Page 141 - La Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique - Rapport 1961

ANNUAL ADDRESS. 137
of the whole enigma." Mr. Stevens, in a paper on the origin
of the Indians, concludes that little or nothing can be known
on the subject. Mr. Prescott, in the chapter alluded to in our
opening remarks, arrives at the same conclusion. Mr. School-
craft leaves the question more deeply involved in mystery than
he found it, concluding that the true aborigines, to use his own
language, "probably broke off from one of the primary stocks
of the human race, before history had dipped her pen in ink or
lifted her graver upon a stone. I-Ierodotus is silent; there is
nothing to be learned from Sanconiathus or the fragmentary
ancients. The Cuneiform and Nilotic inscriptions, the oldest in
the world, are mute. Our Indian stocks seem to be still more
ancient. "-1
The grand error of these writers, I conceive to be this:-
They assume, first, that what they consider the o~iginal Indian
race, must hare sprung from some one nation of the Old World,
and all from one original American stock which came to the
country direct from the nation to which they belonged, and by
voluntary emigration; so that at whatever period it occurred,
the rest of the world musthave been cognizant of the fact and
preserved some record of it; and hence Mr. Schoolcraft con-
cludes that because Hcrodotus and Sanconiathus and the Cunei-
form and Nilotic inscriptions are all silent on the snbject, there-
fore the migration must have taken place before their day! The
facts we have adduced lead more naturally to the following
prorimate conclusions.
1st. That the origin of tlie Indian tribes upon this continent,
viewed as a whole, is an event of not very ancient date. Their
oral and pictorial history, the remains of Indian art, and all the
other traces of the presence of human beings upon the continent,
indicate an origin quite recent, as compared with the pyramids.

+ If we can arrive at satisfactory conclusions respecting thc origin of the
more civilized tribes, and the means by which they reached the continent. it
should, at lenst suggest to us the possibility thnt the primary stock may have
originated from the same quarter, nnd found their way hither by similar means;
cspecially if we find they nll belonged to the same hmily of nntions and first
appeared on the same part of the continent.
t Nut. and Trib. Hist. pp. 16-17.
17x11