Over two
hundred years ago, when Europeans first visited the
Northwest Coast of North America, the weavers of the area were making
robes
of exquisite beauty to adorn the wealthiest of their noble class.
Patterned
in bold black and white designs streaked with scintillating dashes of
yellows,
these robes predate the better-known Chilkat Blankets from the same
area.
Today only eleven robes exist, three of them as fragments. Another
two
are shown in Russian historical paintings by Mikhail Tikhanov The only
other known robes are found in an archival photograph and in two
sketches
by Pavel Mikhailof.To produce this book, Cheryl Samuel travelled to
Leningrad,
Copenhagen, and London to examine the six robes in Europe. She also
studied
the robes housed in museums in Canada and the United States. Using this
research material she was able to reconstruct Chief Kotlean's robe. In
the process she resurrected an old weaving style no longer in use by
the
native people on the northern coast. In this book Samuel presents the
known
historical data on the robes along with an analysis of the materials
used
and a description of the nine twining techniques. The Raven's Tail
makes an important contribution to the knowledge of early Indian
weaving,
and will be of interest to those in native studies as well as weavers.
[ CHERYL SAMUEL is an expert weaver living in Victoria, British Columbia.
Her first book, The Dancing Blanket, revealed the mysteries of
Chilkat
weaving.]
The
Gathering of the Robes
Patterns
speaking of women and men . . . patterns recording the movement
through time of the great clans . . . patterns telling the tale of
transition
.... When I first met the patterns of the Raven's Tail robes, my heart
quickened and my soul danced. I wondered "why?" When I shared them with
others through lectures, I felt an instant response, a recognition. I
wondered,
"why?" Neither I, nor the global audiences I spoke to, had ever seen
these
robes. They were not a part of "our" heritage, nor were they familiar
through
the vast body of the world's literature. Why, then, was it so easy to
make
an audience enthusiastic about them? Why, when we finally had a real
robe
to dance with, did the people who wore it always speak of its Power?
Why
did those who saw it dance, stand spellbound?
These questions
have followed me through the last seven years. As I
have wandered the world following the trail of the robes, I have
pondered
the impact they have had on me and on others.
The odyssey of
the gathering of the robes has been touched with magic.
It seems almost as if the robes themselves wished to come forth and be
counted. The saga started in New York in 1980 at the American Museum of
Natural History. I was totally involved with the Chilkat Dancing
Blankets,
speaking to the weavers through the products of their hands. Dr.
Phillip
Gifford came one morning with a box full of what looked like scraps of
yarn. "You might be interested in this," he said, and left me. To my
amazement,
the box yielded remnants of half of a robe such as I had never seen
before.
It was twined; it was not Chilkat. Techniques were hidden in its
structure
which were completely new to me. I spent the next three days puzzling
its
border; by day I would prod the disintegrated threads, by night I would
weave on a sample loom. Finally I figured it out. The difference
between
knowing something intellectually and actually being able to do it never
ceases to astonish me.
In New York I
also made another discovery which was to prove important.
Prior to arriving there I had been in Ottawa, where I had studied a
tunic
which had been fashioned from one half of an old robe. On it, blocks of
Chilkat design units were placed on a black and white background. I had
treated it as a Chilkat robe, for I knew no better. At the Heye
Foundation,
having "done" the storage rooms,.l was prowling through the public
display
when I spotted a legging which I did not recognize. Also a piece once
cut
up in potlatch, the patterns were identical to those on the Ottawa
Tunic.
Questions produced the mate to this legging, and suddenly I had two
more
sections of what I now recognize as theLynn Canal
Robe.
After New York
my next destination was the HarvardPeabody
Museum and the famous Swift Robe.
Arrangements
had been made for me to see it, but when I got there I discovered that
"seeing it" meant looking at the front of the robe through a display
case.
Not only was the case wired with a burglar alarm system, but also
decades
of dutiful decorators had painted the glass to the frame. Undaunted, I
asked if the robe could be removed, and miraculously workmen appeared
to
scrape away the paint, unwire the case, and free the robe. The gallery
was roped off and I was left to live with that exquisite garment "as
long
as I wished." Perhaps they thought I would leave at closing time, but
in
the wee hours of the night I could still hear the footsteps of the
guard
doing his round. I left the robe when my eyes would no longer focus.
That journey was
only the beginning. At home, I received a box in the
mail addressed to me from Carolyn Osborne. I knew of her by reputation,
but I had not paid much attention to her writings. At that time my work
was on the Chilkat robes, and she had written on another of those
mysterious"geometric
Chilkats."Hearing of my investigations, she had quite
independently
felt inspired to pile all of the material she had into a box and post
it
to me. I was, and still am, extremely moved by the generosity of this
woman.
Initially I did all my research on the Knight
Island
Robe from Osborne's notes. When I found that I would be doing a
workshop in Philadelphia the following year, I wrote to the University
Museum requesting permission to view its remains. My arrival was
uncomfortable
for the staff had not been able to locate the fragments. I was there
for
five days, and on the morning of the fourth I received an ecstatic call
from the museum curator saying they had at last discovered their
whereabouts.
No one had asked for them since the 1950's when Osborne had placed them
in a small box....
In that same
year, a visit to a good friend, Dr. Giovanni Costigan,
Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington, was to
catapult
me into a Russian adventure. Over tea served in cups of delicate bone
china,
I shared with him and his wife Amne my newborn enthusiasm for the
"pre-Chilkat"
robes. How I rued the fact that the largest number of them were in
Russia
where I would never be able to see them. "Go to Russia!" was their
astonishing
reaction. Me? Go to Russia? Impossible! But the seed was planted, and
in
time it grew and bore fruit...
The trip
to the Soviet Union was extraordinary. I was treated with immense
respect, given an office and the freedom to come and go whenever I
pleased.
Four precious robes were in my constant possession, and I was not only
allowed to photograph them outside in the natural light, but also a
museum
staff member put them on so that I could get a real sense of the
incredible
impact of their designs. The graciousness of Madame
Rosa Lyapunova was unbounded; she
expressed
only two concerns. One was that I take time from the
robes to see their beautiful city, and the other
was thatI
see the "most important piece in the museum's collection."
I did indeed tour the Hermitage and journey to the Summer Palace of the
Czars on the shore of the Baltic sea, and in
the
final hours of my visit I stood for twenty minutes dutifully staring
into
a darkened display case at the small etched markings on a
Rongo-rongo
board from Easter Island.
" Some day you will know why you were to
see it, " she told me.
RONGORONGO. The Easter Island Tablets
History:
Easter Islanders are of Polynesian descent, and archaeologists concur
to date their arrival around 400 AD. The island was stripped bare of
timber
by the eighteenth century. Yet in a letter dated December 1864, Brother
Eugene Eyraud mentions the existence of hundreds of wooden tablets
covered
in hieroglyphics. Four years later, Monsignor Jaussen, Bishop of
Tahiti,
could only recover five tablets. Only twentyone have survived,
scattered
in museums and private collections. The writing on them is
extraordinary.
Tiny, remarkably regular glyphs, about one centimeter high, highly
stylized
and formalized, are carved in shallow grooves running the length of the
tablets. Oral tradition has it that scribes used obsidian flakes or
shark
teeth to cut the glyphs and that writing was brought by the first
colonists
led by Hotu Matua. Last but not least, of the twentyone surviving
tablets three bear the same text in slightly different "spellings", a
fact
discovered by three schoolboys of St Petersburg
(then
Leningrad), just before World War II. In 1958 Thomas
Barthel
made the whole of the Easter Island corpus available in his "Grundlagen
zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift" ("Bases for the Decipherment of
the Easter Island Script"), alas never translated into English. Almost
forty years later now the tablets remain as much of an enigma. Their
meaning
remains unknown, except for two and a half lines of one tablet, which,
beyond reasonable doubt, contain a lunar calendar, already identified
as
such by Barthel in 1958.
Let us wind the story back to the discovery of the first tablet. I
can
do no better than quote the excellent little book by Catherine and
Michel
Orliac, "Des dieux regardent les étoiles" ("Gods gaze at the
stars",
No.38 in Gallimard's paperback series "Découvertes"):
"In 1868 newly converted Easter Islanders send to Tepano
Jaussen,
Bishop of Tahiti, as a token of respect, a
long twine of human hair, wound around an ancient piece of wood.
Tepano Jaussen examines the gift, and, lifting the twine, discovers
that
the small board is covered in hieroglyphs."
The bishop, elated at the discovery, writes to Father Hippolyte Roussel
on Easter Island, exhorting him to gather all the tablets he can and to
seek out natives able to translate them. But only a handful remain of
the
hundreds of tablets mentioned by Brother Eyraud only a few years
earlier
in a report to the Father Superior of the Congregation of the Sacred
Heart.
Some say they were burnt to please the missionaries who saw in them
evil
relics of pagan times. Some say they were hidden to save them from
destruction.
Which side should we believe? Brother Eyraud had died in 1868 without
having
ever mentioned the tablets to anyone else, not even to his friend
Father
Zumbohm, who is astounded at the bishop's discovery. Monsignor Jaussen
soon locates in Tahiti a laborer from Easter Island, Metoro, who claims
to be able to read the tablets. He describes in his notes how Metoro
turns
each tablet around and around to find its beginning, then starts
chanting
its contents. The direction of writing is unique. Starting from the
lefthand
bottom corner, you proceed from left to right and, at the end of the
line,
you turn the tablet around before you start reading the next line.
Indeed,
the orientation of the hieroglyphs is reversed every other line.
Imagine
a book in which every other line is printed backtofront and
upsidedown.
That is how the tablets are written!
What Then, Do We Know?
Very little. We will probably never know what the tablets mean: too
few have survived. Let us then be content with the little of which we
can
be sure.
Each tablet was prepared before carving. Shallow grooves were cut
lengthwise,
probably using an adze with a blade of shell or of obsidian. They are
10
to 15mm wide, and can be clearly seen in a photo pp.6465 of
Catherine
and Michel Orliac's excellent little book. The signs themselves were
engraved
in those grooves, probably with shark teeth or obsidian flakes, as oral
tradition has it.
Of the 21 tablets we have, three bear almost exactly the same
hieroglyphic
text. A fourth one, called "Tahua" or "The Oar" bears only part of that
text, and in a very different, more lapidary, style. Indeed this tablet
is an oar made of European ash, as were used in the British navy two
centuries
ago. At the earliest, it could date from the beginning of the
eighteenth
century, at the latest, from the end of the nineteenth. There must
therefore
have been then literate Easter Islanders, because this "Oar" is not a
mere
copy. It looks like a compilation, a digest of earlier texts, lost,
except
for its beginning, found on those other three tablets (see "On a
Fragment
of the Tahua Tablet" in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, December
1985).
The overwhelming majority of the hieroglyphs are anthropomorphic. They
are little figures, facing you, or sideways; standing with dangling
arms;
or sitting with their legs sometimes stretched, sometimes crossed; with
a hand up, or down, or turned to the mouth; some hold a staff, some a
shield,
some a barbed string. Some sport two bulging eyes (or are they
ears, or coils of hair?); some a huge hooked nose with
three
hairs on it; some have the body of a bird. The writing often
looks
like an animated cartoon. You can see the same little
fellow
repeated in slightly different postures. One tablet shows the same
figure
in three successive postures, sitting sideways, playing, it seems, with
a top. Or is it a potter at the wheel? A jeweller with a drill, making
shell beads?
There are also many zoomorphic figures, birds especially, fish and
lizards
less often. The most frequent figure looks very much like the frigate
bird,
which happens to have been the object of a cult, as it was associated
with
MakeMake, the supreme god.
When you compare the tablets which bear the same text, when you
analyze
repeated groups of signs, you realize that writing must have followed
rules.
The scribe could choose to link a sign to the next, but not in any old
way. You could either carve a mannikin standing, arms dangling,
followed
by some other sign, or the same mannikin holding that sign with one
hand.
You could either carve a simple sign (a leg, a crescent) separate from
the next, or rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise and carve the next
sign
on top of it."
(Jacques B.M. Guy, RONGORONGO. The Easter Island Tablets;
emphases
supplied)
