calumet de paix

[Wallace Chafe]

John's take on this seems right. The Northern Iroquoian languages have a
word ske:no? (both vowels nasalized), or similar forms, which means
something like "well-being". It gets applied to good health, the absence of
strife, having plenty of food, etc. Nowadays it's sometimes translated
"peace", but it has a broader meaning than simply the absence of war. And
in fact both peace and war, as we understand them, weren't quite the way
the Iroquois understood things in pre-contact times. Obviously there were
raiding parties and so on, but European-style warfare was something
different. I'm not familiar with a "peace" morpheme occurring in an
Iroquoian word for "pipe".

Wally

--On Friday, February 27, 2004 9:18 AM -0700 Koontz John E
<John.Koontz at colorado.edu> wrote:

> On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Michael Mccafferty wrote:
>> Does anyone know if a morpheme for "peace" occurs in any Siouan
>> language's term for "pipe"? I'm trying to determine the origin of "paix"
>> (peace) in the French expression "calumet de paix" (peace pipe).
>
> The concept of "peace," itself is perhaps somewhat difficult.  I remember
> looking for this fairly recently.  This is a complex collection of
> associated ideas, the details of which seem to me to depend on a "Western"
> and Christian context.  The cultural dependence is perhaps not as obvious
> or absolute as something like 'junk mail' and to some extent my
> difficulties may stem from awkward or literal translations.  The 'peace'
> forms I tracked down in Omaha-Ponca seemed to refer to mental peace, or
> calm, and although this might certainly be connected with not fearing an
> attack that didn't seem to be the emphasis.  Peace in the sense of an
> absence of declared war or an agreement not to fight, among other things,
> seems harder to find a term for.
>
> I'm not sure there's a countervailing term for 'war' either, though there
> is certainly the term nudaN rendered 'go on the warpath' (itself a
> formulation growing out of early French and English interactions with East
> Coast groups), i.e., 'to conduct a military expedition', which is rendered
> 'war' in translated compounds like 'war chief' (or 'war leader').  There
> are also, I think, some terms often rendered 'to hate each other' ('be in
> a state of war?') that might be relevant.
>
> On the other hand, I believe I have seen references to agreements not to
> fight being concluded.
>