Dhegiha Hymnals and Bible Portions

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 7 Apr 2003, Justin McBride wrote:
> But later it really got me to wondering about James Owen Dorsey.  If
> Dorsey acheived enough fluency in Ponca to conduct church services,
> isn't it at least plausible that he devised some sort of hymn book and
> perhaps even translated Bible portions?  Unfortunately, I don't know
> nearly enough about the man or his work outside of Kaw to answer this
> question.  Did he ever do anything like this?  And even if he didn't,
> does anyone know if *any* documents like this exist for OP, OS, or QU
> (and perhaps KS, in case I overlooked something)?

Dorsey went as a missionary - Episcopal? - to the Ponca.  He left that
position, ostensibly for reasons of health, though I gather it may have
actually also been, at least in part, a matter of difficulties with the
agent, as this is implied in a letter from Albert (?) Riggs I noticed in
passing in the National Anthropological Archives's Dorsey Papers.  Riggs
mentions that Agent so-and-so is gone and suggests he can now return and
would be welcome.  Riggs, incidentally, worked with Paul Mazakute, a
Dakota missionary to the Ponca who was literate in Santee.  Some of
Mazakute's notes on Ponca vocabulary are in the NAA in the Dorsey Papers.

Instead of returning to missionary work, Dorsey went to work for the BAE,
becoming one of their staff ethnographers - in effect a combination
linguist and anthropologist.  From that period on he worked primarily with
the Omaha as opposed to the Ponca, though I'm not sure there was no
further contact with Ponca speakers.  In fact, I know he was involved in
letter writing on behalf of the Poncas who came back from Oklahoma.

Although Dorsey must have achieved some degree of fluency, he also made
extensive use of bilingual consultants.  I don't know if he was ever
fluent enough to preach in Omaha or if he was fluent enough to do so
during the very earliest period, when he was a missionary.  It would be
interesting to pursue this, of course.  The principle authority on Dorsey
is Ray DeMallie, by the way.

A small number of notes dealing with missionary activity are mentioned in
the NAA catalogs of the Dorsey Papers.  I haven't consulted this material.
I think that other material - I don't know if it would be fair to
characterize it as "the bulk" - is on file in (Episcopal?) church archives
at Vermillion.  I noticed a reference to Dorsey materials there once in a
list of arhival materials dealing with Native American languages.

I have actually seen a xerox of a printed page from a (Presbyterian?)
Omaha Hymnal.  I was asked to see if I could translate the text and put it
into a modern orthography.  I did, and that was the last I heard of it.
I believe this was prepared by Hamilton.  It was in use in the Reformed
Church in Macy.  The Reformed Church is a small synod with congregations
on various Native American Reservations in the Midwest, including, I
think, the Santee, Winnebago, Omaha, and Fox (?)  reservations.

I suspect any religious materials in Omaha would be very little use with
Kaw.  The basic vocabulary is similar, though transmuted phonologically
and semantically, but there are some differences in morphology (e.g., in
the dative), and the function words (conjunctions, final particles, etc.)
are rather difference between Dhegiha "dialects."  None of this seems to
have posed a great deal of difficulty for fluent speakers in the old days,
but it might floor modern users, especially ones approaching the languages
from English.

I have seen one of two volumes of handwritten notes on Omaha (sermon
texts, I think) by Hamilton.  The owner showed it to me in confidence,
explaining that he had only the one volume, having lent the other to
someone who had failed to return it.  He said he found the volumes on a
trash heap.  I understood him to mean in some pile of discards in a
particular context, and didn't press the matter, as it was potentially
sensitive and he was clearly nervous about showing the material to me.  I
recommended that he consider some sort of archival disposition at some
point and named some possible candidates, leaving it at that.  The man in
question seemed to me the sort of person who would appreciate the
importance of that.

I do consider such materials interesting and intellectualy valuable, but I
have never pursued these missionary-produced materials, because I am
unsure to what extent they represent grammatically and lexically correct
Omaha-Ponca.  I don't feel that I've done justice to the more reliable
materials prepared by Dorsey from native sources, let alone to the
resource represented by present speakers of the language, and I've
consciously left the potentially less reliable material out of
consideration.

This said, I believe that most such materials were prepared with the aid
of native speakers every bit as conscientious and able as the ones working
with linguists (often the same people, in fact).  In short, second
language errors by the missionaries are probably not a major issue.  The
only real problems with the materials might be non-native influences on
the syntax and the existence of loan words (names and concepts).  Of
course, this might actually make the material rather more interesting than
not, as it presents the reverse of the process of glossing native texts in
English.