Proverbs of the Native Americans; A Prize Competition

Abstract

Once upon time there was the learned European tradition of prize competitions on preannounced topics, designed to promote scholarly research on important but hitherto unresolved questions. Such an area is without doubt the lack of information thus far on the proverbial speech of American Indians and Eskimos. In order to eradicate this unfortunate situation, I would like to propose scholarly competition to investigate whether Native Americans are indeed as lacking in proverbs and proverbial expressions as has been claimed by various collectors and researchers. For this purpose I am making available $250 prize for the best manuscript on this topic submitted to me by end of summer, 1991. This paper will be published in Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship; others might appear there as well or in other American folklore and anthropological journals. It is my sincere hope that this competition will result in better understanding of the proverbial language of Native Americans. By way of an introduction to the problem and for some bibliographical background let me point out that while the national proverb stocks of the various immigrants and the proverbs of the African-Americans go into the thousands in each case, it is mind-boggling fact that the native American Indians appear to have hardly any proverbs at all. Members of the many Indian tribes in Southern, Central and North America (including Canada) and the different Eskimo groups in the polar regions all seem to have but very few proverbs. In fact, it has become commonplace among anthropologists, folklorists and linguists to stress the fact that these natives are unique in the world due to their lack of proverbs. The famous anthropologist and Indian expert Franz Boas declared already in 1917 that there is a great dearth of proverbs, of popular snatches, and of riddles among American aborigines, in contrast to their strong development in Africa and other parts of the Old World (1940:209). The problem is that nobody has really satisfactorily succeeded in explaining why this strange void exists. In fact, it appears to me that it is almost criminal from scholarly point of view how quickly people have accepted the idea that there simply aren't any Indian proverbs without trying to find out the reasons for this apparent lack of verbal traditional wisdom. I an convinced that more proverbs than the few which have been registered thus far could be found, just as riddles have been collected from the Indians even though there had been the claim that they too did not exist among the Native Americans. One of the most convincing explanations for the absence of proverbs among Indians is that the Indian languages appear to be much less metaphorical than other languages. But this too has long been proven to be false assumption (see in particular Keith H. Basso and Elsie C. Parsons). It was