The primitive Siouan music was limited to the chant and rather simple
vocal melody, accompanied by rattle, drum, and flute, the drum among the
northwestern tribes being a skin bottle or bag of water. The music of the
Omaha and some other tribes has been most appreciatively studied by Miss
Fletcher, and her memoir ranks among the Indian classics.(47) In general
the Siouan music was typical for the aboriginal stocks of the northern
interior. Its dominant feature was rhythm, by which the dance was
controlled, though melody was inchoate, while harmony was not yet
developed.
The germ of painting was revealed in the calendars and the seed of
sculpture in the carvings of the Sionan Indians. The pictographic
paintings comprised not only recognizable but even vigorous
representations of men and animals, depicted in form and color though
without perspective, while the calumet of catlinite was sometimes chiseled
into striking verisimilitude of human and animal forms in miniature. To
the collector these representations suggest fairly developed art, though
to the Indian they were mainly, if not wholly, symbolic; for everything
indicates that the primitive artisan had not yet broken the shackles of
fetichistic symbolism, and had little conception of artistic portrayal for
its own sake.
INSTITUTIONS
Among civilized peoples, institutions are crystallized in statutes about
nuclei of common law or custom; among peoples in the prescriptorial
culture-stage statutes are unborn, and various mnemonic devices are
employed for fixing and perpetuating institutions; and, as is usual in
this stage, the devices involve associations which appear to be
essentially arbitrary at the outset, though they tend to become natural
through the survival of the fittest.
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