History
PISL's antecedents, if any, are unknown, due to lack of written records, but the earliest records of contact between Europeans and Native Americans of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the Europeans' arrival there. These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541.
As a result of several factors, including the massive depopulation and the Americanization of Native North Americans, the number of PISL signers declined from European arrival onward. In 1885, it was estimated that there were over 110,000 “sign-talking Indians”, including Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa and Arapaho. By the 1960s, there remained a “very small percentage of this number”. There are few PISL signers today.
William Philo Clark, who served in the United States Army on the northern plains during the Indian Wars, was the author of The Indian Sign Language, first published in 1885, The Indian Sign Language with Brief Explanatory Notes of the Gestures Taught Deaf-Mutes in Our Institutions and a Description of Some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Codes of Peace and War Signs, is a comprehensive lexicon of signs, with accompanying insights into Indian culture and history. It remains in print.
Read more about this topic: Plains Indian Sign Language
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)