42 EEBOES TO WIIICII COLLECTORS AEE LIABLE. 



most civilized Indians would reproduce enough of their ancient system to 

 be valuable, even if the persistent enquirer did not in his search discover 

 some of its surviving custodians even among Chahta or Cheroki, Iroquois 

 or Abenaki, Klamath or Nutka. 



Another recommendation is prompted by the fact that in the collection 

 and description of Indian signs there is danger lest the civilized understand- 

 ing of the original conception may be mistaken or forced. The liability to 

 error is much increased when the collections are not taken directly from the 

 Indians themselves, but are given as obtained at second-hand from white 

 traders, trappers, and interpreters, who, through misconception in the begin- 

 ning and their own introduction or modification of gestures, have produced 

 a jargon in the sign as well as in the oral intercourse. If an Indian finds 

 that his interlocutor insists upon understanding and using a certain sign in 

 a particular manner, it is within the very nature, tentative and elastic, of the 

 gesture art — both performers being on an equality — that he should adopt 

 the one that seems to be recognized or that is pressed upon him, as with 

 much greater difficulty he has learned and adopted many foreign terms used 

 with whites before attempting to acquire their language, but never with his 

 own race. Thus there is now, and perhaps always has been, what may be 

 called a lingua-franca in the sign vocabulary. It may be ascertained that all 

 the tribes of the plains having learned by experience that white visitors expect 

 to receive certain signs really originating with the latter, use them in their 

 intercourse, just as they sometimes do the words "squaw" and "papoose," 

 corruptions of the Algonkin, and once as meaningless in the present West 

 as the English terms "woman" and "child," but which the first pioneers, 

 having learned them on the Atlantic coast, insisted upon as generally intel- 

 ligible. This process of adaptation may be one of the explanations of the 

 reported universal code. 



It is also highly probable that signs will be invented by individual 

 Indians who may be pressed by collectors for them to express certain ideas, 

 which signs of course form no part of the current language; but while that 

 fact should, if possible, be ascertained and reported, the signs so invented 

 are not valueless merely because they are original and not traditional, if 

 they are made in good faith and in accordance with the principles of sign- 



