By Bill Dockery

Dressed out in an elaborate feathered headdress, Tom White Horse sits in a tipi, gesturing broadly. The black-and-white image flickers like an old-time movie as the Arapahoe chief talks in sign to other men in similar regalia. A sonorous voice narrates the meaning behind his moving hands as he compares Indian medicine to white man’s medicine:

“The red men used to communicate with their medicine in sleep, thus hearing things they could not see.

“Now comes the white man with another kind of medicine. (He goes on in sign to describe a radio.)

“Thus, the white man, with his mechanical medicine, is also able to hear that which he cannot see.”

Though it looks like an outtake from a 1930s Western, the short film is a priceless historical record that a UT Knoxville linguist has rescued from the vaults of the National Anthropological Archives and made accessible to 21st-century scholars and the public.

Jeffrey Davis, an associate professor in education and sign language linguistics, recently finished digitizing a collection of films shot in 1930 in an effort to preserve the sign language spoken by the Plains Indians of the western United States.

“I came across this while I was researching records in the archives,” Davis says. “We’re bringing these films and records together in one place for the first time.”

Now the forgotten films are on a website Davis created with the support of the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. UT Knoxville funded the digitization of the images.

A Product of Passion

The rare footage is the product of the passion of one of the soldiers sent to finish controlling the often rebellious tribes of the Western Plains. Hugh L. Scott, a West Point graduate, served in the Seventh U.S. Cavalry and, shortly after Little Big Horn, had an assignment at the post from which the late general George Armstrong Custer had launched his final fatal operation.

While Scott would go on to become a general and serve with distinction as Army Chief of Staff at the start of World War I, he spent 20 years in the West soaking up Native American culture. He was working with the Smithsonian Institution on native sign language when he was reassigned to combat duties in the Spanish American War.

“Scott had a passion for working with the native peoples. At one point he was an ambassador to the Indian nations,” Davis says. “He was almost 80 when he took on filming the sign language, and he envisioned a wide distribution of the work.”

The meeting where the films were made was held in September 1930 in Browning, Montana, and drew together chiefs and elders representing a dozen Indian nations. Funded by an act of Congress through the U.S. Department of the Interior, the project sought to preserve Indian sign language in a variety of discourse styles, from introductions and conversations to storytelling. Scott, the convener, served as master of ceremonies and did voice-over narration when the films were produced.

In flickering black and white, the chiefs introduce themselves: Dick Washakie, a Shoshone; Bitter Root Jim, from the Flathead tribe; Iron Whip, a Sioux; and Foolish Woman (a male), from the Mandan tribe, “one of the earth lodge people.” They tell stories—Bitter Root Jim’s classic bear story, Strange Owl’s near-death experience with a buffalo calf, Mountain Chief’s description of a buffalo hunt.

Cinematic and Cultural History

Apart from the fascinating content, the films themselves are interesting for what they represent in the history of cinema. Made a scant three years after the first talkie—Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer—the shorts represent the most modern technology of the time, used in this case not for a commercial production but for the purposes of science and historic preservation. Yet they do not include the spoken tribal languages of the various speakers. The soundtracks include only Scott’s narration and background music of Native American drumming and chanting, underscored by the residual rhythmic hum of early projectors. Signs of the recently displaced practices of silent movies are evident in the intertitles or caption cards that precede each episode.

From linguistic and historical perspectives, the archive is invaluable, but Davis also finds implications for the study of signed languages.

“When you look at Indian hand talk, it seems to be structured more like the sign language of deaf people than a spoken language of the Native American community,” he says. “Sign languages have a linguistic structure of their own. I believe a lot of American Sign Language is based on Indian signs. This is evident from the presence of a large number of cognates,” words (or signs) that are related in origin.

Davis says contacts between Indian schools and schools for the deaf likely contributed to borrowings and crossover influences between the two languages.

According to Davis, Scott’s ambition to see a wide distribution of the sign language failed due to funding shortfalls during the Great Depression. Scott died in 1934. The films with their wealth of linguistic and ethnographic data nearly faded into obscurity at the National Archives, with one exception.

“The Indian sign language films were given to the Boy Scouts and served as an international language for them,” Davis said. Scott’s work became a major component in the Scouts’ Order of the Arrow program. Fortunately, the films have now been transferred to the permanent collections at the Smithsonian.

Though currently endangered, Indian sign language continues to serve a vital role in traditional storytelling, rituals, legends, prayers, and conversational narratives, and as a primary language of American Indians who are deaf.

Davis’s reconstruction of the data and presentation of the collection makes them available to new generations of linguists and historians—and to the native communities where Indian sign language once thrived.

The Cambridge University Press is publishing Jeffrey Davis’s book on Indian sign language, Hand Talk: Sign Language Among Indian Nations of North America. It is scheduled for release in fall 2009.

Visit the Hand Talk web site

Tags: Anthropology • Education • Jeffrey Davis • Linguistics