The aesthetic arts of the American aborigines cannot be studied apart from their languages, industries, social organizations, lore and worships. Art was limited most of all by poverty in technical appliances. There were just as good materials and inspirations, but what could the best of them do without metal tools? One and all skilful to a surpassing Fine art.degree—weavers, embroiderers, potters, painters, engravers, carvers, sculptors and jewelers,—they were wearied by drudgery and overpowered by a never-absent, weird and grotesque theology. The Eskimo engraved poorly, the Déné (Tinneh) embroidered in quill, the North Pacific tribes carved skilfully in horn, slate and cedar, the California tribes had nimble fingers for basketry, the Sioux gloried in feathers and painted parfleche. The mound builders, Pueblo tribes, middle Americans and Peruvians, were potters of many schools; gorgeous colour fascinated the Amazonians, the Patagonians delighted in skins, and even the Fuegians saw beauty in the pretty snail shells of their desolate island shores. Of the Mexican and Central American sculpture and architecture a competent judge says that Yucatan and the southern states of Mexico are not rich in sculptures, apart from architecture; but in the valley of Mexico the human figure, animal forms, fanciful life motives in endless variety, were embodied in masks, yokes, tablets, calendars, cylinders, disks, boxes, vases and ornaments. The Nahuatl lapidaries had at hand many varieties of workable and beautiful stone—onyx, marble, limestone, quartz and quartz crystal, granite, syenite, basalt, trachyte, rhyolite, diorite and obsidian, the best of material prepared for them by nature; while the Mayas had only limestone, and hard, tenacious rock with which to work it, and timber for burning lime. However, looking over the whole field of North American achievement, architectural and non-architectural, composite and monolithic, the palm for boldness, magnitude of proportions and infinity of labour, must go to the sculptured mosaics of Yucatan. Maya architecture is the best remaining index of the art achievements of the American race. The construction of such buildings as the palace at Uxmal and the castillo at Chichen (Chichenitza) indicates a mastery in architectural design. There is lack of unity in plan and grouping, and an enormous waste of material as compared with available room. At Uxmal the mass of masonry is to chamber space about as forty to one. The builders were “ignorant of some of the most essential principles of construction, and are to be regarded as hardly more than novices in the art” (Holmes, Archaeological Studies, &c.). As for the marvels of Peru, the walls of the temple of the sun in Cuzco, with their circular form and curve inward, from the ground upward, are most imposing. Some of the gates without lintels are beautiful, and the geometric patterns in the walls extremely effective. The same objection to over-massiveness might not apply here as in Mexico, owing to volcanic activity.
Institutions in Europe and America have gathered abundant material for an intelligent comprehension of American Indian sociology. The British Association had a committee reporting during many years on the tribes of north-west Canada. The American Museum in New York has prepared a series of monographs on the tribes of the North Pacific Sociology.coast, of northern Mexico, and of the Cordilleras of South America. The reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington cover the Eskimo, east and west, and all the tribes of the United States. In Mexico the former labours of Pimentel and Orozco y Berra are supplemented by those of Bandelier, Penafiel, Herrera and Alfredo Chavero. Otto Stoll’s studies in Guatemala, Berendt’s in Central America, Ernst’s in Venezuela, Im Thurn’s in Guiana, those of Ehrenreich, von den Steinen, Meyer in Brazil, or of Bandelier, Bastian, Brühl, Middendorf, von Tschudi in Peru, afford the historian of comparative sociology ample groundwork for a comprehensive grasp of South American tribes. In all parts of the western hemisphere society was organized on cognate kinship, real or artificial, the unit being the clan. There were tribes where the basis of kinship was agnate, but these were the exceptions. The headship of the clan was sometimes hereditary, sometimes elective, but each clan had a totemic name, and the clans together constituted the tribe, the bond being not land, but blood. Women could adopt prisoners of war, in which case the latter became their younger sons. When a confederacy was organized under a council, intermarriage between tribes sometimes occurred; an artificial kinship thus arose, in which event the council established the rank of the tribes as elder and younger brother, grandfather, father and sons, rendering the relationship and its vocabulary most intricate, but necessary in a social system in which age was the predominant consideration and etiquette most exacting. (See Morgan, Tables of Consanguinity, Smithsonian Contributions, xvii.)
The Eskimo have a regular system of animal totem marks and corresponding gentes. Powell sets forth the laws of real and artificial kinship among the North American tribes, as well as tribal organization and government, the formation of confederacies, and the intricate rules of artificial kinship by which rank and courtesy were established. (Many papers in Reports of Bur. Am. Ethnol.) Bandelier declares that in Mexico existed neither state nor nation, nor political society of any kind, but tribes representing dialects, and autonomous in matters of government, and forming confederacies for the purposes of self-defence and conquest. The ancient Mexican tribe was composed of twenty autonomous kins. According to Brinton the social organization of ancient Peru was a government by a council of the gentes. The Inca was a war chief elected by the council to carry out its commands. Among the Caribs a like social order prevailed; indeed, their family system is identical with the totem system of North American Indians. Dominated by the rule of blood relationship, the Indians regulated all co-operative activities on this basis. Not only marriage, but speech and common industries, such as rowing a boat or chasing a buffalo, were under its sway. It obtrudes itself in fine art, behaviour, law-making, lore and religion. In larger or smaller numbers of cognate kindred, for shorter or longer periods of time, near or far from home, the aborigines developed their legislatures, courts, armies, secret societies and priesthoods.
In organization, engineering, strategy, offence and defence, the art of war was in the barbarous and the savage status or grade. One competent to judge asserts that peace, not war, was the normal inter-tribal habit. They held frequent intercourse, gave feasts and presents, and practised unbounded hospitality. Through this traffic objects Art of war.travelled far from home, and now come forth out of the tombs to perplex archaeologists. Remembering the organization of the tribe everywhere prevalent, it is not difficult to understand that the army, or horde, that stands for the idea, was assembled on the clan basis. The number of men arrayed under one banner, the time during which they might cohere, the distances from home they could march, their ability to hold permanently what they had gained, together form an excellent metric scale of the culture grade in the several American provinces, and nowhere, even in the most favoured, is this mark high. With the Mexicans war was a passion, but warfare was little above the raid (Bandelier; Farrand). The lower tribes hunted their enemies as they hunted animals. In their war dances, which were only rehearsals, they disguised themselves as animals, and the pantomime was a mimic hunt. They had striking, slashing and piercing weapons held in the hand, fastened to a shaft or thong, hurled from the hand, from a sling, from an atlatl or throwing-stick, or shot from a bow. Their weapons were all individual, not one co-operative device of offence being known among them, although they understood fortification.
The term “slavery” is often applied to the aboriginal American tribes. The truth of this depends upon the definition of the word “slave.” If it means the capture of men, and especially of women, and adoption into the tribe, this existed everywhere; but if subjection to a personal owner, who may compel service, sell or put to death the individual, slavery was far from universal. Nieboer finds it only on the North Pacific coast as far south as Oregon, among the Navajo and the Cibola pueblos, and in a few tribes of Middle and South America.
The thought life of the American aborigines is expressed in their practical knowledge and their lore. The fascination which
