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A Structural Analysis of Mide Chants

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A Structural Analysis of Mide Chants A Structural Analysis of Mide Chants GEORGE FULFORD McMaster University Introduction In this paper I shall investigate the relationship between words and im­ agery in seven song scrolls used by members of an Ojibwa religious society known as the Midewiwin. These texts were collected in the late 1880s by W.J. Hoffman for the Bureau of American Ethnology and subsequently published in their seventh Annual Report (Hoffman 1891).1 All the pictographs which I shall discuss were inscribed on birch bark and used by members of the Midewiwin to record chants used in their ceremonies. According to Hoffman (1891:192) these chants consisted of only a few words or short phrases. They were sung by single individuals — never in chorus — and were repeated over and over again, usually to the accompaniment of a wooden kettle drum. In a previous study (Fulford 1989) I analyzed patterns of structural variation among these pictographs and outlined how three complex symbols — the otter, bear and bird — evolved from clan emblems into pictographic markers. The focus of my earlier study was purely iconographic; in this paper I shall explore the verbal structure of Midewiwin chants in order to show some of the ways in which they were pictographically encoded. For the sake of convenience, I have limited my discussion to song scrolls sharing the otter symbol. Six of the seven scrolls that I shall examine contain this marking device. Although one (designated Scroll C in the appendix) lacks an otter, it displays many other formal similarities with Hoffman published transcriptions and translations of 23 songs performed at the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. Of these, 21 had accompanying pictographic texts (i.e., song scrolls). One highly unorthodox scroll Hoffman 1891:Plate XVII A) has been excluded from this and my previous study !IBQVO 19§9\' However- four orthodox scrolls published by Garrick Mallery (1893:233-236) were included in the earlier study. Unfortunately, Mallery did not provide transcriptions of the original Ojibway chants. I have thus excluded his material from the present analysis. 126 A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF MIDE CHANTS 127 the otter scrolls and has thus been included. While other complex symbols such as the bear and bird might have been used, the structural processes at work are essentially the same in all the White Earth song scrolls collected by Hoffman. To facilitate analysis, I have presented the chants from the seven otter scrolls in a concordance. To create this concordance I first typed carefully revised versions of Hoffman's original transcriptions of the chants onto file cards. Next, I affixed photocopies of the accompanying pictographs to the top of each file card. Then, following a technique outlined by Claude Levi- Strauss (1963:221-228), I arranged the file cards into horizontal rows, each of which corresponded to the sequence of pictographs and chants comprising one song scroll. Chants from different song scrolls sharing similar words or sequences of syllables were aligned vertically to highlight processes of structural variation. Transcription and Translation of the Chants Comparison of pictographs published in Hoffman with the originals kept in the U.S. National Anthropological Archives reveals that the reproductions are generally accurate. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Hoff­ man's transcriptions and translations of the accompanying chants. Vowel length, which is phonemic in Ojibwa, is idiosyncratically transcribed by Hoffman. Lenis and fortis consonants, which are also phonemic, are com­ pletely ignored. In addition, morpheme boundaries are often overlooked. Together, these inconsistencies result in questionable and at times incom­ prehensible translations. For example, in column 25 of Scroll H the chant Ni bimosse aking ('I walk upon the earth') accompanies a pictograph depicting a human figure walking with its arms pointing downward. Yet Hoffman's translation of this phrase is 'The spirit saw me and sent medicine from above.'2 To improve the quality of Hoffman's material, I have completely retran- scribed and retranslated the chants he collected. In this project I was guided by Baraga's Ojibwa grammar (1850) and dictionary (1966). While adopt­ ing Baraga's orthography, I have also consulted Johnston (1978a, 1978b), Nichols and Nyholm (1979) and Rhodes (1985). To further check the accuracy of Hoffman's work I employed two Ojibwa language teachers, Dorothy Wassegejig-Kennedy and Basil Johnston. I cross-checked my informants' retranslations and retranscriptions with my own, questioning them each time there were inconsistencies. I then re­ worked the entire corpus, developing glosses which I believed might improve 2 Readers seeking more information on the idiosyncracies of Hoffman's tran­ scriptions should consult Fulford (1988:86-88). 128 GEORGE FULFORD the flow or provide better links between the words to the pictographs. The result of these labours can be found in the appendix. To aid the reader, I have printed Hoffman's original transcription and translations in larger type. My retranscriptions and retranslations are printed in smaller type, above each line of Hoffman's text. Despite all these measures, it remains impossible to provide definitive transcriptions and translations of the Hoffman material. This is due as much to ambiguities introduced by his informants' poetic use of language as to Hoffman's own inadequacies. Indeed, the insights I have gained in trying to understand the structure of Midewiwin chants have led me to reflect on the limitations of Hoffman's work. In so doing, I have also gained a fuller appreciation of his transcriptions. Analysis of the Chants A total of 249 identifiable Ojibwa words, representing an 86-word lexicon, were used in the seven chants included in the appended concordance. Ap­ proximately 25 per cent of this lexicon is comprised of verbs, 25 per cent of nouns and the remainder of pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and particles. Since a much higher percentage of spoken Ojibwa consists of verb forms, the relatively high number of substantives is significant, suggesting that a unique form of the Ojibwa language was used in the chants.3 Formulaic words like nikanis 'my brother' and ningwis 'my son' usually appear at the beginning or end of Midewiwin chants, but rarely in the middle. This pattern supports Dell Hymes's (1977) contention about the rhetorical use of formulaic words in native texts. There is, however, no evidence of measured verse in the chants.4 Most paralinguistic features are not consistently marked by Hoffman in his transcriptions of the Midewiwin chants. This makes it difficult to test Dennis Tedlock's ideas (1971, 1977) about the importance of style in oral performances. While ignoring intonation, Hoffman does occasionally use commas to indicate hemistiches and pauses between epenthetic syllables at the end of chants (eg., Scrolls A and G, in the appended concordance). In the majority of cases, however, the only pause markings are periods at the end of chants. Only a few chants are comprised of more than one verse. 3The number of syllables in each chant varies between 4 and 15 with the umitTof::^- Tthe length ofverse s is s°variabie'h— - "«££ * utility ot averages into question. itemsSiX A fart W ^ ^^ "** ? *« ChantS Iefer t0 rdiSious °r cosmological P accent ^hl J ffl K r^ ™J°™^c ™<ds. When this is taken into a e mi^td ^ ^^ "^ SP°ken °^^ and the <*«* '-guage A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF MIDE CHANTS 129 The only paralinguistic feature which Hoffman consistently recorded is primary stress (indicated by an acute accent in his own transcriptions and by an apostrophe in mine). Irregular stress patterns tend to predominate, with evidence of trochaic ('x as in nin'de) and dactylic ('x x as in ni'kanis) patterns in some of the chants. Hoffman does not differentiate the features of vocal stress (i.e., pitch, loudness and length) nor does he distinguish vocal from musical stress. It is noteworthy that Frances Densmore (1910:19-20) observed that in Midewi­ win chants "the drum and voice are usually independent metric units." This suggests that in Hoffman's transcriptions many complex vocal and musical stress patterns and rhythms may have been conflated. The verbs used in Midewiwin chants are usually conjugated in the present indicative, although the subjunctive is occasionally also used. The first person singular subject nin is used most often, with the second and third person singular subjects kin and win appearing occasionally and other forms appearing rarely, if at all. Determination of the subject is compli­ cated by the frequent deletion of both pronouns and pronominal suffixes from verbs in the chants. However, the use of the obviative marker (-ian) facilitates the identification of third person subjects and objects. Whereas most of the substantives used in Midewiwin chants can be eas­ ily organized into a relatively small number of semantic categories, verbs cannot. Twenty-one per cent of verbs used in the chants (kikito, win- damawa, debadjimo, nondam) refer to the act of speaking or listening to a story. Enda 'to live' appears five times (eight per cent of the total num­ ber of verbs) and is usually associated with the near-homophones nindi 'heart' or endaidn 'lodge'. Ni zhawenimik 'pity me' appears eight times (13 per cent of the total number of verbs). Waba 'to see' appears only twice. The 35 remaining verbs describe a wide variety of actions (com­ ing/going, giving/taking, laughing/crying, etc.) which defy any systematic semantic categories. Three obvious questions arise in reference to the verbs used in Midewi­ win chants. First, why does ni zhawenimik 'pity me' appear so often? Second, why do references to speaking, telling and hearing so outnumber references to seeing? Third, why do so few verbs fit into neat semantic categories when so many nouns do? Ruth Landes (1968:10)provides a partial answer to the first question.
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