English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750-1830
ENGLISH LETTERS AND INDIAN LITERACIES: READING, WRITING, AND NEW ENGLAND MISSIONARY SCHOOLS, 1750-1830. By Hilary E. Wyss. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. xii + 251 pp. $59.95.Hilary Wyss has emerged as a major force in the recovery of early Native American writers. For years, the standard anthologies, and a good deal of scholarship, acknowledged only two: seventeenth-century Mohegan missionary Samson Occom and nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess. This limiting (abetted by the Heath and Norton anthologies’ annoying persistence in relegating Native American oral traditions to their “pre-literate,” pre-1700 sections) helps perpetuate racist myths: that Native Americans vanished; that they had relatively little to contribute to American literature; and that, when they did write, they did so only as tools of the colonial order.Alphabetic literacy is certainly a technology of colonial domination, but Wyss’s first book, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity and Native Community in Early America (2000), argued that indigenous textual production between and preceding Occom and Apess is much more complicated and much more voluminous, if only we are willing to read the archives more deeply. Bearing out her claim, the last decade and a half have produced a cascade of new work on early Native authors: Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks’s widely cited study, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008), and Drew Lopenzina’s Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period (2012), as well as the brilliant documentary anthology that Wyss coedited with Kristina Bross, Early Native Literacies in New England (2008), and Robert Dale Parker’s Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 (2010). These volumes, and many more, have assiduously illustrated that Native Americans who embraced alphabetic literacy-and even those who had it thrust upon them-exercised their own agency in writing and articulated complex ideals of self-determination and tribal sovereignty.You cannot understand early Native American literature without understanding early Indian education. As Wyss puts it,Indian education is the nexus through which social, political, and cultural differences were played out among Native groups, between colonial and indigenous peoples, and between competing colonial figures invested in the idea of Native literacy. . . . And under often intensely difficult conditions Native Americans sustained themselves as people with their own history and culture while accepting the material artifacts of English life. (35-36)English Letters and Indian Literacies continues to fill in this history with a sustained examination of the Congregationalist boarding schools operating within and outside of New England between the two Great Awakenings. Evangelical efforts to educate Indians, and thereby to convert them, began almost as soon as the Puritans arrived. These projects ranged from John Eliot’s famous “praying towns” to more diffuse, home- and communitybased reading instruction. In the mid-eighteenth century, New England authorities began pinning their hopes on boarding schools-precursors to the infamous Carlisle Indian School of the later nineteenth century, which removed Native children from their home communities in the interests of speedier assimilation. Most of these early experiments were short-lived: “[N]one of them were able to sustain good relations for more than a few years with the various tribes they claimed to serve . . . [revealing] the gap between what Natives wanted from such ventures and what missionaries expected of their students” (18). Yet the schools also left extensive archives, documents that have much to tell us about colonial ideals of Indian literacy and about Native uses of writing.Wyss characterizes the former ideal as “the Readerly Indian” (one imagined as a passive recipient of the European missionary message) and the latter as “the Writerly Indian,” a construct that aims, strategically and purposefully, to recover the agency of Indians who picked up the pen.
