Hilary E. Wyss
In August of 1763, Sarah Wyacks [Wyoggs]1 breezily wrote to her brother, filling him in on family news: brother Jonathan was slowly recovering from “a fit of sickness” while “your mother is well at present & Lucy & her family.” She continues, “Thomas went up to Windsor last winter, came down last March & after tarrying a few days (with an intent to tarry all summer) he return’d to his wife.” “As for myself,” she writes, “I am as well as I am ordinarly” (Wyacks 1763). The letter continues for about a page, with some comments on Wyacks’s religious state and with some further questions about her brother’s planned travels. Unremarkable at first glance, this letter seems to be simply one of the thousands of familiar letters exchanged in rural New England in the eighteenth century, with nothing much of interest to anyone beyond the particular family at this specific moment. Except that this letter, written by a Mohegan woman to her increasingly prominent brother Samson Occom, upends most of what scholars have taken for granted about Native Americans, literacy practices, gender, and early Native New England.
Until relatively recently, scholars have held as a certainty that Native Americans in North America had no writing systems. Having no written forms of their own languages, it was believed, their history could only be saved from capricious oral retellings through the certainty and permanence of print culture, the domain of English, French, and Spanish colonists. This notion of the opposition between oral and written cultures remained a standard for a remarkably long stretch, and because of this assumption nobody thought to look for writing by Native Americans in early American archives, or to suggest that Native Americans might have had alternative literacy systems. Scholarship in the last few decades has challenged all these assumptions, and in doing so has opened up entirely new approaches to Native American literacies and even more broadly to the notion of literate versus non‐literate social structures.
Literacy scholars of early Native texts are generally beholden to Ibero‐colonialists working with New World literacies of Central and South America. Such scholars, among them Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo (1994), have pointed out that early Spanish missionaries did in fact encounter Native literacy systems in the form of codices and other textual productions in Indigenous languages in Central America. They promptly burned these, arguing they were products of the devil, and tried to replace them with alphabetic texts more to their liking, as Walter Mignolo (1996) has shown (69–124). This brazen act of colonial appropriation and destruction has prompted scholars to think more critically about what early sources mean when they say that Indigenous people did no writing, and this has proved useful in the North American context as well. Scholars like Germaine Warkentin (1999, 2014) establish the communicative value of wampum and other material artifacts of exchange, reminding us that pen and ink are not the only structuring artifacts of communication. In fact, scholarship on early Native American literacy has loosely divided into two camps: those who have sought and found overlooked grapheme‐based texts by Native Americans and those who have explored alternative literacy systems.
The scholars in the first category, who focus on recovering alphabetic texts from the archives, have found materials ranging from Indigenous‐language texts to English‐language materials. For those invested in the literatures of early America broadly conceived, the extent of early Native engagement with English literacy and literate practice is only now being understood. These scholars’ work has focused almost entirely on New England, with its rich documentary evidence and clear investment in recovering its Native past; indeed, with only a few exceptions, this essay will also largely focus on this region. The materials that have been recovered are primarily related to the work of missionaries, including French Jesuits in Canada and the northern United States (see Thwaites 1896–1901), English missionaries like John Eliot and others in New England (see Clark 2003), and to a limited extent colonial settlements further south. Colonial missionaries established schools and religious institutions as early as the mid‐seventeenth century through which to spread alphabetic literacy into Native communities with the belief that literacy should and would reinforce conversion to Christianity. While scholars still argue over the success of such conversion strategies, the effect was that Native Americans who engaged with these schools produced a body of writing, and by the eighteenth century Native communities throughout New England were not only familiar with the conventions of English literacy but had also developed extensive networks and uses for alphabetic texts in their own language. Recent scholarship has established in greater detail the breadth of literacy experiences in New England, which has complemented the careful editing work of Laura Murray (1998), Joanna Brooks (2006), and others in bringing forward the words of Native American writers of the eighteenth century. Letters like that of Sarah Wyacks, always available in the archive, suddenly became evident to those who started looking for them, and it has become clear that we have only begun to recover what has been hidden in plain sight. Digital projects like the Native Northeast Research Collaborative (formerly the Yale Indian Papers Project) have embraced the spirit of recovery by making available to scholars, tribal historians, and anyone curious about the topic an inter‐institutional database of primary materials by and about Native New England. Emerging from this literacy‐based project is the recognition that an enormous variety of documents exist that we are only now beginning to recover. To understand them we must develop new strategies of reading and analysis to honor their range and sophistication, since in many cases they challenge our notions of “literature” and of commonly accepted genres of literary production.
The second category of scholars explores alternative literacies or expands the idea of literacy to include non‐grapheme‐based communicative systems. Scholars from fields like Native studies, history, art history, and archaeology ask what the archives can tell us about non‐textual communicative systems among Native peoples. They argue that other forms of marking – from carving to basketweaving to other “decorative” arts – in fact function quite differently as communicative systems from those of the English colonists, who simply didn’t have the patience or the interest to learn how to understand them. This is a fundamental challenge to the notion of literacy – or more particularly alphabetic literacy – as the most useful category of knowledge transmission. This recent scholarship has urged us to look beyond “English letters” for a more comprehensive sense of early Native New England (Wyss 2012). Lisa Brooks (2008, 2018) powerfully reveals the extent of Native political interrelations marked by literacy exchanges that were distinct from the needs and desires of white colonial figures; she argues that it is largely by reading past rather than through historical documents that we can begin to recover that Native story of New England, a story that is deeply embedded in the landscape and in Native patterns of community exchange. In the same vein, Matt Cohen (2009) challenges us to look beyond traditional books and letters for what he calls networks of communications in which literacy is simply one mode among many through which communities and individuals marked out political and cultural exchange. Using material culture to read and complicate written texts, Cohen engages both with what is said and what is left out of written records. Andrew Newman (2012) argues that the very concept of literacy as a marker of cultural value, however broadly defined, is too constraining and that it is only by rejecting its limits that we get outside Euro/Western hierarchies of value. Certainly, these insights have opened up whole new ways of seeing Native New England, immersed as it was in print culture.
These lively recent conversations have drastically decentered literacy as a category of understanding culture. And certainly that is a most welcome conversation, from Birgit Rasmussen’s wide‐ranging Queequeg’s Coffin (2012) to Scott Lyons’s X‐Marks (2010). Such scholars ask us to resist the easy judgment of alphabetic literacy as a clear sign of cultural sophistication and instead be attentive to alternative structures of meaning and meaning making. Is graphic expression inherently more important than other sign systems or might we all learn to understand the world in more expansive, sophisticated ways if we were to abandon our limited view of reading and writing as the most valued structures of understanding? Such an approach opens us to a wide array of alternative communication systems, including tattooing, body paint, wampum, bark drawings, and pictograph systems, and makes clear that our own inability to read and interpret such systems is not a quality inherent to them but instead tells us more about the limitations of our own strategies. Indeed, these scholarly approaches engage from a variety of perspectives with questions we have only begun to ask. The conversation that pushes past alphabetic literacy honors those Native communities and individuals who did not embrace Western structures of meaning and makes way for a far more inclusive conversation about alternative patterns of communication. It opens our eyes to bodies of knowledge that have up to now been invisible to academics, wedded as we are to our own structures of knowledge embedded in literacy and literate practice.
As valuable as I find this alternative conversation, my own work has focused on the texts so recently recovered from the archive. These are rich documents that offer an incredibly compelling glimpse into the lives and experiences of Native Americans navigating a colonial world with its contradictory expectations for them. These texts, which range from highly literary sermons and accounts to the most rudimentary letters and writing exercises, hint at the variety of experience of Native New Englanders, and by doing so they challenge us to think more carefully about the promise and limitations of literacy and its practices. New England serves as a great example of and starting point for thinking about how Native literacies can alter or reshape American literature, which has traditionally been represented as unfolding in Puritan New England with its roots in England. By examining Native literacies in the heart of the most literate and literary ground of American identity, we can usefully remind ourselves of the alternative stories of origin and community embedded within that same region and in those same letters. Rather than being distinct from written experience, some versions of Native experience exist right within in our archives, and before we move past them we might consider more carefully what attending to these documents has to offer us as scholars of literature.
New England’s history is rich in literacy projects since its Protestant roots ensured a commitment to reading and writing as a means of enriching religious experience. Starting with James Printer, Job Nesuton, and others working with John Eliot, the Algonquian language was rendered into alphabetic form and the Bible was translated into this language, published in the colonies in 1663. At around the same time, Indian students matriculated at Harvard, which formed an Indian College in the 1650s; although about half a dozen Indian students attended, only two, Joel Iacoombs and Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, graduated in the seventeenth century. Experience Mayhew documented the experience of many Native Christians on Martha’s Vineyard in the early eighteenth century, suggesting that there were many more than he could present in his book, Indian Converts (Liebman 2008). While the missionary impulse to spread literacy among Native populations may have been the impetus, and published materials overwhelmingly focus on texts related to Indian conversion, manuscript documents tucked into various archives suggest that religion was only one of a variety of uses Natives had for literacy: land deeds, wills, familiar letters, petitions, formal documents, and even biblical marginalia documenting family histories exist from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, suggesting a range of literacy and literate practice that we are only now beginning to recover.
If religious conversion was the goal for religious organizations, Linford Fisher (2012) usefully replaces that term conversion with the notion of religious affiliation, which allows for a more flexible and variable set of relationships with the practices and institutions brought into Native communities by English missionaries. Indeed, political forces were a powerful incentive for Native people to embrace literacy, as scholars have noted, and Native communities were eager to have their own people able to argue for them in colonial exchanges involving treaties, land deeds, and petitions. English literacy skills brought practical political results to Native communities, not least of which was the ability of some individuals to more fluently engage with the intricacies of colonial legal and political structures. Literacy practice is political practice, and this is nowhere clearer than in eighteenth‐century New England, where the besieged and embattled Algonquian tribes were threatened as they were increasingly relegated to the outskirts of New England colonial towns and treated as unwelcome guests in their own homelands. Over a century of warfare and disease, along with increasing levels of alcoholism and grinding poverty, had taken their toll since the arrival of English, Dutch, and French colonists, and New England tribes found themselves fighting to maintain a political identity as more than simply remnant stragglers of once powerful nations. Literacy, for many, presented itself as an essential element of continual survival as a distinct people and community.
Native writers produced a variety of texts, and some Native writers even produced a body of literature that is extraordinary. Samson Occom was not exceptional in his ability to write, but as his modern editor Joanna Brooks (2006) has suggested, he is extraordinary in the range of his textual production and his ability to write powerful and sophisticated works, from autobiographical narratives to petitions and sermons. This writing made him one of the most significant intellectuals of his day, someone who was sought out by travelers and visiting dignitaries for his sophisticated understanding of the world. Born in 1723, Occom was deeply invested in the internal politics of his own nation, the Mohegan tribe, which had various upheavals in his lifetime, including a question of succession to the sachemship as well as an ongoing land controversy with the Connecticut colony. At the same time and by his own telling, Occom was powerfully influenced by the religious fervor of the Great Awakening in his teen years. In December of 1743 Occom went to live with Eleazar Wheelock, a local minister who agreed to help this young Native American further develop his studies. He went on to teach in the Montaukett community on Long Island, where he established himself as a community leader, marrying a Montaukett woman, Mary Fowler, and serving as an essential member of this Native group. In the meantime, based on his experience with Occom, Wheelock went on to found a boarding school for Native American and white students interested in missionary work. Named Moor’s Charity School, Wheelock’s school was an ambitious attempt to reach out to Native communities and spread Christianity throughout the region. In 1757 Occom was ordained as a minister and continued to work both at Montaukett and increasingly in a broader missionary role to various Native communities, including the Iroquois of upstate New York. In late 1765 Occom traveled to England to raise money for Wheelock’s school, leaving his large family for over two years with Wheelock’s assurance that they would be well cared for. Upon his return, having raised an astonishing sum for Wheelock’s school, Occom was dismayed to learn not only that his family had suffered significant financial difficulties, but also that Wheelock’s school was increasingly focused on white students rather than Native Americans. In the dark years that followed for Occom he was called to give a sermon at the execution of Moses Paul, a Wampanoag man convicted of murder. This sermon made Occom famous, and was reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. Occom died in 1792, having spent his life committed to his own community of Mohegan, his beloved adopted community of Montaukett, and eventually to Brothertown, a Christian community in upstate New York that he helped to found. Beyond his important sermon, Occom famously kept journals throughout his life documenting his travels and his other experiences; he also tirelessly wrote petitions on behalf of his people, corresponded with individuals throughout America and Great Britain, including the young poet Phillis Wheatley, and wrote various other tracts, including an herbal medicinal text and several autobiographical narratives. Although his work largely disappeared after his death, his sermon as well as one of his autobiographical narratives was rediscovered in the 1980s and he has since become essential reading in literature survey courses. His complete writings, beautifully edited by Joanna Brooks (2006), run to several hundred pages. Together his works give us a picture of an extraordinary writer producing sophisticated and honest material throughout a very difficult life.
If Occom lived a long and prolific life, his son‐in‐law, Joseph Johnson, while only slightly less prolific, died in his mid‐twenties. His works, too, have been edited into a modern edition (Murray 1998), which includes several journals, letters, and various other accounts such as the documents through which the Brothertown community was founded. Johnson was a leader of the Brothertown movement, although he died before it came to fruition after the American Revolution. Johnson attended Wheelock’s charity school from the age of seven, and as a 15‐year‐old he was sent by Wheelock to upstate New York as a teacher’s assistant and eventually a teacher of his own small school among the Iroquois. These were difficult years for Johnson, and he eventually abandoned his school, confessed to bad behavior (including drinking) and went off to sea, after which he returned to Mohegan and had a conversion experience under the influence of Occom. He married Occom’s daughter Tabitha, and they had two children before he died mysteriously during the American Revolution. Johnson was a talented writer and speaker (some of his works include a series of negotiations that he participated in with the Iroquois to get land for Brothertown), and he was clearly adept at offering his readers/listeners a rhetorically appropriate experience through which he navigated a complex series of social and cultural hierarchies. Although modern readers may be put off by his occasionally obsequious language, especially when writing to Eleazar Wheelock, in the context of his other work it is useful to recall what Wheelock expected to hear from his Indian students and how cannily Johnson was able to provide this while still forging his own way among those he lovingly called his “Indian Brethren.”
Beyond these two extraordinary writers, a significant number of other Natives wrote, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a strong political focus. Figures like Hendrick Aupaumut, Joseph Brant, and others wrote sometimes extended journals and other political documents. These are often subtle documents that shift back and forth between Indigenous and colonial rhetorics. Such documents require not only a certain level of familiarity with the conventions of Indigenous diplomacy, but also an engagement with the complexities of early modern literacy, which might involve an amanuensis, variable forms of collaboration, and an elision between oral and written conventions of communication, not to mention the possibility of coercion or deception among the various parties. Indeed, to fully engage with the range of early Native American writing, scholars have developed sophisticated strategies of interpretation that account for silences, elisions, and double meanings. We are unlikely to find a novel or a play or other forms of belletristic writing by early Native Americans since they were far more likely to produce political or practical documents that might more fully establish their communities within a colonial framework. The documents these writers produced, which range from treaties, petitions, diaries, sermons, songbooks, and letters, require not only a strong sense of the specific cultural background of those involved but also a sensitivity to the strategies of communication embedded in each of these forms. To read such texts requires an understanding not only of the conventions of these specific forms, but also a recognition of what it means for authors to occasionally break from these conventions either as a form of refusal or as a redefinition of the terms of communication. These are texts that are marked by silences, alternative forms of communication, and Indigenous ways of seeing the world, all of which are brought to bear through the work of scholars and tribal historians in recovered a non‐textual past. In other words, these ways of understanding literacy or looking beyond it are both crucial to a firmer grasp of that varied field we call “Native literacy.”
Clearly, individuals like Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson among others used the literacy skills refined through schools such as Eleazar Wheelock’s charity school, also known as Moor’s Charity School, for political as well as religious ends, and their writing has received quite a bit of scholarly attention. This scholarship fundamentally changes how we read early American texts and provides sophisticated modes of reading to recover some of the hidden transcripts of Native participation in English literacy practices. However invested modern scholars are in the work of these Native students, the teachers and missionaries involved with such schools tended to see their own efforts as largely fruitless; students abandoned these schools at very high rates and attendance was erratic at best. When Samson Occom was encouraged to send his own 10 children to Wheelock’s school he demurred, sending only his eldest son for a very brief period. Even so, there are extant letters from Occom’s children, both sons and daughters, that remind us that literacy and its practices were available to Native children in a variety of forms, from community schools to family training. Indeed, there are signs of Native literacy throughout the colonial records, often the result of a commitment by families to pass along literacy skills within and along family lines as well as through the networks of community schools.
That families play an important role in developing literacy is of course hardly unique to Native communities. Scholars of early American education such as E. Jennifer Monaghan (2005) have recognized that early American children, like most modern ones, acquired the first few levels of alphabetic literacy in the home, and some continued to develop reading and writing skills within their own households rather than through formal schooling, although most spent at least some time in school. This relationship between literacy acquisition and family is inflected in particular ways in Native communities, however, especially along the eastern seaboard where the language of political alliance is the language of familial connection: the terms “father,” “brother,” “uncle,” and “nephew” shape and define complex alliances among various Native communities from towns to nations, and family is the institution through which political relations are formalized and expressed. It is certainly the case for Samson Occom and his connection to Moor’s Charity School that family relations were the basis for an expanded set of political alliances that brought together many Native communities, and indeed the Native Christian community that emerged from this set of alliances marked that connection through its name, Brothertown – a space through which a stew of religious, political, and literacy practices were brought together in a community defined by its commitment to ongoing Native sovereignty.
While Wheelock’s school helped Occom and Joseph Johnson refine their educations, the school does not seem to have had the same effect on the girls who attended; of the 16 or so girls who attended over the years, only a handful left evidence of writing skill. One such student, Sarah Simon, wrote several letters in which she pleaded with Eleazar Wheelock to allow her to go home to visit her mother. Hardly at the same level of penmanship and rhetorical polish of letters by some of the boys (including her own brothers) from the school, Sarah Simon’s rough skills, which were developed over several years at Wheelock’s school, were some of the best for the girls that attended this school; their time was primarily spent developing domestic skills, and they had only a single day a week in the classroom, unlike the boys. Scholars like Margaret Szasz (1988) and I (Wyss 2006) have found in letters and other documents by and about Native women a wrenching story only marginally communicated through writing. Since women were not the primary beneficiaries of missionary schools, their education was seen as a corollary to that of the boys and men at these schools, and their secondary status was reinforced for them at every turn. Nonetheless, letters by Native women are scattered throughout the archives, and there is even evidence that Native women served as schoolteachers in their own community schools, evidence of a strong commitment by at least some Native women to literacy. While it is highly likely that whatever writing they produced was not preserved, it is still possible that as we continue to search we will find more documents authored by Native women. Until we do, much of their experience must be recovered from the fragments that exist rather than a fully formed notion of the shape and contours of their experience, either at Wheelock’s school or even more generally as members of the colonial world of New England.
While certainly other forms of expression proliferated, letters – formal, familiar, and everything in between – dominated. These documents, written by men and women, children and adults, were at times incredibly intimate and just as often shrewd rhetorical manipulations of distant and unfamiliar audiences. As has become increasingly clear, a full understanding of the work of interpreting seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century letters can involve a host of issues, from the sale and distribution of paper and ink to handwriting practices and even letter‐writing manuals, which were widely distributed among colonial people and contained a wealth of information about the form and structure of a proper letter. As a regular postal service came into being and literacy rates increased, letter writing became a standard feature of even communities with limited resources. And indeed, letters by Native Americans ranged from beautiful and carefully prepared documents full of rhetorical flourishes to hastily scribbled urgent missives to everything in between. From schoolchildren writing letters to be conveyed to benefactors of their missionary schools to family members communicating across great distances about personal matters to Native men writing formal petitions for money or political support on their own behalf or for their communities, letter writers were acutely aware of the visual and rhetorical meanings of their letters. With ink blots and pictograph signatures, faded ink and narrow margins, letters were marked by class, race, and audience perception, and their meaning lies both in their language and in their physical form. Because letters were sometimes written by a third party and read aloud and passed along to multiple recipients, they could be produced and consumed by those not fully literate themselves. Often a single letter might contain news and reports from several individuals, or letters would include paragraphs or even separate sheets for various recipients, making authorship and audience far more flexible categories than a single signature or addressee might suggest. Sometimes letters simply authorized the person delivering them to speak more fully on a private or delicate matter, breaking down the line between spoken and written communication.
Sarah Wyacks’s letter with which I opened this essay is perhaps at face value not particularly engaging. However, it is misleading to read even such seemingly minor texts at face value; their ordinariness masks a very rich history in which the act of acquiring literacy is embedded with a set of assumptions about usefulness, political expediency, and personal expression. It does not require abnegation of Nativeness or of Indigenous ways of thinking and knowing, as earlier scholarly assumptions about literacy and its effect on the mind implied. Instead, acquiring literacy was one decision among many, and Sarah Wyacks’s letter usefully embodies what literacy can and does mean in Native communities. For Wyacks, her family and her community were becoming increasingly dispersed; brothers, fathers, husbands traveled great distances to support their families and earn enough to survive. Literacy was one way Wyacks could maintain her ties to her family and to her sense of a unified and enduring Native space – albeit one not particularly marked with what outsiders might consider visible signs of a more traditional Indian experience. Sarah Wyacks repeatedly and insistently marked her relationship to a particular community and family, dispersed as it was, and used her literacy skills to emphasize the value of that community in her life. If we brush past such tantalizing documents in the archives we will lose track of figures like Sarah Simons and Sarah Wyacks, who were dismissed for generations for their poor grasp of the technicalities of literacy and now risk being pushed aside for having tried at all. Literacy and its complicated relationship to self‐expression still has much to tell us about community and value, even – or perhaps especially – in those communities in which literacy skills were not a given, but were instead hard won and barely mastered.
We are in a period of recovery, having only relatively recently started looking for texts by Native Americans; what we find will surely startle us and challenge our assumptions about the lived experience of early Indigenous people. Along the way, we will have to question our right to define “authentic” experience and instead engage with what records tell us over and over again: Native people in New England and elsewhere were deeply invested in maintaining themselves as a community, and they used literacy skills and practices in complicated and various ways to contribute to that effort. Samson Occom is an extraordinary individual, but as we find more examples of other individuals’ writings, the shape and contours of Native New England and other regions of the country will emerge as we learn to find and then read the writing nobody knew was there.
As this essay makes clear, the field up to now has been dominated by New England and its environs. This is in large part because early American studies have followed patterns of European (and especially English) settlement in North America, which started along the eastern seaboard and moved inland, arriving in California in the nineteenth century. This pattern, as Daniel Richter’s book Facing East from Indian Country (2001) pointedly reminds us, is predicated on the notion that history (or writing) starts with European settlement, and Native stories become available as they come into contact with Europeans. If we resist this notion, and scholars across a range of fields are increasingly doing so, we not only can resist the pull of literacy as inherently valuable, but we also come to realize the range of textualities that we might begin to recover if we were to approach them with humility and an open mind. While historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have long looked to alternative forms of meaning making in a range of different cultural situations, scholars of literature have been reluctant to see the relevance of these strategies to our own work of reading and analyzing texts. With the growth and expansion of the field of Native studies, we are well situated to begin the cross‐disciplinary work of “reading” texts beyond the pen‐and‐ink productions that have anchored literary studies.
There are exciting developments that have opened up different ways of imagining early Native literacies. Two examples are Anna Brickhouse’s The Unsettlement of America (2014) and Birgit Brander Rasmussen’s Queequeg’s Coffin (2012). These are ambitious experiments in reorienting our ways of understanding a Native past both by mining standard written historical accounts in new ways and also by folding in Native ways of marking history, such as bodily markings, earth mounds, petroglyphs, oral histories, and wampum. Geographically, these books reject the Atlantic emphasis and center instead on a reframed understanding of connectedness: Brickhouse’s book demonstrates a reorienting of the American South to its Spanish and Central American relations and an emphasis on the mobility of individuals within an increasingly global world, while Rasmussen’s book advances a broadly theoretical approach to what she calls “alphabetism” and the alternative literacies that stretch across the Americas. Each of these books offers a broad restructuring of what constitutes evidence and how we might imagine a field that integrates different ways of knowing, offering suggestive rather than definitive readings of a specific moment or region.
History has often led the way to the recovery of Native texts, but the goal of the historian is to create an overarching narrative while the goal of the literary scholar is to interpret and analyze texts closely and with great attention to the particularity of individual sources. The focus on written texts has been a logical by‐product of our strategies for reading, but if we are to expand beyond alphabetic texts and do justice to the full potential of Native literacies, we must become more comfortable listening to each other and learning from the strategies of our colleagues in allied fields, from anthropology to art history and archaeology. We must also imagine ourselves fully engaged as learners of other cultures and other ways of seeing the world, not just within academia but beyond it. The increasing turn to the global – with its foregrounding of the interconnected spaces of the early Americas – requires new ways of reading, new ways of understanding ourselves and our past. New generations of scholars have embraced this work, heeding the ambitious call to expand and complicate and above all step humbly with the understanding that none of us can pretend to hold all the answers. Perhaps, though, if we start to ask the right questions we can imagine a future in which reading Native writing will involve pulling on hiking boots or poring over faint images or carvings even as we honor the letters and other documents through which Native people marked their past and imagined their future.
If colonial literacy studies open with the scene of Spanish missionaries burning books, it is perhaps useful to close our discussion with a moment in Cherokee literacy studies, even if that moment is a few years beyond our rough ending date of 1820. When early nineteenth‐century missionaries (generally from New England) came into the Cherokee Nation in the Southeast, they decided that religion was woefully lacking among these people. Like John Eliot before them, they painstakingly worked on a literacy structure that would produce alphabetic literacy among a (presumably) small cadre of Cherokees on the way to English‐language literacy. Native “assistants” who attended English schools, sometimes at a great distance from their homes, supported this work. Some missionaries and Cherokees worked together to publish a handful of texts in the 1820s in an alphabetic rendering of the Cherokee language that was useful for missionaries already literate in English, but much less so to Cherokees for whom the alphabetic system was new and cumbersome.
And then Sequoyah, or George Guess, came along. Accounts differ about the length of time it took him to invent his system, but what is clear is that this Cherokee intellectual – illiterate and unremarkable by the measure of the missionaries hard at work on their alphabetic system – produced a form of written Cherokee based on the sounds and structures of spoken Cherokee. The only person known to have ever single‐handedly invented an alphabet (really a syllabary), Sequoyah’s system was easily comprehensible to Cherokee speakers, many of whom embraced the system and were able to use it comfortably within a few days (Cushman 2011; Round 2010: 123–149; Wyss 2012: 190–210). Those Cherokee assistants who had spent years mastering the cumbersome outside system instantly understood the potential of this new system and brought it to the attention of white missionaries, who in turn accepted it in place of their own. So many things about this moment were revolutionary, not least that the syllabary took the power of literacy away from English alphabetic structures and produced from it an Indigenous system of communication that was deeply embedded in Cherokee ways of knowing. As such it remained largely foreign to all but a handful of English speakers who had to spend years mastering this system – first the language, then the system, which followed its own grammatical structures and syntax. The syllabary took hold throughout the Cherokee Nation within a few short years of its creation in the tumultuous period of resistance to and then reluctant acquiescence to Indian Removal and has remained in use to this day among Cherokee speakers.
What this example makes very concrete applies just as easily to earlier structures of Indian literacy. If we as modern readers steeped in alphabetic structures of knowing apply our own expectations and standards without honoring the experience and understanding of those producing early texts, we will struggle to make meaning of them. However, if we understand Native texts on their own terms, as imbued with ways of thinking and specific historical and cultural experiences, they become much richer and more complex windows into the past, and we can no longer hold to notions of literacy, literature, and text that don’t take into account the variety of experience and expression that early Native texts reveal for us if we are willing to listen patiently and humbly.
See also: chapter 1 (the storyteller’s universe); chapter 2 (cross‐cultural encounters in early american literatures); chapter 6 (captivity); chapter 18 (letters in early american manuscript and print cultures); chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture).