Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880

7. The Culture of Reprinting

( 173 ) chapter Seven the culture of reprinting proprietary authorship, though an essential tool for American Indian writers seeking intellectual sovereignty, was itself not a foundational structure in nineteenth-century American print culture.That honor went to the ad hoc local publishing practices of reprinting. Print historian Meredith McGill argues that such practices were fundamentally shaped by an “antebellum commitment to the circulation of unauthorized reprints”embodied in a decentralized system of publishing.¹ This culture of unauthorized reprints served as a counterweight to property-based paradigms of authorship (like those we examined in the previous chapter) and provided American literary culture with a republican model of textual dissemination. At the level of local publishing , reprinting books was viewed as the circulation of public property for the pubic good.Thus, the trends we observed in chapter 3 concerning missionary and tract society publication, in which mass-produced works emanated from centralized distribution centers, were counterbalanced by local, ad hoc publishing practices, especially reprints of already established works. As I have argued in earlier chapters, books functioned as objects in Indian Country. As such, they flowed along the same imperial mercantile circuits as other material goods. As material objects imbued with intellectual property rights, they were subject to copyright, and thus a kind of legal protection as well as a form of social visibility. When Indian books were reprinted by nonIndians , however, it raised important questions about cultural sovereignty. These questions would remain largely unanswered during the nineteenth century. In fact, they continued to be unresolved until the late twentieth century , when Congress passed the Native American Graves Preservation and Repatriation Act, in 1992. In this legislation, Euro-American collectors and archaeologists were forced to confront a question that had basically been ig- ( 174 ) The Culture of Reprinting nored for 200 years: Who “owned” the human remains and ceremonial artifacts in the collections of Euro-American museums? In literary studies, such questions also led to a reconsideration of cultural and intellectual property rights in textual settings, and Native literary critics began to view non-Indian reprinting and editing of Indian materials as a similar infringement on tribal sovereignty.² The marketplace afterlife of Samson Occom’s Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul illustrates how reprinting by non-Natives co-opted Indian intellectual sovereignty early on in the history of the production of Native books. Occom’s Sermon was reprinted many times during his life and long after his death. Each of the nineteen editions produced from 1772 to 1827 offered publishers and booksellers a new opportunity to exploit Occom’s popularity for their own purposes. The substantive changes made between editions had a significant impact on the meaning of the death of Moses Paul and, more broadly, on American Indian identity as a whole. For example, in 1789 an edition of the Sermon printed by a New Haven publisher appended the treatise on Indian languages of Jonathan Edwards Jr.to Occom’s work.Instead of the grim death’s-head and the black-letter “murder”motif of the original title page, this one featured a monolithic body of staid, crowded Roman type, befitting the “scientific” nature of Edward’s linguistic observations. In this reprinting, Occom’s work seems to function primarily as a supplement to Edwards,granting the white-authored work “Indian”authenticity by virtue of proximity. In 1810, another reprint of Occom’s Sermon appeared in Bennington, Vermont ,with a title page illustration that undercut the authority of the Mohegan author by employing the parodic image of a mountebank—that festive and theatrical, jesterlike character who, as Patricia Crain notes, “descends from the commedia dell’arte zanni, the artful scheming and bumbling clown” (figure 26).³ It is not clear from the engraving whether Moses Paul or Occom is the intended object of ridicule. Since Crain observes, however, that “scholars and pedagogues” are generally the target of the zany’s antics in nineteenthcentury children’s primers, it seems likely that the Bennington edition was attempting to belittle Occom’s learning and literacy. These two examples of the ways Occom’s groundbreaking text was repackaged serve to remind us that Indian books were often pirated and exploited to further non-Native publishers’ particular agendas, intellectual sovereignty notwithstanding. This chapter thus continues the previous chapter’s exploration of the issues surrounding intellectual sovereignty, but from a slightly The Culture of Reprinting ( 175 ) different perspective—by examining the...