The Calusa: Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships (review)

Granberry’s preface to this slim volume suggests that he has already received some daunting, perhaps even negative, criticism during the preparation of the work. He compares himself to Joseph Greenberg, whose Language in the Americas (1987) received a storm of criticism because of his conclusions, and Granberry expects similar criticism concerning the contents of his book. He probably is correct, for his conclusions—that the language of the Calusa Indians of southern Florida is a form of Tunica, a language historically attested to exist in central Mississippi and northern Louisiana, and that the language of the Ais, Surruque, Mayaca, and Jororo of north central Florida is a form of Chitimacha—will certainly be received with a great deal of skepticism.

Granberry does not make it easy for the reader to accept his conclusions. His style is effusive and full of digressions and moral judgements about persons, events, and academia that seem to have been calculated to be piquant, but more often are simply distracting. Is it germane to the thesis of this book, for example, that Franz Boas was a family friend (p. xiii)? Or that “culturally insensitive sixteenth-century Christian Spain and its incredibly cruel Inquisition” is “so reminiscent of American actions in the Middle East in the late 1900s and early 2000s” (pp. 2–3)?

In addition, the organization of the book could and should be more user friendly. For example, chapter 5, the most important portion of the book in regard to his Calusa-Tunica thesis, is haphazard. The list of Calusa words and phrases that have Spanish glosses, the foundation of his thesis, is relegated to table 9 in this chapter, rather than being at the beginning, and the derivation of the meanings from the glosses is not clearly discussed.

Rather like Greenberg’s language data, Granberry’s is less than accurate. My critique of Greenberg (1992) was not concerning his hypothesis, which I considered worthy of exploration, but rather the haphazardly transcribed, often erroneous data that he used to support it. Certain of the apparent errors in Granberry’s book actually weaken his argument. For example, he states that the Tunica phoneme written ɛ is pronounced like /ey/ of English they. However, according to Haas, orthographic ɛ is actually “a low vowel, slightly closer than the a of English mat but not so close as the e of English met” (1940:15), thus, more like /æ/. Using the correct pronunciation, Granberry’s equation of Tunica /tataštʔæ/ (orthographic tataštʔɛ) with Calusa tatasta becomes much closer. He compares the erroneous Tunica form *táskʔhapo with the Calusa tejiEue /tešihebe/(?) ‘watchtower’; the correct Tunica form tásɛhapo ‘mirror’, especially as its literal meaning is ‘the examiner’, is much closer to the Calusa. It would help his identification of Calusa /es(i)/ as ‘water’ (in the form Guasaca Esgui ‘Rio de Cañas [Cane River]’) if he had discussed the fact that Tunica wiši ‘water’, to which he relates the Calusa word, is also used in names of rivers, for example, táwišmíli ‘Red River’, literally, ‘the red water’ (Haas 1940:63). Additionally, there seem to be typographical errors in some of the other Tunica words cited, but they are not of a serious kind that would affect the validity of Granberry’s argument.

One might quibble about the place names in Florida that Granberry claims to be Natchez (ʔapalica vs. *ʔapalaci; ʔahaya·nah vs. *ʔahana) (cf. Kimball 2005), but one would still need to explain why there appears to be a Natchez loanword in Apalachee, and that interjections in various unrelated Southeastern languages are similar in form (Koasati hí·hà ‘damn!’, Chitimacha ʔi·hà ‘alas!’, Natchez hi·hà ‘interjection of disgust’). One also might argue with Granberry’s use of Chitimacha in an attempt to explain the tribal name Ays and the single phrase of that language recorded by Luis Carcer in 1549. While the evidence seems weak, there is nothing to be found that...