Passamaquoddy Indian Voices – from 1890!

Introduction: In this article, Melissa Davenport Berry describes an astonishing collection: the earliest known recordings of Native Americans talking and singing in their original language. Melissa is a genealogist who has a website, americana-archives.com, and a Facebook group, New England Family Genealogy and History.

In this photo we see members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe with anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes as he records traditional Passamaquoddy stories, songs, and words on wax cylinders, on the Pleasant Point Reservation in eastern Maine in 1890.

In March of 1890 Jesse Walter Fewkes, anthropologist, archaeologist, writer, and naturalist, gathered members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Calais, Maine, to record folk stories, songs, and chants. For genealogists and historians, understanding each family’s last name meaning within these tribal communities adds valuable context to the preservation of their language and oral traditions.

A total of 31 four-inch wax cylinders of Passamaquoddy Indian music and spoken word was recorded.

The cylinders were received by the Library of Congress from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, in 1970.

These are the earliest known field-recorded cylinders of Native American song and narrative, collected by Fewkes primarily as a test in preparation for his work with the Second Hemenway Expedition to the southwestern pueblos beginning in the summer of 1890. He employed Thomas Edison’s recently developed wax cylinder phonograph for use in fieldwork.

For Dr. Fewkes, the trip to Maine was a learning experience as well as a time to practice using the equipment intended for the summer expedition.

Fewkes’s letter to his sponsor Mary Hemenway, dated 16 March 1890, expressed his astonishment at the extensive mythology of the Passamaquoddy Indians (Edwin L. Wade and Lea S. McChesney, “America’s Great Lost Expedition,” Heard Museum, 1980, p. 8).

Here is a newsclip from the Boston Herald titled “Folk-Lore in the Phonograph, Indian Songs and Legends Recorded for Scientific Purposes.”

This article reports:

A most remarkable demonstration of the power of the phonograph was given last night in the theatre of the Boston Society of Natural History. Dr. J. Walker [Walter] Fewkes, by indomitable energy and devotion to ancient history, has succeeded in recording by this instrument, for the edification of future generations, a number of songs, tales, legends, and conversations of the Passamaquoddy Indians. These he ground out of Edison’s wonderful instrument last evening, to the delight of a very large attendance of members of the American Folk-Lore Society. About the middle of last month Dr. Fewkes took his phonograph down to Calais, Me., where 30 or 40 families of Passamaquoddy Indians are domiciled. Among them are two or three of the original red men who worshipped the Great Spirit before Christianity…

Dr. Fewkes noted the most interesting recording was the Passamaquoddy song of the Snake Dance furnished by Noel/Newell Joseph, the patriarchal leader of the tribe.

Listen to Joseph’s recording at the Library of Congress.

Dr. Fewkes explained his work in this newspaper article:

This article reports:

The present state of perfection of the Edison phonograph led me, writes J. Walker Fewkes, in Nature, to attempt some experiments with it on our New England Indians, as a means of preserving languages which are rapidly becoming extinct. I accordingly made a visit to Calais, Maine, and was able, through the kindness of Mrs. W. Wallace Brown, to take upon the phonograph a collection of records illustrating the language, folk-lore, songs, and counting out rhymes of the Passamaquoddy Indians. My experiments met with compete success, and I was able not only to take the records, but also to take them so well that the Indians themselves recognized the voices of other members of the tribe who had spoken the day before.

Here is a photo of Mrs. W. Wallace Brown, who aided Jesse Walter Fewkes in his research of the Passamaquoddy Tribe. She is pictured here in the middle left in Passamaquoddy ceremonial wear.

Dwayne Tomah, language keeper, director, and curator of the Sipayik Museum, who also served on the Passamaquoddy Tribal Council, made a video on the recordings: https://youtu.be/clPDWK9Fooc?si=rZmnp9Ne1Q-nL0AO

Below are photos of a presentation Tomah gave in 2024 about the 1890 recordings, courtesy of the Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society in Sullivan, Maine. In these photos we see: the exhibit display featuring photographs of Dr. Fewkes and the recording of Passamaquoddy Indians; Dwayne Tomah speaking; and an Edison wax-cylinder phonograph from 1890.

To be continued…

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Note on the header image: Jesse Fewkes recording Passamaquoddy Indians, 1890. Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Related Articles & Sources:

• Smithsonian: Waxing Poetic: Digitizing Cylinder Recordings
• Centuries-Old ‘Indian Melodies’ Come to Life Through Collaborative Project
• Finding the Words: New Technology and New Thinking Are Helping Native American Communities Revitalize Their Languages