The Red Record

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Shkaakwas -

http://forum.americanindiantribe.com/viewtopic.php?t=285

Thank you for the URL. I will examine it

Its true what you state about my level of knowledge of Lenape, but that cognate failure would be strange, given Illini "piasse" and Shawnee "piasse". If the Lenape borrowed the word, it may have been from the Shawnee rather than the Swedes.
 
It's called a coincidence.  BTW, Oestreicher says it's a borrowing from Dutch in his dissertation, as is universally agreed by linguists.  You have to know how Proto-Algonquian words changed pronunciation in each of its daughter languages (Lenape, Shawnee, Ojibway, Mahican, etc., etc.), to understand why "pu:shi:s" ('cat') cannot have originated in Proto-Algonquian, *peshiwa ('lynx').)

Yeah, well, speaking of coincidences I read Cyrus Gordon's work many years ago in which "proved" Linear A recorded a semitic language, and its now known to record Luwian. As Oestreicher consulted with Gordon, I still have my doubts.

And once again, perhaps you may wish to research the North American jaguar, which used to prey along the Ohio River.

Moving on, the remains of the stockades are there, and well dated.
 
'WHERE?  They're not mentioned in the Walam Olum!'

In the field, in the real world.
 
Yes.  But not in the Walam Olum!

That depends on whether or not Lenape Medewak used Walam Olum proper to preserve the tradition given to Heckewelder, now doesn't it?
 
'First:  Heckewelder's account is NOT the Walam Olum--which is the only thing under consideration as a fraud, in this thread!

The only thing under consideration is whether to leave this in Research Needed.
I think Research is Needed, for the reasons I've set out. I am not satisfied with Oestreicher's analysis yet, and have real problems with his "reconstructed" history of the first peoples.

Second:  Heckewelder NEVER said he got this account from "medewak." That's your own guesswork!'

Excuse me, but I said I did not know. If Lenape practices mirrored other peoples, then the historical tradition may have been publicly recited once a year, so anyone may have been Heckewelder's informant. In this regard, I seem to recall records of the Big House ceremonies are under dispute as well.

Therein lies the problem. Oestreicher's assertions concerning Rafinesque are one thing, but his assertions about Lenape medewak and mnemonic aids are another, as is his reconstruction of the peoples' history.
 
Where can I read these "assertions" about metewak and mnemonic aids? Please don't tell me I have to come to Anderson to see them!    

In your case that would be best.

Certainly if Oestreicher's thesis is available via Print on Demand, then an electronic file of it could be provided to me, or some generous person (or perhaps even Oestriecher himself or one of his close associates) could gift me with a copy of it.

I actually had to travel to Lexington to get a copy of the NJAS article.

I highly recommend the root beer place on the old bypass when you visit.

"Whether Heckewelder received his account directly from them, or from those who they had related the tradition to, is something that I do not know."

I highlighted it this time, since you missed it the first time around.

Not only do we not know that, we don't even know that any of his account ever originated with metewak.

"mede/wak", not "mete/wak"
 
I gave other European accounts of Lenape medewak over at the wikipedia discussion. Oestreicher's failure to track the location of them and the Big House [Council House] is frustrating to me.
 
Why on Earth is it incumbent on Oestreicher to do your research for you? That wasn't what he was researching!

I am not satisfied with Oestriecher's analysis yet, for the reasons I've stated.

This thread is NOT about Heckewelder's account.  It's about the Walam Olum.

Again, I suppose that depends on whether you think "Walam Olum" actually existed, or whether they were entirely Rafinesque's creation.

Let me see if I can get to my bottom line here. Given Oestreicher's biases against Medewak, oral tradition, and mnemonic aids, and his reconstruction of Native American history, I can not accept his work entire yet.
 
You're attributing "biases" to Oestreicher which you have absolutely no idea he holds!

I written messages here for several days pointing out my problems with accepting Oestreicher's analysis, and I've stated the reasons underlying my reluctance.

At a minimum, I think that Oestreicher may have missed one of Rafinesque's sources, perhaps Rafinesque's inspiration. There are still the coincidences in time, toponyms, and ethnonyms, too many of them for me to accept Oestreicher's analysis entire yet.
 
You can keep saying this, but nobody but you can see them, unless they accept your very flawed interpretation of what the Walam Olum is saying.

As you yourself can see from the posts of others here, you're making assertions about their thoughts that are wrong.

I ask that this remain in Research Needed, for the reasons stated.
 
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[shkaakwus]

This is turning into a joke.  Sorry, Al.  I brought my expertise to this subject in an effort to help folks identify one of the great hoaxes of all time, but, I guess it's falling on deaf ears.  E. P. Grondine offers nothing but wild speculation and guesswork, in support of his pet theories concerning the movement of people across North America in pre-contact times.  And, these speculative vaporings are given the same consideration as the facts I've provided.  I wash my hands of the matter.  People can judge for themselves.  I highly recommend David Oestreicher's Ph.D. dissertation, The Anatomy of the Walam Olum:  The Dissection of a 19th-Century Anthropological Hoax, for a complete understanding of this fraud.  Put this thread wherever you like.

[E.P. Grondine]

This is turning into a joke.  Sorry, Al.  I brought my expertise to this subject in an effort to help folks identify one of the great hoaxes of all time, but, I guess it's falling on deaf ears.  E. P. Grondine offers nothing but wild speculation and guesswork, in support of his pet theories concerning the movement of people across North America in pre-contact times.  And, these speculative vaporings are given the same consideration as the facts I've provided.  I wash my hands of the matter.  People can judge for themselves.  I highly recommend David Oestreicher's Ph.D. dissertation, The Anatomy of the Walam Olum:  The Dissection of a 19th-Century Anthropological Hoax, for a complete understanding of this fraud.  Put this thread wherever you like.

Hi Shkaakwas -

We can hear you, Shkaakwas. But do you listen to others?

People can always judge for themselves. I am sure that educated indian and his colleagues welcome your permission for them to put this thread where they think it belongs. It is proper for you to recognize their right to do so.

Speaking of your allegations of wild speculation, speculative vaporing, pet theories, and guesswork: well, facts are facts.

I wrote much earlier about my opinion of Rafinesque's work and techniques in my note "Reconstructing Rafinesque", long before you started your strident demands that this thread be moved to Frauds.

As far as my opinion of Oestreicher's work and techniques goes, some thoughts came to me last night and were with me when I woke about 3:30 in the middle of the night, and they are proper to share.

Oestreicher and Kraft would have us believe that the Lenape came south so early that they forgot their own word for "cat", and then had to borrow a similar word from the Swedes. Their morphology of this will bear examining...

If we accept Oestreicher's reconstructed history of the Tallege/we as the Cherokee (ani tsulagi), we are left with the problem of how an ENTIRE SIOUXIAN SPEAKING PEOPLE, the MONACAN, ended up living in the eastern piedmont of Virginia at the time of European contact.

If however we identify the Lenape Tallege/we with the Shawnee Tchiliga/tha (modern pronunciation "Talega") division, and accept the rock hard FACTS of the archaeological record of the Lenape migration (rock hard facts, not speculation nor vapor) which I set out here, then we have a perfect explanation for how this entire Siouxian people, the Monocan, ended up living in the piedmont: they were the Mengwe spoken of in Heckewelder's fragment. In other words, the account preserved in Heckewelder's fragment, the archaeological record, and the European historical record all lock together.

Finally, the lack of respect for the Lenape mede/wak, their Council House, and oral tradition in Oestreicher's work as it now sits is simply unacceptable to me. I don't know how you others feel about it, but I am not entirely satisfied with Oestreicher's work as it now sits for the reasons I have stated, and I ask that this remain in Research Needed.

(Shkaakwas, this means you as well as me: research is needed. I hope you will understand why my research is likely to take me in the direction of locating the Lenape mede/wak through the conquest period, and trying to retrieve other fragments of their traditions from Heckewelder, rather than in other directions. I  hope you will also understand why I am much more interested in Shawnee language and the Principal Narrative than in Lenape traditions.)

Finally, while most of Rafinesque's Kentucky neighbors were busy killing Native Americans and stealing their lands, and trying their best to remove all memory of them by destroying their remains, Rafinesque treated them honorably and tried his best to understand them and preserve their memory, and stood alone for many years while doing so, and we should remember this about him as well, alongside his faults.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[NanticokePiney]

 Hi Ed! Rich here, I have some questions:

 1.Where is the paleontological evidence that jaguars roamed as far as the Ohio valley?
 2. Where is the Archaeological evidence that Cahokia was burnt. All evidence points that Cahokia failed due to over-extending it's resources.
 3. The Eastern Proto-Siouian people lived from Pennsyvania ( Shenks Ferry Culture) to the Carolinas ( Pee Dee, Santee, etc.) Archaeological research points to them existing in the East since the Middle Archaic Period. That and linguistic evidence also points to a East-West migration for the Western Siouian. The Proto-Algonquians did not start moving in, in small groups, until the Terminal Archaic/ Early Woodland Periods. So how were the Monacan "driven to the East" and how are they "isolate"? 

[shkaakwus]

I've tried a dozen times to post my reply, here, but everytime I hit "post," I get this message:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /smf/index.php on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apache/1.3.41 Server at newagefraud.org Port 80


And, yet, it allows me to post this!!!  

[bullhead]

Mr Grondine
the Mengwe are the Nottaway People{ Iroquoian speaking people.

[bullhead]

Mr, Grondine
in your reply # 22 you state there were NO MOUND BUILDERS.
how do you explain the effigy mounds,in Iowa ,bear mounds,bird mounds,also other types of mounds.
wisconsin there were bird ,turtle,some type of big cat mound.and other
mounds
ohio there were 2 large serpant mounds,bear mound,bird,lizzard or alligator mounds.
i could bring up the mounds in Manitoba, North dakota, Indiana,Missouri,Minnesota,Kentucky,etc.there were 1000s and 1000s  of mounds.

[NanticokePiney]

Mr Grondine
the Mengwe are the Nottaway People{ Iroquoian speaking people.

 Mengwe was the Lenape term for the Iroquois but it was mainly applied to the Seneca and Mohawk. According to some scholars it signified the fact that they didn't circumcise.

[bullhead]

Thanks for the correction Nanticokepiney the one source i have listed them as Iroquoian,and the other J.R.Swanton list`s them as Nottaway people

[wolfhawaii]

A bit off thread, but it goes to what I said in an earlier post about how "science" sometimes tries to ignore certain things that tends to weaken pet theories. Not having read the scientific criticism of the Walum Olum, I am not prepared to defend the WO as legitimate but I am interested in the discussion.



http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ghi/fachap.html

It reads in part:

In the 1960s, anthropologists uncovered advanced stone tools at Hueyatlaco, Mexico. Geologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and other members of a U.S. Geological Survey team obtained an age of about 250,000 years for the sites implement-bearing layers. This challenged not only standard views of New World anthropology but also the whole standard picture of human origins. Humans capable of making the kind of tools found at Hueyatlaco are not thought to have come into existence until around 100,000 years ago in Africa.

Virginia Steen-McIntyre experienced difficulty in getting her dating study on Hueyatlaco published. "The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco," she wrote to Estella Leopold, associate editor of Quaternary Research. "It concerns the manipulation of scientific thought through the suppression of 'Enigmatic Data,' data that challenges the prevailing mode of thinking. Hueyatlaco certainly does that! Not being an anthropologist, I didn't realize the full significance of our dates back in 1973, nor how deeply woven into our thought the current theory of human evolution has become. Our work at Hueyatlaco has been rejected by most archaeologists because it contradicts that theory, period."

[shkaakwus]

wolfhawaii writes:

"A bit off thread, but it goes to what I said in an earlier post about how "science" sometimes tries to ignore certain things that tends to weaken pet theories."

What this article ignores is that the lead archaeologist, and discoverer of this site, Cynthia Irwin-Williams, criticized the dating methods used, and asked these geologists to emphasize, in their report, that an age of 250,000 years is essentially impossible!  They failed to heed her advice.  (Not that any of this has anything to do with the Walam Olum, but since I can't post my replies on that, I thought I'd attempt this one.)

[bullhead]

Shkaakwus I can`t imagine your post on { W O } being delibrately blocked.I hope you will try to post it again.if you can`t get it posted maybe you could send it to some one who could try and post it for you.and see what happens.

[shkaakwus]

No.  It's not being done deliberately.  It's some kind of technical snafu.  I might try typing the whole thing (it's not too long), here, instead of doing a copy and paste of what I've written.  We'll see.

[E.P. Grondine]

Mr Grondine the Mengwe are the Nottaway People{ Iroquoian speaking people.

Hi bullhead -

As I have been told, "mengwe" is the general Lenape term for non-Lenape people.

In Brinton's translation of the Walam Olum, the Nanticokes are mentioned as the Lenape move up the Ohio River, but as Shkaakwas points out, the whole of it is questionable.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[shkaakwus]

"Mengwe" was a Lenape name for Iroquois people.  It was never applied to any other people.  (See Heckewelder, Indian Nations, pages xxiv and xlii; and, Brinton & Anthony, A Lenape-English Dictionary, p.81.)