2095 Chinook hymnody
A few posts back I mentioned the "fun" of browsing the Yale Beinecke Library uncataloged database and trying to discover the keywords that might bring up some entries. I used "horse," "letters," "manuscript," "woman" (didn't get much, which may mean those were rushed right to cataloging), and today I tried "hymns." I thought perhaps that genre would languish in a Yale backlog. I found a first reading book for Chinook that included hymns. Interesting. So I Googled Chinook because the only chinooks I knew about were strong winds and helicopters. There apparently are still a few Chinook Indians in the Pacific Northwest, they helped Lewis and Clark, and their language became the lingua franca jargon of the area. So I peeked around and found some interesting bibliographies, and eventually came to "Early Canadiana Online" and found some wonderful Chinookiana full text, online.Now to the point of this blog, which isn't about Indians in the Pacific Northwest. I'm a Lutheran and although I love singing camp songs at informal gatherings in the woods and after potlucks, and I can swing and sway and raise my hands, I'm less than thrilled to stare at an overhead screen on Sunday morning and sing ditties that repeat and repeat. Here's what they were writing in the 19th century about teaching the Chinook Indians Christian hymns:
"These hymns have grown out of Christian work among the Indians. They repeat often, because they are intended chiefly for Indians who cannot read, and hence must memorize them."
Bingo!
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3 comments:
interesting. i bet you can google for hours non-stop huh? Do we need to call an interventionist?
heh heh
Wendy sent me, but we may need a greater force to assist you.
Interesting fact about the Indians and the hymns that were born out of memorization. When I was growing up, I went to the Lutheran Church, which went strictly from the Hymn book. Later in life, I went to a church that stared at the overhead screen and sang the same song over and over. (It was easier to learn the melody that way anyway.) ;-)
Wendy directed me here.
3T
I'm a Lutheran too! And I can't stand the overhead projector...but only because I don't like our Music Director.
She had one song on the projector with white writing on a yellow background...no one could read it! But I don't think that she ever looked at the slide to see what the problem was because the next time she used that song she decided to have us "learn" the song before we started the service...DUH, we can't read it.
I think a bunch of the older members told her, because she hasn't used it since we moved into the new sanctuary.
Our Church has gone to printing all the songs in the bulletin, so the only times we use the Lutheran book of Worship is when there is a baptism...isn't that sad?
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