PREFACE.
The Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine, together with the
Maliseets (Milicetes) or St. John's River Indians of New
Brunswick, form a single linguistic group of the eastern
Algonquin family known as Wabanaki "people of the dawn-land"
or "East." The other most important members of
this group of tribes are the Delawares, or Lenape, who
still use the term Wapanachki of themselves, and, in the
eastern States and Canada, the Penobscot, Abenaki and
Micmac.[1] The Penobscot and Abenaki form a linguistic
group similar to that of the Passamaquoddy and Maliseet,
while the Micmac idiom stands more remote, although
closely allied. It has been estimated that there are still
about seven hundred, people who use the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet
speech.
The name "Passamaquoddy" is a corruption of pestumo‛kat
'one who catches pollock-fish' (Gadus Pollachius) = peska‛tum.
This term has been applied to the tribe only in comparatively
recent times.
The Passamaquoddy of Maine now live at Sipayik or
Pleasant Point, near Eastport, Me., and near Princeton, Me.,
while the Maliseet have their chief settlement near Fredericton,
N. B. At Pleasant Point, which is the modern headquarters,
dwelt Sopiel Selmo, the keeper of the Wampum
Records, a mnemonic system of wampum shells arranged
on strings in such a manner, that certain combinations
suggested certain sentences or certain ideas to the narrator,
who, of course, knew his record by heart and was merely
aided by the association of the shell combinations in his
mind with incidents of the tale or record which he was
rendering. With Selmo, however, died the secret of this
curious system, but some of the wampum strings are still
to be seen at Pleasant Point and there are a few in the
possession of Mr. Wallace Brown at Calais, Me. The laws
and customs thereby recorded are published in the first
Series of the following texts in a more exact form than that
given in my former publication of this record in "Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society," 1897, pp. 479-495.
There is also a large amount of oral literature handed
down by these Indians, a quantity of which existed in the
manuscripts of the late Hon. Lewis Mitchell, former Indian
member of the Maine Legislature. These documents, together
with Mitchell's version of the Wampum Records, came into
my possession some years ago, but were all destroyed by
fire in 1911, since which time Mr. Mitchell industriously
reproduced them at my request from memory. They are
herein presented to Americanists for the first time in the
original in Series 2, 3 and 4 of the following texts. Other
matter of this character has already appeared in the
Philosophical Society's Proceedings, XXXVIII, pp. 181-189:
"Some Passamaquoddy Witchcraft Tales;" American Anthropologist
(N. S.), XI, No. 4, pp. 628-650: "A Passamaquoddy
Aviator."
Of the texts in the present work only the Wampum
Records (former publication cited above) and part of Series 4,
"Songs" (N. Y. Academy of Sciences, XI, No. 15, pp. 369-377
and XIII, No. 4, pp. 381-386) have been published before
in an imperfect form. Poetical and inexact English renderings
of some of the Kuloskap material (Series 2 below) have
appeared in Leland and Prince "Kuloskap the Master," New
York, 1902, a popular exposition of eastern Algonquin folk-lore.
The phonetics of the Passamaquoddy dialect are comparatively
simple. In the Mitchell manuscripts, the scribe
followed a spelling influenced variously by both English and
French, frequently using b, d, g, for p, t, k; j for tc, and a
purely arbitrary system of vocalization employing a, u, e for
the indeterminate vowel u or ', often omitting entirely the
rough breathing ‛, or representing it by h. It was, therefore,
clearly impossible to reproduce Mitchell's texts literally,
so I have followed, as far as was feasible, the system used
in my "Morphology of the Passamaquoddy Language of
Maine," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,
LIII, pp. 92-117, the principles of which follow herewith:
a = short o in 'bother'.
ā = a in 'father'.
â = aw in 'awful'.
' = the indeterminate vowel (Schwund).
u = oo in 'foot'.
There are no nasal vowels, as in Penobscot and Abenaki.
h is the simple breathing, but the inverted comma ‛ is a
glottal catch like a very soft Arabic ḥ.
l often carries its own inherent vowel similar to the
heavy Russian l. This sound is represented in the following
material by an elevated e, before the l (εl).
n before consonants carries its own inherent vowel, as nki,
pron. ŭnkî.
p, t, k, are voiceless surds, pronounced almost like b, d, g
between vowels and never like English, p(h), t(h), k(h).
tc, dc represent almost the same sound, between a palatalized
English ch and a palatalized English j, similar to
Polish ć and ź.
s between vowels is frequently pronounced z and written
thus.
w after k (= kw) represents the final Algonquin "whistle,"
as ke‛kw = keḥkwu; w in general is a weak consonant;
sometimes initial w almost = u, as w'liko = uliko.
The intonation of Passamaquoddy is highly tonic, showing
a voice-raise which often varies, apparently arbitrarily, with
various speakers. Thus, such a word as lakutwâk'n has
the voice-lift on the first syllable, a drop on the second,
lift on the third, and drop on the fourth. As I have noticed
so many stress-variations often of the same vocable by
different Passamaquoddy speakers, the accent has been
rarely indicated in the following texts. The peculiarity of
the voice-lift seems to be distinctively Passamaquoddy, as
the kindred Maliseets usually speak monotonously, with no
especially noticeable voice-lift. The Abenakis also have
frequently a monotonous tone, amounting practically to a
drawl. All these idioms of the Wabanaki are spoken in a low
pitch and almost never with the strong emphasis and often
loud voice of western Indian languages such as the Dakota.
J. Dyneley Prince.
New York, Columbia University, 1920.