UNIT II STUDY GUIDE 1600-1760 Course Learning Outcomes for Unit II Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to: 3. Describe the characteristics of the divided regions of Colonial America. 8. Discuss the evolution of American philosophies or ideals. Reading Assignment Click here for the Unit II Journal Assignment reading. Chaney, T., Cohen, K., & Cotton, L. P. (2012). The Virginia Company of London. Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/the-virginia-company-of-london.htm Poe, E. (1849, April 21). Eldorado. Retrieved from http://www.online-literature.com/poe/577/ Virtual Jamestown. (n.d.). John Rolfe (1585-1622). Retrieved from http://www.virtualjamestown.org/jrolfe.html The articles cited in the unit lesson are required reading. You may be tested on your knowledge and understanding of that material as well as the information presented in the unit lesson. Unit Lesson Pre-1600 colonization of the Americas, in short, would be at first inspired by a desire to find quicker trade routes to the distant orient, but would unexpectedly lead to the uncovering of a world that was new to the European mind. Exploration of the land mass in the western Atlantic, dominated by the Spanish, included explorers, navigators, and conquistadores searching to fulfill the temptations of God, gold, and glory. A brief recap (set to a familiar TV sea shanty) follows: The 1500’s tell the tales That stem from one historic ship It began with Ferdinand and Isabelle And the financing of a trip Columbus was fearless with a plan His navigation was true and sure The goal was a new trading route To the lucrative Asian shore The lucrative Asian shore Each month at sea was increasingly tough His crew was cross and blue But luck would spot virgin land one day In 1492 In 1492 Indian lands, the crew was sure of this Exploration would prove futile There was no trade He had missed his mark HY 1110, American History I 1 Back in Spain, he was dismayed His find a farce He would again sail the seas Dying on an American isle UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title A legacy though was cast that day Like God’s golden, glorious chime A brand new world with the best of things An adventure sure to find Ponce de Leon, de Soto, too Vespucci undercut the rest, Cortés & Pizarro, with disease Spain’s claim proved the best Explorers, navigators, conquistadores in search of luxury Religion was carried with them To convert the primitives they seek Millions died, much society was lost History records some as vile The impact of each explorer’s step marked another Spanish mile Exploration was not without reason. Europe was fracturing on the grounds of new beliefs challenging the often oppressive Catholic Church. What started as the publishing of a series of complaints on the door of Wittenberg in 1517 by devout follower Martin Luther would soon spiral into what is today known as the Protestant Reformation. Following Luther’s lead, other (and generally more dissatisfied) Protestant leaders such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin, whose followers were called Huguenots, would emerge to spread their doctrines across Europe and inspire migration to the new world for a chance at worship without oppression. Lastly, Spain’s dominance in the Americas would not be exclusive to one area. The series of voyages had successfully charted a North, South, and Mesoamerica region, and even discovered a successful (though very dangerous) passage around the locked continents to once again begin the attempt to circumnavigate the globe and find new trading routes to the Orient. Colonization Attempts Spain’s successes with establishing religion, free lands, and riches in the Americas would not go unnoticed, and soon others would join the claim. England (1576) was among the first in the claiming of American lands, but with much less initial success than anticipated, including the fate of the ill-fated first Roanoke colony (1585). Despite early troubles, myth and legend would continue to inspire English and French exploration for their crowns. Englishman Sir Walter Raleigh, for example, would embark on his own deliberate attempt to search for myth to claim the spoils. For Raleigh, his passion would be the legendary City of Gold, El Dorado, which was thought to exist somewhere in South America’s vast jungles. The legend that had first famously gained the interest of noted Spanish trailblazer Francisco de Orellana, who coined the name “Amazon River,” failed to bear fruit in the West. As a result, Raleigh’s expedition for the lost city would take to the East, but that also would come up empty. Interestingly, his larger passion—staking England’s claim to the riches of South America—would eventually be a factor in his execution, as he endangered more than himself raising British colors in Spanish-controlled seas. This infamous search, though, would also inspire future artistic masters to make this tale an allegory for other such desperate attempts at riches. These artists included poet Edgar Allan Poe, whose description of the Gold Rush and desperation of the miner provides a keen, supernatural take on the human’s determined psyche: HY 1110, American History I 2 Eldorado Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado. UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title But he grew old This knight so bold And o'er his heart a shadow Fell as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado. And, as his strength Failed him at length, He met a pilgrim shadow "Shadow," said he, "Where can it be This land of Eldorado?" "Over the mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied "If you seek for Eldorado!" – Edgar Allan Poe (1849) Today, El Dorado remains a favorite story and a real-life magnet for those searching for American treasures. Although the only “proof” is far from convincing, essentially on a par with Plato’s descriptions of the lost city of Atlantis, this does not deter the explorers still trying to make their name, fortune, or influence in the world. Permanent Settlement Entering the seventeenth century, the American continents, North, South, and Mesoamerica, were feeling the initial effects of European influence. Though the “discovery” of North America by European sailors could have been considered a mistake, since it resulted from their intended search for trade routes, these lands quickly became prizes in and of themselves. As Europe’s population continued to grow, its materials, resources, and opportunities continued to shrink. Also, as European populations became more accepting and knowledgeable of the New World, those who felt the oppressions of the Old World discovered for themselves the opportunity that this new land opened for them. In America, new periods of opportunity and oppression would emerge in the form of frontier conflicts, but these also occurred within the European settlements themselves. Progressing into this unit, it is imperative to focus on the changing experiences, expectations, and roles among all those invested in the English colonies, including women, labor groups, and Native Americans. To adequately cover this change, our focus will, from this point on, remain on North America, with brief jaunts to the south as prudent. During this era, the “known” North America could be separated into a few major regions of note (examples can be seen in the Suggested Readings). The East Coast, ranging from what is now Savannah, Georgia, to Nova Scotia, and roughly as far west as the Appalachian Mountain range, would become known as English Colonial America. This was due to the large number of primarily English speaking areas to emerge, even though not all were strictly under the jurisdiction of the crown. In addition, much of what is now modern Canada would accept English influence, especially with trade options. To the west, following the Mississippi and its tributaries to the north, stretching from modern New Orleans, Louisiana, to the Acadian provinces, would be the French Crescent. This was mostly made up of a series of HY 1110, American History I 3 French missions, hunters, foragers, and trappers who engaged in civilized andUNIT mutually beneficial trade with x STUDY GUIDE the Native Americans of those regions. Here, groups such as the Huguenots found Title a region where they could freely practice their beliefs, but they did this with respect to the neighboring tribes, as forcing European ideals often led to negative results. Further out west would be large sections of understood frontier territory. The area was dominated by Native Americans, and there was little European presence. Those who dared try to establish a residence were often on their own and at the mercy of neighboring tribes. Lastly, sticking primarily to the south and west were Spanish claims, including modern Florida, much of Texas, and the greater American Southwest and Pacific Coast. Though loosely enforced, compared to the colonized East, these were heavily protected territories thought to hold vast riches for those who could find them. Early attempts at colonization were shaky at best. As previously introduced to the ill-fated Roanoke colony, and despite the mysterious circumstances therein, the English would again attempt to colonize America’s Atlantic Coast. This time, however, the colonies would be closely tied to the crown’s economic interests. While the English would initially travel to the familiar Chesapeake shores, this would come with the support of private investors, most notably the Virginia Company, who would not trust the colony to its fate again. To read this article, click the link below: Chaney, T., Cohen, K., & Cotton, L. P. (2012). The Virginia Company of London. Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/the-virginia-company-of-london.htm Though the experience for these particular investors would ultimately prove unsuccessful, this renewed interest would help to ensure these colonies’ success by drawing the interest of the crown. This caused North America to develop stronger imperial potential than even what the Spanish had found in South America and Mesoamerica. English Colonial America The English colonies, not including much of modern Canada, are generally divided into four regions based on commonalities in religion, population, economics, and general culture. We will look at a few of those elements here. New England America’s northernmost colonies, often referred to as New England due to the similarity of their climate and strong settlements to their ancient namesake, urbanized quicker than other regions. The term is still used today to describe the cluster of small states. The population of this region, which would retain an overwhelmingly English ancestry, included the colonies of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. With the common heritage, so too came a strong effort to ensure the success of religious communities. Most notable were the Puritans, who were among the earliest settlers of this region. The Puritans were sometimes criticized for acting overzealously, especially compared to more southern regions, but they would dominate the religion of this region. Their main disagreement was with the Catholics, whose traditional views and authority from the Vatican had also been previously driven from the English mainland. Soon, however, religious tolerance would be legally enforced, but only in an effort to ensure safety and opportunities of the masses, not to restrict the religious freedoms that so many colonists came to the New World demanding. A decree from the crown called for religious tolerance and an end to the aggressive reactions. Still, the strong Puritan, and growing Quaker, populations of these vastly important colonial regions would leave an indelible mark on the culture of the American law and endear reverence to a Protestant core. The familiar conditions and seasons of the New England region provided a sense of comfort for the colonists. The seasonal change was unlike the rich agricultural regions further south, and there was less chance of contracting an unknown disease, such as malaria. In the same way, because these colonies had few Spring and Summer months, produce was greatly limited compared to their southern counterparts. Still, there were important crops such as gourds and corn, and other trades supplemented the economy—notably fishing, HY 1110, American History I 4 whaling, and shipping. This region was perhaps so popular because its climate was xso very similar to UNIT STUDY GUIDE England, where the majority of its population originated. Title With this, the city also allowed for the allocation of new professions, such as clothiers, doctors, and dealers of other such luxuries. Because of population growth, however, farmable land was at a premium. Soon, families did not have the resources to provide an inheritance for all offspring, and quickly the measure of a family’s status became more about accumulated wealth than standing in the community. This atmosphere of free enterprise and entrepreneurism, of course, would only expand interests in American commerce. It would eventually sow seeds of growing contempt, however, when new regulations, such as the practice of mercantilism and individual acts levied by the crown, would regulate, threaten, or even steal from these profits. Mid-Atlantic The region immediately south of New England, incorporating the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, was commonly known as the Middle Colonies or Mid-Atlantic. It, too, would benefit from the great population growth, but unlike New England, its populations would come largely from other prominent European nations, such as the Netherlands, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. New England was among the most pure in one heritage, the Mid-Atlantic was just the opposite; this more temperate region would host a wide collection of creeds, races, and religions. This more multicultural collection would be the setting for a drastically different type of inclusive society. The overwhelming motivation for movement to this region of America was opportunity, and some would seek religious or political freedoms that were unavailable in their locations of origin. These travelers were commonly considered middle class, or had limited opportunities available for those not in the upper class, but could pay their way to America. Many new cultures emerged in this region, and as part of that, distinctive religions including the first American synagogue in New York City and a strong Catholic community that would be instrumental in the founding of the southern border colony, Maryland. This region best exemplified the idea of the “melting pot” of cultures that would become a prominent nationalistic theme in the nineteenth century. Economically, there was a wider range of produce able to grow in this climate, and from it would come many items that would be desired in great quantity in Europe. This set the stage for careful trade laws and moneymaking opportunities for the crown. Though much more common further south, some migrants were forcibly exposed to years of extreme labor to pay off their debts. In this region, these laborers were called redemptioners; their services would be returned in a generally livable climate and for less time than some of their southern servant brethren. Part of the reason for this limited use of servants was simply the lack of need. The Mid-Atlantic region was too cold for many of the cash crops that allowed plantations to be successful in the South, and generally agricultural families were large enough to handle the yearly crop yield on their own. The advantage to having servants, and less often, slaves, was that the cost would be significantly less than hiring free help, but for the typical large family, that too was unnecessary. Even in the cities, families would commonly grow to a large size, which was helpful in ensuring that the father could pass on his trait, shop, or profession, and sometimes even gain extra income working in factories or shipping plants. Also significant to consider is the role of status and “superiority” complexes of the time. Many families did not welcome association with those outside of their social class, either from fear of community pressure or because of misguided expectations of aggressive/impulsive behaviors by “less civilized” parts of society. The success of family farms would help to feed these early colonies, much in the same way as the Mid-West has/does today for the full United States. Some who did not fit in, or who did not adhere to social expectations, would try their luck outside of society. Regions to the unincorporated west can be called Backcountry; though officially under colonial legislation, those areas would have little or no political, religious, or government oversight, which was appealing to some. This Mid-Atlantic region, too, would have a very specific relationship with philosophy and religion. Whereas New England was often very specified and cut off, parts of the Mid-Atlantic welcomed a much greater level of diversity. Especially in the colonies of Pennsylvania and New York, there was a heavy Dutch and German HY 1110, American History I 5 influence. Today, the influence that religious freedom in America provided then can xstill be seen in UNIT STUDY GUIDE communities such as the Amish and Mennonite, but the larger presence was that Titleof the Quakers (Shakers), who greatly influenced the shaping of the early U.S. government through political leadership and social teachings. Like the Puritans, though, they too are commonly misunderstood for overzealous practice. The Quaker codes, including teachings of citizenship, behaviors, and social qualities, made them natural leaders and diligent professionals. South Atlantic Coast and Caribbean The remaining colonies, from Maryland and south, are generally collectively known as “the South,” but within this region, there is still great geographical and cultural distinction that has led to further division. Generally the most common terms are “the Chesapeake,” in reference to the Chesapeake Bay region, or upper South, which included Maryland, Virginia, and parts of North Carolina. The remaining colonies are often known as the lower South, or “Plantation South,” for the common use of the rich farmlands. These were generally the least populated regions of Colonial America. In addition to the mainland colonies, this plantation atmosphere would carry directly into major Caribbean islands, including the modern nations of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, which were hotbeds for sugarcane. The main difference between these two southern regions is what the climate allowed the planters to grow. The Chesapeake had a mild climate that was too hot for European farms, but perfect for one of their most desired imports: tobacco. Generally there was a high (in comparison) population rate in this region, in addition to large planter families. There was also a thriving slave population. Chesapeake The ideal tobacco growing conditions of Maryland and Virginia would become the first national jewel, highlighted by the semi-inland port city of Jamestown. Success would not come easy to Jamestown, as the climate and poor management doomed wave after wave of misguided settlers. Arguably the greatest success only came from the unlikely hospitality of the neighboring Algonquians, who received only aggression in return for their aid. In 1624, after three lackluster contracts with the Virginia Company, James I would finally confiscate the Jamestown settlement and put it directly under the direction of the crown’s rule as a royal colony. The one major success of the Jamestown settlement would be the almost unexpected 1612 discovery of a successful West African cash crop: tobacco. To read this article, click the link below: Virtual Jamestown. (n.d.). John Rolfe (1585-1622). Retrieved from http://www.virtualjamestown.org/jrolfe.html Being such a successful crop, due to the extreme diversity in the climate from almost any European nation, tobacco would soon become the most desired commodity in Europe. Being the most economically powerful, it would dominate the market with sprawling plantations and massive armies of labor in the form of servants and slaves—who would be shipped from the same West African nations that shared the climate. Lower South Encompassing South Carolina, and (eventually) Georgia, this region would have a striking difference in population from their northern brothers. Slaves drastically outnumbered Europeans, and there was little call for luxuries or urban development. Land was at a premium, but this region was hostile to the majority of European immigrants. It was partially this issue that would enhance the slave trade from West Africa. Because of these two world regions (South Carolina and West Africa) having a striking similarity in climate, African slaves would be valuable resources in South Carolina, not only as labor, but for their resistance to the heat and diseases, and their familiarity with the items farmed. Tobacco was not the only gem that the Americas produced. The semi-tropical climate of the Lower South, and even warmer weather in the Caribbean, would also provide great economic opportunities. At this time, rice and indigo were of great importance to the colonial merchants, but would only grow in these tropical climates. Rice, a cheap and sustainable foodstuff, as well as scattered inedible cash crops such as indigo, a blue plant used for dyes, thrived in the southeastern climates. This led to early market capitals, such as Charles Towne, HY 1110, American History I 6 becoming surrounded by sprawling plantations eager to cash in. Being such aUNIT cheapx and easily replenished STUDY GUIDE source of food, rice was quickly a major industry, especially to help feed the quickly Title growing labor populations in the cash-crop capitals. Further south, the island of Barbados would become the first of multiple Caribbeanbased plantation economies from which sugarcane would become an export equal to, or perhaps even more lucrative than, tobacco. It was the source of molasses, the main ingredient in rum, sweeteners, and other luxury products that would be desired throughout Europe by all classes. These new opportunities were not without their own dangers and problems, however. Being in a significantly warmer climate than the Europeans were used to, they had little protection against diseases such as malaria, which thrived, especially in the Southeastern swamps and rice fields. In addition, due to the lack of disease resistance Native Americans had to the Europeans (as introduced in the previous unit), their mass enslavement was not a viable labor option in North America. This labor problem, coupled with the refusal to forego the economic opportunities that America presented, fed one of the most controversial early American institutions: the Atlantic slave trade. Regional Effect on Labor To develop the labor point introduced earlier, there are some important notes. The discovery of successful cash crops would usher in the first major labor migration to the colonies in contracted indentured laborers. These laborers were often of lower class and/or without other choice. They would be put to work in the New World by a plantation owner for up to seven years in exchange for the cost of their travel and some promised “freedom dues,” which might include land, tools, food, or clothing, upon completion of their service. The planter would also be granted a headright benefit of land to encourage this sale and production, both of which greatly benefitted the colony in terms of trade, stability, and interest to the crown. These “servants” would, however, only be a short-lived aspect of the colonies. Soon, land was no longer in ample supply to give out, and many servants simply returned home, knowing the harsh realities of service and quickly limited opportunities. Needless to say, with this labor program, a wide socio-economic gap between social classes in the colonies would emerge, and the economic concept of mercantilism took precedence over all. Regional governors no longer felt responsible to their people as the crown passed economic reforms (such as the Navigation Acts of 1650 and 1651) guaranteeing that the kingdom’s interests were a monopoly called mercantilism, and these colonies were firmly under the thumb of a monarch half a world away. A growing distrust and discontent would spark among the colonists, especially the lower classes, and would continue to compound over the next century, eventually erupting into a war for independence. Independent rebellions, however, were already visible along the Atlantic coast. Probably the most well-known example is Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, which would lead to a devastating fire in Jamestown. Others, such as Culpeper’s Rebellion, would also highlight the instability and failures in the colonies. The crown reacted to these threats as simply the fallout of frontier wars and other such conflicts with the Native Americans, such as King Philip’s War and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. HY 1110, American History I 7 The Slave Trade UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title The slave trade thrived due to the decrease of European indentured servitude and the negative response disease had on Native Americans as a labor force. Though skin color would quickly become a major qualification, with the decline of indentures, it should be noted that initially, the major difference between servants and slaves was length of service. Servants were contracted labor with a set release, whereas slaves were considered the property of their owner until that owner deemed otherwise, often either from transaction or a slave’s inability to work. With the expansion into devastating climates, and with many of the early contracts maturing, the servant trade was quickly losing support. Plantation owners did not want to part with their valuable tracts of land or share profits with another European family, and the usable land in the colonies was quickly running out. On the heels of Bacon’s Rebellion, those lessons taught that a new labor option was necessary for the success of the nation—that option would become the Middle Passage, an essential leg of the greater Columbian Exchange (a.k.a. Triangle Trade), as seen in Figure 1 above. Slaves would be taken from Figure 1 the relatively similar West African climate, forced onto large cargo ships, and carted to America with little concern about health, hygiene, or safety, to ports along the Chesapeake, Lower South, and Caribbean. In 1663, successful Bahamian planters founded the first Carolina settlement. This land, granted by King Charles II, would be a southern border for the English colonies, expanding the holdings of the English and further defining the borders of the Spanish settlements in Florida. This Chesapeake region would be the stage that the slave trade needed to guarantee its success, not as much for the hands as for the climate. Africa had long been used for slave trafficking prior to American settlement, but mainly on its Eastern border. What appealed to American planters was the similar climate that the American Southeast and African Northwest share, including many crops, diseases, and conditions that the ancient West African tribes had evolved to survive. These were conditions that were not as friendly to Europeans. Also, there was one other major benefit in that Europeans and Africans were not as susceptible to disease from one another as the Native Americans had been. Centuries of trading had provided the necessary adaptation to allow community, and with that, the Atlantic slave trade began. By the dawn of the eighteenth century, approximately three decades after the Carolinas were granted colony status, the Chesapeake was quickly growing in numbers and divided by race. This affirmed that people were segregated, meaning that laws, rights, and opportunities were now clearly separated by skin color. To gain this labor force, slaves would be literally stolen from their families, sometimes betrayed by their own leaders, in exchange for European cargo—often weapons. This trade would begin the Middle Passage. Once in America, those who survived would be hosed down, barely covered, and taken one by one to be sold to the highest bidder in the public square. There was no account for family, children, or even language – young men cost more than women, and children would generally require a pre-existing community to ensure they would grow up to pay back the investment. During the course of the trade, which would last well into the new nation, millions would be carted over from their native lands—thousands would die either in captivity waiting to board, from the putrid conditions of the weeks of travel, or from the abusive tendencies of owners who demanded obedience and ceaseless effort. A small minority would be fortunate enough to have masters who cared for their literacy, even breaking the law to teach them basic math and reading. It is the memoirs of these few that modern historians have to carry on these stories to future generations in hopes that we never repeat these mistakes. HY 1110, American History I 8 The Middle Passage UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title The movement of slaves to the Americas was only one part of a larger trade network better known as the Middle Passage, seen in Figure 2 below. In all, the Triangle Trade was a series of common expeditions, which explains how goods came and went between Colonial growers and tradesmen, British merchants and industrialists, and African tribes. Each of the three areas would continuously depend on the other two to ensure their personal needs and growth, and the British Empire was the largest beneficiary of this trade through their regulation of ports and the taxes/levies on any and all imported/exported goods on or at British ships or ports through the Navigation Acts. Without a doubt, the biggest loser in this trade was the common African tribesman. European traders from seafaring nations turned this interest in American labor needs to their advantage by transporting slaves. The travel of slaves to America was atrocious; they were crammed beside and atop one another from hull to deck, with netting rigged on the sides of the boats, just in case a slave was to get free and try to commit suicide by jumping. Several thousand slaves would be coaxed, taken, or violently removed from their tribal lands in West Africa and taken to the colonial ports in America and the Caribbean. This process was so violent that for every one slave taken, there was also approximately one casualty. This may be due to conditions of the capture, the shipment, or from being left in a coastal “holding cell” for weeks waiting for the boat to return for the next voyage. Once in the Americas, slaves were subject to new dangers in the form of European disease and a high potential for cruelty. Part of this sentence was due to laws forbidding them to be educated and ensuring that they were considered nothing above property of their master—an attitude that was believed to ensure “superiority” over the now faceless laborers. It is important then to address the question: why was there a change from servant to slave labor? A few key points to note include the following: Figure 2 1. Monetarily, the cost to purchase a slave was approximately twice that of a servant, because the purchaser also had to cover passage costs and processing. This is not including the renewing cost of food, clothing, shelter, medicine, any promised goods, and other basics for living to get back the investment. As settlements became stronger and conditions better, the life expectancy of laborers also became longer. This meant that the original cost meant less in time, and that the costs for a temporary laborer, who was likely to survive indenture, were becoming equivalent to those for a permanent laborer. Men were valued more than women. Most slaves were late teens/early adult, and generally the further south, the worse the conditions were for slave or servant. 2. Stories about the reality of indentured servitude got back to Europe. Servants who had once signed away their freedoms for the promise of some benefit from their service, such as a plot of land, tools, etc., would sometimes finish their indenture only to find those promises not kept. With the growing need for land and the entrepreneurial spirit, the land quickly became more profitable to planters than the person it was promised to. Many servants would simply go back to Europe, feeling that there was even less opportunity in America than had been in Europe to begin with. 3. A solid amount of servants did use the indenture process to earn their way to a chance at a better life, and many early servants succeeded in doing so. However, not all servants were volunteers. As labor became scarcer, shippers found new means for obtaining bodies to fill their ships, including the purchasing of prisoners from jails, emptying orphanages, pulling the poor off of the street, and even some whispers of outright kidnapping. These laborers did not have the motivations of the signed indentures, and all too often, the return did not come on the investment paid for them. 4. The law did not favor the slave, and owners could act however they felt was best with their property. It is important to note that there was an expected decorum for families in America, including Christian morals, and owners did not want to lose their investment. Even as gruesome as many actions were, it HY 1110, American History I 9 was to the benefit of the owners to treat their labor humanely. Food, shelter, social UNIT xclothing, STUDY GUIDE presence, and such would rarely be equal, but they were provided to ensure Title that the investment was beneficial. 5. It became convenient to be able to determine a social class based on skin color alone. In the early years of the slave trade in America, there is record of some slaves earning/buying their freedom, and even starting their own plantations, with slaves of their own. As this labor system evolved, however, in the eyes of the law, those of color, which sometimes included Native Americans or other migrants to the American colonies, did not have what would later be dubbed “inalienable rights.” This meant, in principle, that the rights of one culture would no longer be privy to the basic rights of their fellow man only because of the color of their skin. This difference was so monumental that it even overshadowed economic class in many cases. 6. With the increase of adult slaves came also an increase in slave families. Though slaves had no rights, the masters encouraged families as they felt it made slaves less rebellious and more prone to procreate. Children born of slaves were slaves, so realistically, prosperous owners could ensure the success of their plantations for generations without any additional purchases, trade, or contracted labor. All of these factors increased the domination of the slave system and ensured the increased subjugation of African Americans (i.e., generations of African descendants born in America), a topic that will be of paramount importance in this and all remaining units. There were some examples of rebellion, such as that in Stono, SC, but life for the overwhelming majority of African descendants was harsh and difficult. Today’s historians are lucky to have significant records about these experiences, thanks to testimonials and diaries of slaves and abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano, who, after his enslavement, worked feverously against this labor system. Equiano would be a major figure in the dissolving of the slave trade in Britain; this is a topic that we will explore again in later units. Religion and the Colonies Change, however, was not entirely monopolized by economics in this time. Religion was also an essential part of the daily life of most British citizens, and we will discuss a few issues, both in Britain and in the Americas. In Europe, Protestantism was a growing force. As we have discussed, new leaders arose on the heels of Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses at Wittenberg in 1517. Similarly, England’s King Henry VIII would abdicate Catholic support in 1534 over a political power struggle with then-Pope Clement VII. From that point on, England was a Protestant nation under the guise of the Church of England, headed by the absolute monarch. Unlike the results brought about by Luther, not much would change about how and where the Anglican Church would operate. However, it would become the state religion, and its following would be an essential part of the law, especially in areas like the Chesapeake and Lower South, which had limited option or urban refusal. This would change again during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In short, the Stuart dynasty had long refused to include Parliament in the decisions of the nation, and their absolutist ideals irritated leadership. What would finally put the support of the people against them, however, would be a continued desire to rejoin the pontiff in Rome and return to Catholicism. The people of England feared an international monarch with so much influence, and it did not help that the hated Spanish and French remained two of the most loyal Catholic nations on earth. In 1688, King Charles II would have a son. Fearing a continuation of his absolutist actions, the political leaders usurped Charles, who fled to France. This “Glorious Revolution,” thus named for its bloodless nature, guaranteed Parliamentary power in all aspects of English politics. It also provided a bill of rights and saw the ascension of William (heir to the Protestant Dutch crown) and Mary (eldest daughter of Charles II, and with his abdication, rightful heir) to the throne. With this change, the era of absolutism in England ended. With the ousted monarchy, any remaining Catholic sentiment in England, including her colonies, was immediately the subject of public aggression. In America, news of the revolution made waves. Not only was this a revival of the rights of English citizens, but it would also mean the removal HY 1110, American History I 10 of several unfavorable appointments by Charles II and other Catholic leaders and UNITa xreestablishment STUDY GUIDEof the Church of England as a religious, political, and government arm of the crown. Title For many Americans, nationalistic teachings begin with the Mayflower’s destination at Plymouth (Plimoth) Rock. However, as discussed so far, there was quite a bit of European influence before that voyage, but the influence of these new English sailors is still very significant to the nation’s development. This fateful voyage would eventually lead to the founding of Massachusetts Bay, and from there, the larger New England region as it is understood today. The main motivation for this passage was religious freedom of a small, yet highly devout, conservative Calvinist religious group known as the Puritans (who we have addressed earlier). In 1620, the Puritans would come ashore at what is now Massachusetts, and in 1629, they would set up a self-governed community guided by the preservation of their beliefs from what they considered the corrupt Church of England. It was here in 1630 that Governor Winthrop’s famous “covenant with God” speech would inspire the now multiple passages’-worth of Puritans to form a religious utopia, free from the destructive combination of church within state—a concept that would also become central to a new nation 150 years later. While Puritanism would lose much of its rigor with succeeding generations, other religious groups, such as the Quakers led by William Penn, would also migrate to this region, stirring some aggression among the conformist Puritans. From this charged atmosphere originated a series of unbelievable accounts in the last decade of the seventeenth century that would challenge the strong religious influence which founded these colonies: the Salem Witch Trials. The fallout of these trials would include numerous unfortunate deaths as well as a question about if the Puritan church had indeed contaminated itself like the church it had initially fled due to its close association with the State. Eventually, this renewed atmosphere and large migrations would bring a new opportunity for tolerance and political balance, which was not without its own trials. The middle colonies would be the first to open their arms to all creeds, especially under the temporary Dutch rule, but it too would insinuate the need for a strong government of “good men,” another theme that would become central to the founding of a new nation less than a century later. With these districts now in place, the English had successfully built a permanent empire in America to rival that of Spain, but was it stable enough to last like other, smaller colonies throughout the world? It is important to note that the Enlightenment challenged the structure of religious authority, not religion itself. A final example of religious cultural expression we will introduce here is the Great Awakening. Taking place primarily in the early 1700s and throughout the colonies, this revival would preach the abdication of older faiths if it meant the interference of a personal association with religion. Among the more notable leaders included the next generation of major religious figures, such as Jonathan Edwards (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), and inspiring speakers and revivalists, such as George Whitefield and William Tennent. These men would once again fill pews with their inspiring messages, which appealed to all classes and challenged all dissenters of the faith. This reintroduction of the faith was one that challenged the need for faceless tradition to live a Christian life and encouraged following scriptures to choose to be saved or damned. Among those who would find inspiration are figures such as Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father and noted multiculturalist, philanthropist, and controversial statesman, as well as the aforementioned Olaudah Equiano. This new telling of the ancient scriptures would literally divide congregations between traditionalists (Old Lights) and revivalists (New Lights). It challenged the faith of many, but it would also eventually lead to a series of new denominations in America, including some that directly descended from the experiences of slaves and freemen in a prejudiced America. Open to all, and especially focused on appealing to women, these sermons were instrumental in bringing people back to the church after what had been a very powerful wave of Enlightenment philosophy, highlighting the differences between strict tradition and a personal association with God. Conclusion In conclusion, the 1600s and early 1700s were a period of great change and growth in the American colonies. With each settlement desiring to create one form of utopia or another, these colonies quickly became a melting pot of opportunity, while becoming at the same time a divided gathering of ideals. Looking back, it is important to recognize perspective from all accounts: Northern, Southern, rich, poor, White, Black, Native HY 1110, American History I 11 American, and European. To its beholder, each account would be as valid andUNIT as justified as the next. Using x STUDY GUIDE this understanding, it is highly suggested to look again at the laws, governments, religions, and ideals of the Title different groups: what kind of society was desired in America, and were the differences really so different from one another? Was division inevitable due to differences, or could stronger management have appeased all sides? These are questions that will lead directly into the brewing conflict and defining crisis that would institute a new nation. Reference Poe, E. A. (1849, April 21). Eldorado. Retrieved from http://www.online-literature.com/poe/577/ HY 1110, American History I 12 Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World SEAN P. HARVEY Seton Hall University SARAH RIVETT Princeton University Early American archives abound with references to episodes of communication, translation, and interpretation, and with a diverse array of Native-language texts. They provide evidence both of practical and philosophical colonial projects and of the ways in which Native people used their languages to mediate colonization. Scholars have uncovered a range of methods that diverse peoples employed to communicate with one another, the contexts that shaped the meanings of the words and messages exchanged, and the broader significance of those exchanges for figures far from the point of encounter. The texts and commentaries that flowed from efforts at language learning and linguistic collection bear testimony to ways Native languages shaped Euro-American intellectual, cultural, and religious history. They also transform previous rubrics for understanding American Indian resistance to linguistic imperialism into a social fact with an archive and a material history. Colonial-indigenous language encounters influenced the cultural and intellectual history of Native individuals and communities, providing new media for linguistic expression and new frames through which to consider their own tongues. abstract One of the most striking aspects of the colonization of North America was the number, variety, and significance of the language encounters between Natives and newcomers. The imperial contests among Spain, Portugal, The authors would like to thank Alejandra Dubcovsky, Joshua Piker, participants in the Princeton American Studies Workshop, and the EAS anonymous readers for their valuable criticism. Early American Studies (Summer 2017) Copyright  2017 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. All rights reserved. ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:10 PS PAGE 442 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 443 France, the Netherlands, and England that took place from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, as well as contests the United States joined after its independence, rested on ideologies of linguistic conformity or vernacular translation into a multiplicity of tongues, and sometimes forms of each simultaneously, as foundations for imperial, colonial, and national cohesion. European and American Indian encounters resulted in a vast colonial archive of indigenous language texts: Christian didactic texts in indigenous languages from Nahuatl to Huron to Mi’kmaq, legal records of sale and land exchange, and understudied genres such as the grammars and vocabularies compiled by missionaries and traders and collected by statesmen and philosophers such as Thomas Jefferson and Peter S. Du Ponceau. Circulating throughout the early modern Atlantic world, such documents shaped European intellectual, political, and imperial history through perceptions of Indian origins and migrations, spirituality, and a “savage” mind, while also serving the practical purpose of facilitating conversion, trade, and communication. The translation of the Bible into Massachusett in 1663 might be thought of as an act of colonization through the printed word, or as a moment in which a new field of cultural production opened in North America. The opus, Mamussewunneetupanatamwe up biblum God, could not have been produced by John Eliot alone, for neither Eliot nor his Puritan missionary contemporaries had adequate language skills to accomplish this task. Eliot relied on a Nipmuck convert, James Printer, and the Massachusett Praying Indian Job Nesuton to translate, compile, and print the Bible and various other Christian-Massachusett texts. Besides being exposed to new ideas and acquiring new skills, these two men were also in a unique position to shape Eliot’s message.1 More than three centuries of English print circulation inspired the Cherokee nation’s Sequoyah to invent a writing system for his language. Some of the characters in the syllabary took their shapes from the Roman alphabet, though there was no connection between the sounds and values from one system to another. The invention frustrated whites who had hoped to impose a standardized alphabet on all Native peoples. Cherokees rejected that project, instead writing Cherokee laws and Christian scripture in Sequoyan and publishing a newspaper in parallel columns of Cherokee and English. Sequoyah himself, however, sought cultural and physical distance from whites. Though he was among the first Cherokee emigrants west of 1. Philip Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663– 1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:11 PS PAGE 443 444 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 the Mississippi, his first substantial piece of writing in the syllabary addressed the question, fraught amid pressure for removal, of the Cherokees’ boundary with neighboring states. The syllabary was designed for Cherokee alone, but in Indian Territory, according to one account, he worked on a similar writing system for Choctaw. Some opponents of removal held up the syllabary as a mark of Cherokee “civilization,” but many whites recognized that the syllabary rejected assimilation. Although the appeal of syllabaries to Cherokees, Crees, and other Native peoples fueled theorization of the linguistic aspects of racial difference, these writing systems also contributed to the cultural and political strength of Native communities.2 This essay reflects on some of the conclusions drawn from recent work on colonial-indigenous language encounters in North America. While using the historiography of Latin America as an essential context, it focuses primarily on North America because there the circumstances of colonization were different and the indigenous languages spoken in North America differ from those of Latin America. Consequently, the preserved record of indigenous languages takes a strikingly different shape. Whereas colonial Latin America maintained an indigenous elite of authors writing histories and codices, a parallel culture did not exist in North America. While the comparative hemispheric context is intrinsically interesting and intellectually useful, the conclusions that can be drawn from the historiography are in many ways geographically specific. The concept of colonial-indigenous language encounters links indigenous studies to Atlantic transit, empire building, religious studies, and intellectual history. As Ian Steele explained in 1998, the long-standing assumption of disappearing American Indians created an outmoded anthropological perspective within the fields of early American studies.3 Though studies of 2. George Lowery and John Howard Payne, “Notable Persons in Cherokee History: Sequoyah or George Gist,” Journal of Cherokee Studies 2, no. 4 (1977): 385–93. See also Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh, “The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary,” Ethnohistory 40, no. 1 (1993): 70–94; Ellen Cushman, “ ‘We’re Taking the Genius of Sequoyah into This Century’: The Cherokee Syllabary, Peoplehood, and Perseverence,” Wicazo Sa Review 26, no. 1 (2011): 67–83; Sean P. Harvey, Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 113–44. 3. Ian K. Steele, “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives,” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 70–95. For a retrospective account of the success of this idea a decade later, see Paul Cohen, “Was There an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiograph- ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:11 PS PAGE 444 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 445 Native people have moved well past this view, the notion persists in some measure with respect to Native languages. Despite the well-established fact that Christianity and nation-states disparaged and destroyed indigenous tongues,4 early American archives abound with references to episodes of communication, translation, and interpretation, and with collated vocabularies, dictionaries containing thousands of indigenous words, grammars brimming with rules for intelligible communication, and scripture, catechisms, Psalms, Bibles, and prayer books in dozens of Native languages. These works, in print and in manuscript, formed a linguistic base for massive projects directed at the recording, description, translation, and classification of Native languages in which Native people frequently played prominent roles. The “alchemy of interpretation,” in James Merrell’s compelling formulation, was “the very essence of the American encounter.”5 The crucible of colonization transmuted its distinct elements into something new. At the same time, Native people used their languages to mediate colonization. Old words that were applied to Christian ideas, for instance, often retained older meanings, thereby molding new concepts into shapes that fit indigenous frames of reference. How Native communities named European trade goods reveals how they incorporated new items into older ways of life. Confused and often contradictory attempts at classifying languages and their speakers reveal Europeans’ efforts at control and their failure to achieve ical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (2008): 388–410. More recently, Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), has provided an answer. 4. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 16–39; David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Eric Cheyfitz, Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998); Edward G. Gray, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For a global perspective, see Frances Karttunen and Alfred W. Crosby, “Language Death, Language Genesis, and World History,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 157–74. 5. James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 32. ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:11 PS PAGE 445 446 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 it, even as they occasionally alluded to Native understandings of linguistic relationships. Fifteen years ago, Laura Murray identified the Indian vocabulary as an “elusive” literary genre.6 Her article evokes the contradictory facets of colonial attempts to grasp, use, and even transform indigenous languages. Yet in uncovering the range of methods that diverse peoples employed to communicate with one another, the contexts that shaped the meanings of the words and messages exchanged, and the broader significance of those exchanges for figures far from the point of encounter, a remarkable interdisciplinary effort has made those texts more intelligible. Indian tongues were not only erased through colonialism but also preserved in ways that demonstrate the significance of language encounters—efforts at translation and taxonomy, the varied uses of divergent literacies, and the transit of information from borderland to metropole—to the histories of Native America and the Atlantic world. Scholars of early America have been less attuned to these issues, and their cumulative significance, at least in part because relevant studies have appeared across a range of disciplines and historical subfields. Linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, literary criticism, intellectual history, the histories of several European empires and the early United States, ethnohistory, and Native American and indigenous studies have all addressed facets of linguistic contact, exchange, and negotiation, but seldom in conversation with one another. As early as 2000 Edward Gray noted that many episodes and pursuits—from kidnapping potential interpreters to evangelization to philosophical conjecture—should be understood as different facets of “the language encounter in the Americas.” But little has been done to consider those multifarious projects in light of another, even as studies of each have proliferated and deepened.7 Colonial-indigenous language encounters and the texts and commentaries that flowed from efforts at language learning and linguistic collection bear testimony to ways Native languages shaped Euro-American intellectual, cultural, and religious history. Meanwhile, they transform previous rubrics for understanding American Indian resistance to linguistic imperialism into a social fact with an archive and a material history. Those same 6. Laura J. Murray, “Vocabularies of Native American Languages: A Literary and Historical Approach to an Elusive Genre,” American Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2001): 590–623. 7. Edward G. Gray, introduction to Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering, eds., The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 1–11. ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:12 PS PAGE 446 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 447 encounters influenced the cultural and intellectual history of Native individuals and communities, perniciously in many instances, but also by providing new media for linguistic expression and new frames through which to consider their own tongues.  Scholarly awareness of early American interest in indigenous languages is not entirely new. There has been long-standing interest in European languages’ incorporation of thousands of indigenous words into their own lexicons.8 Sporadic calls for increased attention to other linguistic facets of colonization appeared in the middle decades of the twentieth century, emanating in no small part from scholars familiar with the extensive linguistic collections of the American Philosophical Society, the preeminent learned society of colonial British America and the early United States, and the one most closely linked to American Indian philology and linguistics.9 In these same years, historians of linguistics began to draw scholars’ focus to the richness of available materials for studying missionaries’ struggles, preoccupations, and successes in the study of Native languages.10 By the last quarter of the century, scholars working on Mesoamerica began using Nativelanguage texts to reevaluate understandings of colonization as part of a 8. For a concise and lively overview of the “new world of words,” see Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 172–77. See also Charles Cutler, O Brave New Words! Native American Loanwords in Current English (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). 9. Franklin Edgerton, “Notes on Early American Work in Linguistics,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87, no. 1 (1943): 25–34; Mabel Morris, “Jefferson and the Language of the American Indian,” Modern Language Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1945): 31–34; John C. Greene, “Early Scientific Interst in the American Indian: Comparative Linguistics,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 104, no. 5 (1960): 511–17; H. Christoph Wolfart, “Notes on the Early History of American Indian Linguistics,” Folia Linguistica 1, nos. 3/4 (1967): 153–71; William Cowan, “Native Languages of North America: The European Response,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1, no. 1 (1974): 3–10; Raoul N. Smith, “The Interest in Language and Languages in Colonial and Federal America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123, no. 1 (1979): 29–46. 10. Victor Egon Hanzeli, Missionary Linguistics in New France: A Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Descriptions of American Indian Languages (The Hague: De Gruyter, 1969). For a review of the surge in attention to missionary linguistics beginning in the 1990s, see Otto Zwartjes, “The Historiography of Missionary Linguistics: Present State and Further Research Opportunities,” Historiographia Linguistica 39, nos. 2/3 (2012): 185–242. ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:12 PS PAGE 447 448 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 scholarly movement that has been called the New Philology. By employing Nahuatl sources, mundane local records in addition to the well-known codices, James Lockhart and other ethnohistorians recovered Native roles in the Spanish conquest and the contours of Nahua culture in colonial Mexico, and they inspired other scholars to turn to sources in other indigenous languages.11 Some scholars of northeastern North America also turned their attention to compiling texts, as Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon did those composed in Massachusett, for the purpose of illuminating historical changes both in the language and in the lives of its speakers. The increased attention to the documentary record of Native literacy—at this point imagined in a singular, alphabetic sense—pushed scholars such as James Axtell and Peter Wogan to examine in greater detail initial, and changing, Native reactions to European uses of writing.12 Further, the “linguistic turn” in history and literary criticism, which built on the theories of language and power in the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said to open language philosophy and linguistics as fruitful fields of research, converged with the quincentennial of the Reconquista and Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas to draw substantial attention to linguistic features of intercultural encounters and colonization, the content of philosophical theories and ideologies regarding Native languages, and how these intersected with language-based national, imperial, theological, and philosophical projects in early modern Europe and early America.13 11. Matthew Restall, “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History,” Latin American Studies Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 113–34, points to the beginning of this scholarship in two works: Arthur Anderson, Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart, Beyond the Codices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart, Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 12. Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988); James Axtell, “The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1987): 300–309; Peter Wogan, “Perceptions of European Literacy in Early Contact Situations,” Ethnohistory 41, no. 3 (1994): 407–29. 13. E. F. K. Koerner, Toward a History of American Linguistics (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 18–19, observes the importance of the five hundredth anniversary. For important work in this line, see the works cited in n. 4. For calls to approach language philosophy and linguistics as a field of intellectual history, see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (1967; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), v–vii, 3–11; Wolfart, “Notes on the Early History of American Indian Linguistics,” 153, and as an area of social history, see Karttunen and Crosby, “Language Death, Language Genesis, and World His- ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:13 PS PAGE 448 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 449 Scholars have demonstrated how varied empires used language as a means to power over indigenous populations. For some, such as Stephen Greenblatt and Walter Mignolo, the relationship between language and empire was straightforward, as officials and missionaries sought to impose their own language—and in so doing their faith, their social practices, and their political order—on Native communities. Although Native languages were occasionally conceived as vernaculars comparable to those of Europe, one of the most pervasive forms of ethnographic description to emerge from colonization was the definition of indigenous languages through what they lacked relative to colonizers’ tongues. From the sixteenth century onward, however, European empires also appropriated indigenous languages as vehicles of cultural transformation, as lingua francas for imperial administration, as a foundational form of knowledge that allowed deeper understanding and more effective control of peoples.14 Recognition of these goals, methods, and ideologies is necessary, but not sufficient, for understanding colonization. Another set of scholars has sketched the contours of various linguistic borderlands within and between imperial claims. However much traders, missionaries, officials, or scholars might imagine the continent as a blank tory.” See also Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); John E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987): 879–907. 14. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 16–39; Mignolo, Darker Side of the Renaissance. For the Americas, see also James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 179–84; Frances Karttunen, “Interpreters Snatched from the Shore: The Successful and the Others,” and Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Native Languages as Spoken and Written: Views from Southern New England,” both in Gray and Fiering, Language Encounter in the Americas, 215–29, 173–88. Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning and Power (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), provides an excellent overview of the broader pattern. See also Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), chap. 2; Sara Pugach, Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:13 PS PAGE 449 450 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 canvas, the reality was far different. Linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and ethnohistorians have done much to elucidate the forms of nonverbal communication and the use of jargons and pidgins—tongues dramatically simplified in lexicon, morphology, and in some cases phonology —that allowed linguistically diverse Natives and newcomers to bridge the communication gap and facilitate trade and other forms of exchange. In the sixteenth century Portuguese trade with speakers of closely related Tupı́Guaranı́ languages on the coast of Brazil led to the spread of a lingua franca (the lı́ngua geral), which Jesuit priests later used in the region’s missions (reducciones). Over the course of the seventeenth century, European explorers and colonists to North America infused the indigenous landscape with Dutch, Swedish, English, and French, creating numerous pidgin forms of Algonquian.15 Other forms of contact communication that could very well have preceded colonization, such as Mobilian Jargon and Plains Indian Sign Language, also served these functions.16 In some places, over time, new forms of linguistic intermixture arose, as Natives adapted the words of the 15. On lı́ngua geral, see Denny Moore, “Historical Development of Nheengetu (Lı́ngua Geral Amazônica),” and M. Kittiya Lee, “Language and Conquest: TupiGuarani Expansion in the European Colonization of Brazil and Amazonia,” both in Salikoko S. Mufwene, ed., Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 108–42, 143–67. For overviews of North America, see James Axtell, “Babel of Tongues: Communicating with the Indians in Eastern North America,” and Ives Goddard, “The Use of Pidgins and Jargons on the East Coast of North America,” in Gray and Fiering, Language Encounter in the Americas, 15–60, 61–78; Michael Silverstein, “Dynamics of Linguistic Contact,” in Ives Goddard, comp., Handbook of the North American Indians, vol. 17, Languages, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996). On nonverbal communication, see Céline Carayon, “Beyond Words: Nonverbal Communication, Performance, and Acculturation in the Early French-Indian Atlantic” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2010); Justyna Olko, “Body Language in the Preconquest and Colonial Nahua World,” Ethnohistory 61, no. 1 (2014): 149–79. For a look at one trader’s experiences amid diversity, see Sean P. Harvey, “An Eighteenth-century Linguistic Borderland,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 136, no. 4 (2012): 495–98. 16. On precolonization Native contact languages, see Sarah Grey Thomson, “On Interpreting ‘The Indian Interpreter,’ ” Language in Society 9, no. 2 (1980): 167–93; Emanuel J. Dreschel, Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Allan R. Taylor, “Nonspeech Communication Systems,” in Goddard, Handbook of the North American Indians, vol. 17. On a European pidgin, see Peter Bakker, “ ‘The Language of the Coast Tribes Is Half Basque’: A Basque-American Indian Pidgin in Use between Europeans and Native Americans in North America, ca. 1540–ca. 1640,” Anthropological Linguistics 31, nos. 3/4 (1989): 117–47. ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:14 PS PAGE 450 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 451 newcomers into their own languages and as indigenous words for things previously unknown in Europe transformed the tongues of the colonizers. Beyond the proliferation of linguistic borrowing, even more dramatic were those cases in which Europeans and Native people jointly came to use forms of speech that emerged from the collision of diverse tongues. In some instances, exchange and intermarriage among diverse populations over the course of generations gave rise to creole languages (pidgins that acquired increasing grammatical complexity and became, in effect, the native tongue of communities, as some argue is the case with Chinook Jargon, or Chinuk Wawa) and, in at least one instance, Algonquian and Romance languages so thoroughly “intertwined” that Michif, spoken among Métis in the Red River region, is composed primarily of Cree verbs and French nouns. Records of, and in, these tongues are evidence of linguistic aspects of broader patterns of ethnogenesis.17 Both reflecting and contributing to a broader reevaluation of the degree to which Native people incorporated colonies and empires into preexisting structures of power, some scholarship has stressed how Native people controlled networks of information and much of the space that they crossed, as Katherine Grandjean and Alejandra Dubcovsky have shown for New England and the southeast, respectively.18 Some groups even controlled the 17. For overviews, see Calloway, New Worlds for All, 172–77; John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 315–41. For focused accounts of linguistic intermixture, see Peter Bakker, A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Language of the Canadian Métis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); George Lang, Making Wawa: The Genesis of Chinook Jargon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). For comparative views, see Karttunen and Crosby, “Language Death, Language Genesis, and World History”; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Creole Languages and Their Uses: The Example of Colonial Suriname,” Historical Research 82, no. 216 (2009): 268–84. On ethnogenesis, see James Sidbury and Jorge CañizaresEsguerra et al., “Forum: Ethnogenesis,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2011): 181–246. 18. On Native information networks, see Alejandra Dubcovsky, “One Hundred Sixty-one Knots, Two Plates, and One Emperor: Creek Information Networks in the Era of the Yamasee War,” Ethnohistory 59 (Summer 2012): 489–513; Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). For particular emphasis on Iroquois control of space for the transit of information, see Jon Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011). On the significance of Native, especially Wabanaki, spatial conceptions, see Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). On the changing balance of control of communications ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:15 PS PAGE 451 452 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 medium of communication in the first centuries of colonization. Nahuatl and Quechua, for instance, served as the respective lingua franca in the Aztec and Inca empires and, in turn, became crucial to the imposition of Spanish rule in Mexico and Peru. Besides being a language that officials and missionaries relied on for their particular colonial purposes, Nahuatl was also widely used by less influential men and women in Mexico, though significant distance separated the literary Nahuatl of friar-linguists from the far more limited language, centered on useful words and phrases, acquired by ordinary Spanish colonizers in an indigenous world.19 Farther north, as Native powers—such as the Comanches of the southern Plains or the Anishinaabeg of the Great Lakes—rose, they could effectively impose their tongue, at least temporarily, on those who sought to trade with them. Even after decades of colonization, Native languages were still used as mediums of intercultural communication in places where settlers were outnumbered by Indians. Settlers communicated with Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Mohegans in one or another of mutually intelligible southern New England Algonquian languages in the mid-seventeenth century, often in the Pequot learned from the enslaved people who were widely held in settler households after the Pequot War.20 in space, see Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), chap. 3. 19. For a vivid description of the significance of linguistic difference and shared speech in the precolonial Andes, see Inca Garcilasso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of Peru, in Two Parts, part I, trans. Paul Rycaut (London, 1688), 10, 251. On Quechua, see Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 6; Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2007). On the use of nonliterary Nahuatl in Mexico, see Martin Nesvig, “Spanish Men, Indigenous Language, and Informal Interpreters in Postcontact Mexico,” Ethnohistory 59, no. 4 (2012): 739–64, esp. 747–50. This article appears in an excellent special issue titled “A Language of Empire, a Quotidian Tongue: The Uses of Nahuatl in New Spain,” which also features articles by Yanna Yannakakis, John F. Schwaller, Mark Z. Christensen, Robert C. Schwaller, Laura E. Matthew and Sergio F. Romero, and Caterina Pizzigoni. 20. On Comanche and Ojibwe as lingua francas, see, respectively, Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 171; Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 11. On settlers’ knowledge of southern New England Algonquian languages, see Julie Fisher, ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:16 PS PAGE 452 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 453 With increasing appreciation of the mechanics of intercultural communication has come a growing awareness of the importance of those figures who acted as conduits among linguistically diverse peoples as well as a deeper examination of the ways in which language barriers provided dangers and opportunities for Natives and settlers. This may have been especially true in places where no single Native language possessed wide geographic breadth or preponderant political authority, or where neighboring tongues were not mutually intelligible. Scholars have stressed the importance of official interpreters and other intercultural go-betweens for creating the means of communication, exchange, and conflict resolution between Native communities and European colonies. Many of these were traders who took Native wives or the children who resulted from those unions. In other instances, Euro-American children who grew up near or within Native communities—as captives, children of missionaries, boys learning the fur trade, or youths being groomed as mediators—learned to speak indigenous languages.21 Through such figures information flowed, not all of it reliable. Native languages, like their European counterparts, often conveyed rumors, which motivated decisions and often provided Indians the means to influence settlers, traders, missionaries, and officials, and for those groups to exert pressure on Native communities.22 These same figures were also crucial for the formal, ritualized diplomacy that structured official relations of Native peoples with empires and their colonies. At these treaty councils, trained orators spoke, and the peoples who assembled expected to hear the sentiments of other attendees in their own language, “Speaking ‘Indian’ and English: The Bilinguals of Seventeenth-century New England, 1636–1680” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, forthcoming). 21. On intermarriage and language learning, see Laura J. Murray, “Fur Traders in Conversation,” Ethnohistory 50, no. 2 (2003): 285–314. On cultural brokers and go-betweens, see Daniel K. Richter, “Cultural Brokers and Intercultural Politics: New York–Iroquois Relations, 1664–1701,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 40–67; Nancy L. Hagedorn, “ ‘A Friend to Go between Them’: The Interpreter as Cultural Broker during Anglo-Iroquois Councils, 1740–70,” Ethnohistory 35, no. 1 (1988): 60–80; Margaret Connell Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Frances E. Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Merrell, Into the American Woods. 22. On rumor, see Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina–Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1996): 527–60; Tom Arne Midtrød, “Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (2011): 91–112; Grandjean, American Passage, chap. 3. ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:16 PS PAGE 453 454 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 which made the services of a reliable interpreter crucial to the often tense coexistence of diverse peoples. Moments of communication were frequently moments when diverse peoples performed perceived differences for themselves and their counterparts, and the very fact that relatively few could match the linguistic virtuosity of interpreters made the translating and recording of what was said a fraught process, both for those at the time and for modern scholars who wish to find Native voices in the documentary record. Occasionally interpreters deliberately conveyed sentiments that differed from what an orator had expressed, and scribes sometimes recorded what colonial or imperial officials wished to hear.23 The linguistic exchanges that emerged in Christian missions have been the subject of an especially deep and impressive body of work. One set of scholars, those interested primarily in historical documentation of indigenous languages and in the history of linguistics, have focused considerable attention on the linguistic efforts of Franciscans, Jesuits, Puritans, Moravians, and other missionaries in the Americas; numerous articles have appeared in specialized journals such as Historiographia Linguistica and in essay collections, including the five volumes (and counting) of Missionary Linguistics/Lingüı́stica misionera.24 Historians have turned their attention to 23. On the forms of diplomacy, see Francis Jennings et al., eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1985); Patricia Galloway, “Talking with Indians: Interpreters and Diplomacy in French Louisiana,” in Winthrop D. Jordan and Sheila L. Skemp, eds., Race and Family in the Colonial South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987); Merrell, Into the American Woods, 253–301. On performance of differences, see Jane T. Merritt, “Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the Pennsylvania Frontier,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 61–81. On deliberate mistranslations, see David L. Ghere, “Mistranslations and Misinformation on the Maine Frontier, 1725–1755,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 8, no. 4 (1984): 3–26. On the need for scholars to triangulate multiple accounts of a given speech, see James H. Merrell, “ ‘I Desire All That I Have Said . . . May Be Taken Down Aright’: Revisiting Teedyuscung’s 1756 Treaty Council Speeches,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 777–826. 24. Hanzeli, Missionary Linguistics in New France, ranks among the first and most important. For especially strong collections, see Even Hovdhaugen, ed., . . . And the Word Was God: Missionary Linguistics and Missionary Grammar (Münster: Nodus, 1996); Elke Nowak, ed., Languages Different in All Their Sounds . . . : Descriptive Approaches to Indigenous Languages of the Americas, 1500–1800 (Münster: ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:17 PS PAGE 454 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 455 missionaries’ linguistic work for different reasons. Missionaries’ approaches to language learning have offered insight into the efforts of Euro-American evangelists to make their message intelligible to the indigenous peoples the missionaries hoped to convert. Eschewing pidgins and jargons, Catholic and Protestant missionaries sought ways to convey what they believed to be universal truths. On a practical level, acquiring indigenous languages required diverse efforts aimed at distinguishing sounds and choosing characters that could represent them, and not only learning words but also rules for modifying them to denote particular circumstances, arranging them intelligibly, and using them in socially appropriate ways. Beyond a matter of simple pragmatism, some scholars see in these efforts important examples of missionaries’ accommodation to the expectations of Native people. Others, however, urge us to recognize that the increased familiarity that fluent communication allowed could produce heightened tension when it elucidated incompatible goals among Indians and evangelists. Euro-American efforts at learning languages depended on Native participation. Certainly, not all Indians chose to be teachers. European accounts are littered with references to Indians unwilling to provide the services that Europeans sought. In such cases impatience, distrust, or recognition of the desirability of cultural distance prevailed. Instead of teaching Euro-Americans, these Indians mocked their efforts, refused to answer their queries, or deliberately fed them misinformation.25 In other instances, however, Native individuals chose to bridge the linguistic gap. Native men and women offered names for things, though unclear questions or unknown phenomena frequently stymied collectors and consultants. Whether seeking desirable goods, spiritual power, or influential friends, Native tutors—too often, when considered at all, misunderstood as “assistants”—instructed missionary students in sounds, words, grammar, and usage.26 Nodus, 1999); Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen, eds., Missionary Linguistics/ Lingüı́stica misionera: Selected Papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004). Zwartjes, “Historiography of Missionary Linguistics,” surveys this work. 25. For examples, see Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896–1901), 7:57, 61; George Dixon, A Voyage Round the World; But More Particularly to the North-west Coast of America: Performed in 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, in the King George and Queen Charlotte (London, 1789), 227–28. 26. On (limited) missionary accommodation, see Axtell, Invasion Within, 71–72, 81–83; Margaret J. Leahy, “ ‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France,” French Historical Studies ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:18 PS PAGE 455 456 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 The individuals, Native and European, who met in these language encounters and acted as intermediaries, moreover, produced a wealth of Native-language texts, which a number of scholars have examined with important results. An impressive body of research has demonstrated that these texts were the products of cross-cultural exchanges and the means for furthering such exchanges. Scholars have found in these texts convincing evidence of how Native people used their languages to mediate Christianity, using them to “filter,” in David Silverman’s useful formulation, missionaries’ teachings of components too much at odds with traditional views. Indigenous “assistants,” therefore, played crucial roles in shaping Native Christianities.27 Native linguists, such as the Nahua priest Antonio del Rincón, who produced the first Jesuit grammar in New Spain, were Native intellectuals. As the interdisciplinary work of Alejandra Dubcovsky and Aaron Broadwell has shown, moreover, careful attention to the content of a given text, such as unwitting changes in dialect by a missionary author, can provide evidence of Native coauthorship that has been silenced in the historical record.28 Just as significantly, as Philip Round has stressed, Native instructors, translators, and printers learned strategies of resistance and resignification through their linguistic labors, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and beyond.29 These coproduced texts aided EuroAmericans who sought to communicate messages, but they also facilitated —and provide evidence of—missionaries listening. As Robert Michael 19, no. 1 (1995): 105–32. On increased communication producing widening senses of difference, see Merrell, Into the American Woods; Robert Michael Morrissey, “ ‘I Speak It Well’: Language, Cultural Understanding, and the End of a Missionary Middle Ground in Illinois Country, 1673–1712,” Early American Studies 9, no. 3 (2011): 617–48. 27. David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity on Seventeenth-century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2005): 146; John L. Steckley, Words of the Huron (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier, 2007); Tracy Neale Leavelle, “ ‘Bad Things’ and ‘Good Hearts’: Mediation, Meaning, and the Language of Illinois Christianity,” Church History 76, no. 2 (2007): 363–94; Glenda Goodman, “ ‘But they differ from us in sound’: Indian Psalmody and the Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651–75,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2012): 793–822. On Rincón, see Kelly S. McDonough, “Indigenous Intellectuals in Early Colonial Mexico: The Case of Antonio del Rincón, Nahua Grammarian and Priest,” Colonial Latin American Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 145–65. 28. Alejandra Dubcovskyand George Aaron Broadwell, “Writing Timucua: Recovering and Interrogating Indigenous Authorship,” in this issue. 29. Round, Removable Type. ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:19 PS PAGE 456 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 457 Morrissey has perceptively noted, dictionaries in which the Native words are arranged in alphabetical order, such as that of Illinois composed by the Jesuit missionary Jacques Gravier, aided missionaries seeking to understand Native speakers.30 Moving beyond older debates about the awe that European writing inspired in Indians and when it yielded to more critical or pragmatic views, and older narrative trajectories of the replacement of orality with literacy, it seems increasingly clear that Native responses to and uses of such texts were shaped by Native use of graphic systems that long predated European colonization. Ethnohistorians have documented indigenous use of multiple graphic systems from the quipus of the Andes and the syllabic glyphs and pictographic codices of Mesoamerica to the petroglyphs, painted buffalo hides, doodem representations, birch bark scrolls, and wampum in use farther north.31 Influenced by such approaches, literary scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Germaine Warkentin, Matt Cohen, and Andrew Newman have challenged the traditional binary between oral and written cultures. Going further, Kristina Bross and Hilary Wyss, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Philip Round, Robert Gunn, and Sarah Rivett have pushed scholars to recognize the variety of nonalphabetic indigenous literacies that coexisted alongside, and were actively integrated into, selective learning and use of European literacy and its accompanying textual forms.32 30. Morrissey, “ ‘I Speak It Well,’ ” 639. 31. For an excellent sample of ethnohistorical work on graphic pluralism, see the contributions of Frank Salomon and Sabine Hyland, Heidi Bohaker, Kathleen J. Bragdon, Kevin Terraciano, David Tavárez, John F. Chuchiak IV, Galen Brokaw, Gary Urton, Sabine Hyland, and Margaret Bender in a special issue of Ethnohistory 57, no. 1 (2010). 32. Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians and Colonial America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Kristina Bross and Hillary E. Wyss, eds., Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008); Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Round, Removable Type; Andrew Newman, On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Hillary E. Wyss, English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Robert L. Gunn, Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literatures, and the Making of the North American Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Sarah Rivett, “Learning to Write Algonquian Letters: The ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:19 PS PAGE 457 458 Early American Studies • Summer 2017 Many scholars have looked to Native language texts less to examine instances of religious exchange and more to recover indigenous cultures and how they received and adapted European things and people. Indeed, in some studies, not only such texts but even Native languages themselves have been used as evidence. John Steckley’s studies of Huron have been based on deep knowledge of Jesuit materials about those people and linguistic knowledge of the Huron language. Kathleen Bragdon has been especially explicit about not only using commentary in Native languages as a source for her studies of southern New England Algonquians from the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, but also analyzing languages themselves as lenses into the lives and beliefs of Native speakers.33 That culturalanthropological premise, the subject of continuing debate among scholars in a variety of disciplines, has emerged from centuries of linguistic and psychological theorization, much of it involving Native languages, but the ethnohistorical combination of linguistic virtuosity and mastery of the archival record has yielded tremendous insights.34 Even when based on more superficial familiarity with Native words for particular things, other scholars have turned to colonial-era Native-language texts for Native terminology. Brett Rushforth has recovered conceptual links between slaves and dogs in Algonquian and Siouan languages; Heidi Bohaker and Michael Witgen have explained understandings of kinship, place, and alliance among Anishinaabeg; and Robert Michael Morrissey has sketched the adaptation of buffalo hunting among the Illinois. Those indigenous frames of reference, in turn, shaped the forms that colonization took.35 In the intention to use Indigenous Place of Language Philosophy in the Seventeenth-century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 4 (2014): 549–88. 33. Steckley, Words of the Huron; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native Peoples of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). 34. For recent salvos in the debate on linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), see Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (New York: Picador, 2010); John H. McWhorter, The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 35. Bragdon, Native Peoples of Southern New England, 1500–1650, 29–30; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 15–71, 383–91; Heidi Bohaker, “Nindoodemag: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 23–52; Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 371–73; Robert Michael Morrissey, ................. 19024$ $CH2 06-28-17 14:06:19 PS PAGE 458 Harvey and Rivett • Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America 459 Native-authored texts to provide a fuller understanding of colonization and, more particularly, how Native people understood it, experienced it, and shaped it, this work resembles the New Philology most associated with colonial Mesoamerica. In studies of ethnographic North America, however, comparatively fewer scholars have moved beyond examining discrete words to become more deeply conversant in indigenous languages. Arguably the greatest linguistic effect of colonization was the dramatic spread of English, Spanish, French, and other European languages at the expense of the Native languages of the Americas. By the late seventeenth century this process stoked the frustration of those opposed to the practices and increasing influence of colonizers. According to one account of the Pueblo Revolt, for example, a prohibition on the teaching of Castilian accompanied the expulsion of the Spanish and the destruction of Christian symbols.36 The process of what is often sanitized as “language shift” or grimly prophesied as “language death” was complex and uneven, the product of the demographic consequences of the Columbian exchange; the increasing usefulness and prestige of European languages and literacy, especially in Native communities subject to the political power of settlers or imperial officials; and the deliberate efforts of settler colonies and nations to impose their own tongues on the colonized. The United States, from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century, even sought to eliminate Native languages altogether.37 Though few would dispute the claim that Native people used the languages of colonizers for their own ends, and some have even called for the recognition of language shift as a means of resistance, others have stressed the importance of language preservation and revitalization for maintaining the cultural and political strength of Native communities. Those linguistic programs have gained strength from the perceived connectedness of peoplehood, place, and speech.38 Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 20–25. 36. “Declaration of the Indian Juan,” in Charles Wilson Hackett, ed., Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermı́n’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680–1682 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942), 235. 37. On the English colonies and the United States, see Axtell, Invasion Within, 179–84; Gray, New World Babel, 80–84; Harvey, Native Tongues, 115–19, 169–80; Ruth Spack, America’s Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 38. On English as an Indian language, and on language shift as a form of resistance, see Simon J. Ortiz, “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Aut...
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