INDIAN LOVE-POEMS 619 able treatises on Indian music and love-songs.1 Mirrors, too, are used to attract the attention of girls, as appears from a charming idyl sketched by Miss Fletcher, which I will reproduce here, somewhat condensed. One day, while dwelling with the Omahas, Miss Fletcher was wandering in quest of spring flowers near a creek when she was arrested by a sudden flash of light among the branches. "Some young man is near," she thought, "signalling with his mirror to a friend or sweetheart." She had hardly seen a young fellow who did not carry a looking-glass dangling at his side. The flashing signal was soon followed by the wild. cadences of a flute. In a few moments the girls came in sight, with merry faces, chatting gayly. Each one carried a bucket. Down the hill, on the other side of the brook, advanced two young men, their gay blankets hanging from one shoulder. The girls dipped their pails in the stream and turned to leave when one of the young men jumped across the creek and confronted one of the girls, her companion walking away some distance. The lovers stood three feet apart, she with downcast face, he evidently pleading his cause to not unwilling ears. By and by she drew from her belt a package containing a necklace, which she gave to the young man, who took it shyly from her hands. A moment later the girl had joined her friend, and the man recrossed the brook, where he and his friend flung themselves on the grass and examined the necklace. Then they rose to go. Again the flute was heard gradually dying away in the distance. INDIAN LOVE-POEMS As it is not customary for an Indian to call at the lodge where a girl lives, about the only chance an Omaha has to woo is at the creek where the girl fetches water, as in the above idyl. Hence courting is always done in secret, the girls never telling the elders, though they may compare notes with each other. "Generally an honorable courtship ends in a more or less speedy elopement and marriage, but there are men and women who prefer dalliance, and it is this class that furnishes the heroes and heroines of the Wa-oo-wa-an." These A Study of Omaha Indian Music (14, 15, 44, 52), Cambridge, 1893; Journal Amer Folklore, 1889 (219-26), Memoirs Intern. Congr. Anthrop., 1894 (153-57). 66 66 Wa-oo-wa-an, or woman songs, are a sort of ballad relating the experiences of young men and women. "They are sung by young men when in each other's company, and are seldom overheard by women, almost never by women of high character;" they belong to that season in a man's career when 'wild oats' are said to be sown." Some of them are vulgar, others humorous. They are in no sense love-songs; they have nothing to do with courtship, and are reserved for the exclusive audience of men." "The true love-song, called by the Omahas Bethae wa-an . is sung generally in the early morning, when the lover is keeping his tryst and watching for the maiden to emerge from the tent and go to the spring. They belong to the secret courtship, and are sometimes called Me-the-g'thun wa-an-courting songs." "The few words in these songs convey the one poetic sentiment : With the day I come to you;' or 'Behold me as the day dawns.' Few unprejudiced listeners," the writer adds," will fail to recognize in the Bethae wa-an, or love-songs, the emotion and the sentiment that prompts a man to woo the woman of his choice." Miss Fletcher is easily satisfied. For my part I cannot see in a tune, however rapturously sung or fluted, or in the words with the day I come to you" and the like any sign of real sentiment or the faintest symptom differentiating the two kinds of love. Moreover, as Miss Fletcher herself remarks: "The Omahas as a tribe have ceased to exist. The young men and women are being educated in English speech, and imbued with English thought; their directive emotion will hereafter take the lines of our artistic forms." Even if traces of sexual sentiment were to be found among Indians like the Omahas, who have been subjected for some generations to civilizing influences, they would allow no inference as to the love-affairs of the real, wild Indian. Miss Fletcher makes the same error as Professor Fillmore, who assisted her in writing A Study of Omaha Indian Music. He took the wild Indian tunes and harnessed them to modern German harmonies-a procedure as unscientific as it would be unhistoric to make Cicero record his speeches in a phonograph. Miss Fletcher takes simple Indian songs and reads INDIAN LOVE-POEMS 621 into them the feelings of a New York or Boston woman. The following is an instance. A girl sings to a warrior (I give only Miss Fletcher's translation, omitting the Indian words): "War; when you returned; die; you caused me; go when you did; God; I appealed; standing." This literal version our author explains and translates freely, as follows: "No. 82 is the confession of a woman to the man she loves, that he had conquered her heart before he had achieved a valorous reputation. The song opens upon the scene. The warrior had returned victorious and passed through the rites of the Tent of War, so he is entitled to wear his honors publicly; the woman tells him how, when he started on the war-path, she went up on the hill and standing there cried to Wa-kan-da to grant him success. He who had now won that success had even then vanquished her heart, had caused her to die' to all else but the thought of him "(!) 66 Another instance of this emotional embroidery may be found on pages 15-17 of the same treatise. What makes this procedure the more inexplicable is that both these songs are classed by Miss Fletcher among the Wa-oo-wa-an or woman songs," concerning which she has told us that "they are in no sense love-songs," and that usually they are not even the effusions of a woman's own feelings, but the compositions of frivolous and vain young men put into the mouth of wanton women. The honorable secret courtships were never talked of or sung about. Regarding the musical and poetic features of Dakota courtship, S. R. Riggs has this to say (209): "A boy begins to feel the drawing of the other sex and, like the ancient Roman boys, he exercises his ingenuity in making a cotanke,' or rude pipe, from the bone of a swan's wing, or from some species of wood, and with that he begins to call to his lady-love, on the night air. Having gained attention by his flute, he may sing this: Stealthily, secretly, see me, Stealthily, secretly, see me, Or he may commend his good qualities as a hunter by singing this song: Cling fast to me, and you'll ever have plenty, Cling fast to me, and you'll ever have plenty, "A Dacota girl soon learns to adorn her fingers with rings, her ears with tin dangles, her neck with beads. Perhaps an admirer gives her a ring, singing: Wear this, I say; Wear this, I say; Wear this, I say; This little finger ring, For traces of real amorous sentiment one would naturally look to the poems of the semi-civilized Mexicans and Peruvians of the South rather than to the savage and barbarous Indians of the North. Dr. Brinton (E. of A., 297) has found the Mexican songs the most delicate. He quotes two Aztec love-poems, the first being from the lips of an Indian girl : I know not whether thou hast been absent: I lie down with thee, I rise up with thee, In my dreams thou art with me. If my ear-drop trembles in my ears, I know it is thou moving within my heart. The second, from the same language, is thus rendered: On a certain mountain side, Where they pluck flowers, I saw a pretty maiden, Who plucked from me my heart, There go I. Dr. Brinton also quotes the following poem of the Northern Kioways as "a song of true love in the ordinary sense :" I sat and wept on the hillside, I wept till the darkness fell; INDIAN LOVE-POEMS The moons are passing, and some moon, My maiden's will gladden me most. 623 "The poetry of the Indians is the poetry of naked thought. They have neither rhyme nor metre to adorn it," says Schoolcraft (Oneota, 14). The preceding poem has both; what guarantee is there that the translator has not embellished the substance of it as he did its form? Yet, granting he did. not embroider the substance, we know that weeping and longing for an absent one are symptoms of sensual as well as of sentimental love, and cannot, therefore, be accepted as a criterion. As for the Mexican and other poems cited, they give evidence of a desire to be near the beloved, and of the all-absorbing power of passion (monopoly) which likewise are characteristic of both kinds of love. Of the true criteria of love, the altruistic sentiments of gallantry, self-sacrifice, sympathy, adoration, there is no sign in any of these poems. Dr. Brinton admits, too, that such poems as the above are rare among the North American Indians anywhere. "Most of their chants in relation to the other sex are erotic, not emotional; and this holds equally true of those which in some tribes on certain occasions are addressed by the women to the men." Powers says (235) that the Wintun of California have a special dance and celebration when a girl reaches the age of puberty. The songs sung on this occasion "sometimes are grossly licentious." Evidences of this sort might be supplied by the page.1 'Dr. Brinton published in 1886 an interesting pamphlet entitled The Conception of Love in Some American Languages, which was afterward reprinted in his Essays of an Americanist. It forms the philological basis for his assertion, already quoted, that the languages of the Algonquins of North America, the Nahnas of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan, the Quichas of Peru, and the Tupis and Guaranis of Brazil "supply us with evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among them." I have read this learned paper half a dozen times, and have come to the conclusion that it proves exactly the contrary. I. In the Algonkin, as I gather from the professor's explanations, there is one form of the word "love" from which are derived the expressions "to tie," "to fasten,' ," "and also some of the coarsest words to express the sexual relation." For the feebler "sentiment" of merely liking a person there is a word meaning "he or it seems good to me." Expressions relating to the highest form of love, |