Ohio History Journal

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

 

Walam Olum, or Red Score: The Migration Legend of the Lenni Lenape or

Delaware Indians. A New Translation, Interpreted by Linguistic, His-

torical, Archaeological, and Physical Anthropological Studies. (Indian-

apolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1954. xiv+379p.; illustrations, bibli-

ographies and additional references, and index. $15.00.)

This stately volume is a shining example of what lavish financial backing

can achieve toward extreme attractiveness in the publishing of a work of

scholarly research.

Its contents represent the combined efforts of an Indiana University

group of researchers, whose names follow in alphabetical order: Glenn A.

Black, Eli Lilly, Georg K. Neumann, Joe E. Pierce, C. F. Voegelin,

Erminie W. Voegelin, and Paul Weer. Over a period of roughly twenty

years they have been applying, each in his own field of specialization,

their industry and sagacity to the worthwhile attempt to interpret the

Delaware Indian "Walam Olum" (approximately meaning "red-paint

record") as that which it no doubt is: "The Migration Legend of the

Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians."

This painted-glyph document and the tribal songs which it served as "a

mnemonic support" were first made public in 1836 by the French naturalist

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. Born in Constantinople in 1783, he lived

and worked in the United States, at first in Kentucky, and later at Phila-

delphia, from  1815 until his death in 1840. Rafinesque's Walam Olum

materials were rather inadequately republished in 1849 by E. G. Squier, with

subsequent reprintings by W. W. Beach in 1877 and by S. G. Drake in

the fifteenth edition of his Aboriginal Races of North America.

The first scholarly scrutiny was given the Walam Olum in 1885 by D. G.

Brinton in his fundamental study, The Lenape and Their Legends; with

the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum. In the Preface to his

book, Brinton states that "the original text of the Walam Olum will re-

quire a more adequate rendering than I have been able to give it," and

 

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