AMERICAN INDIANS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 June 1942, Page 4

AMERICAN INDIANS

MIGRATION FROM OR TO ASIA PRESENT DAY EVIDENCE. NEAR KINSFOLK IN MONGOLIA. (By Ta-De-Win in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) The belief that North American Indians once migrated from Asia, coming across Bering Strait to Alaska, or vice versa, is strengthened by evidence coming from a small corner of the Russian Empire. In the north-western part of Mongolia a tribe of about 100,000 persons, known as the Oyrotes, still flourishes. . The word oyrote is seemingly Indian. Strangely enough the Oyrote medicine man is called Shaman—a word that is common to the various races of Northern Asia and to the North American Indian. The Oyrotes bear a strong resemblance to the American Indian in physique, manners, customs, and dress, and their summer dwelling of bark is like the cone-shaped teepee of the Plains Indians. And as some American Indians forge ahead and enter the professional field, so a former Oyrote Shaman is today editor of the first newspaper in his native tongue. Comparison of photos of the Gyrates and those of some North American Indians intensify a marked similarity. An Oyrote will wear a fringed, buckskin, costume and the furry headgear of the pre-white Plains Indians and certainly might be taken for the first cousin of a Sioux Indian. Small shells adorning the costume of the Oyrote'were trimmings Indians used before beads could be obtained. Moreover, the Oyrotes build octagonal, wooden houses , very much like the Gros Ventre Dance Hall at Elbowoods, North Dakota, or ijje winter Council House of the Om.yna Horsehead Society, Nebraska. Patrician Oyrote beauties with shawls over their heads in the Russian fashion and with hair braided in the traditional native way, have a style that is also that of many Indian women. Are these Oyrotes related to the Mayas who, as some anthropologists think, journeyed from Central America to the Azores, then to Egypt, India, Mongolia and into Siberia where some settled, while others of their band, many centuries ago, continued on and across Bering Strait into Alaska and down through North America? Or did . the migration take the opposite route up from Central America and north to Alaska .then across Bering Strait and on to Siberia, where ancestors of these Oyrotes settled? The question has yet to be answered with certainty. Not far from these Oyrotes on the wind-swept steppes in Outer Mongolia live Mongols, whose yurts (dwellings) are much like the Navajo hogan or the former round • homes of the Mandans. Sometimes a common culture may determine a definite relationship, but until then the physical resemblance, outward characteristics, and customs presuppose a racial kinship between Mongols, Oyrotes, and North American Indians.