Neither the Iroquois nor the Algonkin nation can be pointed to as specially gifted with imitative powers, or in other ways furnishing evidence of any highly developed artistic faculty. They cannot compare in this respect with the Zuñi, or others of the Pueblo Indians, among whom the arts of long-settled, agricultural communities have been developed for purposes of ornament as well as utility; nor is their inferiority less questionable when we compare them with some of the barbarous tribes of the north-west coast, and the neighbouring islands. Their languages confirm this; for while, as Mr. Cushing has shown, the Zuñi language possesses many words relating to art-processes, the Iroquois and Algonkin dialects supply such terms, for the most part, in descriptive holophrasms, and not in primitive roots. Nevertheless, alike in their pottery and carvings, and in their picture-writing, they show a degree of artistic capacity of which few traces are found in Europe’s Neolithic age.
In the Ojibway, _oozhebegawin_ is used indiscriminately for “writing, drawing, painting,” _wazhebeegad_, for “a man who writes, draws.” In combination with _muh-ze-ne_, “figure, form,” such words are in use as _muhzenebeégawin_, “a painting, drawing”; _muhzenebeégawenene_ (M.), _muhzenebeégawequa_ (F.), “a painter, an artist”; _muhzenebeégun_, “a picture.” “To carve,” or “engrave on a rock,” is _muhzeneko_; _muhzenekojegun_, “a sculptor’s chisel”; _muhzenekoda_, “it is carved,” etc. Again with _wahbegun_, “clay,” such holophrasms are obtained as _wahbegunoonahgunekawenene_, “a man who makes earthen vessels, a potter,” _wahbeguhega_, “a worker in clay,” lit. “I work with clay.”[110]
In previous remarks on the main subject of this paper, the development of the artistic faculty has been noted as, in many cases, an exceptional manifestation of intellectual activity, alike in ancient and modern barbarous races. The striking contrast between the richly fluent forms of the language, and the infantile condition of this people in relation to so much else, including metallurgy, and the application of the arts generally to the practical requirements of life, furnishes a no less interesting illustration of intellectual development fostered by special influences in another direction. The habitual practice of oratory made the Iroquois acute reasoners; and their language abounds in abstract terms to a degree altogether surprising in an uncivilised race. The purposes of the rhetorician also encouraged the tropical use of literal terms. It is not, therefore, difficult to understand how the primary sense of the verb “to track” or “trace out” should ultimately yield the meaning of “drawing” or “sketching,” and so finally of “painting.” On the other hand, it abundantly coincides with the instinctive use of the imitative faculty as a means of conveying definite ideas to others, that in the Iroquois, as in other languages, the same terms are used to express the idea of making a mark, drawing, or writing. The primitive hieroglyphics, from whence our phonetic alphabets have come, were first literal drawings, and then their abbreviations employed to express associated ideas. An ideographic purpose appears to underlie the earliest efforts of imitative art.