Horatio Hale | |
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Born | Horatio Emmons Hale May 3, 1817 |
Died | December 28, 1896 (aged 79) Clinton, Ontario, Canada |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Harvard University |
Mother | Sarah Josepha Hale |
Scientific career | |
Fields | ethnology |
Horatio Emmons Hale (May 3, 1817 –December 28, 1896) was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist and businessman. He is known for his study of languages as a key for classifying ancient peoples and being able to trace their migrations. [1]
Hale was the first to analyze and confirm that the Tutelo language of some Virginia Native Americans belonged to the Siouan family, which was most associated with the western Dakota and Hidatsa languages. [1]
Hale also determined that the Cherokee language spoken by a tribe associated with the Appalachian Mountains and upland areas of the interior American Southeast was one of the Iroquoian family of languages. [1] Most of the speakers of the latter had historically occupied territory to the east and south of the Great Lakes, in present-day New York and Pennsylvania. In addition, he published a work, Iroquois Book of Rites (1883), [2] based on his translation of their only two known historic manuscripts. [3] It was supported by his studies with tribal elders in interpreting the Iroquois wampum belts to establish the people's prehistory.
Horatio Hale was born on May 3, 1817, at Newport, New Hampshire, in the United States, the son of Sarah Josepha Hale (née Buell), a writer and prominent magazine editor, and David Hale, a lawyer who died when Hale was five. [4]
Entering Harvard College in 1833, Hale showed a marked faculty for languages. His first original work was published the next year, and attracted the attention of the college authorities. It consisted of an Algonkian vocabulary, which he gathered from a band of Native Americans who had camped on the college grounds. [1] While at Harvard, he was a founding member of the A.D. Club, then known as an honorary chapter of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. [5]
Three years later, when the United States Exploring Expedition was organized under Charles Wilkes, Hale was recommended, while yet an undergraduate, for the post of ethnologist and philologist. He was appointed to the position. [3]
From 1838 to 1842, Hale worked with the expedition, visiting South America, Australasia, Polynesia, and north-western America, then known as Oregon Country. [3] From this point he returned overland. The Hale Passages of Puget Sound were named in recognition of his service to the expedition. [6]
The expedition also traveled to Polynesia. Of the reports of that expedition, Hale prepared the sixth volume, Ethnography and Philology (1846), which is said to have laid the foundations of the ethnography of Polynesia. [7] [8]
Having completed his master's degree at Harvard, Hale made a short tour of Europe. On his return, he studied law, and was admitted to the Chicago bar in 1855. In 1854, at Jersey City, New Jersey, he married Margaret Pugh, whom he met in Ontario. [3] Her father William was formerly justice of the peace for the township of Goderich in Huron County, Canada West (now Ontario).
In 1856, the Hales moved to Clinton, Ontario, Canada, where he administered the estate of his father-in-law. [3] He began to get involved in local real estate development and other business and educational endeavours. [1]
He continued to reside in Clinton until his death, devoting much attention to the development of the Ontario school system. [1] He was influential in introducing co-education of the sexes in high schools and collegiate institutes, in increasing the grants to these institutions, in establishing the normal school system for training of teachers, and in improving the methods of examination. [9]
In Canada Hale returned to his study of First Nations and Native Americans. He was mentored by the Iroquois chiefs George Henry Martin Johnson and John Fraser, whom he met while visiting the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation in Ontario. In addition he traveled to the United States to consult with other native informants. Hale documented the oral history and rituals of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was assisted in interpreting the group's wampum belts, which recounted their history. [3] As a result of this work, he published The Iroquois Book of Rites (1883). He also studied the Iroquois languages, determining that Mohawk was the oldest. He also concluded that the Laurentian languages were Iroquoian. [1]
Archeologists and linguists have since confirmed that the St. Lawrence Iroquoians were an early people who had occupied territory in what is now considered upper New England and along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec and Ontario from about the 14th century to about 1580. [10] They were likely destroyed by the Mohawk from central New York, who were competing for control of hunting grounds and the fur trade.
Hale made many valuable contributions to the science of ethnology, attracting attention particularly by his theory of the origin of the diversities of human languages and dialects. [1] This was inspired by his study of child languages, or the languages invented by young children. [7] [11] He also emphasized the importance of languages as tests of mental capacity, and demonstrated that Native American languages were complex and had a high capacity for classification.
He used language as a criterion for the classification of human groups. He was the first to discover that the Tutelo language of Virginia belonged to the Siouan family, [7] which was more commonly associated with the Dakota and Hidatsa languages and tribes located to the west of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. [1]
He was also the first to identify the Cherokee language as a member of the Iroquoian family of languages. [8] By the colonial and federal period, the Cherokee people were primarily located in the southern interior of present-day Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Most of their members were among the southeastern tribes forced to relocate during the Indian removal of the 1830s to territory west of the Mississippi River, in what was reserved for a time as Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma). [1]
Hale never received a doctorate but his research was recognized through his roles in a number of academic societies. [1]
In 1872, Hale was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. [12]
In 1884, he reorganized the section of anthropology as an independent department of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at its meeting in Montreal that year. He had already performed a like service for the American Association. [11] At the request of the British committee, he undertook the supervision of the anthropological section's work in the Canadian North-west and British Columbia. The reports, which are very elaborate, were published in the Association's Proceedings from 1885 to 1897. While Hale continued as a member of the committee, he was asked to accept the position of vice-president at the Association's meeting in Toronto (1896); he declined due to ill-health. [1]
Hale was also a member of the American Folklore Society, serving as its President in 1893. [13]
Hale was an honorary fellow of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, [9] to which he contributed a number of papers. [14]
Hale died on December 29, 1896, in Clinton, Ontario. [9] In an appreciation of his life, Franz Boas wrote: "Ethnology has lost a man who contributed more to the knowledge of human race than perhaps any student". [3]
The Wyandot people are an Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands of the present-day United States and Canada. Their Wyandot language belongs to the Iroquoian language family.
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
The Neutral Confederacy was a tribal confederation of Iroquoian peoples. Its heartland was in the floodplain of the Grand River in what is now Ontario, Canada. At its height, its wider territory extended toward the shores of lakes Erie, Huron, and Ontario, as well as the Niagara River in the east. To the northeast were the neighbouring territories of Huronia and the Petun Country, which were inhabited by other Iroquoian confederacies from which the term Neutrals Attawandaron was derived. The five-nation Iroquois Confederacy was across Lake Ontario to the southeast.
William N. Fenton was an American scholar and writer known for his extensive studies of Iroquois history and culture. He started his studies of the Iroquois in the 1930s and published a number of significant works over the following decades. His final work was published in 2002. During his career, Fenton was director of the New York State Museum and a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York.
The Erie people were an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands historically living on the south shore of Lake Erie. An Iroquoian-speaking tribe, they lived in what is now western New York, northwestern Pennsylvania, and northern Ohio before 1658. Their nation was almost exterminated in the mid-17th century by five years of prolonged warfare with the powerful neighboring Iroquois for helping the Huron in the Beaver Wars for control of the fur trade. Captured survivors were adopted or enslaved by the Iroquois.
The Saponi are a Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia. They spoke a Siouan language, related to the languages of the Tutelo, Biloxi, and Ofo.
The Tutelo were Native American people living above the Fall Line in present-day Virginia and West Virginia. They spoke a dialect of the Siouan Tutelo language thought to be similar to that of their neighbors, the Monacan and Manahoac nations.
Laurentian, or St. Lawrence Iroquoian, was an Iroquoian language spoken until the late 16th century along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River in present-day Quebec and Ontario, Canada. It is believed to have disappeared with the extinction of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, likely as a result of warfare by the more powerful Mohawk from the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy to the south, in present-day New York state of the United States.
The St. Lawrence Iroquoians were an Iroquoian Indigenous people who existed until about the late 16th century. They concentrated along the shores of the St. Lawrence River in present-day Quebec and Ontario, Canada, and in the American states of New York and northernmost Vermont. They spoke Laurentian languages, a branch of the Iroquoian family.
The Occaneechi are Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands whose historical territory was in the Piedmont region of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.
Frank Gouldsmith Speck was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples among the Eastern Woodland Native Americans of the United States and First Nations peoples of eastern boreal Canada.
The Petun, also known as the Tobacco people or Tionontati, were an indigenous Iroquoian people of the woodlands of eastern North America. Their last known traditional homeland was south of Lake Huron's Georgian Bay, in what is today's Canadian province of Ontario.
Central Huron Secondary School ('CHSS') is a secondary school in Clinton, Ontario. The school opened in 1866.
Nikonha, also known as Waskiteng and Mosquito, was known as the last full-blooded speaker of Tutelo, a Virginia Siouan language. He is reported to have been around 106 years old when he died at Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, Ontario in 1871, where his people had migrated with the Cayuga during the American Revolutionary War.
Tutelo, also known as Tutelo–Saponi, is a member of the Virginian branch of Siouan languages that were originally spoken in what is now Virginia and West Virginia in the United States.
The protohistoric period of the state of West Virginia in the United States began in the mid-sixteenth century with the arrival of European trade goods. Explorers and colonists brought these goods to the eastern and southern coasts of North America and were brought inland by native trade routes. This was a period characterized by increased intertribal strife, rapid population decline, the abandonment of traditional life styles, and the extinction and migrations of many Native American groups.
The Draper Site is a precontact period Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on a tributary of West Duffins Creek in present-day Pickering, Ontario, approximately 35 kilometres northeast of Toronto. The site is found in a wooded area on existing farmland and may be reached by walking from the end of North Road.
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Simeon Gibson was a member of the Cayuga tribe and the Onondaga Longhouse on the Six Nations Reserve. Gibson (Iroquois) worked closely with Iroquois researchers, including Horatio Hale, David Boyle, Mark Raymond Harrington, A.C. Parker, and John Napoleon Brinton (J.N.B.) Hewitt. Gibson worked with these researchers to interpret his father Chief Gibson’s two records of the Daganawi:dah legend.
John Buck, titled Skanawati among other variants, was a leader of the Onondaga who lived near Ontario's Grand River. He was the official keeper of the wampum records of the Iroquois, sometimes described as a firekeeper. He took on the role of wampum keeper in 1843. Buck was described in a contemporary account as "a capable ruler and an able and trustworthy negotiator". Kenyon and Kenyon identify him as a "follower of Handsome Lake".
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