by Robert Moor
Lederer and Jackzetavon pushed on, traveling from village to village, stopping frequently to ask the local chieftains for directions. The information Lederer gathered, much of it refracted through an unknown number of translations, often shimmers with the exotic air of a colonial fantasy, replete with human sacrifices and temples full of pearls. Some of the tribes he encountered were tall, warlike, and rich; others were lazy or effeminate. Some were governed by democracies, others by ruthless monarchies, while others still held everything in common ownership (“except their wives,” Lederer primly added). In one village, Lederer watched a man step barefoot onto a bed of burning coals and stand, writhing, foam collecting on his lips, for a full hour, before leaping out, apparently uninjured. At times, Lederer was impressed by the Native peoples’ resourcefulness—as when he witnessed the delicate process by which acorns were roasted and pressed to yield an amber-colored oil, which, sopped up with corn bread, provided “an extraordinary dainty.” Yet he was also horrified by what he perceived as the tribes’ gleeful love of violence, as when a group of young warriors returned from a raid to proudly present their chief with “skins torn off the heads and faces of three young girls.”
Despite the Swiftian tone of his writing, in contrast to the other explorers of his age, Lederer comes across as relatively peaceable, respectful, and punctilious. His second expedition lasted for some thirty days, and he made it home safely. Shortly afterward, he set out on a third, failed expedition in which, after only six days, he was bitten on the shoulder by a deadly spider and only managed to survive thanks to a Native American man who sucked out the poison.
Back home in Maryland, Lederer compiled his notes into a narrative and drew a map showing the route of his journeys. For a time, his writings were dismissed as too fantastic to be believed, but scholars have since judged them to be surprisingly accurate, given the obvious technical limitations of the time. (One must keep in mind just how little white people then knew about the extent of the American continent. Many then believed the Indian Ocean lay only one or two hundred miles west of the eastern seashore, a theory Lederer roundly debunked.) Lederer’s account included a wealth of information, including the location of two easily navigable passes over the mountains, both of which were confirmed by explorers in the following years. One of those passes was described for him by an unnamed group of Native Americans, the other he had seen while following Jackzetavon. It is possible they were the same two paths the old man had drawn in the dirt, which Major Harris, in his arrogance, ignored.
The example set by Lederer and Harris was repeated almost everywhere that the colonists spread: those who ignored the advice of Native people and spurned their trails ended up tangled in brambles and mired in swamps, whereas those who co-opted Native wisdom moved smoothly. A century after Lederer, by following several well-known Native trails, the famed mountaineer Daniel Boone and a team of thirty-five loggers would cut a horse trail up and over the Appalachians through the Cumberland Gap, opening up the continent to westward colonial expansion.
Native guides were sometimes called “pathfinders,” a title that has a double meaning: in wild and remote areas, their job was indeed to locate obscure trails, but in more densely populated areas—which were at times so thickly webbed with trails that explorers described them as a “maze”—the pathfinder’s job was to chart a course through that network. A scholar in North Carolina told me that he had recently read a history of Hillsborough that began with the vague, romantic-sounding claim that when Hillsborough was founded, the county was a “trackless wilderness.” “That’s such bullshit!” he exclaimed. “The problem wasn’t that it was trackless; it had too many tracks. That’s why you needed a Native American guide—to tell you which one of these roads to use.”
In the absence of a trusty guide, the best alternative for navigating a path network is to use a system of signs. Long before the painted blazes that demarcate modern hiking paths, people were slashing blazes into tree trunks to mark their trails. Across the continent, tree trunks were also marked with bright paint, elaborate carvings, or sketches drawn using a mixture of bear fat and charcoal. Along snowshoe paths in northeastern Ontario, evergreen boughs were inserted into the snow at regular intervals to serve as signposts. In many places—from Montana to Bolivia—stones were piled up into cairns, which served both a functional and a spiritual purpose. When I was herding sheep in the Navajo country, I often ran across large stone cairns, which I was told were used in prayers, but which also helped us herders find our way home.
Perhaps more common, but certainly more difficult to document, were the subtler trail signs indigenous people left in passing. For instance, the practice of using bent or broken twigs to mark trails and transmit messages is widespread. In his supremely ill-titled account of transcontinental exploration, First Man West, Alexander Mackenzie wrote that his Native guides marked the trail “by breaking the branches of trees as they passed.” Elephant hunters in Africa noted that it was customary to mark one’s trail by blocking tributary trails with a stick laid across the offshoot, as if closing a gate. The Rauto tribe of Papua New Guinea have a word, nakalang, for the stick that bars an errant trail. In their language, the word is also used, poignantly, to signify death, which separates the divergent paths of the deceased from those of the living.
A few years ago, I went for a walk through the Bornean jungle with Henneson Bujang, a Penan tribesman, and his two sons. As we walked down faint footpaths, they showed me how to bend or break a twig to send a message to someone down the trail. Bujang estimated that he knew dozens of signals involving broken twigs for sending messages, which could be as specific as “Avoid this trail—there’s a hornet’s nest here,” or “You’re taking too long, I’m hiking up ahead.” The author Thom Henley recorded a number of stick signs from the groups he visited: A four-pronged stick planted in the ground indicated a burial, whereas three sticks arranged upright, like a fan, marked a territorial claim. One particularly elaborate stick sign he found in the Melinau River drainage showed the richness of information that could be encoded in these signs:
A large leaf at the top showed that the stick had been left by the headman. Three small uprooted seedlings indicated that the site had once been occupied by three families. A folded leaf told that the group was hungry, in search of game. Knotted rattan gave the number of days anticipated in the journey and two small sticks equal in length and placed transversely on the sign stick suggested that there was something for all Penan to share. Sticks and shavings at the base identified the group and revealed the direction of the journey.
Life is a continual struggle to make sense of the world’s complexity. Knowledge is hard won, and so both spoken language and writing are ways of fixing and transmitting it. Though we tend to imagine that there is a sharp dichotomy between oral cultures and those that have developed written language, as trail signs reveal, there is a vast array of media—twigs, cairns, drawings, maps—that blur the line between the two. But perhaps the simplest and yet most dissolvent of all sign systems, the ur-inscription that predated writing and even the spoken word, is the trail itself.
Henneson Bujang and Lamar Marshall had something in common. While Marshall was fighting clearcutting in Bankhead Forest in Alabama, Bujang and a handful of other Penan tribesmen began sabotaging logging companies’ attempts to cut down the old-growth rainforest where they live. Against steep odds and immense pressure, both ultimately succeeded.
Though some truly nomadic, hunting-and-gathering members of the Penan still lived in the hinterlands of Borneo, the Bujangs had since settled into the comforts of Christianity, zinc roofs, and shotgun ownership. But they continued to doggedly oppose logging efforts (and refused considerable bribes) for reasons that were as much coldly practical as they were culturally inherited: almost all their food still came from the jungle. Over the two days I spent with them, we ate wild bearded pig, mouse-deer, fish, small b
irds, ferns, local rice, green chilies, and cucumbers—all of it collected from within three miles of where we sat. The birds were hunted using a blowpipe, which Bujang wielded with a sniper’s accuracy, hitting hornbills in treetops up to two hundred feet away. He also knew how to carve a bowl out of ironwood, weave a rattan basket, and build a bamboo shelter that would keep him both dry and elevated off the jungle floor. On our walks, he and his sons showed me which insects were edible, which leaves were antiseptic, which plants would cure a headache, and which giant ferns could be woven together to form an impromptu umbrella. “The earthworm can go hungry and the mouse-deer become lost in the forest, but never we Penan,” the Penan like to say.
From the time they have grown waist-high, Penan children are traditionally taken on long journeys through the jungle to learn the land. Even just one generation ago, Penan parents would pull their children out of school for weeks or even months at a time to teach them the old stories and skills. But in recent years, Penan children have become too busy with schoolwork to memorize, preserve, and pass down this ancestral knowledge. Talking with Bujang, I came to realize that the most pernicious threat to their culture might not be the logging companies themselves (which can be fought by blocking roads and “spiking” trees); it’s the slow but unceasing creep of the loggers’ worldview.
Bujang worried over this cultural erosion one afternoon, as we sat around his dinner table, eating stubby blackened bananas. His sons were sprawled on the floor, playing with a skittery baby macaque and a lazy, bug-eyed pangolin they had taken as pets. Bujang said that while his sons were decent hunters, they lacked the instinctive directional sense that allowed him to walk for miles through dense, pathless brush without getting lost—a skill that only comes from a lifetime spent in the jungle. He worried that his grandsons and great-grandsons would surely only be weaker, less knowledgeable, and more dependent on the state for their survival.
We who live in industrialized societies sometimes tacitly assume that all hunter-gatherers will inevitably want to “graduate” to practicing agriculture and global capitalism, but as Bujang and many other indigenous families prove, the so-called modern world is not humankind’s manifest destiny. Some hunter-gatherer societies, like the Cheyenne, chose to abandon a lifestyle of sedentary farming and return to hunting and gathering. Many others, like the Bujangs, chose to adopt certain elements of Western modernity but not others: they hunt bush pig with a shotgun, but kill birds with blow darts. The path of humanity is ever branching. All roads need not lead to Times Square.
However, as I learned from the Bujangs, the path of modern consumer capitalism—with its endless (and endlessly advertised) comforts and conveniences, its wondrous medicine and magical technology—constantly beckons to hunting-and-gathering societies. Once Western capitalism begins to encroach on their land from all sides, life for hunter-gatherers becomes increasingly difficult—their land base shrinks, government interference increases, traditions fray, local knowledge dissipates, and the pressure to assimilate mounts. Under these conditions, converting to a sedentary Western lifestyle begins to look like the path of least resistance.
When an indigenous community assimilates into the dominant culture, either by force, by desire, or from fears of being “left behind” (a threat the Malaysian government frequently wields), there is a concomitant loss of those threads that hold together culture: language, lore, religious practice, familial obligations, and relationship to place. At its core, the problem facing indigenous communities is mnemonic; the culture, long stored in the collective memory and encoded in the land, is gradually forgotten.
Modern Cherokees hold many of these same concerns, but they have their own way of fighting the erosion. Unlike the Bujangs, or traditional Navajos like Bessie and Harry Begay—who have retained much of their culture by living far from civilization, shunning most technology, and never learning English—the Cherokees have tried to chart a middle path between assimilation and traditionalism. Virtually from the beginning of the imperial invasion, many Cherokees were quick to learn the English language, utilize modern technology, and adopt European modes of farming and trade, all while fighting to maintain their heritage.
That fight continues to this day. Since language is vital to preserving culture, in recent years the Cherokee—like many other tribes—have founded a slew of language-immersion schools, which help children become fluent in their native language, even if their parents can’t speak it. I paid a visit to one such school, the Kituwah Academy in North Carolina. The school was run by a man named Gilliam Jackson. Out of roughly fourteen thousand Eastern Band Cherokees, Jackson was one of only a few hundred left who still spoke the Cherokee language fluently.
At Kituwah, every activity—classes, games, meals, songs—was conducted in Cherokee. Over the entryway to the school hung a printed banner: ENGLISH STOPS HERE. In one classroom sat a pile of colorful wooden alphabet blocks, such as one might find in any preschool, only, instead of the Latin alphabet, they were printed with odd-looking characters that resembled something dreamed up by Tolkien. This, Jackson explained, was the Cherokee alphabet (properly known as the “Cherokee syllabary”). Most fluent Cherokee speakers cannot read or write it, but these children were learning to do both.
The written language of the Cherokee was devised in the early nineteenth century by a Cherokee blacksmith who went by the name of Sequoyah, also known as George Gist. Unable to speak English, Sequoyah marveled at the efficiency of written language, which allowed white people to converse across great distances and, most crucially, to fix knowledge so that it would not erode over time. In the oral tradition, knowledge was a mercurial thing, changing shape as it changed hands. As reported in The Missionary Herald in 1828, Sequoyah believed that, “if he could make things fast on paper, it would be like catching a wild animal and taming it.”
Seeing the benefits of such a technology, he set about devising his own code. He began by assigning individual symbols to common words. First he used elaborate hieroglyphs, which, being tedious to draw and memorize, he later replaced with more basic symbols. But with his list of words piling up into the thousands, even those symbols soon proved too difficult to remember. Finally, after much experimentation, he broke the language down to eighty-six spoken syllables, with a different character assigned to each. It took him twelve years to find a workable system.
Once the system was complete, he taught it to his six-year-old daughter, who came to read it fluently. Together, they demonstrated the new system for their neighbors: Sequoyah would ask someone to tell him a secret, he would mark it down on a piece of paper, and then he would ask another person to carry the paper to his daughter, who was out of earshot. Reading from the scrap of paper, the little girl would call out the sentence just as it had been told to her father, shocking many of those present.
Sequoyah’s new syllabary caught on. It was soon being used to record sacred songs and curing formulas. By 1828, a new bilingual newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix was published in an altered form of the syllabary. In the 1980s, the first Cherokee typewriter was invented, and attempts were later made to convert computer keyboards into Cherokee. But, due to mechanical and cost constraints, typing in Sequoyan remained cumbersome until 2009, when a developer released an application for electronic tablets like the iPad that allowed people to easily type in Cherokee.
Jackson said the children at his school had picked up typing in Cherokee on the tablets with remarkable ease. “We have really gotten way into technology,” he said. “All these kids around here, they can text, they can do iPads, they can do computers, you name it. They’re way more advanced than I am. But in terms of being able to identify plants and medicines and foods in the woods, they’ve lost that connection.”
As Jackson was learning, the cultural institutions that European cultures have long relied on to perpetuate knowledge—namely, enormous and intricately organized corpora of texts—cannot properly preserve a form of know
ledge that is orally transmitted and terrestrially encoded. Indigenous cultures need both language and land to survive.
People fighting to preserve indigenous cultures tend to fall into one of two camps. Some believe that technology (being malleable and agnostic) will continue to evolve to better perpetuate elements of indigenous culture, like the Cherokee keyboard, and to situate traditional knowledge in the landscape (using digital maps). Others, like Jackson, counter that without time spent learning directly from the land, no amount of technology would halt the cultural erosion.