The American Race. Brinton Daniel Garrison
phenomena by the analogy with ordinary changes of the seasons and the day. In constant connection with them, and also with the rites of religion and medicine, with the social institutions and the calendar, with the plans of edifices and the arrangement of gens and phratries, in fact, with all the apparatus of life, was a respect for the sacred number. It is strange how constantly this presents itself throughout American life, and is, in fact, the key to many of its forms. The sacred number is Four, and its origin is from the four cardinal points. These were the guides to the native in his wanderings, and, as identified with the winds, were the deities who brought about the change of the seasons and the phenomena of the weather. They were represented by the symbols of the cross, whose four arms we see portrayed on the altar tablet of Palenque, on the robes of the Mexican priests, in the hieroglyphs of the Algonkins, and in countless other connections.
A rich symbolism rapidly developed in all the sedentary tribes, and very much along the same lines. The bird, the serpent, the sacred stone, the tree of life, water as a purifier, the perpetual fire, all these are members of a religious symbolism, clear signs of which recur in all segments of the continent. The chants and dances, the ritual of the medicine men, the functions of esoteric orders and secret societies, present a resemblance greater than that which can be explained by a mere similarity in the stage of culture. I explain it by the ethnic and psychical unity of the race, and its perpetual freedom from any foreign influence.
The mortuary rites indicated a belief in the continued existence of the individual after apparent death. These were by incineration, by inhumation, by exposure, or by mummification. Articles were placed with the deceased for use in his future state, and the ceremonies of mourning were frequently severe and protracted. A sacredness was generally attached to the bones and therefore these were carefully preserved. In accordance with a superstition widely felt in the Old World, they were supposed to harbor some share of the departed spirit. The conception of the after life is wholly material. The Zapotec, for instance, believes that he will return to his familiar haunts after a few hundred years, and buries all the money he makes that he may then live at his ease. Von Gagern estimates the amount of silver thus secreted and lost within the last century at a hundred million dollars.61
The ceremonies of religion, which included that of the treatment of disease, inasmuch as a demonic cause was always assigned to illness, were in the hands of a particular class, known to the whites as “medicine men,” or shamans, or sorcerers. Sometimes the right of belonging to this order was hereditary in a gens, but generally peculiar aptitude for the business was the only requirement. Many of them were skilled in legerdemain, and even to-day some of their tricks puzzle the acutest white observers. As doctors, augurs, rain-makers, spell-binders, leaders of secret societies, and depositaries of the tribal traditions and wisdom, their influence was generally powerful. Of course it was adverse to the Europeans, especially the missionaries, and also of course it was generally directed to their own interest or that of their class; but this is equally true of priestly power wherever it gains the ascendency, and the injurious effect of the Indian shamans on their nations was not greater than has been in many instances that of the Christian priesthood on European communities.
The psychic identity of the Americans is well illustrated in their languages. There are indeed indefinite discrepancies in their lexicography and in their surface morphology; but in their logical substructure, in what Wilhelm von Humboldt called the “inner form,” they are strikingly alike. The points in which this is especially apparent are in the development of pronominal forms, in the abundance of generic particles, in the overweening preference for concepts of action (verbs), rather than concepts of existence (nouns), and in the consequent subordination of the latter to the former in the proposition. This last mentioned trait is the source of that characteristic which is called incorporation. The American languages as a rule are essentially incorporative languages, that is, they formally include both subject and object in the transitive concept, and its oral expression. It has been denied by some able linguists that this is a characteristic trait of American languages; but I have yet to find one, of which we possess ample means of analysis, in which it does not appear in one or another of its forms, thus revealing the same linguistic impulse. Those who reject it as a feature have been led astray either by insufficient means of information about certain languages, or by not clearly comprehending the characteristics of the incorporative process itself.62
As intimated, however, in spite of this underlying sameness, there is wide diversity in the tongues themselves. Where we cannot find sufficient coincidences of words and grammar in two languages to admit of supposing that under the laws of linguistic science they are related, they are classed as independent stocks or families. Of such there are about eighty in North and as many in South America. These stocks offer us, without doubt, our best basis for the ethnic classification of the American tribes; the only basis, indeed, which is of any value. The efforts which have been heretofore made to erect a geographic classification, with reference to certain areas, political or physical; or a craniological one, with reference to skull forms; or a cultural one, with reference to stages of savagery and civilization, have all proved worthless. The linguistic is the only basis on which the subdivision of the race should proceed. Similarity of idioms proves to some extent similarity of descent and similarity of psychic endowments. Of course, there has been large imposition of one language on another in the world’s history; but never without a corresponding infiltration of blood; so that the changes in language remain as evidence of national and race comminglings. I select, therefore, the linguistic classification of the American race as the only one of any scientific value, and, therefore, that which alone merits consideration.
The precise number of linguistic stocks in use in America at the discovery has not been made out. In that portion of the continent north of Mexico the researches of the Bureau of Ethnology of the United States have defined fifty-nine stocks, no less than forty of which were confined to the narrow strip of land between the Rocky mountains and the Pacific ocean.
For convenience of study I shall classify all the stocks into five groups, as follows:—
I. The North Atlantic Group.
II. The North Pacific Group.
III. The Central Group.
IV. The South Pacific Group.
V. The South Atlantic Group.
This arrangement is not one of convenience only; I attach a certain ethnographic importance to this classification. There is a distinct resemblance between the two Atlantic groups, and an equally distinct contrast between them and the Pacific groups, extending to temperament, culture and physical traits. Each of the groups has mingled extensively within its own limits, and but slightly outside of them. Each is subject to conditions of temperature, altitude and humidity, which are peculiar to itself, and which have exerted definite influences on the constitution and the history of its inhabitants. Such a subdivision of the race is therefore justified by anthropologic considerations.
NORTH AMERICAN TRIBES
I. THE NORTH ATLANTIC GROUP
1. THE ESKIMOS
The word Eskimo, properly Eski-mwhan, means in the Abnaki dialect of Algonquin, “he eats raw flesh,” and was applied to the tribe from its custom of consuming fish and game without cooking. They call themselves Innuit, “people,” a term the equivalent of which is the usual expression applied by American natives to their own particular stock.
The Innuit are at present essentially a maritime and arctic nation, occupying the coast and adjacent islands from the Straits of Belle Isle on the Atlantic to Icy Bay, at the foot of Mount St. Elias on the Pacific, and extending their wanderings and settlements as far up Smith’s Sound as N. Lat. 80°, where they are by far the northernmost inhabitants of the earth. They have occupied Greenland for certainly more than a thousand years, and were the earliest settlers in some of the Aleutian islands. Portions of them at some remote period crossed Behring Strait and settled on Asiatic soil, while others established themselves along the shores of Newfoundland. Indeed, from the reports of the early Norse explorers and from the character of relics found on the Atlantic coast, it is probable that they once extended as far south as the mouth
Carlos de Gagern,
I have treated this subject at considerable length in opposition to the opinion of Lucien Adam and Friedrich Müller in my