wisteria and pine trees

I love your new post and it seems to me that there is a lot to think about here. For a start, you've reminded me of conversations we had in Minnesota about the way in which nature recolonises places long after the humans are gone, but - often - a nature changed by the passage of a human population. In the case of Rodney, the agent of nature's recolonisation is an introduced species, wisteria, and in the case of northern Minnesota (including the area round Mallard) it's the secondary growth, which is actually quite different from the primary growth that was there before. (Despite all the forests, Minnesota does not look as it did before the loggers passed through.) So our sense that nature entirely erases the traces of human habitation (and trauma) isn't quite right: if you can read 'nature's book', you can see those traces still in the way nature is changed by the 'passing through' of human populations. When nature reclaims a ghost town, it is itself changed.

I'm aways interested in how language, speech, and voices are connected with experiences of this kind and I think there is a lot of potential for thinking about that here. The plant we call wisteria must have changed its name many times as it passed from Asia into Europe and on into North America. I wonder what wisteria is called in Chinese? And does it appear in Chinese poetry? [...] Actually, I've just tried to answer my last question by doing a quick online search. And this took me to the website of James Cahill, Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at Berkeley. There he has a handout relating to a seminar on 'Poetic Painting in China'. It's a bit hard to interpret - more like a series of notes than a connected text - but it includes this:

Distant Mts. 4: "Scholars Gazing At Waterfall," 1630. Couplet (p. 37): "Pines and rocks are proper to old age; / Wisteria vines do not count the years."

I think there's something rather striking about that couplet, not least in the way it mentions both pines (the flora to be found around Mallard) and wisteria (the plant that is reclaiming Rodney), connecting both with the passing of time. It seems that, in English, the plant is named after a person, although there seems to be some doubt about which person. Having searched online, I've found that a lot of people say it was Caspar Wister (1761-1818), a physician and anatomist from Philadelphia.

As I happens, I've already assembled some material on the naming of plants in Minnesota. While I was kayaking, I was chastened a little by my total inability to recognise or name the plants that surrounded me. So, when we went to the Forest History Center near Grand Rapids, I was excited to see a big board in the exhibition space with the names of lots of the trees that you find in the area. I jotted them down in my notebook and, when I came back to Sheffield, did some research on some that seemed particularly interesting to me. I won't download a lot of information about them now - I'll save it for future postings - but a few that really caught my imagination were:

Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana)
American Basswood (Tilia americana)
Tamarack (Larix laricina)
Northern White Cedar (Thuja occidentalis)

What do you think about collecting a series of 'botanical fragments' relating to the plants that surround our ghost towns? (By 'fragments' I mean fragments of text, of course.) Kayaköy is certainly being recolonised by plant life, all of which presumably has both Greek and Turkish names. Obviously Pompeii wasn't slowly reclaimed by nature - it was buried quickly in volcanic ash. But it occurs to me that the mosaics and paintings of Pompeii include images of plants and I wonder if they are just local ones or if they represent the resources of the empire? Anyway, just a thought - I'll post some more on this later.

the songs

With a bit of luck, you should be able to view the songs by clicking on these links:

Song of the Medicine Lodge
Dance Song
Love Song
Peace Meeting of Ojibways and Dakotas
Gambling Song

ojibwe music #1

Right - in 1904, Gilfillan published a novel called The Ojibway: A Novel of Indian Life of the Period of the Early Advance of Civilization in the Great Northwest. I first looked at it last week and thought it was a bit boring. But then I looked at it again today and it suddenly seemed much more interesting, which shows how much is in the eye of the beholder!

The interest lies in the fact that it constitutes a huge act of ventriloquism by which the missionary gives readers a sense that they are hearing the voices of Native Americans when, of course, all the voices of the book are mediated through the author himself. And the text presents us not only with *speaking* voices but with *singing* voices too in that, scattered throughout the narrative, are five songs:

Song of the Medicine Lodge (p.40)
Dance Song (p.57)
Love Song (p.168)
Peace Meeting of Ojibways and Dakotas (p.361)
Gambling Song (p.451)

They are all described as 'transcribed and harmonized by Edwin S. Tracey'. I'm a little curious about who Tracey was and whether he worked on Native American music regularly or just did this as a favour for Gilfillan. Will try to post copies of the songs now!

minnesota maps

The MHS is currently presenting an exhibit called 'Minnesota on the Map' and you can look at maps from their collection online if you click here.

eagles

Yet more on Gilfillan. He seems absolutely obsessed with the idea of Itasca as the heart of the continent and, indeed, the nation. Witness these comments on eagles:

On the shores of Lake Breck and almost overhanging its waters, two American eagles have built their nest in a tall, yellow pine, and as we came bursting through the dense undergrowth they came sailing a long way to meet us, as if inquiring what this unusual intrusion upon their solitary haunts meant, and when we got to Lake Itasca itself there was another American eagle flying and circling over its waters, as if the national bird were keeping watch over the cradle of the national life. Strange to say, the only American eagles we saw in a journey of several hundred miles in the wilderness, we saw at that spot.

gilfillan on ojibwe

I've spent a fair proportion of today reading what Gilfillan has to say about the Ojibwe language. In the late 1880s he prepared an essay on the subject for publication at the invitation of Henry Whipple, the Episcopalian Bishop of Minnesota. He spends quite a lot of the paper explaining how complex the Ojibwe verbal system is, with a wide range of forms expressing all kinds of distinctions that are not marked grammatically in English. And he confesses that this state of affairs has taken him by surprise:

To one studying the language it is a matter of extreme astonishment how such a rude people ever constructed such a highly inflected system of speech for expressing every thought of the mind with such delicacy and the slightest variation in a shade of meaning, or how they have ever handed it down among themselves, even if originally made and given to them. As a clergyman once expressed it to the writer, that is as much a surprise as it would be to find a beautifully sculptured Corinthian temple, with all its delicate carving, standing on one of our bare prairies. Yet a child, even, who does not know a letter and has never heard of grammar will use those forms with accuracy, and any step outside the grammatical rule will be instantly detected.

Later he considers the question of whether Ojibwe can function as a vehicle for the expression of Christian doctrine and, again, he begins by anticipating the reader's prejudices:

It might be thought that having been constructed and used by a rude nation of hunters the language would be an insufficient vehicle of religious truth, employed on a new and strange subject of which its constructors never thought. But it is found to be a perfectly adequate vehicle by which to express any religious truth, however lofty or subtile. The Epistles of St. Paul, for instance, which strain all language to express the ideas which were struggling in his mind for utterance, and which sometimes deal with things above the region of sense and of all ideas of men in this world so that they are a critical test of the capacity of any language to express them, those sometimes lofty flights of his above all language of earth, almost into things of a to us incomprehensible sphere, are yet found to be as capable of expression in the language of the Ojibways as in our own, or the Greek in which they were written. Yes; from the wonderful precision and delicate shades of meaning obtained by the nice distinction and almost innumerable inflections of the Ojibway, it often seems to possess a superiority in conveying definite religious ideas to the mind.

Eve: I may be wrong but I have a feeling that, in your book about Ojibwe hymn-singing, the author quotes the guy who re-translated the Ojibwe hymns into English and he says something that is almost the opposite of this. I *think* he says something about Ojibwe leaving meaning open in a way that is particularly conducive to religious discourse?

F.J. Turner

I'm struck by Hugh Brogan's comment that 'even in 1939, when the influence of F.J. Turner was at its height', Auden could have learned about both the economic pressures operating on the loggers and the emptying out of game and people from the forests. Turner's famous essay on the frontier experience as the engine of Americanization contrasts the 'civilization' of the east with the 'wilderness' of the west and sees the fault line between them as the space in which distinctively American ways of being emerge. Interestingly for our purposes, he mentions the Mississippi as one of a sequence of frontiers where this kind of process occurred:

In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: the "fall line"; the Allegheny Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghenies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars

I think it's also interesting that Turner envisions a process of 'becoming-Indian' taking place when a new frontier is first opened up:

[The frontier] takes [the colonist] from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is that here is a new product that is American.

Paul Bunyan in Brainerd

And seven miles east of Brainerd, you can visit Paul Bunyan Land. Can we go? Can we?? Lol.

Paul Bunyan in Bemidji

Bemidji, the 'first city on the Mississippi', claims to be the birth place of Paul Bunyan and there is a monument to him there:

[A] huge statue of Paul, 18 feet tall weighing 2 1/2 tons, stands on the shore of beautiful Lake Bemidji. Next to Paul, stands a statue of Babe, the Blue Ox, all five tons of the mightiest Ox that ever lived!

it doesn't start here

This is from the beginning of Lake Wobegon Days and it made me smile:

The lake is 678.2 acres, a little more than a section, fed by cold springs and drained from the southeast by a creek, the Lake Wobegon River, which flows to the Sauk, which joins the Mississippi. In 1836, an Italian count waded up the creek, towing his canoe, and camped on the lake shore, where he imagined for a moment that he was the hero who had found the true headwaters of the Mississippi. Then something about the place made him decide he was wrong. He was right, we're not the headwaters, but what made him jump to that conclusion? What has made so many others look at us and think, It doesn't start here!?

Actually, there's something about this that I *really* like. I'll have to find some way to use it :o)

Jonathan Carver (part the 2nd)

Rejecting the idea that the Native Americans are displaced Jews, Carver argues that they are related to the 'Tartars', an Asian people, who he sees as being closely related to the Chinese. The idea, I think, is that they entered the extreme northwestern parts of North America from Asia at some unspecified point in history. And,again, he adduces what he regards as linguistic evidence for this idea:

Many words also are used by both the Chinese and Indians, which have a resemblance to each other, not only in their sound, but their signification. The Chinese call a slave, shungo; and the Naudowessie Indians, whose language from their little intercourse with the Europeans is the least corrupted, terms a dog, shungush. The former denominate one species of tea, shousong; the latter call their tobacco, shousassau. Many other of the words used by the Indians contain the syllables che, chaw, and chu, after the dialect of the Chinese. There probably might be found a similar connection between the language of the Tartars and the American Aborigines, were we as well acquainted with it as we are, from a commercial intercourse, with that of the Chinese.

Jonathan Carver (part the 1st)

Moving back in time from the era of the Eastmans at Fort Snelling and the Pond brothers' mission to the Dakotas, I've been reading about Jonathan Carver, who spent six months among the Sioux in the late 1760s. I have access to a digital edition of Carver's book, Travels through the Interior Parts of North America, which is very interesting indeed!

In it, he discusses the 'origin' of the indigenous peoples of North America and considers the views of one James Adair, who, as Carver puts it, 'resided forty years among the Indians , and published the history of them in 1772'. Adair thought the Native Americans were 'descended from the Israelites, either whilst they were a maritime power, or soon after their general captivity'. This kind of speculation is very typical of the age, but, even in its 18th-century context, the latter idea makes the mind boggle! After the 'general captivity', by which I take it Adair means the exile in Babylon, one group of Israelites, rather than making their way back to the Holy Land, went into some new kind of exile in North America?

Carver runs through the evidence that Adair cites for this view and - very interestingly from my point of view - he includes some discussion of language:

The Indian language and dialects appear to have the very idiom and genius of the Hebrew. Their words and sentences being expressive, concise, emphatical, sonorous, and bold; and often, both in letters, and signification, are synonimous with the Hebrew language.

Carver himself does not agree with Adair's view and I'll write more about that later :o)

McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Fellowship

woo hoo!! I just found out I have been awarded a McKnight Visiting Composer Residency fellowship for this project: I am really pumped for the financial and moral support this grant will give the project! yay!! (the link for the grant is broken at the moment, but the short information is that it awards funding for a stay of two months in MN by an out-of-state composer and is particularly interested in composers doing residencies in underserved and rural communities. you think maybe this project fits the bill?!?)

yay!!!

itasca

When we last spoke on the phone we talked a bit about place names (including Nauvoo), and, the more I turn it over in my mind, the more I think that keeping an eye on names will be a good thing to do. Place names are concrete little texts in which a connection is forged between the abstract categories of language, landscape, and mental map.

With that in mind, I thought I'd record the fact that the name, Itasca, which sounds as if it might be Native American, was in fact made up Henry Schoolcraft, who traced the soure of the Mississippi to the lake. It is a blend of the Latin words verITAS (truth) and CAput (head). (The Ojibwe name is apparently Omashkoozo-zaaga'igan - Elk Lake.) It seems that Schoolcraft was given to making up names with a Native American sound. Those wonderful people at the Minnesota Historical Society have a short article on this here.

joseph gilfillan

Just did a little research on the Joseph A. Gilfillan whose sermon is commemorated in Itasca State Park and who you mention here. Between 1873 and 1908 he also served as a missionary but to the Ojibwe rather than the Dakota. He apparently learned the Ojibwe language and was particularly interested in place names, publishing a paper on the subject with the title 'Minnesota Geographical Names Derived from the Chippewa Language'. (I gather that the standard work on Minnesota place names is Minnesota Place Names: A Geographical Encyclopedia by Warren Upham.) The Minnesota Historical Society, who - I have to say - seem incredibly active, own an archive of his papers which includes all kinds of material on the language of the Ojibwe. I really may have to go through all this stuff at some point!

There are many layers of irony in play here, I think!

garrison keillor

This is really just a note to remind myself that Garrison Keillor's fiction, much of it set in Minnesota, deals with the sense of home and exile very explicitly and from a number of perspectives. (He writes about Scandinavian immigrants longing for a former home in Europe and young Minnesotans moving to the cities.)

biblical quotations

I'm noticing that various Biblical references are coming up, so I'm going to take the liberty of tagging some of your posts to connect those references, and here's another one...

In Nick Lichter's book about his journey down the river, The Road of Souls, he describes a plaque in Itasca State Park that commemorates the first sermon preached at the headwaters, in May 1881, by a Reverend Joseph A. Gilfillan, who had traveled "through sixty miles of wilderness from White Earth, Minnesota to conduct the ceremony." Lichter, page 6

The text he preached on was "then had thy peace been as a river." (from Isaiah 48:18)

The idea of speaking about PEACE in the context of the history of Native Americans in this region for the previous fifty years (at least?) is pretty ripe, no?!

late july/early august

I've just been thinking about some of the practical issues surrounding the early part of the trip. I'm a bit concerned that the two-day event in Minneapolis is quite early (25th-26th July) and that it *might* be a push for me to get out there ready for paddling at that point. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, although I'd really like to spend some time on that stretch of river, especially around Fort Snelling, so hope you wouldn't be averse to passing along there again?

I was actually wondering what you thought about signing up for a short course on canoeing or kayaking at an outdoor centre in Minnesota - say a couple of days, if we can find one? I notice that the St Cloud State University can organise training:

http://www.stcloudstate.edu/campusrec/outdoorendeavors/canoeshuttle.asp

This might be a good opportunity to pick the brains of the instructors about the river - St Cloud being on the Mississippi they would presumably be able to give us lots of advice - and also about gear we might not have thought of. If we then headed up to Lake Itasca (I'm assuming you'd want to start from source?) we'd have a period of fairly easy paddling to get used to the canoe etc.

There seem to be quite a lot of 'outfitters' in northern Minnesota who will work out what you need for the trip etc. I don't know how much these cost but would it be a good idea to email a few of them, just to see what they say? If there are any near Lake Itasca (which I guess there must be), it might be worth starting with them.

Anyway, just a few thoughts. Very happy to do some emailing - what do you think?

Seth and Mary Eastman

I'm glad you're finding this material interesting! I've also realised that, in the 1840s, when the Pond brothers were in the midst of their missionary work, the commander of Fort Snelling was Seth Eastman, who became well known for his paintings and drawings of Native Americans, particularly of the Dakota. And his wife, Mary Eastman, lived in the fort too and learned the Dakota language. In 1849 she published a book with the title, Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling, her husband providing the illustrations. (An electronic edition is available here.) Mary's voice seems very much to dominate the book but she does sometimes quote Dakota speakers, so that, in a sense, the book resembles the missionaries' linguistic texts in constituting an archive of lost voices. The Mississippi River is often the setting of the events she describes.

One of the illustrations from Mary Eastman's book.

Dakota again

I've ordered a copy of: Anderson, Gary Clayton. 1997. Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862, Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press. I think this is going to answer a lot of my questions. (It seems to include some interesting stuff on the historical idea of the Mississippi as a natural boundary between settlers and Native Americans - and, of course, on the death of that idea.)