Hayne & Taylor re Yukon CJ

[Henry Kammler]

Mike Cleven wrote:

> At 09:31 PM 1/30/99 -0800, Liland Brajant ROS' wrote:
>
> >Does anybody know anything about indigenous deaf
> >signing among NW Coast & Interior Native peoples before the introduction
> >of ASL?
>
> This is only a maybe-very-wrong guess, but I'd suspect that deaf people
> were either put to death, left to starve, or treated as shamans (or
> slaves).......

Probably not!
I can't give you any source but one thing is clear: kinship ideology is so
central to these cultures that no matter how you looked or what your handicap
was -- in the first place you were a relative and as such you were defined as
a human being. Handicapped persons took part in many aspects of social life
(as Sapir's "Abnormal types of speech in Nootka" suggests). Mothers could
exert a certain sort of birth control by killing their newborn (for whatever
reason) but once the child had a name it was a member of its respective
lineage(s). BTW person of royal or commoner blood would not have been made a
slave *within* his/her own society -- totally unthinkable of.
I will try to find out sources on the treatment of the deaf.

Henry