Science Art: Meda Songs, 1851

Scientific Illustration of an Ojibwe music board, with colorful human and animal figures, as illustrated by by James Ackerman after a watercolor by Seth Eastman
Scientific Illustration of an Ojibwe music board, with colorful human and animal figures, as illustrated by by James Ackerman after a watercolor by Seth Eastman

This is a chromolithograph by James Ackerman made of a watercolor by Seth Eastman who was copying an Ojibwe music board – a birchwood slab somebody picked up in the Northern Great Lakes region around 1820.

I’m not sure what a “music board” is. As far as I can tell, this seems to be a way of making musical notation for certain songs: the up-arrow part comes before that big bird part, and then it goes into the tree section. This actually makes sense to me in a musical way.

It’s one of the plates in Historical and statistical information respecting the history, condition and prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1851-57. But I found it in the Trials and Errors photostream on Flickr.