Learning to Read—Almost: New Books in Early Native American Studies

A funny thing happens when seriously curious scholars of literature and culture set out to study the colonization of the Americas. We know already that what’s at stake in colonialism are millions of human lives, entire continents, whole ecosystems. But we find out that thinking critically about colonialism also affects whole worlds of thought and understanding, the conceptual foundations of familiar ways of being, knowing, feeling, writing, and reading, both those indigenous to the Americas and those deriving from European traditions. Press harder, look deeper, and soon enough the very pillars of what passes for political reality in American life—like the inevitability and hence legitimacy of conquest, as propounded by Chief Justice John Marshall in a trio of court decisions on native land and sovereignty claims in the 1830s and implemented in policy ever since—start looking like elaborate hoaxes.

It’s enough to leave one in a state of bewilderment, horror, and wonder at the power of concept, language, writing, and story and their impact on the course of human history. And it is this experience of disorientation and conceptual destabilization that makes the early indigenous literatures and literacies of the Americas so important to teach. That’s what many early Americanists have been trying to do now, for the last several decades, as we have remodeled our curricula and our scholarship to acknowledge the vastness of those early American indigenous thought-worlds and the historic inability of Euro-American scholarship to account for them. There have been many solid and laudable efforts toward advancing our ability to talk and teach this matter with more intelligence, including conferences bringing early Native Americanists, early Americanists, and comparatists into dialogue and book projects like Hilary Wyss and Kristina Bross’s Early Native Literacies in New England. But there still remains much work to be done.

When I first set out to reorganize the opening days of my American literature surveys, it was no longer enough, I knew, to start out with competing Anglo-American accounts of settlement, as important as it was to situate the duty-bound William Bradford along the swashbuckling and opportunistic figure of John Smith. Nor was the apologetic autohagiography of Cabeza de Vaca enough to really open up the problem of difference. Nor even the lovely and suggestive but temporally dislocated ethnographic transcriptions of oral narratives that appeared in the opening pages of our more progressive American literature anthologies. No, I knew, we needed to confront as a class—my undergraduates and me—the reality of whole other worlds of thought and writing. Gamely, I assembled my opening week’s PowerPoint lectures, showcasing textual masterpieces from these other worlds: birchbark, stone carving, codex, winter count, wampum belt. “Look,” I said, “whole other worlds of thought and writing.” That’s about all I could say, I realized, my PowerPoints serving mostly as an exhibit of the limits of alphabetic literacy, a show-and-tell of all the texts we simply did not know how to read.

I went deeper into this experiment one memorable semester a few years ago when I ordered as the first assigned text in the class an affordable paperback full-color edition of the Florentine Codex. Two weeks I marked off on the class syllabus as the time we would study the codex, teach ourselves to read a little of it, perhaps, or at least sit together and experience the limits of our own literacy. And so we sat there, mutely, twenty-five undergraduates and I on a southern California campus in the heart of Tongva-Gabrieleno territory, staring at the pages of the codex. At least codices came in the shape of pages, we agreed. And...