In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xiii Foreword Scott Richard Lyons As far as we know, the first Native American to publish writing in the English language was the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom (1723–1792). Occom is primarily remembered today for his autobiography, “A Short Narrative of My Life” (1768), the first of many Native autobiographies to come, and for his Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), the first Native-authored text to see publication. Life writing and death writing: one might suggest that Native writing in English has dealt in serious business from the very start. One might also remark, as many have, purely on the basis of these two texts, that Samson Occom was “assimilated”—and perhaps that was the price that Indians paid to write their way into the public sphere. But, in fact, Occom wrote a great deal more than those two oft-anthologized texts, as seen in the fine anthology edited by Joanna Brooks, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan (2006). There we find that in addition to the “Short Narrative” and Moses Paul, the Occom archive also includes four occasional essays, seventy-six letters, thirteen petitions and tribal documents, nineteen sermons, plus a large assortment of journal entries and Christian hymns. The range of subjects that Occom addressed—from New Light Calvinism, to the abolition of slavery, to matters of what would now be called tribal sovereignty— is broad and engaged. Occom was, to put it accurately, a committed public intellectual and fairly successful indigenous activist, but one might not draw that conclusion by reading only his two best-known pieces in isolation from the rest of his corpus. As Brooks has explained, on the basis of those two famous texts “a consensus view once developed of Occom as a missionary apologist for Christian imperialism” (9). That view couldn’t help but take Occom for a dupe instead of seeing him as a formidable intellectual with a sharp critical perspective who navigated his world and spoke truth to power using the best tools at his disposal: his education, his access, and his literacy. Since Occom’s time, Native American writers have written extensively—and, I’ll add, consistently—about matters of life and death, including concerns related to imperialism, using those same tools, but until quite recently most of that work was lost to archives soon after publication. It wasn’t until the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent rise of what American Indian studies scholar Kenneth Lincoln has termed the “Native American Renaissance” that Native writers started being recovered, reread, and reconsidered. At that point in history—decades after the anthropologist Franz Boas popularized what is now known as cultural relativism—scholars and critics of Native American writing assumed that Native cultures were “oral.” While orality was clearly more authentically Indian than literacy, neither orality nor literacy was inherently better or more advanced than the other. In fact, many critics said, Indian writing of the Native American Renaissance was not a departure from but rather a continuation of oral tradition by other means. To evoke the title of one critical study from the period, Indians were “writing in the oral tradition.” This was quite the sea change from the attitudes of the previous century. For example, in 1847, when the Ojibwe writer and preacher George Copway felt compelled to explain to his readers that “the mind for letters was in me, but was asleep,” he credited Christianity for waking up his latent literacy in a way that strikes me as logically the opposite of writing in the oral tradition. Both characterizations of Indian writing assume that orality and literacy are (1) dramatically different from each other, even opposed , yet (2) somehow existing inherently inside the subject—asleep, perhaps, but now in the process of being dramatically (re)awakened. What thinkers across history, from Occom’s time to our own, seem to have in common is a “great leap” theory of the movement from orality to literacy—the idea that, as classical literature scholar Walter Ong famously put it in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), “writing restructures consciousness .” Substitute the words “culture” or “identity” for “consciousness,” and suddenly Samson Occom seems assimilated. Indians, according to this great leap theory, do not write; it is not their culture or tradition, and if they do write, well, it seems they have become a little less Indian—unless of course we flip the script entirely and see them becoming more...

Share