diffusionism

[terry glavin]

well, this is truly fortuitous. i actually have a useful contribution to
make to a thread on this list! so hold on, this is going to be a long one. .
.


for years. i've been fascinated with the history of the human presence on
the north pacific, and i'd just finished a 14,000-word chapter on the
antiquity of north pacific maritime traditions (i.e. 3 a.m. december 23 sent
it off to the publisher) when i read linda's note about diffusionism in the
"atlantic," which i picked up the next day during a last mad-dash christmas
shopping trip to victoria. read the article on the ferry home, and thought -
holy is this hilarious or what. most of the author's references i had
already, others i have the author seems to be unaware of.

 linda: i am interested in your query re a copper-hulled canoe. i AM aware
of a story in the oral tradition that includes a copper-hulled canoe: it's
part of the mowachaht origin myth (first woman god created at yuquot is
visited by handsome men in a copper-hulled canoe), west coast vancouver
island. you got another one?

 anyway, here's some stuff i've snipped from that chapter in book (working
title of the book is "the whole haunted sea," hint-hint), with an effort to
help linda, who's interested in pre-columbian "contact" stories surviving in
the oral tradition. the chapter opens with a lenghty bit about the voyage of
swaneset, from the katzie oral tradition, which i refer to at length in the
chapter because of my katzie fishermen buddies and their oral tradition is
profoundly beautiful (i.e. my bias). anyway, i trust the following will stay
on this list (i.e. don't get me in trouble with my publisher please):

 . . . It was a French sinologist, Joseph de Guines, who first
popularized the Huishen story (CHINOOK LIST - this is the guy who allegedly
visited the Land of Fusang, alternately speculated to be Mexico or British
Columbia) in his 1761 work, Chinese Voyages to the
American Coast. Even in the 1700s, the idea that Asian mariners had
been crossing the Pacific before Columbus was not a particularly radical
notion. In 1542, at a time when Europeans were engaged in much
fevered speculation about the ancestors of the people of the New World,
a certain Hugo Grotius wrote a lengthy dissertation arguing that the Inca
of Peru were originally emigrants from China: "This is confirmed by the
remains of Chinese ships, which, according to the reports of the
Spaniards, have been discovered on the shores of the Pacific sea."

. . . There is certainly no lack of evidence for Asian shipwrecks on North
America's west coast. There has been no great shortage of Asian "stuff"
in west coast archeological sites, nor a dearth of apparently-Asian
references in the ethnographic record. The result has been persistent
speculation about Asian voyages to North America, Asian settlement on
North America's Pacific coast, and Asiatic influence in New World
cultures.

 "Such speculation about an early Asian presence on North America's
west coast tends to be extremely contentious. For one thing, speculative
Asian voyages, for at least a century, have been a favourite subject of
cooky avocational historians. But even the most sober hypotheses tend
to become embroiled in debates among archeologists and anthropologists
over issues related to "cultural diffusion" and "independent invention."
In the most extreme case, diffusionists will argue that a single spark was
the source of all civilization, which eventually brought light throughout
the planet, uniting Chinese, Egyptians, Toltecs, Romans, Assyrians and
Aztecs. Independent inventionists, on the other hand, are known to be
bitterly contemptuous of any theory that proposes a common antecedent
among cultural traits shared by peoples significantly separated from each
other in space and time. In discussions between these two camps, any
mention of Thor Hyerdahl - famous for his romantic notions about great
sea voyages, and more famous for his attempts to reconstruct those
voyages in rickety watercraft with names like Ra and Kon-Tiki - is
enough to cause otherwise reasonable people to come near to blows.

 (Then several paragraphs documenting Asian artifacts on the west coast,
confirmed  Asian shipwrecks - literally dozens of them, from the very
earliest days of the Russian and China-based fur trade, etc.).

 Then from the sublime to the ridiculous:

 "Apart from the physical evidence that is suggested, at least, by bits of
iron, one would think that the routine landfall of so many unfortunate
Asian seafarers on the wrong side of the Pacific would have left more
of a mark. On the Northwest coast, the closest thing that comes to
physical evidence of actual Asian settlement is a peculiar society of
potters that appears quite suddenly near the southern Washington state
coast, at about 1400 AD, and then disappears just as suddenly, about
300 years later. Along the shores of Lake River, in a narrow valley
between Vancouver Lake and the Columbia River, archeologists have
unearthed hundreds of ceramic artifacts, including figurines, pipes,
pendants, small sculptured heads and decorated bowls. Some of these
ceramics have been found in what appear to be the remains of kilns, and
a noticeable absence of surface-burning on the objects distinguishes
them from the ceramics technology employed in the U.S. southwest.
Alison Stenger of the U.S. Institute for Archeological Studies, after a
lengthy comparative analysis of the Lake River ceramics, found they
most closely resembled ceramics produced in Japan, on Alaska's Bering
Sea coast, on the Russian Pacific coast, and in Korea. The ceramics
appear to have been produced locally, and the archeology of the Lake
River area shows no evidence of ceramics technology evolving over
time. The potters seem to simply arrive, and after a few generations,
they're just not there anymore.

"In the oral traditions of coastal peoples, there are a variety of stories
that hint at "pre-contact" Asian voyagers. On Vancouver Island's west
coast, there were stories of mariners in ships preceding white people
who were said to eat "maggots," which has led to speculation about
rice-eating sailors. And at the mouth of the Columbia River, a story
persisted well into this century that may be an account of an Asian
shipwreck. In that story, the ship was carrying a bride who never arrived
at her wedding.

"Asiatic influence" in New World cultures has been postulated for
societies as far afield as Equador and Peru in ways that usually stretch
credulity, but there is at least one hypothesis, tested by scientific
methodology in a variety of disciplines, in which credulity isn't stretched
to the breaking point. That hypothesis involves the Zuni people of New
Mexico.

 "The Zuni have always presented something of an enigma to academics,
and Nancy Yaw Davis, an American anthropologist, argues that
upheavals in the Zuni culture that occurred in the 13th century may well
have resulted from the arrival of Japanese pioneers, and not just
shipwrecked seafarers who, for some reason, headed deep into the North
American interior. According to Davis, they may have been Buddhists
who deliberately left Japan in search of the "middle of the world." What
separates Davis' hypothesis from various pop-anthropology theories
about Asian voyages to North America is her reliance on solid academic
studies in history, ethnology, and biology. And the Zuni themselves,
whose origin mythology includes a detailed story about a terrifying
ocean voyage, seem to have at least an open mind about the theory
Davis presents.

 "Davis's hypothesis begins with events in 13th century Japan, when Asian
ship-building technology and navigational expertise had flowered, and
military, religious and political upheavals racked the Japanese
archipelago. In 1274, Kublai Khan sent 450 ships and 30,000 warriors
against Japan. The invasion was repelled, but the following year, the
Chinese emperor mobilized the Korean military against Japan with
15,000 warriors in more than 900 ships. In 1281, Kublai Khan
dispatched a navy against Japan again, and while all this was happening,
Japanese Buddhism became embroiled in schism and controversy. A
prominent feature of the religious upheaval was a resurgence of "Pure
Land" Buddhism, which, among other things, was characterized by
charismatic leaders and an obsession with finding the centre of the
world. Monks were continually heading off on pilgrimages into the
mountains, sects were engaging in ambitious journeys to find the earth's
mythical centre, and the religious controversies that ensued sometimes
resulted in sects being banished, en masse, from Japanese cities. Davis
argues that it is quite likely that during all this hubbub, with thousands
of Chinese and Japanese mariners floating around the western Pacific,
some could easily ended up on North America's west coast with "the
middle of the world" on their minds.

 "While these events were unfolding in Japan, something tumultuous was
beginning to change the course of the Zuni pueblo culture. The
archeological record suggests the arrival of small-statured people, and an
apparent mixture of two distinct populations that set off a period of
dramatic cultural transition. Suddenly, in the 13th century, glazed
pottery begins to show up in Zuni villages, not unlike the ceramics
found in Japan during that period. The Zuni oral tradition explains these
events in ways that involve a bifurcated origin myth, with one tradition
based in a typically local origin, and the other involving a voyage across
"the ocean of the sunset world" by mariners searching for the "middle of
the world."

 "If nothing else, Davis's theory, and the various parallels she draws
between Zuni and Japanese cultural traits, presents an intriguing
explanation for a number of puzzling anomalies about the Zuni. These
anomalies include distinct blood-type characteristics, a distinct language
that doesn't clearly fit into any other broad language family, and a
religious tradition that stands in stark contrast to other aboriginal belief
systems."

 . . .CHINOOK LIST: Then an illustration of the reasons why diffusionists
end up sharing the same tent with cranks and oddballs. I mean, I'm from an
Irish family so I've grown up with stories about Saint Brendan and Hy-brasil
and all that, but when Barry Fell argues that Irish monks were wandering
around British Columbia 800 years ago, well, please. . . Anyway, the fun
stuff:

 "Of all the theories about pre-Columbian Asian seafaring that rely on
analysis of the aboriginal oral tradition, the most elaborate, and without
doubt the most entertaining, are the theories of Ethel G. Stewart. As a
graduate student at Queen's University in Ontario in the 1950s, Stewart
became convinced that she had uncovered definite evidence of Asiatic
influence in North American aboriginal cultures. Her conviction was
firmly established in her study of the Dene people of Fort Hope in the
Northwest Territories. Stewart's initial revelation led her to a lifetime's
worth of research. While her theories found no academic acceptance,
she did cause the occasional sensation in the popular press, and she
capped her career with an opus, published in 1991, titled: "The Dene
and Na-Dene Indian Migration, 1233 A.D: Escape from Genghis Khan
to America."

 "Whatever might be said of Stewart's ideas, the 566-page tome is
impossible to put down.

 "Stewart's ideas are based upon her interpretation of an epic narrative in
the Dene oral tradition that in many ways is similar to the story of
Swaneset's voyage. The Dene story, first recorded by the Oblate father
Emile Pettitot in the 19th century, follows the travels of a culture hero,
known in Pettitot's version as "the sailor," who travels down a great
river. Like the Swaneset story, characters in the Dene epic have both
animal and human characteristics, and carry animal names, such as
Crow, Mouse, Otter, and so on. From this story, and a generously
liberal interpretation of various linguistic features among the Dene and
other Athapascan peoples, Stewart constructs a complex and wide-
ranging epic of her own. The story begins with Genghis Kahn's
rampages across Central Asia.

 "As Stewart sees it, the Dene people of the Northwest Territories are the
descendants of a group of refugees from the Mongol seige of the
northern Chinese kingdom of Hsi-Hsia in 1207 A.D. From a Gwi'chin
flood story, in which all but one man is drowned because of Crow's
vengeful nature, Stewart discerns remnants of the Hsi-Hsia refugees'
memory of their flight to the city of Chung Hsing. In Stewart's view,
Crow is really Genghis Khan, who also shows up in Dene stories as Big
Mosquito and Big Porcupine.

  "Eventually, the His-Hsia refugees make their way to the Chinese port
city of Liao-tung. From there, Stewart tracks them on a voyage by ship,
skirting the Sea of Japan, to an Amur River fur-trading port, just east of
Sakhalin Island, in what was then the Jurchen Empire. From this port, a
great voyage across the Pacific is mounted, perhaps one of several, and
that's how the Dene ended up, Stewart argues, in the Northwest
Territories.

 "Stewart's theories also account for the Tlingits of Southeast Alaska,
who "came from the region north of the Gobi desert" around the same
time. The Kaigani Haida and the Chilkat Tlingit descended from Tatars
and were related to the Uighurs of the Lake Baikal area, Stewart writes.
Capilano Canyon may have got its name from the Nicola Athapascans
of B.C.'s southern interior, whose ancestors "preyed upon the caravans
of the Southern Silk Road" where the Carrier Indians of B.C.'s northern
once worked "in the transport business" and spoke an Italo-Celtic
language, Stewart concludes. The Yurok people of Northern California,
meanwhile, "were a Turkish tribe of Central Asia, some of whom found
their way westward with the Ottomans and ended up across the
Bosporous in Europe."

 "While all this would have made the basis for a fabulous work of
speculative fiction, Stewart's basic ideas, to be fair, are not so radically
different from "Asiatic origin" theories proposed by some early eminent
anthropologists and experts on Northwest coast culture. The great
Marius Barbeau himself once suggested that the ancestors of certain
Tsimshian clans may have been refugees from Genghis Khan's
depredations. Charles Hill-Tout, one of British Columbia's most prolific
early ethnographers and an accomplished linguist (when he wasn't
conducting seances or writing a column for the daily Province
newspaper in Vancouver), held several theories about the Asiatic origins
of B.C. coastal peoples. Hill-Tout found similarities between the
Squamish and the Hawaiian languages, and argued for an "intercourse or
relationship of some kind between the Kwakiutl-Nootka and Salish
stocks and the Malay-Polynesians, between the Haida-Tlingit and the
Japo-Corean, and between the Dene, or Athapascan, and the Chinese
and cognate races." Hill-Tout would likely have been heartened to hear
of Stewart's ideas, at least from the standpoint of the linguistic evidence,
which Hill-Tout believed was in support of a Chinese origin for the
Dene. "Of the Dene tongue," Hill-Tout wrote, "it is no exaggeration to
say that 50 per cent of its radicals are pure archaic Chinese."

 . . .In the 1890s, the Royal Society of Canada was happy to publish Hill-
Tout's theories, along with a treatise by the language scholar John
Campbell, who claimed that his studies were "sufficient to make it
morally certain" that the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands
were the descendants of Melanesian mariners who had crossed the
Pacific only a few centuries earlier. Campbell proposed that sometime
between the 13th century and the 16th century, a band of Melanesian
rebels had been driven into the sea by "Hindoos" that had colonized the
Malay archipelago. The rebels, Campbell wrote, were "offered their
choice between death and expatriation, and, spurned from every
intermediate landing-place, at last found refuge on the uninhabited
islands of the far east."

 So there we are. Hope this has been fun.

 tg.