THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN TO CIVILIZATION.

BY ALEXANDER F. CHAMBERLAIN.

FOUR hundred years have come and gone since the landfall of Columbus, and though the mild Lucayans who first greeted him have long since disappeared from mortal ken, there still dwell in the United States and Canada some four hundred thousand of the race he made known to the Orient, to say nothing of the vastly more numerous Indian population of Mexico, Central and South America, estimated at from fifteen to twenty millions, not including métis or mixed-bloods.

But their lot has been a hard one. Mexico, Central America and Peru were, apparently, arrested on the highway to the development of an indigenous culture of a noteworthy type, and elsewhere over the broad area of the double-continent the breath of the "higher" race has blasted the life of the "lower." To the age of "Spanish slaughter and oppression," imitated so closely sometimes by the early colonists of other nationalities, has been added that "century of dishonor," whose gratuitous prolongation we have even now before our eyes, as the records of recent investigations not yet complete abundantly demonstrate.

"The only good Indian is a dead Indian!" said once a soldier-epigrammatist, and the neat untruth seems to have fixed itself firmly in the popular mind. The great

mass of the people are still at the stage of knowledge represented by the declaration of Pope:

"Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the Solar Walk or Milky Way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Beyond the cloud-topt hills, a humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happy island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be content his natural desire,

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company."

Out of this characterization of the American aborigines the vulgar have created a "Mr. Lo," and imposed him upon not a few of the educated members of the community. Indeed, the examination of certain text-books of history and philosophy leads one to think that their authors have not yet advanced beyond the horizon of Pope.

Since Pope's words were written, however, we have learned something concerning "the poor Indian" and "his untutored mind." The researches of the scientists of the New World especially have thrown a flood of light upon his material and his intellectual achievements. The labors of Catholic and Protestant missionaries, the investigations of a Brinton, a Powell, a Trumbull, a Dorsey, a Fewkes, a Gatschet, a Mallery, a Boas, a Holmes, a Fletcher, a Mooney, a Thomas, a McGee, a Cushing, a Matthews, a Tooker, to mention but a few names out of an illustrious list, have told something of what the Red Man has accomplished in the matter of language, art, religion and the institutions of human society. In brief, some of us have learned to respect him, instead of patronizing him. Well

spoke the first Americanist of our time on the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of this continent:

"The native American was a man, a man as we are men, with the same faculties, and aspirations, with like aims and ambitions, working, as our ancestors worked, endeavoring to carry out similar plans with very similar means, fighting the same foes, seeking the same allies, and consequently arriving at the same, or similar results!"1

Another student of primitive man closes an interesting discourse with these suggestive words:

"The question, however, that really concerns the ethnologist of today, is not who are the American Indians, but what are they, and what have they accomplished in working out the problems of life, which, ever since his birth, man has grappled with." "

It is in the spirit of these wise utterances that I would seek to tell, in brief terms, the world's debt to the Red Man, what we owe to the race from whom we have snatched a continent. And the debt is, indeed, great. First our language owes him much. Though our unskilled tongues have all-too-often sorely marred them, the whole land is still dotted over with the names he gave. Republic, state, province, county, township, city, town, hamlet, mountain, valley, island, cape, gulf, bay, lake, river, and streamlet are his eternal remembrancers: Mexico, Alabama, Ontario, Multnomah, Muskoka, Lima, Parahiba, Kiowa, Managua, Kootenay, Yosemite, Chonos, Campeche, Panama, hail from as many distinct linguistic stocks as there are individual names in the list. This legacy was sung by Walt Whitman:

"The red aborigines!

Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and wind, calls of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names,

1 D. G. Brinton: Address on Columbus Day (Phila., 1892), p. 15.

2 H. W. Henshaw in Amer. Anthrop., Vol. II., p. 213.

Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,

Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names."

America, itself, in spite of the persistent arguments of Marcou and others, is not an aboriginal name. But of the states and territories of the Union, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, the Dakotas, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, (New) Mexico, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, derive their appellations from the Indian languages of the country. North of us Canada, and nine of her provinces and territories, Assiniboia, Athabasca, Keewatin, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Ungava, Yukon, have been named from like sources. To the south the aborigines are remembered in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Peru, Chili, Guiana, Uruguay, Paraguay, and in innumerable lesser divisions of these and the other Spanish-American republics and in Portuguese Brazil. And how well, after all, these lands have been named! And so many of our rivers, lakes, mountains and cities. too! How thankful we really ought to be that surveyorgeneral De Witt had not the chance to do on a grand scale all over the United States, what he did in New Yorkbaptize so many places with the names of ancient European cities, and when his atlas gave out have recourse to the names of Greek and Roman poets, philosophers and statesmen, until Lemprière's dictionary was exhausted. And that the practice of naming counties after members of the legislature, and townships after pet dogs has not been let run all over the land. Some of the terms the Indian has left us, are, doubtless, "jaw-breakers," but most of them are not, and adorn our maps as well as do those inherited from our Aryan forefathers. And where some

of the older Indian names of more general application have passed out of use, they have reappeared, sometimes in abbreviated or more euphonious forms, in the appellations of ships of peace and of war, sea-side hotels and country cottages, public parks and private estates, golf clubs, organizations of a political and social nature, etc. But not even the most imaginative of the American Indians could have guessed to what uses some of their place-names would be put by the whites. In far-off Germany, they have been employed, with the titles of doctors' theses in chemistry and other linguistic monstrosities, to test the speechcapacity and memory of school children and help them overcome impediments of speech. Mexican mountain names have been used for this purpose, and, also, as we learn from Immermann's "Münchhausen," the sesquipedalian name of a plain in western South America: Apapurinkasiquinichiquasaqua.

No insignificant inheritance, then, have we received from the aborigines of this continent in the geographical names that lie upon it thick as the leaves in Vallambrosa. With the poet De Mille we may ask,

"The memory of the Red Man,

How can it pass away,

While his names of music linger

On each mount, and stream and bay?"

But it is not place-names alone that have come to us from the Indians' store of speech. The languages of all sections of the peoples of European stock dwelling in the New World preserve scores and hundreds of words derived from one or another of the many tongues spoken by the aborigines. This debt to the Indian is, of course, greatest in Mexico, Central and South America, where the natives still exist in very large numbers, and where they have intermixed considerably with the white population, giving rise to millions of mestizos and mixed-bloods of various degrees.