Читать книгу Moravian Soundscapes - Sarah Justina Eyerly - Страница 16

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PENN’S WOODS

Ein GOttes närrgen	God’s little fool
ist schon so imaginatif	Is so beautifully imaginative
ins Lämmleins seine Pleura tief:	Inside the little Lamb’s side-hole deep:
kein fischgen schwimmt,	No little fishes swim,
kein vöglein singt,	no little birds sing,
kein bäumgen blüht,	No little trees bloom,
kein hirschgen springt	no little deer spring
so applicirts das selgen	So applies the soul itself to thee,
auf sich unds wunden-höhlgen.1	And to your little wounds-hole.

THE FORESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND RIVER VALLEYS OF PENNSYLVANIA had been named and mapped by Native American cultures for thousands of years before the colonial era.² Long before Pennsylvania became a territory ceded by Charles II of England to Admiral William Penn to discharge his debts, this was a landscape that had been traversed and interpreted, worshipped, storied, and sung by the people who lived there. Native places on the land and water were often endowed with names that carried mnemonic, descriptive qualities: Ahkokwesink (The Place of Mushrooms) or Ahsenesink (The Place of Rocks). The acoustic environments of forests, fields, and streams were also remembered with names that spoke of their sounds: Chekhonesink (The Place Where There Is a Gentle Sound) or Oniska (The Ringing Rocks). These place names were sounded metaphors that embedded generations of memories of animals and birds, the natural topography, or the sounds of falling water and lithophonic rocks. They were charted and mapped in rock cairns and painted trees, bark scrolls and songs. Places became intertwined with their names. To sound them was to honor and remember the ancestors who had once claimed that ancient landscape with words.

In the eighteenth century, this familiar landscape became a liminal space, wedged between the competing land claims of France, Great Britain, and the Six Nations. It would be claimed under a new name, Penn’s Woods, or “muni khikhakan eheluwensink Pennsylvania (This State Which Is Called Pennsylvania].” In this renamed landscape, both settlers and Native peoples sought to construct new and changing identities in response to each other and to rapid changes in their natural, political, and cultural environments. Along with an influx of immigrants from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, seeking new opportunities in Penn’s Colony, the first Moravian missionaries arrived in Pennsylvania in 1740. Within two years, they had established communities in the region around the Lechewuekink (Lehigh) and Lenapei Sipu (Delaware) Rivers. See website chap1.1, Static map: “Early Moravian Missions in Pennsylvania and Ohio.” Moving outward from these mission centers, Moravian missionaries traveled frequently to Native American villages and settlements throughout eastern Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, via water or the complex network of forest trails that had been used by Indigenous communities for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. On these forest journeys through the Mahantango and Kittatinny Mountains, and the river valleys of the Lehigh, Juniata, and Susquehanna, missionaries renamed indigenous places. Mountain ridges, rivers, valleys, and springs were memorialized with new Moravian perspectives on the landscapes of Penn’s Woods: Ludwig’s Fountain, Erdmuth’s Spring, Ludwig’s Rest, Anna’s Valley, Benigna’s Creek, Jacob’s Heights. Even a Native hunting cabin in the Tiadaghton Forest came to be christened the “Coffee House” in remembrance of European places left behind.

Confronted with new and unfamiliar landscapes, European settlers, including Moravian missionaries, often fell back on familiar patterns of naming and claiming space that would transform Native country into a European-inflected landscape.³ See website chap1.2, Interactive map: “The Pennsylvania Frontier.” For Moravians, this process of claiming Pennsylvania as a Christian, and more specifically a Moravian Christian, space began immediately upon their arrival in Pennsylvania. In 1742, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf became one of the first Europeans to travel north and west of the Kittatinny Mountains into the dense forests that covered much of eastern and northern Pennsylvania. As he journeyed, he named and interpreted the places and people he encountered, committing them into an ongoing Christian narrative told through maps, diaries, names, and hymns that came to symbolize the essential features of the American colonies for a pan-Moravian audience who had never seen or heard Pennsylvania’s forests.

Hearing the Forest

The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals.

Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle

Our interactions with the natural environment are framed by the maps we draw, the stories we tell, and the songs we sing. As historian Simon Schama has argued, “landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.”⁴ Whether those landscapes are forest, grassland, mountain, sea coast, or other setting, the natural environment is the most fundamental place that we inhabit. It is in these environments that we develop our understandings of the world: attachments, connections, meanings, experiences, belongings, and exclusions.⁵ These simultaneously imagined and physical landscapes constitute the reality of our human experience on a daily level. But landscapes are not merely physical topographies: they also exist in sound.⁶ Our sense of spatiality is not grounded in only sight but in sound; we listen to perceive distance and space. Our interactions with the world fully engage the senses, and our ears are constantly attuned to a wide range of sounds: language, music, rain, even birdcalls.⁷ It is from these sounds, and other sensory data, that we form Schama’s “constructs of the imagination.” These are the landscapes of songs, maps, names, stories, rituals, and histories.

Long before Count Zinzendorf’s mid-eighteenth-century journey through Pennsylvania’s forests, this was a landscape that had been sung, storied, and mapped by Indigenous communities. According to current archaeological data, as glaciers receded from Pennsylvania around the end of the Ice Age, people migrated into the Ohio, Susquehanna, and Delaware river valleys from the more populous interior regions of the continent.⁸ Pennsylvania’s first residents would have encountered an ecological patchwork of environments in the lands south of the glacial ice. Thick forests of spruce, fir, birch, pine, and alder dominated the lower slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and the ridge and valley systems that stretched to the east and south. Over time, as the climate warmed, hardwoods such as oak, chestnut, hickory, and beech began to populate the forests along the Appalachian Plateau. These new forests supported a rich understory of edible and medicinal plants: mushrooms, berries, ginseng, chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts.⁹ In the middle canopy, dogwood, ironwood, viburnum, spicebush, witch hazel, and honeysuckle vied for sunlight and sustenance.¹⁰ On the alluvial plains along the Susquehanna and Delaware Watersheds grew carpets of wild strawberries, so notable a feature of the riparian landscape for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years that early European travelers would eventually write of “whole plains covered with them as with a fine scarlet cloth.”¹¹ Even during the sixteenth century, and the first recorded journeys of Europeans along these eastern river valleys, more than 90 percent of Pennsylvania’s landscape was covered in densely packed forests.

Pennsylvania’s diverse geographic regions and forests supported a great variety of animals. The grasslands of the higher elevations and pools of salt and brackish water along creeks and streams were home to deer, elk, moose, and buffalo.¹² These salt holes attracted predators such as wolves, panthers, lynx, cougars, and foxes. In the denser parts of the forest, thickets of mountain laurel, witch hazel, and chokeberry harbored bears’ dens and crouching panthers, wild cats, mountain lions, and boars hiding in the underbrush. The dense carpet of leaves on the forest floor teemed with field mice, moles, chipmunks and squirrels, as well as ticks, fleas, and beetles that carved the bark of trees or fed on the blood of passing animals. Minks, otters, muskrats, and beavers flourished along the many creeks and streams that flowed off of the Appalachian Front.

The acoustic ecologies of Pennsylvania’s forests were dynamic. Depending on the particular place, time, and season, the sounds of wind, water, fire, rustling plants and trees, and falling rocks carried quickly over dry terrain or were muffled in the humidity of a rainy day. Even the dynamic sounds of water fluctuated from ice to snow to rain, or from stream, to creek, to river. The quiet sounds of winds moving through the dense hardwood stands had their counterpoint in the vigorous blowing of salt breezes on the riparian plains of the Susquehanna. The branches of trees that remained silent and still in the heat of summer crackled in the brittle cold of winter. These natural sounds were augmented by birds, insects, and animals who responded in their calls and communications to patterns of light and dark, fluctuating seasons and climates. The dense heat of a summer day could suddenly transform into a cacophony of birds, insects, and frogs after an afternoon thundershower. Spring evenings resounded with the dense soundscapes of insects and amphibians that resonated over wetlands and along the margins of ponds.¹³ Common horseflies, mosquitos, grasshoppers, yellow jackets, wasps, and locusts clicked and scraped in densely layered soundscapes in the upper canopies of forests and along the grassy edges of meadows. The calls and songs of forest and meadow birds—pigeons, turkeys, turtle doves, woodpeckers, bald eagles, owls, wrens, bluebirds, hummingbirds, and thrushes—resounded through the skies.¹⁴

Within this densely layered landscape and soundscape of plants, animals, insects, and birds, Native American settlements clustered around Pennsylvania’s distinct geological regions and river systems. A majority of travel and commerce centered on the three major watersheds of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. An intricate network of trails and pathways linked different settlements in the river valleys, although only a few pathways, such as the Great Shamokin Path and Kittanning Path, traversed the high mountains of the Appalachian Front.¹⁵ See website chap1.3, Interactive sound map: “The Great Shamokin Path.” Rivers, streams, and springs were also crucial hubs for the spatial distribution of settlements and territorial boundaries, creating zones of human activity interspersed with forested borderlands.

For Native Americans, these borderlands of the forest were filled with the sounds and voices of stones, dirt, animals, plants, wind and air, water and fire, trees, insects. The patterns of these geophonic and biophonic soundscapes articulated distinct sonic languages that characterized particular geographic areas.¹⁶ Careful attention to and meaningful interpretation of aural cues from animals, insects, and birds, as well as wind, water, and storms were important in a typically dense, forested environment where distance could not be adequately judged or easily remembered by sight.¹⁷ The paths between well-established and populous towns such as Shamokin, Kittanning, and Onondaga were carefully charted through trail markings, painted trees, and mental maps that preserved the spatial relationships of the structured world of villages and agricultural land, to lighter forest thickets and dark “swamps,” places where the trees grew so close and so high that they blocked the sun.

Human journeys into the forest were often accompanied by a complex system of songs and offerings that could be sung to appease or beguile the spirits who resided there. These symbolic methods of naming, remembering, and sounding the landscape were especially important in navigating the miles of forest lands that lay between villages and towns. These forested spaces were crowded with spirits, who sometimes helped or hindered the people who encountered them. In the darkness of the liminal under-canopy, accidents could easily happen: broken legs, starvation, mental illness, and stripping of the powers of sight and hearing. People listened carefully for the dynamics and counterpoint of the natural environment, observing climate, season, weather, and time of day through the soundscapes of frogs, trumpeter swans, or wild geese. Shades of darkness were measured by the calls of nocturnal birds: spring and summer nights resonated with the songs of the whip-poor-will and the noisy calls of owls. But in the liminal spaces of the forest, these sounds could also disrupt human activities. Upon their return to villages and human spaces, travelers were immersed in complex rituals designed to counter the ill effects of the woods. For eastern Woodlands cultures, “Edge of the Woods” ceremonies were critical pathways to healing that cleared the eyes and unstopped the ears of those who had ventured “thro’ dangerous places, where evil Spirits reign.”¹⁸ The particular ability of owls to imitate the human voice could create misunderstandings or cause messages to go astray.¹⁹ According to a Delaware legend, screech owls were particular bearers of misfortune: “Enta wa chululhuwe pèchi lihëlak hìtkunk tali kochëmink ènta awèn wikit luweyok hùnt, ‘O, mata wëlëtu.’ Alëmi wishas’hatuwàk, wëlusemëneyo në sikhay òk patamaok. Elaihòsihtit hùnt lòmwe Lënapeyunkahke lòmëwe.” (When a screech owl comes to your home and lands outside in a tree where a person lives they say, “Oh, that is not good!” They began to be afraid and they burned some salt and they prayed. That is the way the old Delawares did long ago.)²⁰

The perching of a nighthawk on the roof of a house was also to be avoided at all costs. Its “singing with a mournful note” portended impending disaster to those who heard it. The cooing of turtle doves was even worse—a harbinger of death.²¹ The bald eagle could cause thunder if angered in spirit.²² But rather than bringing ill luck, some animals were simply noisy nuisances. Meadows and agricultural plantations were frequently inundated with flocks of wild pigeons so loud that they prevented people from hearing each other. These birds could appear suddenly in large groups and descend like a cloud, forming “a ceiling between earth and sky.”²³

But in the woods, where sight was often limited to the next stand of trees, recognition of animal and bird sounds was crucial to survival.²⁴ Birds and animals possessed a keenness of hearing that rendered them particularly dangerous. Packs of wolves roamed the woods at night, listening and smelling for prey. Those humans and animals who traveled or slept out at night took care to be silent. The howling of wolves was an omnipresent sound of the nocturnal forest—their ostinatos called out the hunt or served as directional locators for the pack in the darkness.²⁵ Animals also listened and responded to human sounds. An early Moravian Church history, George Loskiel’s History of the Mission of the United Brethren, relates the story of a young Native man named Joshua. One summer’s day, as Joshua was traveling in the woods near his community, he surprised a mother bear and cub near their den. With a roar, the mother rushed at him. The terrified Joshua screamed so loudly that the bear was unnerved and “suffered him to escape.”²⁶

Sounded communications between humans and animals were especially critical for those who entered the woods to hunt. Hunters needed to possess inward spiritual knowledge to sing songs and make sounds that would summon prey or appease the spirits of animals killed for food. Often, hunting songs came through dreams produced after fasting or ingesting spiritual medicines called besons. Hunting besons were typically prepared by older men, who may have been too weak to join in the hunt, and consisted of roots, herbs, and seeds. Some were emetic and produced vomiting; but ingested in small doses they could ensure success in hunting. Besons also had the power to yield potent dreams.²⁷ In beson-induced dreams, hunters could learn of the locations of animals or the best methods to appease the wrath of evil spirits. Dreamers especially hoped to encounter the dead and to hear them speak. With the right prayers and sacrifices, an ancestor might guide the hunter to game.²⁸ Young boys were encouraged to solicit dreams of communication by envisioning animals or animal spirits.²⁹ According to Loskiel’s History, dreams of predatory birds and vultures could signal either the success or failure of an upcoming hunt, depending on the nature of the dream. Hunters could also offer a preparatory sacrifice of a deer, divided into many small pieces, so that they could observe the pattern created by carrion birds as they ate the pieces of meat. These patterns possessed symbolic meaning that alerted hunters to the nearby presence of game, or an impending injury or disaster that may occur if they chose to hunt at that particular time. Nocturnal birds such as owls could also serve as an aid to hunters. Those who heard their calls in the woods at night could offer a sacrifice of tobacco to the campfire and expect to receive a blessing in the next day’s hunt.

Hunters also learned to communicate through sound with animals and their spirits by “calling the game”—vocally imitating animal noises, or using natural objects to produce sounds attractive to particular animals. These calls appealed to an animal’s sense of hearing and their instincts. Archaeological finds in various locations throughout Pennsylvania have verified that turkey-wing calls have been used in Pennsylvania for at least the past four thousand years. These small, delicate wing bones could be carefully joined together, and used as a type of mouth organ that produced sounds remarkably similar to a turkey’s call. But mastering the art of communication with animals also required practice and an understanding of the syntax of animal sounds: greeting calls, hailing calls, feeding calls, lonesome calls, and mating calls. Clucks, yelps, quacks, purrs: each animal had a range of sounds embedded within a complex sonic language. Even with the aid of a wing call, learning these animal languages required years of practice.

Boys began to learn the art of hunting in their infancy. Toddlers were encouraged to begin by climbing trees in search of birds. This strengthened their connection with the spirits of birds and honed their eyesight for even the smallest movements in the bushes or trees. Woodlore and hunting lore were skills honed by weeks or months spent in the woods. Many years of a man’s life could be spent in the forest, beginning with a rite of initiation around the age of ten:

At the age of about ten, a boy underwent a test of endurance. He was sent into the woods with bow and arrows and told not to return until he had shot something to eat. Before he set out, his face was blackened with charcoal, a sign to all whom he met that he was on his test and was not to be helped. Little Wildcat Alford, when undergoing this ordeal, was two days alone in the woods without food. He became too weak to shoot straight; but he managed somehow to kill a quail and returned to his family, a man.³⁰

Another important goal of these solitary experiences was to establish lifelong relationships with natural spirits. The forest could be a place of revelatory experiences and visions, an in-between space where one encountered the divine. Listening was central to understanding and mapping these sacred spaces within the forest. The cawing of a raven often preceded a period of religious revelation.³¹ In pan-Native American lore, even inanimate objects had the potential to speak. According to a Seneca tale, “a young boy, tired from hunt, rested his head against a great stone. The stone began to talk. Tired and hungry as he was, he listened, for every hunter knows that spirits dwell in objects. From the stone he learned the ways of the various game animals.”³²

Since the power of spirits could be revealed in the rushing of mountain streams or the roar of waterfalls, the murmur of springs or the groaning of trees as they swayed in the wind, naming these acoustic environments was one important way of claiming their potential for human use.³³ For eastern Woodlands cultures, geographic information, and therefore a sense of distance and place, was conveyed through place names that reflected the natural features of the environment: Kighalampegha (Standing Pond), Moghwheston (Worm Town), Sughchaung (Salt Lick), Oghkitawmikaw (White Corn) or Wapwallopen (Where the White Hemp Grows). Each of these place-names represented the plants, insects, animals of the local ecology. The town of Wyoming (Large Plains) was named after a stretch of riparian meadow on the north branch of the Susquehanna River. The Delaware River, whose western branch flowed by the future site of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was sometimes referred to with a name that represented the speed of rushing water: Lenape-whituttuck (Rapid Stream).³⁴ And the people who lived around the river took their name from that place: the Lenape (Delaware). Place-names could sometimes signify two different meanings. The Delaware settlement of Tulpehákink (Turtle Land Place) was named for the Tulpehocken Creek, which once abounded with water turtles, but it also indicated the area’s human inhabitants, members of the Delaware Turtle phratry.³⁵

Areas with notable soundscapes were also named. A place along the banks of the Ohio River populated by toads so loud that travelers reported being unable to sleep received the fitting name Tsquallutene (Town of Toads).³⁶ The name of Sheshequanink (At the Place of the Gourd Rattle), on the north branch of the Susquehanna River reflected the sound of the gourd rattles that accompanied religious ceremonies often conducted in the area. Paupaunoming (Cave of the Winds) in the Kittatinny Mountains resounded with whistling gusts of air from small holes in the cave walls.

Once names were given to places, it was possible to link them into a mental framework for quick reference and travel. This type of mental mapping could be sounded through song or speech for personal or communal use.³⁷