's linguistic methods, there are other points that stick. Why Rafinesque used "Towako" to refer to Twakanhah (Cahokia), when he could have come up with another spelling if he was working from Cusick's "Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations", is beyond me. If Rafinesque got that spelling from Heckewelder's list of toponyms, then one has to wonder where Heckewelder got that list of place names from... a transcript of the Walam Olum? If so, where did Heckewelder get it?

Given the detailed information in the Heckewelder fragment, it's also strange that Rafinesque did not include more of it in the Walam Olum, while at the same time he has other details confirmed by hard evidence that do not appear to have come from Heckewelder.

My goal in "Man and Impact in the Americas" was to get to the best preserved versions of the traditions where they survived. I tried my best to keep my comments separate from what was passed on, and succeeded except at the end when my stroke interrupted me in the use of italics and indentation.

That the Lenape had medewiwin and that they held a migration tradition using mnemonic aides is inescapable for me.

The fundamental question is whether Rafinesque was working from a transcription of this, or whether he attempted a reconstruction of it using other materials. For me that question is still open.

Finally, whichever it was, if Rafinesque managed to put an end to a lot of European nonsense with his work, then do we not have to give him some respect for this reason alone, little less the other good works he did in his life?

In closing, I ask that this topic be left in "Research Needed".

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[E.P. Grondine]

A further note on Oestreicher's biases:

"... I supposed that the Delaware had taken the names of historical chieftains and
superimposed them into an epic of a bygone era. Numerous examples of this phenomenon exist in oral traditions. A narrative told by the late Delaware elder Martha Ellis, for example, casts Tecumseh and Henry Hudson as contemporaries"

Oestreicher clearly does not differentiate between oral history remembered by an individual, and traditions held by a team of selected and well trained especially talented individuals using mnemonmic aids such as wampum or pictographs.

Aiee! If these ethnographers had of done their job better, it would have made my task much easier. I could have simply used the fragments of the medewak's tradition of the Lenape migration as preserved by Heckewelder and Sutton.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[E.P. Grondine]

And another catch: NJAS article, page 31: Oestreicher attributes Sutton's report  of the medewak migration tradition to Beatty, while Beatty clearly stated that he got it from Sutton.

This is followed by the assertion that the tradition refers to Delaware migrations during the Beaver Wars.

And another: NJAS article, page 25: Heckewelder and Zeisberger both reported that the Lenape held deluge traditions

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[E.P. Grondine]

As Oestreicher points out, Rafinesque was pretty bizarre by modern standards, and most modern scholars worked with Brinton's translation, and that's what I did as well.

The major problems that I have with Oestreicher's analysis concern:

1) the Lenape mede/wak - whose existence and operation are well documented.

2) the Lenape migration, and Oestreicher's interpretation of it - I suppose I'll have to make this as easy as possible for you, and to give others a warning as well:

For a discussion of the appearance in eastern Wisconsin of Oneota culture, see Victoria Durst, The People of the Dunes, Whitefish Dunes State Park, 1993, p. 46-63. For a discussion of the appearance of Oneota culture at Redwing, see Clark A. Dobbs, Red Wing Archaeological Preserve, Goodhue-Pierce Archaeological Society Planning Committee, Institute for Minnesota Archaeology, Minneapolis, 1990, p. 7. For a discussion of the western Oneota culture appearance and distribution, see James L. Theler and Robert F. Boszhardt, Twelve Millenia, Archaeology of the Upper Mississippi River Valley, pages 152-155, particularly abandonment of effigy mounds, p. 155. In their book on The Gottschall Rockshelter, Robert J. Salzer and Grace Rajnovich cite cannibalism at Aztalan, citing Fred A, Finney and James B. Stohlman, The Fred Edwards Site, New Perspectives on Cahokia, Prehistory Press, Madison. One problem assigning this here to a climate collapse is Oneota occupancy at Aztalan, following on the Stirling phase occupancy at the site. For carbon dates at this site: Lynne Goldstine, Joan Freeman, Aztalan State Park, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, 1995 for group burials and stockade history.

For radio carbon dates for the stockade and later fall of Cahokia, see the literature. For the radio carbon dates for Angel Mounds, see the literature. For "Middle Fort Ancient" sites in this area, see the literature - but note that "Middle Fort Ancient" attacker and defender sites are seldom clearly delineated. In this regard note especially the Ana Lynn site on the Blue River in Indiana, rc 1170-1270 CE, for evidence of the Lenape flanking move around Cahokia ("Twakanhah" in Iroquois, "Towako" in the Walum Olum) and their recent defeat of a Mississippian people on the Ohio River.

For the east central areas of North America, the "Wellsburg" complex appears to be equivalent to Oneota. It goes by a yet another different name further east in far Western Maryland and central Pennsylvania...

Aside from the archaeological sequence given above, you have the Missasagua, Assinapi (Anishinaabe?), Mengwe (apparently Siouxian Monacans in this case), Towakon (Twakanhah, Cahokia), Tallegewi (Tchilagathawi), Talmatan ("Neutrals"), etc. all showing up exactly where they were in the WO. How could Rafinesque have guessed all of them correctly? Heckewelder didn't mention them.

Another really stunning coincidence for me is the burning of the stockades described in the WO, and if CSR dreamed this up 150 years before the stockades at Cahokia and Angel Mounds were excavated, then one would have to admit he had an unbelievably great creative talent.

3) the Lenape deluge tradition - whose existence is independently attested to by Heckewelder and Zeisberger.