Walam Olum

In 1836 in his first volume of The American Nations, Rafinesque published what he represented as an English translation of the entire text of the Walam Olum, as well as a portion in the Lenape language.

Many generations passed (the characteristics of each chief briefly described), until a large part of the nation decided to invade the territory of the Talegawi people, aided by the northern Talamatan.

Slow expansion into the rich eastern lands eventually reached another sea, where, after generations, the first white men arrived in ships.

This (which incidentally names the composer of the original Walam Olum as one Lekhibit) exists only as a purported translation by John Burns, who has himself never been satisfactorily identified.

He said "the late Dr. Ward of Indiana" acquired the materials in 1820 from a Lenape patient in return for a medical cure, and eventually passed them on to Rafinesque.

Ward[5] (1794–1863, so not "late" in the sense of "deceased") who spent some of his early career in Indiana, moved to New England in 1823 and from 1831 was professor of natural history at the University of Georgia.

[9] Any items in Rafinesque's large collection of specimens, which did not find a ready sale after his death were apparently destroyed.

Twentieth-century archaeology has confirmed that by Rafinesque's time, Native Americans had been using birch bark scrolls for over 200 years.

In 1965 the archaeologist Kenneth Kidd reported on two finds of "trimmed and fashioned pieces of birch bark on which have been scratched figures of animals, birds, men, mythological creatures, and esoteric symbols" in the Head-of-the-Lakes region of Ontario.

He accepted it as genuine, partially on internal evidence but also because the educated Indian chief (Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh) (George Copway), to whom he showed the manuscript, "unhesitatingly pronounced it authentic, in respect not only to the original signs and accompanying explanations in the Delaware dialect, but also in the general ideas and conceptions which it embodies.

"[15] 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.

[18] 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.

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.

Oestreicher examined the Lenape language text with fluent native speaker, Lucy Parks Blalock, and they found problems such as frequent use of English idioms.

The existence of genuine historic pictogram documents elsewhere does not overcome the textual and ethnological problems of the Walam Olum.

Oestreicher examined Rafinesque's original manuscript and "found it replete with crossed-out Lenape words that had been replaced with others that better matched his English 'translation.'

[8] In general, he found a variety of evidence that the Walam Olum was not an authentic historical record but was composed by someone having only a slight familiarity with the Lenape language.

Oestreicher argued that Rafinesque crafted the linguistic text from specific sources on the Delaware Language published by the American Philosophical Society and elsewhere.

[27] David Oestreicher asserted that the stories were a conglomerate assembled from numerous sources from different cultures that spanned the globe.

Oestreicher's findings were summarized by Herbert Kraft in his study, "The Lenape-Delaware Indian Heritage: 10,000 BCE to 2000 CE", and by Jennifer M. Lehmann in "Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge".

[28] Oestreicher's very detailed analyses have not found a wide audience, but they have made it possible to go a step further, and study the thinking and cultural assumptions of earlier researchers (for example by examining how they treated features of the Walam Olum which should have been clear evidence that it was a fake).