The Walam Olum in The 20th Century
In the 1930s, Erminie Voegelin attempted to find evidence of Walam Olum narrative elements in independent Lenni-Lenape and Delaware sources; the parallels were at best inconclusive. Doubts about the text's authenticity began to grow. In 1952 renowned archaeologist James Bennett Griffin publicly announced that he “had no confidence in the 'Walam Olum'.” Historian William A. Hunter also believed the text a hoax. In 1954 archaeologist John G. Witthoft found linguistic inaccuracies and suspicious correspondences of words in the texts to 19th-century Lenape-English word lists. He concluded that Rafinesque composed the narrative from Lenape texts already in print. The following year, he announced in the Journal of American Linguistics the start of a Walam Olum project for further study, but this project did not take place.
In 1954, a multidisciplinary team of scholars from the Indiana Historical Society published another translation and commentary. They stated, "The 'Red Score' is a worthy subject for students of aboriginal culture." A reviewer noted that the team was not able to identify Dr. Ward, and he concluded that the document's origins "are undeniably clouded." Anthropologist Della Collins Cook commented on the 1954 study, "The scholarly essays are best read as exercises in stating one's contradictory conclusions in a manner designed to give as little offense as possible to one's sponsor." Other translations and commentaries have followed, including translations into languages other than English.
Selwyn Dewdney, art educator and researcher into Ojibwa art and anthropology, wrote the only comprehensive study of the Ojibwa birch bark scrolls (wiigwaasabakoon). In it he wrote: "A surviving pictographic record on wood, preserved by the Algonquian-speaking Delaware long after they had been shifted from their original homeland on Atlantic shores at the mouth of the Delaware River, offers evidence of how ancient and widespread is the myth of a flood (see Deluge (mythology) involving a powerful water manitou. The record is known as the Walum Olum (Painted Sticks), and was interpreted for George Copway by a Delaware Elder... Apart from the reference to man's moral wickedness, the mood and imagery of the Walum Olum convey an archaic atmosphere that surely predates European Influence." A review of his study by the anthropologist Edward S Rogers states "Dewdney is apt to rely upon ethnographic generalizations that were in vogue a quarter of a century ago, but in the intervening years have been modified or disproven...Dewdney handles ethnohistorical matters no better than he does ethnographic topics... Dewdney has deceived the unwary that do not realize that the exact distributions and certain proposed migrations of Ojibwa still remain unresolved. A final word, but one that is of paramount importance, must be voiced. How will the Ojibwa react to this book? Most likely, negatively, from the few comments received to date. The fact that "Sacred" information is being divulged will be resented."
Kentucky-based writer Joe Napora wrote a modern translation of the text, which was published in 1992. At the time he thought the Walam Olum was genuine. In his preface, he wrote, "My belief is that the Walam Olum is closely related to the Mide Scrolls that Dewdney wrote so eloquently about in 'Sacred Scrolls of the Ojibway.'"
By the 1980s, however, ethnologists had collected enough independent information "to discount the Walam olum completely as a tradition". Herbert C. Kraft, an expert on the Lenape, had long suspected the document to be a fraud. He stated that it did not square with the archaeological record of migrations by the prehistoric ancestors of the Lenape. In addition, he cited a 1985 survey conducted among Lenape elders by ethnologists David M. Oestreicher and James Rementer that revealed traditional Lenape had never heard of the narrative. The older Lenape people said that they "found its text puzzling and often incomprehensible." Oestreicher examined the Lenape language text with fluent native speaker, Lucy Parks Blalock, and they found problems such as frequent use of English idioms.
In 1991 Steven Williams summarized the history of the case and the evidence against the document, lumping it with many other famous archaeological frauds. The existence of genuine historic pictogram documents elsewhere does not overcome the textual and ethnological problems of the Walam Olum.
Read more about this topic: Walam Olum