So I made this post doing research partially in anticipation of today when I would get to Thimble being surprised Kattigan can write, because as bitter as I am about Thimble, I appreciate Laura so much because it gives me the opportunity to talk about not only the Anishnaabemowin writing systems, but also about the fidelity of oral history keeping, and wampum!
I made a post about Native languages at some point last week in relation to Kattigan knowing Theives Cant, but what I didn't get into in that post is that I somewhat implied indigenous languages like Navajo are mostly undocumented and didn't explain what that means. Also I made a post ages ago about X marks and Kattigan signing for Misha with an X and I probably referenced more of this there, but! This is because, for a majority of indigenous North American languages, there was no alphabetical written form of the language. Our histories are largely not written in words, they recorded in art and passed down in stories, but in my Nation, what is written in our written language known as Anishinaabewibii'iganan which can be literally translated as "written in native people talk". These symbols are mostly found on birch bark scrolls which contain sacred knowledge and are not shared outside the tribe, and so the meanings are not shared even with most of the tribe.
That all being said, I did say the other day that totem is spelled doodem in Ojibwemowin so what do I mean by that? In the past two hundred years, after the process of forced assimilation was irrevocable in its destruction of our languages, there have been efforts to create writing systems so that our languages can be retaught to us and language exchange can happen easier, like with French being able to be taught orally by a teacher and supplemented outside of lessons by a book. In the time that had passed though, there have been many attempts by settlers to create dictionaries of indigenous languages by using the latin alphabet to romanize words. This created essentially hundreds of different ways of writing the same word, which creates issues in being able to read phonetically without instruction, so in my region in the 1970s, there was a conference of elders who came together to agree on how to teach the language in my region, with elders from my band included. They ultimately came to the conclusion that no singular writing system would ever be able to capture the phonetic differences in all of the dialects of Anishnaabemowin, but they settled on a system that uses a double vowel system attributed to Charles Fiero, that's also popular other places. On wikipedia, the system I was taught by one of the elders that was on this council, though she is from the band closest to where I went to university, is listed as "Southwestern Ojibwe".
Now, anyone whose been looking stuff up on wikipedia as I mention it will likely have noted an entirely different alphabetical form of the language with no relation to an alphabet that they recognize, these are known as syllabics, sometimes Ojibwe Syllabics, sometimes Canadian Syllabics, sometimes Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, I'm just gonna go with Canadian Syllabics but you know what one of the language families that has languages that use these syllabics? Dene, and Dene is the greater language family that Apache falls under! The Canadian syllabics are mostly used in the Dene languages up north of the Canadian border, and it's an official writing system of Inuktitut in Nunavut that the government has to release information in alongside the latin script version, so it's used more by the languages closer to there, but Apache is still linguistically related so I wanted to highlight that.
The syllabics have contested origin. Most of the accepted evidence suggests that they were originally developed in the 1830s and published in 1840 by James Evans. This evidence does still note that he was inspired and influenced by Cherokee syllabics invented by Sequoyah, published in 1821, cited as one of the first written forms of an indigenous written language. Sequoyah invented the syllabics, without basing it on an existing alphabet, after learning about European written language, and within 40 years of beginning formulating the language, nearly 100% of Cherokee on reservations were literate in their language. The Cree, who are the people who most consistently use the Canadian Syllabics, have their own oral traditions saying that the Canadian syllabics were revealed to a Cree that had temporarily died, but the earliest recorded attestation of this that I can find is after the publishing of James Evans' version, which is what the syllabics used today are still based off of.
This is already really long, and I probably should make a separate post for this at somepoint but to quickly go over the wampum and oral history, people who have never encountered a long standing society without widespread written language tend to all work their way to the same question eventually. "What about contracts? How do you know who agreed to what? Wouldn't those be everywhere?" and this is where wampum comes in! Wampum belts are one of the earlier forms of contracts and treaties, and just like with range of marriage contracts and the legal precedent of engagement rings to NDAs, belts were made and embroidered and beaded to represent any sort of agreement. Most famously wampum belts have been traded with settlers as representation of the treaties signed. The name Wampum comes from the Narragansett word for the specific kind of shell traditionally used to make beads for wampum belts. As for the significance to the specific belt, there are themes and symbolism in the design of the belt, like the Two Row wampum that represents living in parallel without encroaching on each other's way of life, but also oral history carries the details.
(Last part of this post I swear) Now, with the example of a contested topic like the syllabics, there is a tendency to trust recorded word over oral history, but even among European cultures, there are modern historical rediscoveries based on oral history that was removed from written record for multiple centuries. My favourite example of this is L'Anse Aux Meadows, the only known viking and pre-columbian European landing site in North America. L'Anse Aux Meadows is located North of an area that is known in Danish viking sagas as Vinland, and was discovered after corroborating stories that were kept orally for hundreds of years with a map made based off of them 400 years later, and following the most likely route that the Vikings would've followed they came across the site that locals referred to as "an old indian camp." There had been one there before and after viking activity, but they were able to find what is thought to be either a settlement or a site they regularly stopped at to make repairs and camp on their way to permanent settlements further south, and confirm that they were using tools that had been made from trees felled in 1021 and also evidence of food that grows in the region further south that grows wild grapes, confirming the basis of Vinland Sagas was genuine history of viking settlements in wine berry growing country in North America.
But all that said and told, whether you believe the Cree story, we have our whole own writing system made for settler eyes and we have our own sacred writing systems that we're losing the knowledge of, and we have our own forms of historical documents and extensive records at that, so being surprised we can write is very painful, and this post is done now.
