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Forgery, Fraud, and “Theft of Voice”: Circulation of Walam Olum

Éléonore Devevey
Traduction de Julia Mc Laren
Cet article est une traduction de :
Faux, usages de faux et « vol de voix ». Circulations du Walam Olum [fr]

Résumés

En 1988, Florence Delay et Jacques Roubaud publient Partition rouge, sous-titré Poèmes et chants des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord. Le « texte » qui donne son titre à ce volume est un manuscrit attribué aux Lenapes, connu sous le nom de Walam Olum (ou Red Score), qui retrace la genèse et les migrations de ce peuple algonquin, et rend compte de son point de vue sur l’arrivée des colons blancs. Édité et traduit à plusieurs reprises au cours des xixe et xxe siècles, le Walam Olum a cependant été reconnu comme faux dans les années 1990 – ce qui ne l’a pas empêché de poursuivre sa vie éditoriale. Comment comprendre une telle persistance ? Plus généralement, que faire des multiples cas de faux qui jalonnent l’histoire de la littérarisation des traditions orales ? Un tel « vol de voix » permet de mesurer la montée en puissance de l’exigence, inséparablement épistémologique et politique, de revalorisation de l’expertise autochtone.

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1What should we do about the odor of falseness that the long history of oral literature studies gives off here and there? What role do forgeries and frauds play? This field of knowledge, more than any other, conveys at one and the same time a sense of extreme scrupulousness and a feeling that something has been tainted: it is a field in which establishing the facts requires patience; one in which the authentic and the counterfeit are often difficult to separate in a clear-cut way.

2The history of transforming oral traditions into literature is particularly rich in actual or suspected cases of forgery, from Ossian’s poems to Marcel Griaule’s Dogon mythology, through to the rewritings done by the Brothers Grimm—so much so that the American folklorist Richard Dorson developed the idea of fakelore (a contraction of fake folklore) to deal with such cases (see especially Dorson 1976). While the publication of oral traditions, because of the transformation of the act of communication that it implies, may be considered as inadvertently causing adulteration, such adulteration can also be deliberate: authenticity is so valued in these undertakings that this very aspect alone is enough to stimulate a forger’s inventiveness and prompt the creation of apocrypha. These forgeries themselves cover the whole gamut, from “literary” rewriting (“free” expansion from fragments, for example) to the outright invention of a fake: attributing to a community a creation that was put together by a person presenting him or herself as a mere collector.

  • 1 On the logic of “misrepresentation,” see Said 1980 [1978]; Ziff and Rao 1997 [1990].
  • 2 On the basis of a logic similar to the phenomena of “auto-ethnography” analyzed by Mary Louise Prat (...)

3When we are presented with a case of complete forgery, the most convenient position is to see it as a story that implicates the name of a community in spite of itself, but which does not concern it, which “says more” about the forgers than their victims—and, at best, to turn it into material for a critical and amusing history of knowledge. However, it would be wrong to make rash judgements on the forger’s motives, just as it would be a mistake to think that a priori there is nothing at stake for the communities to which the forgery is attributed. The transcription and translation process necessarily involves the appropriation of a corpus for the person who undertakes this work, but in the case of a forgery, the act of appropriation involves not a corpus but the possibility of self-representation: in such cases, the person concerned does not just speak on behalf of others; he also contributes to ensuring they stay silent. The fake thus appears as an extreme form of “orientalism,” which removes the true nature of the source communities in such a way that even their involvement becomes merely incidental.1 However, this does not prevent an apocryphal corpus from being used or even reappropriated by the community to which it has been attributed,2 and, in either case, in support of claims that are, themselves, very real.

4How can forgeries and their exposure play a part in power relations? That is, how can they contribute both to the unequal terms of the relationship and to redressing the balance? And what course of action should the researcher adopt when faced with material that is impossible to restore (doubly so, because it is immaterial and because it has no community of origin other than that of the forger)?

5By focusing on the circulation of the Walam Olum, a manuscript attributed for over a century and a half to the Lenape (Delaware), and especially on its French translations, we will see that identifying a document as a forgery (or a player as an impostor) does not always put an end to the matter. This investigation will take Partition Rouge, by Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud (1988), as both its start and end point, but its real subject is the journey of Walam Olum, the credit given to it for decades, and the role of indigenous expertise in this process. When dealing with this case, which lies on a continuum of truth and falseness that is merely theoretical, the key issue is not so much to settle the matter, but rather to understand the purposes for which a source considered indigenous was used, and the discussions it prompts us to have today. Above all, the example of the Walam Olum highlights the need to extend the idea of restitution to the oral arts: a community’s willing involvement in the shaping and circulation of the representations it gives rise to.

I. Something Red: The French Walam Olum

6In 1988, Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud published Partition Rouge, subtitled Poèmes et chants des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord. Inspired by the research of Jerome Rothenberg, the specialist in ethno-poetics, this work brings together translations of utterances collected by American ethnographers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The “text” that gives the book its title is a manuscript, attributed to the Lenape, known as the Walam Olum, the name given to a narrative in five songs that traces the genesis and migration of these Algonquin people from the Bering Strait to the east coast of the United States. Called Red Score in English, this document, which is made up of pictograms matched with textual sequences, also features an account of the indigenous perspective on the arrival of white people on the continent, in particular in an additional “fragment” (which has no pictograms). Let us just say that the document (the authenticity of which was always questionable) was widely recognized as a forgery by the academic community at the end of the twentieth century, following the work of David Oestreicher (more on that later). This in no way prevented its very existence from being taken seriously or from its repeatedly being qualified as genuine, and we need disregard its status as a forgery (about which specialists now agree) if we are to understand the credit it was given and the interest shown in it over time.

  • 3 The editions by Ephraim G. Squier in 1849 and Franck Speck in 1945 should also be mentioned. See Oe (...)
  • 4 For information on this character and the speculations he has given rise to, see Boewe 2003.

7The Walam Olum has been the subject of several editions and translations, in English as well as in French—I shall focus on the latter, as numerous studies have looked at the former. In short, there are three main American editions.3 The first is that of the inventor of the document, Constantin Samuel Rafinesque, a French-born American naturalist and scholar,4 which was published in The American Nations in 1836 (Fig. 2). Rafinesque only provided an English translation of a manuscript that remained in his possession. This manuscript (Fig. 1), which contains a series of pictograms and the utterances associated with each one, was, he said, the product of his own efforts, based on the transcription of the “praying sticks” contained in a “medicine bundle” which came to him in obscure circumstances—the sticks had mysteriously disappeared, but not their handwritten transcription. Secondly, there is Daniel G. Brinton’s edition, in The Lenâpé and Their Legends, which appeared in 1885 in the Library of Aboriginal American Literature (chapter VII: “The Walam Olum: Its Origin, Authenticity and Contents”), with the pictograms and text sequences in the original language (left-hand page), based on the Rafinesque manuscript, and in English (right-hand page) (but without the “fragment,” for which there are no pictograms or original language). Finally, we have the imposing edition, commissioned and financed by Eli Lilly (Fig. 4) and published in 1954, which was the product of a long, interdisciplinary collaborative effort from within the Indiana Historical Society, and reputed to be the most “scientific,” with the ethnologists Charles F. and Erminie Voegelin overseeing the linguistic aspects. It includes the reproduction of each pictogram as it appears in the Rafinesque manuscripts, an analysis and interpretation of each one, and important historical and ethnological commentary.

Fig. 1. Title page of Constantine S. Rafinesque's manuscript : “Wallamolum. First part of the painted and engraved traditions of the Linnilinapi […], translated word for word by C. S. Rafinesque”, 1833. Folio 2, recto. Kislak Center for Special Collections.

Fig. 1. Title page of Constantine S. Rafinesque's manuscript : “Wallamolum. First part of the painted and engraved traditions of the Linnilinapi […], translated word for word by C. S. Rafinesque”, 1833. Folio 2, recto. Kislak Center for Special Collections.

Collection linguistique Berendt-Brinton, Ms. Coll. 700, 217, Philadelphie, Bibliothèques de l’Université de Pennsylvanie.

Fig. 2. Constantine S. Rafinesque, The American Nations; or, Outlines of A National History; of the Ancient and Modern Nations of North and South America. Philadelphia, 1836.

Fig. 2. Constantine S. Rafinesque, The American Nations; or, Outlines of A National History; of the Ancient and Modern Nations of North and South America. Philadelphia, 1836.

Fig. 3. Daniel G. Brinton, The Lenâpé and their legends ; with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum, a new translation, and an inquiry into its authenticity. Philadelphia, 1885. Facsimile reprint, New York, AMS Press, 1969.

Fig. 3. Daniel G. Brinton, The Lenâpé and their legends ; with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum, a new translation, and an inquiry into its authenticity. Philadelphia, 1885. Facsimile reprint, New York, AMS Press, 1969.

Fig. 4. Edition of the Walam Olum by the Indiana Historical Society, 1954, with a frontispiece portrait of C. S. Rafinesque. Walam olum; or, Red score, the migration legend of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1954.

Fig. 4. Edition of the Walam Olum by the Indiana Historical Society, 1954, with a frontispiece portrait of C. S. Rafinesque. Walam olum; or, Red score, the migration legend of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1954.

8The first French translations were produced by Americanist scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when the peoples of the Americas were not yet considered as “societies without writing” (see Deléage 2017, 66)—at a time, therefore, when indigenous graphic creations were within the scope of their research. In his Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a specialist in Mayan writing, reproduced Rafinesque’s English translation as a “supporting document” (Brasseur de Bourbourg 1868, 435–48). More than twenty-five years later, Georges Raynaud produced a French translation of Rafinesque’s work, published partly in his Introduction à l’étude des religions du Mexique (chants I, II, III, 1894) and partly in the Archives de la Société américaine de France (chants IV and V, 1895). Both men specialized in Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations: Their foray into northern Mexico is based on a comparative approach to indigenous graphic productions (an approach that fears neither eclecticism nor fanciful hypotheses).

Surrealist Marvel and Revolution: Annales rouges

  • 5 The genesis of this Anthologie, the identification of its sources, and the analysis of Péret’s exac (...)

9In the twentieth century, French translations were the work of historians and poets who, by turns, kept changing the status of the Walam Olum, which fluctuated between source and work, document and monument—as if the lack of interest on the part of ethnologists on this side of the Atlantic allowed for other forms of engagement. The surrealist writer Benjamin Péret was the first to produce a complete translation, including the reproduction of the pictograms, in his Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique (1959). While his approach can be compared to that of Blaise Cendrars in his Anthologie nègre (1921), Péret provides more information than Cendrars on the sources of the texts he collects—his work is the product of extensive ethnographic readings carried out during his years of exile in America.5 As Africa did for Cendrars, the pre-Columbian past held a lasting fascination for Péret and led to various types of writing: translations (notably of the Chumayel Chilam-Balam, sacred Mayan books that he translated from Spanish) but also poems and articles. For both men, the anthology of non-Western oral arts supports a universalist conception of art, modernist in Cendrars’s case, surrealist in Péret’s. Péret’s introduction amounts to a manifesto of the “poetic marvelous”: the marvelous, in his eyes, as supremely exemplified by the Hopi dolls with their “medieval castle” heads (Péret 1959, 14–15), is common to Surrealist creation and that of the civilizations of the American continent. While Péret sees in myths the need to recognize “the common origin of poetry and science” (ibid., 31), he also sought in them a revolutionary prospect, one of a truly popular poetry “made by all” (Lautréamont, cited ibid., 27); the oral creation of the peoples of the Americas fascinated him, in that as he saw it as testament to other forms of social structure, forms which had no knowledge of the division of labor, inequality, and oppression (ibid., 26–28).

10Péret’s reworking of the Walam Olum gives it a new status and meaning: firstly, by including it at the top of the section entitled “The Epics”; secondly, by reproducing the pictograms (of the five songs), which were absent from previous French editions; and above all, by the translation itself (based on Brinton’s edition), starting with the title. Walam Olum is translated as annales rouges: the narrative is given the status of a chronicle, of a lineament of history. For the sake of brevity, let us consider the text associated with the last three pictograms. After recounting the origins and migrations of the Lenape people (songs I to III), the chronicle describes how they separated from the other Algonquin peoples, and all of this is chanted by enumerating the names of the chiefs who by turns guided them. In the fifth song, whites appear fleetingly for the first time, only to reappear more prominently at the very end. In Rafinesque’s manuscript (Fig. 1) and then in Brinton’s (Fig. 2) the last three pictograms are presented as follows:

11And here is Péret’s literal translation:

58. Surveilleur fut chef, il regardait la mer. (Supervisor was chief, he looked out to sea.)

59. À ce moment du Nord et du Sud, les Blancs vinrent. (At that moment from the North and the South, the Whites came.)

60. Ils sont pacifiques, ils ont de grandes choses; qui sont-ils? (Péret 1959, 264) (They are peaceful, they have great things; who are they?)

Fig. 5. Constantine S. Rafinesque's manuscript (cf. Fig. 1), Folio 41, recto. End of the fifth chant, recounting the arrival of the Whites on the American continent, accompanied by Rafinesque’s translation.

Fig. 5. Constantine S. Rafinesque's manuscript (cf. Fig. 1), Folio 41, recto. End of the fifth chant, recounting the arrival of the Whites on the American continent, accompanied by Rafinesque’s translation.

Fig. 6. Daniel G. Brinton, The Lenapê and their Legends (cf. Fig. 3). End of the fifth chant, accompanied by Brinton’s translation (repr. 1969, p. 216-217).

Fig. 6. Daniel G. Brinton, The Lenapê and their Legends (cf. Fig. 3). End of the fifth chant, accompanied by Brinton’s translation (repr. 1969, p. 216-217).

Fig. 7. Benjamin Péret, Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique. Paris, Albin Michel, 1959. Cover of the original edition.

Fig. 7. Benjamin Péret, Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique. Paris, Albin Michel, 1959. Cover of the original edition.
  • 6 On this reversal of perspectives, in the tradition of Julius Lips, see Kramer 1989.

12The striking final question, which makes the European reader come face to face with his own otherness,6 provides the link between “legend” and “verifiable facts” (Péret 1959, 241), between myth and history, and between indigenous peoples and settlers: it ensures the transition from the story of genesis to the shock of contact, and makes powerfully clear just how bewildering that contact was. In Anthologie des mythes this song is immediately followed by an extract titled “Les Blancs débarquent” (The Whites land) (from Michoacán, Paisajes, Tradiciones y Leyendas, by Eduardo Ruíz Álvarez, which describes omens that accompanied the arrival of whites in Mexico): this juxtaposition of texts from very different cultures, a sort of collage based on thematic analogy, seeks to give substance to the indigenous perspective on the arrival of the whites.

A Counter-Narrative: Entaille Rouge (Red Gouge)

13In 1982, the historian Nelcya Delanoë translated Walam Olum/Red Score as entaille rouge (red gouge—the term hovers somewhere between engraving and wound) and made it the title of her study of United States territorial policies. Originally published by François Maspero in the Textes à l’appui collection (reissued ten years later by Albin Michel, in the Terre indienne collection), this work includes the complete text, the five songs (without the pictograms) and the “fragment,” with detailed commentary. Delanoë sees the Walam Olum as a source of prime importance in supporting an anti-imperialist historiography. For her part, she draws on the Voegelin edition and especially emphasizes the significance of the “fragment”: “An archive of the origins and life of a people, the Fragment, which was added later, transforms the Walam Olum into a record, sacred and yet profane, of a wrong” (Delanoë 1982, 336). This fragment constitutes “an explicit answer to the question about the identity of the Whites, a fatal intrusion into the saga described up to that point,” and an indictment concerning “the theft of the land” (ibid., 342–43). The thrust of her argument is thus much more explicit than in Péret’s Anthologie.

Fig. 8. Nelcya Delanoë, L’Entaille rouge : terres indiennes et démocratie américaine 1776-1980. Paris, François Maspéro, 1982. Cover of the original edition.

Fig. 8. Nelcya Delanoë, L’Entaille rouge : terres indiennes et démocratie américaine 1776-1980. Paris, François Maspéro, 1982. Cover of the original edition.

14Here is her translation of the end of song V:

58. Quand Épervier fut leur chef, ils faisaient face à une immense étendue d’eau (When Sparrowhawk was their leader, they were facing an immense expanse of water)
59. Où voguaient des êtres qui venaient vers eux en provenance du Nord, en provenance du Sud: les Blancs (Where beings were sailing towards them from the North, from the South: the Whites)
60. Hommes amicaux, chargés de riches biens : qui sont-ils? (ibid., 357). (Friendly men, laden with wealth: who are they?)

15And here is the beginning of the “fragment,” supposedly added later:

1. Hélas, hélas! Nous savons désormais qui ils sont; ces Wapsinis (les Blancs) qui arrivèrent par la mer pour nous voler nos terres; affameurs éhontés! Ils ont débarqué le sourire aux lèvres, mais se sont vite révélés être des Serpents, des ennemis. (1. Alas, alas! We now know who they are; those Wapsinis (the Whites) who arrived by sea to steal our lands; shameless starvers! They landed with a smile on their face, but soon revealed themselves to be Serpents, enemies.)
2. Le Wallamolum a été consigné par Lekhibit (le Scribe) afin de conserver le souvenir de notre gloire. Me faudra-t-il en écrire un autre qui conservera l’histoire de notre défaite? Non! Nos ennemis s’en sont occupés; mais je te conterai ce qu’ils ne savent pas ou ce qu’ils dissimulent (ibid., 359). (The Wallamolum was recorded by Lekhibit (the Scribe) to preserve the memory of our glory. Should I write another to preserve the story of our defeat? No! Our enemies have taken care of it, but I’ll tell you what they don’t know, or what they’re hiding.)

Fig. 9. Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud, Partition rouge : poèmes et chants des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord. Paris, Seuil, 1988. Cover of the original edition.

Fig. 9. Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud, Partition rouge : poèmes et chants des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord. Paris, Seuil, 1988. Cover of the original edition.

16This translation, which takes advantage of the meticulous work carried out for the Voegelin edition, uses more complex syntax and has a more sophisticated vocabulary. The solemnity of the language, especially in the “fragment,” is reminiscent of the Segalen’s Immémoriaux, but Immémoriaux which would have been anonymously rewritten by Chateaubriand. According to Delanoë, these lines reveal a keen awareness of how history is written, of its tendency to overlook the viewpoint of the vanquished, and of the importance of a counter narrative. The commentary also points to the tragic dimension of the “ill-fated encounter,” perceived as a death sentence:

Even today, despite the future that has become the past, we remain in the grip of the boomerang effect that throws the reader back on himself and his history through a discourse, a lament, of burning eternity. The Lenni Lenape sensed, and rightly so, as we know from reading them, the end of Eternity with the arrival of these ships laden with men and goods” (ibid., 337).

17The conclusion of Delanoë’s work, which appears underneath an epigraph borrowed from L’Écriture du désastre by Maurice Blanchot (the historian’s style is reminiscent of the latter’s), underlines the lesson to be learned from Walam Olum: it is a written document that challenges “the demarcation line between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ This old refrain, more or less modernized with the evolution of the social sciences” (ibid., 344), renders obsolete the binary oppositions typical of Western understanding of non-Western cultures.

A Total Poem: Partition Rouge (Red Score)

  • 7 To understand the roots, dating from the eighteenth century, of the enduring stereotypes of Indians (...)

18Excerpts from Walam Olum appear at the beginning of Partition Rouge, which was first published in the Seuil collection Fiction et compagnie. As was the case with Nelcya Delanoë, Delay and Roubaud’s work takes its title from this document. Their translation of the title is obviously polysemous: it invokes the Western technique of musical notation and, through this, the problem of the transition between the oral and the written, between material marks and performance, while also subverting the race discourse—the “redskin” inherited from Carl von Linné’s7 classifications, is taken up and inverted in the civil rights movements as Red Power—as well as, in the background, hinting at the notion of a revolution, which is inherent to the modern idea of poetry. While the collection is explicitly inspired by Jerome Rothenberg’s approach, Delay and Roubaud most probably owe their discovery of Walam Olum to Péret (the document does not appear in Rothenberg’s two flagship anthologies, The Technicians of the Sacred [1968] and Shaking the Pumpkin [1972]).

19Delay and Roubaud pay tribute to Péret’s pioneering work in their general introduction, echoing his intention not to “encroach on the domain of ethnography” (Delay and Roubaud, 10); then, in the introductory note to Walam Olum, the authors specify:

  • 8 The songs are preceded, however, by “four annotated pictograms from the Indianapolis version,” desi (...)

Like Benjamin Péret in the past, we have based our translation on Brinton’s version. The “translation” of the most recent and scholarly edition, the one developed by the team of anthropologists from Indiana, may be more accurate, but it suffers from a serious flaw: it totally erases the poetic dimension of the text (ibid., 17).8

20Everything, therefore, contributes to distinguishing this volume from a scientific approach. Delay and Roubaud only include the first two songs and the end of the fifth. Here is their translation of the latter:

58. Guetteur était le chef. Il regarda vers la mer. (Watcher was the chief. He looked out to sea.)
59. Alors, du nord et du sud, les Blancs arrivèrent. (Then, from the North and the South, the Whites arrived.)
60. Ils sont calmes. Ils ont de grandes choses. Qui sont-ils? (ibid., 29–30) (They are calm. They have great things. Who are they?)

21In contrast to Nelcya Delanoë’s translation, the syntax and vocabulary are deliberately rudimentary, “the language [. . .] brief, almost aphoristic,” this being, in the eyes of both translators, one of the essential characteristics of this “Odyssey in images” (ibid., 17). But it was clearly the pictograms that caught their attention. The introductory note reads:

the drawings are a “score” of the songs they evoke; they are like Renaissance emblems whose meaning is revealed by a poem. [. . .] Each moment of the poem, of the song, has two elements: the pictogram is linked to a rhythmic fragment of language, which itself, as in the case of the Chippewa and Ojibwa Bark Songs, was in all likelihood simultaneously sung, mimed and danced. The whole thus constituted a sort of “total poem” that was at once a tale of origins and a historical account, with both mythical and “medicinal” significance [. . .] (ibid., 16).

  • 9 For the Renaissance emblem, which plays on the association between a title, a figure, and a text an (...)

22The analogy with the “emblems of the Renaissance,” in which the figure is not intended to graphically represent the text,9 is of questionable relevance, but what is clear is that, in Delay and Roubaud’s work, the pictogram is transformed into a visual poem which encodes a performance and thus embodies the fantasy of the “total poem,” where the sign, the body, and the community are brought into play all at once. From the authors’ point of view, the graphic inventiveness of the document, its ritual use, and its ideological significance are more important than its authenticity. The pictograms, which do indeed give the impression of authenticity, are also a sign of loss, starting with the loss of their semiotic function.

23Thus, with each of these retranslations into French, the Walam Olum has been given a new meaning, as exemplified by the terms used to translate olum, which reveal the changes in the status of the document as a discursive work. In an unexpected chiasmus, the Surrealist poet sees it as “annals,” while the historian uses the metaphor of a “gouge,” and Delay and Roubaud’s choice of title suggests the text is something to be interpreted—all of them, by turns, see in the Walam Olum the traces of a history, of a violence suffered and of a performance.

II. Resistance of the Fake

24As we have said, the Walam Olum was identified as a fake in the 1990s. Rafinesque’s forgery was exposed by David Oestreicher in his doctoral thesis, The Anatomy of the Walam Olum: The Dissection of a 19th Century Anthropological Hoax (1995), and many scholars have agreed with his analysis: the Walam Olum is a text that was translated from English into (approximate) Lenape, and not the other way around, using grammar and vocabulary that had only just been established by Moravian missionaries. It is therefore a well-informed forgery in terms of mythology, history, and the Lenape language—although there are inconsistencies in the circumstances in which it was allegedly acquired by Rafinesque and in the “Lenape” text itself that are hard to ignore.

  • 10 It was republished in Points Sagesses (1995) and then in Points Poésie (2007), in collections that (...)

25Nevertheless, the Walam Olum continued on its course of being republished and reprinted after Oestreicher’s work and was included in numerous anthologies right up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (Shell and Sollors 2000), which aims to revise the canon through a multilingual approach, the five songs are accompanied by a note by Dennis Tedlock, an ethnologist and specialist in ethnopoetics, who, with Jerome Rothenberg, co-founded the ethnopoetics journal Alcheringa. In the republished editions of Partition Rouge,10 the introductory note (which certainly expressed doubts about the authenticity of the document, but only to dismiss them even more) has remained unchanged, which confirms, if confirmation were needed, the translators’ lack of scientific ambition—but it is also possible that they were simply unaware of Oestreicher’s work. In his French translation of Technicians of the Sacred, published in 2007 by Corti, Yves Di Manno even took the liberty of adding an extract from Walam Olum to the “America” section of Rothenberg’s work, which hadn’t been included in it originally (Rothenberg 2007, 245–47). Di Manno expressly reproduces Benjamin Péret’s translation, paying tribute in a note to his role as a forerunner in the transfer of the poetic traditions of the American peoples to the French poetic scene (ibid., 579), but without mentioning Oestreicher’s work or even the doubts surrounding the authenticity of the manuscript. Admittedly, Oestreicher’s thesis remained unpublished, and the articles drawn from it appeared in minor journals, which helps to explain the limited dissemination of his conclusions beyond specialist circles, but this alone is not enough to explain why the forgery persisted for so long. Such persistence points to a deep-seated desire for indigenous authenticity, a fortiori in graphic form, and it is perhaps something of this order that is at the heart of what Rafinesque and Di Manno did—a desire so powerful that it can thumb its nose at reality, to the point of forgery in the one, and denial in the other.

26How can we explain a century and a half of producing authenticity, and the inertia of a forgery that continues to be considered as true despite the refutations? How can we understand the enthusiasm of successive publishers and translators? And how can we understand the efforts of the inventor in the first place?

A “Virtuous” Fake: Good Intentions and Ideology

27A distinction must, of course, be made between forgers and smugglers, voluntary adulteration and its involuntary perpetuation, lies and errors: the one, as Umberto Eco reminds us (Eco 2022 [2017]), raises an ethical problem (falsifying, lying), the other an alethic problem (saying false things while believing they are true). In this case, however, the invention of the forgery and its perpetuation as something genuine seem to stem from the same ideological motives. While the Walam Olum is a complete forgery (a counterfeit, and not just a simple written reworking of oral material), we can imagine that, for the document’s inventor, it constituted a means not only of attracting a certain scientific prestige but also of showcasing the people to whom the work was attributed.

28As Andrew Newman has shown, Walam Olum was invented initially to support Rafinesque in his theories on the Asian origins of the indigenous peoples of America. As these peoples also came from the Old World, they shared a common humanity with their invaders. By demonstrating this, Rafinesque reconciled their history with the biblical narrative (and, at the same time, boosted his chances for the Prix Volney, a scientific award, which he did not win as it happens). In a more fundamental way, the “document” allowed him to take a stand in support of indigenous territorial rights and to speak out as a member of the scientific community against the decision approved by Congress to deport peoples still living east of the Mississippi towards the west—as set out in the Indian Removal Act, signed in 1830 (Newman 2010, 27). In this way, the supposed graphic material was made to play a strategic role in the debates of the time, in which orality was readily associated with backwardness. In fact, the Walam Olum was for a long time accepted as the Book of the indigenous peoples of North America (“Bible of the Lenape,” “pictographic bible,” or “Odyssey in images,” in the words of Delay and Roubaud [1988, 15–17]). The use of graphic practices was seen as adding dignity and prestige, at the same time as the cultures in question came to be considered worthy of philological effort.

29This newly gained dignity had political implications since the story, which traces the occupation of the American continent by the Lenape, could then be used to condemn colonial violence and the territorial injustices these people were victims of. The “fragment” in particular, which gives a critical account of the indigenous perspective on the arrival of white men on the continent, could appear as a form of writing back (Newman 2010, 43)—even, indeed, as something like the imaginary beginnings of an inverted ethnology (everyone, from Victor Segalen to Tzvetan Todorov, loves accounts of conquest seen through the eyes of the vanquished). Starting with what Rafinesque did through to the reception of Walam Olum over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the desire to endow the “vanquished” populations with their own perspective in the form of a discourse, whether oral or written, has been a driving force; by playing on the idea of “the book,” the graphic materialization of this hoped-for counter discourse has in this case reinforced the impression that it was indeed authentic. It is more than likely that this desire—miraculously fulfilled—dulled the critical faculties of the scholars who worked on the manuscript and who, rather than acknowledge its inconsistencies, sought to find explanations for them. Thus, Brinton concludes that Rafinesque’s errors show that he was acting in good faith (Brinton 1885, 157); for Delay and Roubaud, doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript were “obviously fostered by the general lack of education in American society, which could not conceive of the possibility that a work of such magnitude could be produced by ‘savages’” (Delay and Roubaud 1988, 15). As Andrew Newman writes, “an attitude of skepticism might be politically unsavory” (Newman 2010, 28). We are dealing then with some kind of “virtuous” forgery, the uses of which reveal above all the importance of literacy in the symbolic dignity conferred on a culture (and the stubborn persistence with which this is the criterion used as an indication of cognitive development)—so much so that the invention of its manifestations seems necessary for the rights of its members to be taken seriously. The case thus presents us with a double paradox, a sign of the contradictions and persistent blindness within the scholarly world: the desire to read the natives and a fortiori to read their critical discourse on the “victors” has led to words which are not their own being attributed to them, that is, it has led to the assumption of the right to substitute a fictitious voice for their own voices, which are thereby rendered inaudible; and this “theft of voice” (to use Lenore Keeshig-Tobias’s words 1997, 71) was used to condemn the “theft of land” (to use those of Nelcya Delanoë 1982, 343).

Indigenous Expertise and Collaboration

30The Lenape, however, were not totally excluded from the editorial work: certain “natives” were called upon to take part in the development of most of the publications. Not only was there great variation in the way indigenous expertise (which itself is not infallible) was appreciated from a scientific and political point of view, but, above all, it also remained subject to the academic discourse that sought out and directed it. From this perspective, a brief survey of the main publications is revealing. The collaboration of Delaware informants and interpreters is not mentioned by Rafinesque, but it is by E. G. Squier, whose translation reproduces that of his predecessor and who invokes the authority of the Ojibwa George Copway (Squier 1849, 7): at Squier’s request, this “learned Indian chief” (Methodist missionary and writer) read Rafinesque’s manuscripts and deemed their content to be authentic. Brinton also speaks of this collaboration, from the opening paragraphs of his preface (Brinton 1885, v), and later declares that the text was “pronounced genuine by the Delawares.” Above all, he highlights the expertise of “the Rev. Albert Anthony, a well-educated native Delaware, equally conversant with his own tongue and with English”: according to this personage, the song is “a genuine oral composition of a Delaware Indian,” but it was transcribed by a third party with an imperfect knowledge of the language (ibid., 156).

31In the Voegelin edition, the new translation is presented as “the product of what is now an in-depth knowledge of Delaware dialects” (Lilly et al. in Voegelin 1954, XII), acquired through fieldwork with native speakers. According to Oestreicher, however, this publication contains so many errors that “it seems inconceivable that living Delaware speakers could have worked with Voegelin directly on the text”; moreover, nothing in Voegelin’s notes attests to “a serious attempt in conjunction with a Delaware speaker to ensure that the translation and contextual exactness of the words in the Walam Olum” are correct (Oestreicher 1995, 395); above all, no informant is named in the final publication.

  • 11 After paying tribute to David McCutchen’s translation, Linda Poolaw writes of the Walam Olum: “It i (...)

32In his own fieldwork among the Lenape in the 1990s, Oestreicher makes the following observations: while the elders only recently learned of the existence of the document through anthropologists and archaeologists and “found the linguistic text puzzling and nonsensical” (ibid., XIII), young people, on the other hand, who neither read nor speak Lenape take a keen interest in it, especially since the publication in 1993 of an edition of the Walam Olum by the poet David McCutchen, with a foreword by Linda Poolaw,11 who at the time was the Grand Chief of the Delaware Nation Grand Council of North America.

In an era when only a handful of elders could still speak the Delaware language and few remembered the traditional ways of the tribe, the Walam Olum seemed to offer the Delaware people a tangible identity, a story of their origins and former glory (ibid., XVIII).

  • 12 Since 2002, a vast collective effort to preserve this language has been undertaken; see the online (...)

33With the help of Lucy Parks Blalock—born in 1906 and “among the last fluent speakers of the Southern Unami dialect of the Delaware language” (ibid., 14–15)12—Oestreicher analyzed the “original” text and its translation: the work he and Blalock did together brought to light numerous inconsistencies in the “Lenape” text, starting with its title and the composite origins of the graphic symbols (of Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, and Native American origin), as well as the sources—linguistic, ethnographic, and literary—that allowed Rafinesque to craft the story. In Oestreicher’s acknowledgements, a special place is reserved for Lucy Parks Blalock, “who freely gave of her time, tirelessly analyzing with the author every word of the Walam Olum text and helping to remove it from the inordinate place it has occupied for so long in our understanding of the Delaware people” (ibid., XXVIII)—but, perhaps because of the requirement of single-authorship for a doctoral thesis, she is not given the status of author.

34Whatever the verdict (authentic, fake, or a mix of both), indigenous expertise was used to support an argument born of the academic world and was not considered an autonomous voice: it can be used to corroborate an argument, never to counter one. Within philological practices shaped and underpinned by the idea of a Western epistemic monopoly and which were sometimes heirs to this prejudice, the only way for the indigenous voice to exist was in support of the scholarly authority that sought it out.

35The Walam Olum is a diehard forgery, and one that has been perpetuated, despite people’s suspicions, in a multitude of republications and reinterpretations because everyone has, at one time or another, had an interest and found a meaning in its being true, including so as to support identity claims (consider the examples of “fakelore” which become folklore given by Dorson [1976] or of the “invented traditions” exposed by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger [1983]). However, the forgery does have one pernicious effect: it perpetuates the idea that indigenous people have lost the memory of their own traditions and that non-indigenous scholars are the only ones in a position to make up for that loss. While the forgery was able to be used in the cause to recognize the rights of the communities to which it was attributed, it contributes to the continuation of a heteronomy in which whites and the written word—Western philology—are the only true repositories of cultural heritage.

III. Red Face?

  • 13 This is obviously an issue of a very broad historical dynamic and not a position of principle. In “ (...)

36And that is not all. The Walam Olum story contains another lesson. It highlights the need to engage indigenous expertise to appraise not only the sources and their authenticity but also the mediation itself in the transition from one cultural context to another. This means recognizing not only the primacy of the players’ expertise on who they are, but also their right to have some control over how they are represented—so that they are no longer confined to the status of objects. In other words, the trajectory of the Walam Olum allows us to have a better understanding of the increasing demand over time, at once both epistemological and political, for the emic to prevail over the etic.13

37While the Partition Rouge can be seen as seeking to do this, their efforts too, as we shall see, are overtaken by the question of forgery and ambivalence. While the authenticity of the Walam Olum seemed to be a secondary issue to Delay and Roubaud, they nevertheless did want to take account of the indigenous view on the translation process that underpins their collection. At the end of the introduction, they quote the words of a certain Rarihokwats, who is meant to provide this perspective. Responding rather strongly to Jerome Rothenberg’s work, Rarihokwats wrote:

  • 14 Translator’s note: the original version of the text is quoted here, with the additional elements in (...)

While an American [let us say a white man] may read the sacred curing songs of the Society of Mystic Animals and even elicit some exotic imagery, the American does not know how to make it cure him. Poetry it may be, a cure it isn’t—for the tribal man, the reverse is true. Those who know the ancient secrets know that living power can be called upon to bring about good health and peace of mind. Read by Western man, it becomes a collected butterfly, pinned in an album by a knowledgeable collector: something beautiful and very dead. [. . .] So, if you are interested in poetry, Shaking the Pumpkin [or Partition Rouge] will offer some and interesting thoughts and ideas and styles. If you are interested in its essence, though, gather together your family and close friends and move to the site you have chose to form your new tribe. Read one selection each year for several generations. Your grandchildren may be able to grasp the meaning and compare it with ceremonials of their own” (Delay and Roubaud 1988, 11).14

38For Delay and Roubaud, including in the introduction criticism of Rothenberg’s work, which they took as their model, is obviously a way of noting the same in relation to their own undertaking (the additions in square brackets are their own): it is a means, that is, of expressing self-criticism and anticipating any negative comments that might be leveled at them. Based on Rarihokwats’s assessment, the reception by non-indigenous speakers is (necessarily) limited to an aesthetic reception, to the “beauty of the dead” (to use Michel de Certeau’s phrase), whereas in indigenous usage, song has the power to heal and to shape connections between human beings. The image of the pinned butterfly evokes the criticisms of ethnological museography—as expressed, for example, in Les statues meurent aussi (Marker and Resnais 1953)—which is accused of reducing once-living objects to artifacts rendered inert behind museum glass. The distinction made between an aesthetic reception with no therapeutic input, and therapeutic use with no concern for aesthetics, points to the limits of the reception of such texts by a non-indigenous readership, which can only consume them in a superficial way, rather than use them in the pragmatic or ritual ways for which they were conceived. Rarihokwats also suggests an alternative process for the transplantation of a poetic tradition: a gradual, long-term method of assimilation that has all the hallmarks of an exercise in anthropological experimentation.

  • 15 The issue also includes an anonymous article titled “Museums: Return our heritage.”

39No bibliographical information other than the author’s name, Rarihokwats, is provided by the two anthologists. Research into the genesis of Partition Rouge, some of the texts of which were pre-published in journals, does, however, offer a clue: the lines quoted are extracts from a text titled “Poésie tribale et façons de vivre tribales,” which Jacques Roubaud translated from English and published in extenso in 1973 in Action poétique (no. 56, “Poésie USA” issue); Rarihokwats is introduced as a “young Indian journalist.” A year earlier, the text had appeared in the fourth issue of Alcheringa under the title “Tribal Poetry and Tribal Lifeways”: it was in effect a critical review of Shaking the Pumpkin, an anthology of “traditional North American Indian poetry” published in 1972. But this was still not where it appeared originally: the text was first published, says Rothenberg, in Akwesasne Notes, in the journal of the Mohawk Nation and indigenous struggles15 and, as we learn from the pages of the latter, almost simultaneously in Win Magazine, subtitled Peace and Freedom Through Nonviolent Action.

Fig. 10. Win Magazine no8, 1972. The article « Tribal Poetry and Tribal Lifeways », written by Rarihokwats, was published almost simultaneously in Akwesasne Notes, and then, the following year, in Alcheringa (Fig. 11).

Fig. 10. Win Magazine no8, 1972. The article « Tribal Poetry and Tribal Lifeways », written by Rarihokwats, was published almost simultaneously in Akwesasne Notes, and then, the following year, in Alcheringa (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Akwesasne Notes, no1, vol. 4, 1972.

Fig. 11. Akwesasne Notes, no1, vol. 4, 1972.

Fig. 12. Alcheringa, no 4, 1973.

Fig. 12. Alcheringa, no 4, 1973.

Fig. 13. Action poétique, no56, 1973. This issue contains the article « Poésie tribale et façons de vivre tribales », written by Rarihokwats, translated from English by Jacques Roubaud.

Fig. 13. Action poétique, no56, 1973. This issue contains the article « Poésie tribale et façons de vivre tribales », written by Rarihokwats, translated from English by Jacques Roubaud.

40In his review, Rarihokwats begins by contrasting the Indian way of being in the world with the Western way of being in the world: the former is based on the continuity between poetry and life, on the one hand, and between man and nature, on the other, while the latter way, in both cases, breaks up and separates the two poles. Hence a number of criticisms of Rothenberg’s work, in addition to those in the extract cited by Delay and Roubaud. In Rarihokwats view, Rothenberg translates texts, but he does not translate the idea of the poetry that underlies them: written mediation disassociates the poems from life; the book form is, in essence, an abstraction and a reification. He also believes that, while the work of mediation is meaningful for the person who undertakes it (the translator), the reception of the result, on the other hand, is uncertain: “One senses that the task has somehow found great meaning to him and has altered his life. Whether readers will find any similar deep personal feelings is open to question” (Rarihokwats 1973, 71). It is therefore the transition process, not the outcome, that can have an effect: the transformative virtue of mediation operates primarily on the mediator, not the recipients. What is more, this work should be reciprocal: the “translat[ion] of Shakespeare and Tennyson and Whitman into Mohawk or Navajo” (ibid.)—an appeal that helps explain the presence of the translation into Tlingit of a poem by e. e. cummings or two haikus by Bashō (see Déléage 2016, 53–55) in a later issue of Alcheringa (1975, no. 2, new series), under the heading “Reverse Process.”

41Behind the name Rarihokwats (which means “he writes” in Mohawk) stands Jerry Gambill, an American citizen who died in 2020. He was not an indigenous member of the Mohawk Nation but worked with them as a community development officer in the 1960s under a program set up by the Department of Indian Affairs. Adopted as a member of the community, he took part in the founding of the Akwesasne Notes newspaper (published from 1968 to 1991), which made a significant contribution to the dissemination of information about indigenous struggles at the time of the civil rights movement.

A man came to see us; he was a federal government employee in charge of helping people who were setting up businesses. He organized the information. He knew how to write articles; he was always on his typewriter. Then the Department of Indian Affairs ordered him to leave the reserve, but the women said, “No, he’s going to stay here. We invited him to stay here, and we want him to stay here.” Eventually, the Bear clan adopted him into our community, and he was given the name Rarihokwats. [. . .] No one has ever received a salary [for his work at Akwesasne Notes], not even Rarihokwats (Ateronhiatakon, Akwesasne “house keeper,” in Blouin 2023, 78–79).

  • 16 It is signed as follows: “Rarihokwats, editor of Akwesasne Notes, a national Indian Newspaper publi (...)

42For Jerry Gambill, the simultaneous publication of his review of Shaking the Pumpkin in Akwesasne Notes and in Win Magazine (a pacifist journal that supported the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, etc.) 16was part of his militancy: it enabled him to reach the widest possible readership, both indigenous and non-indigenous.

  • 17 For example, that of Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee artist whose origins—but not his political commitmen (...)

43While Rothenberg—and then Delay and Roubaud—invokes Rarihokwats as an indigenous authority, his membership of the community is based on an adoptive bond—his “indigenousness” is therefore open to debate, but not his political commitment to the communities. Thinking they were giving an indigenous person a voice, Rothenberg, Delay, and Roubaud (but what did they know of him?) give a voice to a white man who has taken up the “red” cause, a cultural defector. The very man who seemed to challenge translation work in the name of indigenousness is not himself an indigenous person, but another mediation figure. This case (which may evoke others)17 opens up a more general debate: Who can claim indigenous origins? Who can create or express themselves in this capacity? Does commitment authorize the adoption of a borrowed identity?

* * *

44As we go back over the philological paths opened up by Partition Rouge, it seems that the more we look for the “Indians” of the subtitle, the more they seem to vanish . . . until they can no longer be found. This is hardly surprising, even if other investigations concerning provenance, based on the same work, might lead us to a different finding. As long as the phenomena of mediation and cultural transfer are the subject matter, we cannot expect to be dealing with “pure products” (as William Carlos Williams once put it, and as James Clifford said at the beginning of The Predicament of Culture [1988]): the translating process essentially excludes unadulterated membership of one culture, since the openness to others that this process requires already constitutes the beginnings of hybridization. In this sense, any publication of oral traditions, no matter how scrupulous the editor, is a cultural hybrid. Should we conclude from this that the difference between forging oral traditions and giving them literary form is a matter of degree, not of kind? At the very least we must retain the equivocal nature of the notion of authenticity, which lies at the heart of our philological heritage and practice and which can be used to help us understand how the dichotomies of both true/false (the issue of attribution) and pure/impure (the issue of origin and cultural blends) go hand in hand. Compared to the suspect equivalence between truth and purity, the fake does have the merit of demonstrating the paramount importance of contact and, consequently, the violence, symbolic or physical, that it gave rise to.

45In both the cases discussed—which involve the source and the man, the scholarly forgery and the pseudonym—determining that they were falsifications was not enough to put an end to the matter. This is first and foremost because such cases reveal the full gamut of players and intermediary positions within two communities—scholars and half-scholars, real and fake indigenous people, poet-translators and activists—who make it difficult for us to assign a definite identity and make a clear-cut axiological evaluation. Although the Walam Olum is not an indigenous source, it is incontestably a record of contact on two counts. Firstly, the contact is represented within the narrative—and the question “Who are they?”, once the issue of attribution has been rectified, becomes a question not about the identity of the other, but about the effect of otherness produced on others. The contact is also involved, in a mediated but real way, in the process of fabricating the narrative (Rafinesque consulting the glossaries of Moravian missionaries) and through its circulation (Delay and Roubaud scouring the archives of nineteenth-century Americanism). Although Rarihokwats is not an indigenous Mohawk, his political commitment to this community is unquestionable, and his identity was never used to defraud it. This is in no way to deny that falsification is an abuse of trust and power with regard to both the source community and the recipients it is intended to fool, but to point out that the falsification results from the very relationship that it seeks to establish, even if this has pernicious effects.

Fig. 14. Camp in the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon, United States.

Fig. 14. Camp in the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon, United States.

Photograph by Lee Moorhouse, 1900/1910. Moorhouse (Major Lee) Photographs Collection. University of Oregon Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives. Treated using a photochrome printing process, this photographe was reproduced as a postcard and distributed in the 1940s. The postcard appears on the cover of the original edition of Partition rouge by Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud.

46If determining that something is a falsification is not enough to take forgeries out of action, this is also because they put the person considering them in an impossible position by exacerbating the tension between the current perspective, which is sensitive to the issues of cultural appropriation, and the historian’s approach, which is attentive first and foremost to understanding context—and by revealing that neither of these positions is irrecusable: militancy exposes itself to essentialism; historical concern to the relativization of violence. Provenance investigation requires us to identify the forgeries and recognize that they might have unduly monopolized Western attention at the expense of actual indigenous voices, but it does not account for the perspective of those who took part in these translations, or for their motivations, or for their familiarity with the world they claimed to “translate.” By attempting to reconstruct their perspective, we can give them credit a minima for their attempt at translation and a maxima for their willingness to fight against certain cultural prejudices. While it is impossible to retroactively restore a voice to the communities dispossessed by the falsification, it is possible on the other hand to stop perpetuating the dispossession. This requires engaging in a less Eurocentric philology: publishing corpus controlled by indigenous players or produced by indigenous and non-indigenous researchers working collaboratively, or even indigenous publishing of non-indigenous forgeries—what would the indigenous republication of Partition Rouge look like? Perhaps the fakes and their stories, just as much as the “authentic” traditions, deserve to be reappropriated by those to whom they have been attributed—not so much as a symbol of an identity that is finally seen more clearly and correctly, but as testament to a relationship that, despite everything, has been established and has transformed each of the terms it is based on.

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Notes

1 On the logic of “misrepresentation,” see Said 1980 [1978]; Ziff and Rao 1997 [1990].

2 On the basis of a logic similar to the phenomena of “auto-ethnography” analyzed by Mary Louise Pratt, that is, situations in which colonized subjects seek to represent themselves in reaction to the colonizers’ depictions and do it by re-appropriating their codes (Pratt 1992, 7).

3 The editions by Ephraim G. Squier in 1849 and Franck Speck in 1945 should also be mentioned. See Oestreicher 1995 in regard to these. The three editions I mention here are those that served as the sources for the French translations.

4 For information on this character and the speculations he has given rise to, see Boewe 2003.

5 The genesis of this Anthologie, the identification of its sources, and the analysis of Péret’s exact treatment of them remain to be undertaken; for a first survey, see Segura Pantoja 2015.

6 On this reversal of perspectives, in the tradition of Julius Lips, see Kramer 1989.

7 To understand the roots, dating from the eighteenth century, of the enduring stereotypes of Indians created by Europeans, as well as those that Indians developed of Europeans, see Shoemaker 2004.

8 The songs are preceded, however, by “four annotated pictograms from the Indianapolis version,” designed to shed light on the semiotic function of the graphic signs.

9 For the Renaissance emblem, which plays on the association between a title, a figure, and a text and is primarily a literary game, see for example Giraud 1982 and Choné 2023.

10 It was republished in Points Sagesses (1995) and then in Points Poésie (2007), in collections that softened its meaning and toned down its experimental significance, then became part of the Fiction et compagnie collection again in 2014.

11 After paying tribute to David McCutchen’s translation, Linda Poolaw writes of the Walam Olum: “It is an old song, by an ancient people. I believe it was sung by my Grandfathers. I believe it was sung many, many times for many, many centuries. I believe it was sung by my ancestors, as they traveled thousands of miles in search of that place where the Sun wakes up. I pray that this song of the Lenape will be heard. Listen” (McCutchen 1993, x).

12 Since 2002, a vast collective effort to preserve this language has been undertaken; see the online database and tools, accessed May 20, 2024, https://www.talk-lenape.org/about-us/. In particular, the project draws on recordings made by Oestreicher with Nora Dean Thompson (1907–1984) and Lucy Parks Blalock (1906–2000).

13 This is obviously an issue of a very broad historical dynamic and not a position of principle. In “Leurs mots et les nôtres. Une réflexion sur le métier de l’historien, aujourd’hui” (2013), Carlo Ginzburg has clearly shown the benefits of a permanent dialectic between these two strains, taken as heuristic moments in an analytical approach and not as stable states to choose between.

14 Translator’s note: the original version of the text is quoted here, with the additional elements inserted in brackets by Delay and Roubaud.

15 The issue also includes an anonymous article titled “Museums: Return our heritage.”

16 It is signed as follows: “Rarihokwats, editor of Akwesasne Notes, a national Indian Newspaper published on the Mohawk Nation at Rooseveltown, N. Y.”

17 For example, that of Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee artist whose origins—but not his political commitment—have been disputed, or that of Cree writer Bernard Assiniwi. On the latter, see Jeannotte 2019.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Title page of Constantine S. Rafinesque's manuscript : “Wallamolum. First part of the painted and engraved traditions of the Linnilinapi […], translated word for word by C. S. Rafinesque”, 1833. Folio 2, recto. Kislak Center for Special Collections.
Crédits Collection linguistique Berendt-Brinton, Ms. Coll. 700, 217, Philadelphie, Bibliothèques de l’Université de Pennsylvanie.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 368k
Titre Fig. 2. Constantine S. Rafinesque, The American Nations; or, Outlines of A National History; of the Ancient and Modern Nations of North and South America. Philadelphia, 1836.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 392k
Titre Fig. 3. Daniel G. Brinton, The Lenâpé and their legends ; with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum, a new translation, and an inquiry into its authenticity. Philadelphia, 1885. Facsimile reprint, New York, AMS Press, 1969.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 152k
Titre Fig. 4. Edition of the Walam Olum by the Indiana Historical Society, 1954, with a frontispiece portrait of C. S. Rafinesque. Walam olum; or, Red score, the migration legend of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1954.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 64k
Titre Fig. 5. Constantine S. Rafinesque's manuscript (cf. Fig. 1), Folio 41, recto. End of the fifth chant, recounting the arrival of the Whites on the American continent, accompanied by Rafinesque’s translation.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 324k
Titre Fig. 6. Daniel G. Brinton, The Lenapê and their Legends (cf. Fig. 3). End of the fifth chant, accompanied by Brinton’s translation (repr. 1969, p. 216-217).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 52k
Titre Fig. 7. Benjamin Péret, Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique. Paris, Albin Michel, 1959. Cover of the original edition.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 500k
Titre Fig. 8. Nelcya Delanoë, L’Entaille rouge : terres indiennes et démocratie américaine 1776-1980. Paris, François Maspéro, 1982. Cover of the original edition.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 788k
Titre Fig. 9. Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud, Partition rouge : poèmes et chants des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord. Paris, Seuil, 1988. Cover of the original edition.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 372k
Titre Fig. 10. Win Magazine no8, 1972. The article « Tribal Poetry and Tribal Lifeways », written by Rarihokwats, was published almost simultaneously in Akwesasne Notes, and then, the following year, in Alcheringa (Fig. 11).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 660k
Titre Fig. 11. Akwesasne Notes, no1, vol. 4, 1972.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 352k
Titre Fig. 12. Alcheringa, no 4, 1973.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 328k
Titre Fig. 13. Action poétique, no56, 1973. This issue contains the article « Poésie tribale et façons de vivre tribales », written by Rarihokwats, translated from English by Jacques Roubaud.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 260k
Titre Fig. 14. Camp in the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon, United States.
Légende Photograph by Lee Moorhouse, 1900/1910. Moorhouse (Major Lee) Photographs Collection. University of Oregon Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives. Treated using a photochrome printing process, this photographe was reproduced as a postcard and distributed in the 1940s. The postcard appears on the cover of the original edition of Partition rouge by Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8649/img-14.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 212k
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Éléonore Devevey, « Forgery, Fraud, and “Theft of Voice”: Circulation of Walam Olum »Gradhiva [En ligne], 38 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2025, consulté le 18 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/8649 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1451j

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Éléonore Devevey

Département de langue et de littérature françaises modernes
Université de Genève / FNS
eleonore.devevey[at]gmail.com

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