-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Phillip H. Round, Hilary E. Wyss. English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 840–841, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.840
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
In English Letters and Indian Literacies, Hilary E. Wyss asserts that there is much more to the history of literacy in Indian Country than the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution founded in 1879 on Captain Richard Pratt's motto, “Kill the Indian … and save the man.” Before Carlisle, there were the New England Protestant missionary schools supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which sponsored John Sergeant's Stockbridge Indian school (1739), Eleazar Wheelock's Moor's Charity School (1754), and the Cornwall, Connecticut, and Brainerd Mission schools of the 1820s. It was from within this earlier and ever-expanding New England Christian educational network, Wyss maintains, that the foundational cultural logics of Native American literacy found lasting enunciation—for Native and non-Native participants alike—down through the nineteenth century.
At the heart of this important new interpretation of the origin and nature of Native literacy practices are two significant recalibrations of earlier readings of missionary education. The first builds on Laura Stevens's The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (2004) and traces the implications of Indian literacy for Euro-American self-fashioning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the book demonstrates, Native literacy provided non-Indians with a comfortable fantasy of English colonial order, linguistic supremacy, and paternal benevolence, epitomized by Wheelock's self-aggrandizing fund-raising tracts and the martyrology surrounding David Brainerd, erstwhile missionary to the Delaware.
