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Translating the Walam Olum The Tale of a Hoax David M. Oestreicher Some texts present scholars with problems beyond those generally associated with a typical translation process.1 One such case is the Walam Olum, or ‘‘Painted Record,’’ a document long regarded as a classic native account of Algonquian origins. Ever since its ‘‘discovery’’ in the early nineteenth century, the text had been widelyaccepted as genuine. It appears in numerous anthologies of American Indian literature, has been cited by leading scholars as support for various migration theories, and can be found to this day in school textbooks as an example of aboriginal literature and culture. In recent years it has even been accepted by some American Indian groups seeking to reclaim their tribal heritage.2 Although a minority of scholars were long skeptical of the veracity of the document, a larger number had endorsed its authenticity, and as no studies were advanced providing definitive textual evidence either proving ordisproving the alleged Algonquian epic, it remained an enigma. The Walam Olum first emerged some 170 years ago, when the well-known naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783–1840) announced that he had deciphered an ancient pictographic record whose story revealed the long-lost history of North America. Engraved and painted on wooden tablets, it was an account of the peopling of the continent by the Lenape (Delaware) Indians that had presumably been passed down in the tribe for thousands of years. According to Rafinesque, the tablets were obtained in 1822 from ‘‘the late Dr. Ward of Indiana ,’’ who had originally received them from a grateful Lenape patient he had cured (Rafinesque 1954, 7; 1836 1:122, 151). The ‘‘original’’ tablets were inexplicably lost; Rafinesque’s notebook ‘‘copy’’ is the sole record of the hieroglyphs. Rafinesque claimed to have acquired not only the original wooden tablets but also a transcription in the Lenape language of near-forgotten songs that explained the pictographs and revealed their story.3 ‘‘This m[anuscri]pt and wooden original . . . was inexplicable till a deep study of the Linapi enabled me to translate them, with explanations,’’ Rafinesque wrote on the cover of his manuscript (1954, 7), informing us that the translation was completed by 1833 (1954, 7; Rafinesque 1836, 1:151), years after the Walam Olum was originally obtained. The Walam Olum’s 183 pictographs appeared to reveal an astonishing saga: they relate a creation myth, a flood myth, and an origin legend of the Delaware 4 the tale of a hoax people. They allegedly document how the Lenape crossed the Bering Strait from Asia and migrated southeast across the North American continent. They describe the Lenape conquest of an advanced mound-building people who had already settled in the Midwest, the fracture of the Lenape into the numerous tribes of the Algonquian language family, and the Lenape’s settlement along the mid-Atlantic coast. The epic concludes with the arrival of Europeans in the Lenape homeland during the 1600s.4 In 1994 textual evidence was advanced demonstrating that the Walam Olum is spurious and that Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, its alleged discoverer, was in fact its author (Oestreicher 1994). The so-called Delaware Indian pictographs are not Delaware at all but are in fact hybrid combinations of Egyptian, Chinese, Ojibwa, and even several Mayan symbols newly published at the time (Oestreicher 1994, 16–21; 1995b, 101–231). As for the accompanying ‘‘Delaware’’ text, it was fabricated by Rafinesque from the very sources he claimed to have used as translation aids: mainly, David Zeisberger’s Grammar of the Language of the Lenni Lenape Indians (1827) and John Heckewelder’s list of Lenape place and personal names (1834) (Oestreicher 1994, 3–12; 1995b, 10–72). (Heckewelder and Zeisberger were both Moravian missionaries who had lived among the Lenape during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.) Additional evidence demonstrated that Rafinesque had created the document in December 1834 through January and possibly February 1835 in hope of securing the prestigiousVolney Prize offered by the Institut Royal de France and thereby attaining a lasting and long-coveted place in history (Oestreicher 1994, 12–15; 1995b, 73–88). As for his claim to have completed the translation by 1833, Rafinesque was simply attempting to predate some of the published sources from which the forgery was crafted (1994, 13–15; 1995b, 76–83). Rafinesque failed to win the prize, but he refused to give up on the Walam Olum. In 1836...

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