#John Heckewelder

[pennstateuniversitypress]

Unlocked Book of the Month: History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our February pick:

First published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1818, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations provides an account of the Lenni Lenape and other tribes in the mid-Atlantic region, looking at their history and relations with other tribes and settlers, as well as their spiritual beliefs, government and politics, education, language, social institutions, dress, food, and other customs. The text, written by the Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary based in Ohio and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, includes the author’s observations, anecdotes, and advice, preserving not only his knowledge about the Indian nations in the eighteenth century but also his perspective, as a missionary and settler, on Native Americans and the often-fraught relationships between the tribes and European settlers. This version of the text, published in 1876, contains an introduction and notes by the Reverend William C. Reichel as well as a glossary of Lenape words and phrases and letters between the author and the then-president of the American Philosophical Society concerning the study of the Indian nations and their languages.

Read more & access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06701-8.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

[unhistorical]

"When Lenape scouts first sighted The Half Moon with Hudson at its helm, they noted that the captain wore red, a color that signified vitality and warfare, joy and anger. According to [John] Heckewelder, they marveled, 'He, surely, must be the great Mannitto, but why should he have a white skin?'

Here Heckewelder, writing two centuries later, was projecting his contemporary racial sensibility onto their first impressions. It seems unlikely (as the historian Evan Haefeli has argued) that to Lenape eyes the strangers would have appeared 'white,' the color of wampum shells and flint. The Dutch, when they controlled the New Netherlands, did not identify themselves as 'white' but as 'Christians.' And the Lenape’s own early accounts fixate on the peculiar hairiness of the Europeans rather than their skin color—to a society of men who did not grow beards, the new arrivals seemed more akin to otters or bears. Or else the Lenape commented on their eyes, for where they lived, only wolves had blue or green irises.

According to records from the early eighteenth century, natives and new arrivals in the English colonies rarely remarked on skin color or identified one another in such terms. Yet within a few decades, the division of peoples into a trinity of white, black, and red had become common. Barbados, England’s first plantation colony, was the first to witness the transition from 'Christian' to 'white,' as the colonists sought to separate themselves from their slaves, the islanders, and the small but growing caste of people with mixed ancestry. Like a wind, whiteness travelled north and into the Carolinas, as colonialists from Barbados emigrated there. It took a decade to reach the northeast.

Around the early 1720s, indigenous people in the South began to appropriate the label 'red.' Long before it became a slur, it was a term of empowerment, evoking ardor and prowess in war. When Carl Linnaeus, in 1740, classified the peoples of the New World as 'red' in his Systema Naturae, red skin became enshrined as a scientific category, though it is no more grounded in biology than in the air.

The Lenape, for their part, called the sunburned strangers Shuwanakuw. The modern Delaware-English dictionary defines this as 'white person.' Yet Shuwanakuw derives not from the word for white, waapii, but from shuwanpuy, meaning 'ocean, sea, or saltwater.' White people were those who had emerged from the sea."

The Paris Review: "White Gods."

[bicycleboyblog]

Hi! I just binge read all of bicycle boy and I'm fucking hooked i love it so much but i have a huge question.....How do you pronounce Machk?

I love to learn about languages so I have done a lot of research to find the answer, but...I am still not sure! I confess I chose this name from a random list when I was a teenager. There’s a lot of misinformation around Native American names, so if anybody knows this better, or if I make any mistakes, please let me know.

Machk is part native, and I wanted his name to reflect that. Initially I thought the name was Algonquin but later learned that’s a misattribution, and it is actually a Lenape word part of the Algonquian language family. For those who don’t know, ���Algonquian” is commonly mistaken to be a single tribe, and while there is one in Canada called the Algonquin/Algonkin, Algonquian is the name for dozens of tribes that speak related languages.

Now back to Machk. Machk (or Mauch) seems to only appear in this spelling in books written by settlers (1) (2) about the Lenape language, so its accuracy comes into question. The name also comes up in a bunch of places in Pennsylvania, where we find a mountain ridge, creek, reservoir, lake, switchback railway, and park all named Mauch Chunk (bear mountain). This leads me to believe that Machk/Mauch is an anglicisation of the Lenape word Màxkw [click to hear pronunciation], which means bear. It sounds a bit like ma-hwuh.

There is a character in the Canadian historical drama show Frontier named Machk, and I watched it purely to see how they said his name. For research! (For those interested: it’s on netflix & the first two seasons were p good, but it drops the ball on the third). The natives in Frontier are Cree, and the Cree language is in the same family as Lenape. I can’t find a clip online but they said it softly, like Mashk, and outsiders said Mok with a hard K. This is just a TV show, so I don’t know its accuracy.

I decided to go with the Cree pronunciation, it’s the easiest to say. All these years I’ve really butchered it though. I read it like Ma-chi-kuh.

Indian Local Names by Stephen Gill, 1885

Words, Phrases, and Short Dialogues, in the Language of the Lenni Lenape, or Delaware Indians by Rev. John Heckewelder, 1819

Note: I don’t advocate for the wording used by those idiot 19th century settlers, but the names of the books are here for archival purposes.

[sskyt]

トーテミズムに関する資料集

J. G. Frazer,  Totemism And Exogamy, Macmillan & co., 1910.

vol. 1

vol. 2

vol. 3

vol. 4

John Ferguson McLennan, The Worship of Animals and Plants, Fortnightly review, London.

part. 1(1869)

part. 2(1870)

アボリジニの部族名一覧：Tindale's Catalogue of Australian Aboriginal Tribes

初期アメリカの探検・移住の証言記録：American Journeys

J. Long, Voyages and travels of an Indian interpreter and trader, 1791. ※このp. 86が「トーテム」の初出。ただし、totamと表記されている。

Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology （1881-1933）

Revue d'ethnographie（1882-1889） 

The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland （1872-1918） 

Fison&Howitt,  Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Melbourne : G. Robertson, 1880.

Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (1847-1964)

Native Tribe of South Australia,  E. S. Wigg&Son, 1879.

George Catlin, Illustrations of the manners, customs & condition of the North American Indians, 1875. 

vol. 1

vol. 2

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, The American Indians: Their History, Condition and Prospects, from Original Notes and Manuscripts, 1851.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, History of Indian Tribes of the United States , 1857.

Lewis and Clarke, Travels to the Source of the Missouri River, London, vol. 1-3,.

vol. 1 (1815)

vol. 2 (1817)

vol. 3 (1815)

Sir George Grey,  A Vocabulary of the Dialects of South Western Australia, T. & W. Boone, 1840.

Bourke, Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, 1884.

Du Chaillu, Explorations in Equatorial Africa, 1861.

Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions in North- West and Western Australia, 1841.

vol. 1 

vol. 2

R. C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island, 1862.

C. J. Anderson, Lake Ngami, 1856.

E. T. Dalton, The "Kols" of Chota-Nagpore, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, Vol. 6 (1868), pp. 1-41.

E. T. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology Of Bengal, Calcutta, 1872.

H. H. Risley, Primitive Marriage in Bengal, The Asiatic Quarterly Review, Jluy, 1886, pp. 71-96.

E. James, Account of an expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Philadelphia, 1823,

vol. 1

vol. 2 

vol. 3

E. Casalis, The Basutos, London, 1861.

Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, 1882.

G. Turner, Samoa, a Hundred Years Ago and Long Before, Macmillan,1884.

Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java, London, 1817.

vol. 1 

vol. 2 

Charles New, Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa, London, 1873.

Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, Cambridge, 1885.

Alfred Robinson,  Life in California, New York, 1846.

vol. 1 

vol. 2 

vol. 3 

vol. 4 

vol. 5 

Daniel Garrison Brinton, The Lenâpé and their legends, Philadelphia, 1885.

Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society, New York, 1877.

Selden, De Dis Syris Syntagmata II , Leipsic, 1668.

John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, 1871.  

Grammatici latini, vol. 2, Ed. Heinlich Keil, 1855.　※カエサリアのプリスキア『文法学教程』（Institutiones grammaticae）所収。この中で、蛇氏族（オフィゲネイス、プシュリ族）に関するウァロの記述を引用した箇所がある。なお、フレイザーは出典を間違えている（誤：vol. 1、正：vol. 2）。

[charlesholbrookposts-blog]

Blog 2

“Here, they say, a general laughter ensued among the Indians, that they had remained ignorant of the use of such valuable implements, and had borne the weigh of such heavy metal hanging to their necks, for such a length of time.” (Pg. 105)

 This quote struck me as very interesting as I thought deeper about the meaning behind it. It made me think more of all the things and opportunities that are present right in front of me that I am oblivious to. In the example given by John Heckewelder, these tools that were given to the Indians would make everyday life much easier and more efficient if only they used them to their full potential. This made me think of infinite examples of things like this in my own life.

Another way to look at this from a whole different perspective is to look at how well off the Indians were before the Europeans came and brought them these “presents”. These Indians were very happy people and provided well for themselves while remaining outside the loop of all the negatives that come along with these new technologies. Technology is something I believe has way surpassed the levels of advancement made in science and the world environment. This is way more relevant in today’s world than it was back in the 1700’s but this was the beginning of an explosion in technological advancement.  These ideas come fresh in my head after just recently watching a film called Surviving Progress. A key concept when thinking about this is the idea of progress traps, meaning these new technologies are being used before we know the full impact they will have on our future and before we know it we rely on that technology to live and therefore can not resort back to not having it again.  For example, in modern day we use a pesticide to kill bugs that could damage crops but do not realize that the bugs that are being killed are necessary for other plants to grow. Now I realize that this is far more advanced technology but I do believe that this is where it all started.

Am I thinking too far into things like this? Maybe but this is something I feel is of great importance and needs to be known to all. There are an infinite number of examples of progress traps and technology that still to this day seems to do only good but will we find out later that its cons out way its pros?

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