Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas

12. The Algonquian Word and the Spiritof Divine Truth

12 The Algonquian Word and the Spirit of Divine Truth John Eliot’s Indian Library and the Atlantic Quest for a Universal Language Sarah Rivett Over the course of the settlement of the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European missionaries discovered the power and knowledge available to those who learned Indian languages. Spanish missionaries began a massive effort to compile, organize, and record indigenous tongues. In 1547, Pedro de Gante published the Doctrina Cristiana, offering a Nahuatl text in which the linguistic knowledge set in black-letter type comes from twenty-nine manuscript leaves, produced by a number of hands (see fig. 12.1). Introduced in Spanish, the purpose of de Gante’s Doctrina Cristiana was to increase knowledge of Nahuatl among Spanish speakers, many of whom were actively involved in the missionary endeavor in New Spain. What is striking about de Gante’s text is that it is not merely functional, designed to give an accessible overview of Nahuatl for the simple purpose of facilitating fluency such that the missionaries could pursue Fig. 12.1. Page from Pedro de Gante, Doctrina Cristiana en lengua Mexicana (1547). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 378 Sarah Rivett their endeavors of proselytizing and converting more effectively. Rather , the printer took a great deal of care in the production of this text, setting the frontispiece in two different ink colors so that the titular announcement of doctrines “en lengua Mexicana” in red is offset by the inlaid black-and-white image of a Fransciscan friar speaking these truths to a group of patiently attendant indigenous proselytes. The manuscript leaves record how such knowledge had been acquired, recorded , and preserved, emphasizing the process and pious work that went into this rendition of Christian truths.The material form of the book announces something substantial to be conveyed through the representational power of revealed truths in an indigenous tongue. De Gante’s Doctrina Cristiana exemplifies a large number of such printed texts coming out of Mexico City in the sixteenth century.¹ The Spanish practice of compiling, ordering, and printing indigenous languages set the stage for parallel endeavors among the French, English , and Germans. Although the Jesuits were not granted the printing press that they requested in the 1660s, manuscript grammars proliferated among them. Jean de Brébeuf was the first linguist of the Huron language, producing a grammar that was then reprinted in Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages in New France (1632). Paul Le Jeune printed grammars in the Jesuit Relations, published regularly in Paris between 1632 and 1672, and Pierre Chaumonot compiled a manuscript dictionary of the Montagnais language.² Missionary linguistics proliferated in New France, with manuscript dictionaries and grammars circulating among the Jesuits and Franciscan Recollects stationed in missionary communities, while vocabularies of Montagnais and Algonquian were also printed in Paris.These linguistic efforts instigated sweeping and irrevocable change. Imperial language projects have long been described by scholars as acts of erasure or techniques of domination and colonial appropriation. Stephen Greenblatt reads “linguistic colonialism” as the pervasive intellectual and popular belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that American Indian languages were either “deficient or nonexistent .”³ Jill Lepore and David Murray show the detrimental effects The Algonquian Word and Divine Truth 379 of this ideology throughout the colonial period as literacy and translation destroyed cultural relativity and autonomy.4 Shifting our focus to Renaissance writing in Latin America, Walter Mignolo demonstrates the semiotic colonization of Amerindian languages.5 While these interpretations have produced a fascinating discussion, deliberate acts of preservation were also central to the linguistic dimensions of the colonial encounter. European encounters with Native American languages and the Indian grammars that emerged from them focused on retention and—especially in the case of Anglo-America—reinvention. In North America, missionaries confronted the problem of translating Algonquian from oral to written.They began this process by preparing lists of words and expressions and compiling a grammar.The final stage involved the composition and preaching of sermons.This was a crucial phase, integral to the cycle of Algonquian language acquisition. It served the practical purpose of enabling ministers to transmit the gospel to the Native Americans whom they were trying to convert. But sermons preached in Algonquian also completed a tripartite transformation from the fallen, spoken language of heathen savages to the written language of pious Christians, and then back into a redeemed primitive language whose...