Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999

From: Dan Moonhawk Alford [responding to Dennis, Rene, Robert Firth]:

However, looking in my The Languages of the World by Kenneth Katzner, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, c 1986; [a must-have for any language nut], as long as you don't take its information too seriously, that is -- especially when it's simply repeating self-serving white culture statements about the 'pre-history' of a people of color. To wit:

1) Sequoyah, a Cherokee Indian, invented a syllabic script for the Cherokee language (although Bob Richmond informed me that Cherokee is a tone language and Sequoyah did not indicate tones);

According to Sequoya's direct descendants, Sequoya did not invent anything (no matter how much the missionaries of the time wanted to take credit for bringing the 'talking leaves' which he supposedly drew his inspiration from), but was simply the last of his tribe's Scribe Clan (the rest having been massacred by militia and God-fearing settlers making *their* country safe for 'progress'), the last who had knowledge of a writing system that dated back to before the Invasion. But the white culture, the victors who write the books, decided long ago that it knows better than the Indians about the Indians' own history. Our loss. See  Tell Them They Lie for direct quotes from this book.

2) the Miao language of southern China was written in a syllabic script by a missionary, Samuel Pollard, in 1904. (The script is giving way to Latin script.)

What do the speakers of Miao say about that? Does it make sense to anyone here that anyone, much less a missionary, trained in ALPHABETIC literacy only (no linguistics training back then) would actually devise a syllabic system from whole cloth?

3) The Cree Native American language of Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in Canada is written in a syllabic script invented in 1840 by a Protestant missionary.

Again, self-serving missionary crap refuted by the Natives themselves -- who are only in the latter half of the latter-20th-century finding their own English voice. According to Blackfoot Native scholars, the Cree Syllabary comes from an ancient Blackfoot Syllabarium which has always been in one family, and they were always told, "You guys camp way over there," so that the writing system would not corrupt the oral traditions -- the only intentional practice of 'balanced literacy' I know in the past two millennia.

Again -- linguistically untrained missionaries who know only alphabets developing a syllabic system? I don't THINK so. I've worked first-hand on a missionary-devised writing system from early in this century -- Petter's Cheyenne -- and I'm here to tell you that it was pathetic. Having no linguistics training and knowing the systems of English, French and German, he completely blew off the voiceless/whispered vowels of Cheyenne: if he didn't hear them, he didn't write them, thereby obscuring the integrity of the phonemic system.

Do I believe the Indians over the righteous missionaries? Yes, I guess I do. The Indians have fewer reasons for distorting the truth, and have a history of better integrity, from my experience with both. It's perfectly true, of course, that the missionaries were the first to translate the Bible into Native language writing, but that's not the same as developing from scratch. Bending a writing system to describe the ideas of a foreign desert religion is not the same as inventing the writing.

I can't do anything about the mountains of misinformation out there in books about Native American peoples and their cultures, especially regarding the presence/absence of pre-Columbian writing systems (I'm surprised you didn't include the ancient Micmac birchbark writing, which Father Pacifique wrongly took credit for), but what I can do is give the loyal opposition side from the Natives' own account of their own history (not 'pre-history' to them when they have oral traditions, the term being predicated on writing alone) whenever I see these ideas crop up on lists such as this..

And now .. back to our regularly scheduled programming.

warm regards, moonhawk

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Robert Firth wrote:

[Robert Firth:]

The evidence that Sequoiah devised the Cherokee syllabery is compelling. The book "Tell them they lie" by Traveller Bird is remarkable for its failure to present any objective evidence for most of its assertions. There is also not one extant example of a "talking leaf" from before Sequoiah.

'Evidence' is a tricky thing when one group massacres another and vilifies them as brute savages and puts bounties on their scalps, wouldn't you say?

Let's put the moccasin on the other foot for a moment. If Natives had invaded say France 800 years ago, sacking and destroying, would the clerics, the only literates then, have rushed out and showed the Natives their most important historical and sacred documents -- or hidden them?

If it had been solely up to the Spanish Invaders, for instance, we would today have no Mayan Codexes and would be arguing whether ANY writing ever evolved in the Americas. Evidence indeed!

On this one, the balance of probability is heavily on the side of the forked-tongues palefaces.

As it is, "the balance of probability" is heavily on the side of those who destroyed any "works of the Devil" they could find. How convenient. And how EASY the lies are to believe by the descendants of the destroying invaders. So you're ready to dismiss out of hand what the Natives say about their own history because any confirming evidence was destroyed or hidden. No cultural prejudice there!

The Cree syllabery [SIC] does indeed, as Jacques mentioned, use shape to convey the consonants and orientation to convey the vowels. Again, the balance of the evidence is indeed that it was created by missionaries, specifically one James Evans.

Evidence again. Sigh. So the linguist (Buff Parry) and Blackfoot researcher (Stan Knowlton) who showed me the Blackfoot Syllabarium and told me the Cree SyllabAry was derived from it were full of shit?

Deranged? Confused? Not paying enuf quality attention to Invader-missionary claims? Is there no possibility whatever that, in this time of minimal massacre, ancient knowledge might be reappearing? What FAITH you have in missionaries!

And no, I don't think info about the Syllabarium is public yet. (How convenient?)

I do not see wny this should be considered improbable, since most missionaries were trained in Hebrew, which means they were familiar with consonants "decorated" with vowel marks, and that's halfway to a syllabery [SIC]. many of them were also well versed in the history of the Ancient Near East, including the fact that the Persians used a syllabery [SIC]. So it's not as if they thought up the idea on their own.

That's a nice picture of missionaries you're painting, but I've worked with the actual output of one. Have you? Or are you only spouting abstract cultural knowledge? Have you ever worked on a Native language yourself? Lived with Natives? Or is your only life experience that of the dominant European Invader culture?

Can you tell me how a missionary could come up with the idea of writing consonant signs and then rotating them in the Four Directions to indicate different vowels? What ancient language that they might be trained in would give them that idea?

Larger picture: we can confirm that Native peoples in what we call Mexico (modern borders) and further south had writing, but north of there, everyone is lying who claims they had writing. It was the missionaries who handed out strange syllabic systems like Easter eggs to the poor benighted savages.

It's very possible that the same golden plates of writing originally in possession of a minor tribe who joined the Cherokees long ago (according to Traveling Bird) were those that were stolen by Brigham Young, who had been snooping around the area of the Cherokees, who then founded Mormonism on them. A Mormon renegade last year, I believe, broke the code of silence about them and said they were in some ancient writing system and contained a primitive history of the Americas. Angel Moroni indeed! That was simply prevaricative disinformation to cover the theft and hide the existence of Native writing systems in North America. Who among the Invaders do you suppose would write such a history in a weird writing system instead of a European-language alphabet? OR, of course, the Natives are simply lying to their own children, much less us, about their own history in a grandiose way.

When does the cultural, cognitive and spiritual imperialism stop? When do the surviving colonized Natives get to tell their own truth without being branded as liars because most of their confirming evidence has been burned and looted by the marauding colonizers? When do they get a break?

PS -- it's always cool to spell correctly the key term you're giving opinions on.

warm regards, moonhawk

I had always found it strange, or amusing, or puzzling (depending on my mood, time of the day, and whatnot), that missionaries should have constructed syllabaries. And strange ones too: the vowels of the Cree syllabary (if I remember correctly) are expressed by rotating the signs! As for the MicMac hieroglyphs... well, I used to think that there must have been quite a few eccentrics with a lot of spare time among those missionaries. So the claim that those syllabaries and ideographic system were *native*... well, I'm prepared to believe it. All the more so that I have been fed up to my eyeteeth with the constant harping on the Easter Island writing having been fired up by the natives witnessing Spanish writing in 1770. Quite asinine a claim, since all knowledge of the writing had disappeared by 1864 (in fact, I suspect that it disappeared with the destruction of the ahu's, about the time Cook went there). Yes, I am keen to buy the idea that the Cherokee, Cree, etc. systems were ancient native inventions (that picture of Sequoyah definitely looks like pure fantasy, too!). But I'd like to see more evidence (it is an unwelcome view to argue on hearsay. The head of the linguistic department at Monash U. next door would be interested, too).

Alors, M'sieur Lune Fauconnire, au boulot!

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Daniel Harms wrote:

[Moonhawk's earlier post:] If it had been solely up to the Spanish Invaders, for instance, we would today have no Mayan Codices and would be arguing whether ANY writing ever evolved in the Americas.

I'm not sure if this is an apt comparison - the stelae in the ruined cities would have been hard to explain away. And the fact is that Maya writing did survive, and continued to be performed for centuries after the Conquest. Paradoxically, it was de Landa, the destroyer of the Mayan codices, who took down the first Mayan syllabary (though he thought it was an alphabet).

The very fact that Mayans wrote syllabically gives credence to the other Native claims regarding syllabaries. And the fact that de Landa thought it was alphabetic confirms the alphabetic mind-set of the Invaders, who didn't recognize a syllabary when they saw it, much less be of a mind to create one!

[Moonhawk's earlier post:] So you're ready to dismiss out of hand what the Natives say about their own history because any confirming evidence was destroyed or hidden. No cultural prejudice there!

It may be cultural prejudice, but it has some scholarly benefits. I have done some work on the Necronomicon, an ancient book that contains the most powerful black magic in the world - or so those who believe in it tell me. When I ask where I can find a copy, they say they've never seen one - all copies were hidden or destroyed by the Inquisition (despite the fact that magical manuscripts are by no means uncommon in collections today). Same story.

I didn't catch the benefits there.

What it comes down to is this. Native American culture has been irreparably damaged by the arrival of the Europeans. But when you get past everything else, Native Americans are people who have ideas and agendas, just like everyone else. Both sides are interested in writing history, and in this day and age both can. Yet when it comes down to the debate, most people come down on the side of the evidence. So far, you've provided no evidence of any pre-Contact document, aside from the highly-suspect case of the Book of Mormon.

That's true. I'm just weighing in with minority viewpoint from a people whose evidence was destroyed -- not possibly as with the Necronomicon, but actually.

In brief, you are free to believe in pre-Contact writing systems. However, if you come to the table without any documentation other than the testimony of those who may have something to gain, don't be surprised if people don't immediately share your belief. Instead of accusing scholars of racism, you should try to track down these documents - if you're right, it's likely there are some out there.

"Cultural prejudice" is "racism"? I chose my term carefully, and you are twisting it. I accused no one of racism. Maybe culturism. The only "something to gain" the Natives have is that their children remember the truth in the face of the Invaders' lies and misrepresentations about them.