Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[612] keepers among the Five Nations that he was able to repeat all the details of public transaction connected with every one of the five hundred belts entrusted to his care.

Other aids to memory were occasionally employed, bundles of notched sticks, the painted skins of the Plainsman's Summer and Winter counts. These were in the nature of public documents. Chippewa (Ojibway) tribes had ‘board plates’ on which between straight lines were painted or incised ideographic symbols indicating the song sequences of their rituals. But these could be read only by members of the societies to which they pertained. In the whole of what is now the United States there was but one native record that could be called, in our fashion, a book. It consisted of a number of birch-bark plates, incised and painted red, the Walam Olum, the Red Score of the Lenni Lenape. For the rest, the record of the Amerind soul was committed to the mind and the heart.

This is only another way of saying that all Amerind literature was rhythmic. It was true of all those forms we are accustomed to think of as prose, oratory, epigram, and tribal history, as well as of lyric and epic. But, though the Indian had no names for them, there was always a distinction in his choice of rhythms to be used. The difference was in their psychological relation to himself. The thing that came out of the Amerind heart was poetry, but if it came out of his head it was prose. This is a distinction to be borne in mind, for in the present state of our knowledge it is the only possible classification of aboriginal literary modes.

If utterance was out of the Indian heart, it could be sung or danced. But all Indian life was so intensely democratic that there was very little to be danced and sung which had not to be danced and sung in common, by the group or the tribe. When literature is danced or chanted in common there must be some common measure, some time-keeper. Among the Indians this was the drum, that ‘breathing mouth of wood,’ the hollow log or hoop with a stretched skin. All Amerind literature is of these two classes: it can be drummed to, or it cannot.

Of the literature which came out of the Indian's head, too little has been preserved to us, and that little by ethnologists rather than literary specialists. Translators have been chiefly interested in mythology, in language, in anything except literary form.