-
6. Intertribal Conversations
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
198 6·Intertribal Conversations The texts in Chapters One to Five of this anthology are grouped according to tribal affiliation.We hope that this organization helps readers to understand literacy issues within particular cultural contexts—especially important, since the cultures that produced our anthologized texts are still vital parts of New England today. We believe that it is important to recognize not only the significance and the persistence of tribal identities but also that individual tribal histories tell only part of the story of New England as an“Indian world.”¹ Literacy practices, particularly the adoption of alphabetic literacy, cut across tribal identities and linked Native peoples of New England during the early colonial period. This chapter takes seriously Ann McMullen’s contention that we should not view the development of a pan-Indian perspective as a loss of cultural identity, that we should view “regionalism and regional cultures as survival rather than cultural disintegration.”² Indeed, as McMullen points out, regional cultures predated the arrival of Europeans, and colonial-era alliances and intertribal conversations such as those in the Massachusetts Bay Colony might well be viewed as the successful adaptation of old ways of relating across tribal groups. This approach can incorporate Lisa Brooks’s notion of the“common pot”³ as a metaphor for how different Native spaces look when we focus not on Europeans but on Natives and their attempts to create balance and unity among and between communities. Historians have uncovered various intertribal affiliations and conflicts throughout the period represented herein. Both before and after the arrival of the English, groups came together in defensive alliances, agreed on or disputed land use, traded, and intermarried.We have touched on some of these developments in the headnotes to the chapters. In terms of literacy, intertribal conversations have been significant: Katherine Garret and Sarah Pharaoh spoke to Indians, not just to Pequots or Narragansetts. Of course, the Wampanoag and Natick experiences with print literacy influenced their own communities . This phrase is taken from the Montaukett petition included in this chapter. . McMullen,“What’s Wrong with This Picture?” . . L. Brooks,“The Common Pot.” Intertribal Conversations · 199 deeply, but well into the eighteenth century the Massachusett-language texts that their translators and printers produced were widely distributed, read, argued about, and cherished by Indians across New England. In addition, as we discussed in the introduction and in the headnote to Chapter One (“The Mohegans”), intertribalism was a hallmark of such nativist movements as the one that led to the founding of Brotherton. Intertribalism was especially important to the prominent Mohegan writer Samson Occom, who appears once again in this chapter. The three essays in this section illustrate the range of uses to which intertribalism and literacy were put in the eighteenth century. Joanna Brooks discusses the successful deployment of traditional language in a petition that protests the appropriation of Montaukett land by New York. The petition re- flects a specific partnership—that between Occom and the Montaukett Tribe. This connection—built on not only kinship ties forged through marriage but also a common political understanding—allowed for a powerful critique of colonial policies. Sandra Gustafson’s essay examines another agent for intertribal conversations: Hendrick Aupaumut, who served as a go-between in U.S. negotiations with more westerly Indians. Unlike the authors of the Montaukett petition, he could not, as a U.S. agent, be pointedly critical of white colonization; very much like the authors of the petition, however, he mobilized indigenous communicative practices within traditional Western print literacy. Heidi Bohaker’s essay, in turn, serves as a reminder both of the ways that nonalphabetic literacy was employed after colonization and the artificial limits that this consideration of early Native literacy in New England imposes on its subject: The iconographic signatures that she examines—although written by people from northern rather than southern New England—were inscribed and archived in Boston, as a symbol of the Wabanaki agreement with Bay Colony officials. We contend that they number among the examples of early Native literacy in New England. Although we must not forget the assymetrical power relationships that were in place in 1725 (which required Penobscot representatives to travel from Maine to Boston), inscribed images of turtles and beavers, crayfish and thunder beings remind us that, even in colonial strongholds, seemingly English spaces were part of a wide Indian world. All three primary texts in this section demonstrate the ways that, as Joanna...