The Good News in Print and Image: Catholic Evangeliteracy in Native America

In the comparative study of New World colonialism and the culture of writing, I am interested in how Christian missionaries—especially Roman Catholics—employed writing in their evangelism, and how the Indians of the Americas have responded—primarily within the regions now controlled by the United States. How important was literacy in the evangelical process and how important in the indigenous reply?

One might say that the “colonial” epoch ended in 1776, or perhaps in 1821, or one might perceive its persistence to the present for these colonialized peoples. There is a colonizing continuum between past and present; therefore, I am looking at five centuries of “evangeliteracy”—a word I have coined to indicate that the spreading of the word and the writing of the word have often gone hand in hand.

Today a sharp dichotomy is made between “cultures of the book” (evolved from “religions of the Book”) and “Native American understandings of land”¹; indeed, one critic calls Western culture in America one big “paper chase.”² In 1969 Lakota theologian Vine Deloria, Jr., provided rhetorical flourish to this distinction: “It has been said of missionaries that when they arrived they had only the Book and we had the land; now we have the Book and they have the land.”³

Walter D. Mignolo has examined “the complicity between language and religion”⁴ in the New World. He writes of the colonizing process regarding Indian languages through alphabetic writing: reducing them to written, latinized translations and grammars. As Christian missioners subjected Indian communities to reductions—centralizing them for the process of indoctrination and control—they also reduced Indian languages to alphabetic hegemony, according to Mignolo. To the religious colonizers of New Spain, like Pedro de Gante, Bernardo de Sahagún, or Diego de Landa, the basic difference between themselves and Indians was that the latter were unlettered; the indigenes employed images in their lives, but not the alphabetic, encyclopedic exactitude of written expression.

The same could be said of Protestants, as well as Catholics. The Reformation, after all, was a media revolution as well as an ecclesiastical one. Martin Luther and his followers buttressed their preaching with pamphlet propaganda and they translated the Bible into the vernacular languages of Europe and beyond. Europe was becoming a culture of books, just as the New World was discovered. Until 1500 about 27,000 texts had been printed on the continent—about ten million items. In the next century, as Protestants and Catholics vied for spiritual supremacy, the number of titles grew fivefold, amounting to 500 million printed books by the beginning of the seventeenth century (although it should be noted that many were heavily illustrated). Protestants in New England, even more than Catholics in New Spain, regarded writing as an essential ingredient in missionary effort, absolutely necessary for godliness and civility among the Native converts.⁵

Modern, Western theorists like Jack Goody⁶ and Walter Ong⁷ have emphasized the dichotomy between literate and non-literate peoples: the key to defining “modern”—supposedly logical, scientific, abstract, skeptical, historical—and “traditional”—putatively pre-logical, primitive, savage, mythopoeic—ways of thinking in contrast to one another. More recent critics⁸ have thrown doubt on these theoretical models, and I am not compelled by the stark distinctions Goody and Ong delineate.

For, as we shall see, Catholic evangelical culture in the Americas was highly visual—relying largely on images—and participatory—emphasizing sacramental liturgy like baptisms, processions, dramas, recitations of rosaries, and the like. At the same time the Indians of the Americas had their own forms of writing and record keeping, not all of them imagic. Amidst the alphabets, syllabaries, and pictograms⁹ of the world’s writing systems—the grammatology of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Semitic epigraphic scripts, Asian calligraphy, Greek alphabet, musical notations, etc.¹⁰—we find Mayan and other Mesoamerican scripts—as many as a dozen different kinds. Gary Urton’s attempt to decipher Andean khipus for their narrative threads beyond accounting and recounting, i.e., beyond mathematics and mnemonics,¹¹ suggests writing in South as well as Mesoamerican...