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Show 42 ERRORS TO WHICH COLLECTORS ARE LIABLE. most civilized Indians would reproduce enough of their ancient system to bo valuable, even if the persistent enquirer did not in his search discover some of its surviving custodians even among Chahta or Cherolvi, 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 understanding 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 beginning 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 intelligible. 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- |