ojibwe music #6

Another (shorter) quotation from the article on Ojibwe music that I found in Gilfillan's scrapbook. It follows on from the material on rhythm and harmony that I posted earlier. The title of this section is 'Rules of Indian Music':

One of the rules of Indian music is that a song begins on a high note and ends on a low one. We usually reach our climaxes in art music by just the opposite process. To its own rules Ojibway music generally conforms, but among the comparatively few examples studied there are striking exceptions, one song in particular ending in the most spirited manner on a high note. Another rule is in regard to the scale which, with most tribes, is limited to five notes. The omitted intervals are usually the fourth and seventh; some of the Ojibway songs have the seventh as a passing note, and some include the fourth on the accented part of the measure. It will occasion no surprise to discover native songs in which every note of the scale is employed. How much missionary influence, exerted over a series of generations, has had to do with the making of Indian songs cannot be asserted, but various circumstances suggest that the music is practically undefiled. The melodies unquestionably are very ancient. No one appears to know where or when they originated, but it is certain that they have been handed down by oral tradition for many generations. It is not a wild dream that many of the identical songs of Longfellow's Chibiabos are reproduced annually on the shore of Lake Huron.

So here we have more of that speculation about how 'pure' the present state of Native American music is and how much is owed to contact with missionaries. Actually, it made me think of something you said last summer about the term 'authenticity'. A practice is authentic if its practitioners see it as such...

Biblical Sirens: Isaiah 13, 21-22

The second mention of Sirens in the Septuagint is in the book of Isaiah (13, 21-22) and Rahner translates it like this:

Now beasts make their homes there
and an empty echo is heard in the houses.
Sirens have their habitation there
and demons dance.
Ass-centaurs dwell there
and hedgehogs breed in the halls.

This comes from a passage of prophecy in which Isaiah describes the destruction of Babylon by the Medes - this is Babylon after its ruin. Again, other versions are interesting. The Vulgate has:

sed requiescent ibi bestiae et replebuntur domus eorum draconibus et habitabunt ibi strutiones et pilosi saltabunt ibi et respondebunt ibi ululae in aedibus eius et sirenae in delubris voluptatis

According to Rahner, this is the only passage in the Latin text that mentions Sirens (sirenae). He says: 'with one exception all these passages in Jerome avoid the Greek mistranslation, so that the Bible hardly brought the Roman Christian into direct contact with the Siren myth at all'. The King James version has:

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

The relevant phrase in Greek is:

And, of course, we've talked about Isaiah before, again in connection with Gilfillan's visit to Itasca. (It was a passage from Isaiah that Gilfillan took as his text for the first sermon to be preached at the source of the Mississippi.)

Biblical Sirens: Job 30, 29-30

So, the first passage in the Septuagint to mention Sirens is in the book of Job (30, 29-30). This is Rahner's version of the text:

I am a brother to sirens
and a companion of ostriches.
My skin is black and falleth from me
and my bones are burned with heat.

Here Job is lamenting the afflictions he has suffered and the terms he uses suggest that his estrangement from God is a figurative exile in the desert. I notice that in the King James translation, we have 'a brother to owls', and in the Latin Vulgate, 'frater ... draconum'. The relevant phrase in Greek is:

I've mentioned Job on this blog before. It was when Gilfillan was writing about the shape of Lake Itasca and suggesting that it was an image of the Trinity, written into the heart of the North American continent. The quotation he uses comes from Job 19, 24 and my post is here.

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!

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 place names

In 1886, Gilfillan published a list of Ojibwe place names along with English translations. For fact fans: It appeared as chapter 7 of the 15th annual report on The Geographical and Natural History Survey of Minnesota :o) Here are some of the entries relating to lakes and sections of the river that we kayaked. (The numbering appears in Gilfillan's text.)

116. Winnibigoshish is correct; means miserable-wretched-dirty-water, (Winni, filthy; bi, water; osh, bad, an expression of contempt; ish, an additional expression of contempt, meaning miserable, wretched).

119. Cass lake is Ga-misquawakokag-sag, or The-place-of-red-cedars-lake, from some red cedars growing on the island; more briefly Red Cedar Lake.

120. The large island in the lake was anciently called Gamis-quawako-miniss, or the island of red cedars. It is now called Kitchi-miniss or Great island.

121. The little pond, nameless on the map, two miles south of the extremity of lake Itasca, from which the furthest drop of water comes to the Mississippi, has no name given to it by the Indians; it was first named by the writer lake Whipple in honor of the first bishop of Minnesota.

122. Elk lake – on the map so called – separated from lake Itasca by a narrow piece of land and south of same is called by them Pekegumag-sagaiiun. The-water-which-justs-off-from-an-other-water.

122½. The river (nameless on the map) running from above lake is Pekeguma-sibiwishi, or brook-of-the-water-which-juts-off-from-another-water.

123. Itasca lake has been called by the Indians, from time immemorial, Omushkozo-sagaiigun; Elk lake.

124. The Mississippi running thence is called Omushkozo-sibi from lake Itasca till it reaches the lake.

125. Lake Bemidji is Bemidjigumag-sagaiigun, or the lake where the current flows directly across the water, referring to the river flowing squarely out of the lake on the east side, cutting it in two as it were.*

[*footnote: Others interpret it as meaning the same as the French Travers, i.e. where it is necessary to go directly across the body of the lake in passing up or down the Mississippi. —[N.H.W.]]

126. From lake Bemidji to Cass lake the river is called Bemidjiguma-sibi, or Cross river. [For fuller description see No. 439.]

127. From Cass lake to Winnibigoshish it is called Ga-misk-quawakoka-zibi; Red Cedar river, or river of the place of red cedars.

128. From outlet of Winnibigoshish to mouth of Leech Lake river it is called Winnibigoshish-zibi; Winnibigoshish river.

129. Below the junction of Leech Lake river it is called Kitchi-zibi, or Great river.

[N.B.—I can not find by inquiry that the Chippewas have ever called it Missizibi (Mississippi) or Missazibi. But I consider it very probable that in remote times they did, for Missa-zibi (Mississippi) would express the same idea in their language, and would be proper, as witness Missa-sagaiigun (Mille Lac) meaning Great lake. It so exactly corresponds with their language that it must have been taken from it.]

439. The part of the Mississippi – nameless on the map – which flows between two points in Cass lake, where the church is on one side and the chief of Cass lake’s house on the other – being less than half a mile long – is called by the Indians Wub-itigweia-zibi. The-river-that-flows-through-the-narrow-constricted-place.

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?

gilfillan at itasca

Today I've been going through the Gilfillan material at the MHS library and found a short article that Gilfillan himself published in The Minnesota Missionary in July 1881, describing his visit to Lake Itasca. It doesn't incorporate the text of the sermon he preached there but it does include this comment:

The lake itself is not remarkable for beauty, there being many much more beautiful lakes in Minnesota, and it would not, therefore, but for its being the source of the great river, attract the tourist. But in another way it is very remarkable, namely, in that in shape it is a very striking emblem of the Holy Trinity. It is composed of three long and narrow arms, nearly corresponding in length, width and volume, and meeting at a central point. Roughly speaking, it may be described as a three pointed star. There is no other lake, of the 7,000 in Minnesota, so far as a perusal of the map shows, anything like it in shape, and the first thought of any one who looks upon it is, that here God had stamped Himself and His own mysterious nature on this, the fountain head of the great river of the continent. Here, one is almost tempted to exclaim, is the baptismal formula graven, not as Job wished, with an iron pen, but with the finger of the Almighty Himself, in the heart and centre of this continent.

I thought the reference to Job was interesting. It's actually to a passage that is well known because Handel set part of it in the Messiah:

Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book!
That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!
For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:
Whom I shall see for myself,and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my veins be consumed within me.

I think it's quite sweet that he thinks 'the first thought of anyone who looks upon it' will be that the shape of the lake is an emblem of the Trinity!

back in the cities

Well, I've spent my first day back in Minneapolis-St Paul and have actually crossed the river twice: once cycling *to* the Minnesota Historical Society's building and once coming *back*. (It looked pretty big!) I've mostly been doing practical things - moving into my new accommodation, finding a bike to rent, getting food, etc - and the trip to St Paul was really just to work out a decent route. But I spent an hour or so in the library and the staff were extremely helpful. I'm going to order the Gilfillan papers tomorrow and start going through them. The sermon he preached at Lake Itasca isn't listed in the inventory of the collection but there *is* a later article relating to the construction of the monument at Itasca and dating from 1940. It's possible that will have something to say about it, since the sermon is mentioned on the monument. Will keep you posted!