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1 Introduction In 1769 a young Narragansett woman named Sarah Simon spent an agonizing afternoon trying to explain to the white minister responsible for her Christian education just how far short of providing a new spiritual framework for her life his efforts had fallen. Her letter survives in the Dartmouth College archives. In 1794 Hendrick Aupaumut, a Stockbridge/Mahican tribal leader who had served as a go-between for the United States and certain western tribes, created a narration reflecting the oratory that was the signal feature of his diplomatic efforts among the Delawares, Miamis, Shawnees, and others. His work, discovered among private papers in the nineteenth century, can be found in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, an unknown Mohegan woman took an old issue of a Hartford, Connecticut, newspaper and carefully lined a woodsplint basket into which she had woven traditional colors and patterns. Her basket sits on the shelf of the Connecticut Historical Society. In the winter of 1659, a Massachusett man named Samuel Ponampam described his encounters with the Christian God to an English missionary, who included this “conversion narrative” in a printed tract touting the success of his evangelism. Sometime between 1771 and 1775, Samson Occom, a Mohegan missionary now best known for a sermon published upon the execution of a fellow Native, Moses Paul, wrote a very different sermon on drunkenness and white vices. The surviving unsigned fragment of his work is included in the Samson Occom Papers at the Connecticut Historical Society. The written and material archive of early Native authors exists piecemeal and often overlooked in museums, manuscript collections, and print from the colonial period. Too often, access to these works is limited by outdated archiving practices, the fragility of the materials, or a history of scholarly disinterest .¹ This critical anthology seeks to address these problems in two ways: (1) by bringing together texts and images that reflect the wide range of “literacies ” that represent the authorship of Algonquian peoples in southern New . Until relatively recently, important sources of Native writing, such as the marginalia in Indian Bibles, were liable to be viewed, at best, as unimportant or, at worst, as graffiti whose presence lowered the value of rare books. Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon, editors of Native Writings in Massachusetts, write, “In spite of the occasional attention that the Massachusett documents had received . . . knowledge of their existence remained vague and incomplete and was confined to a few 2 · Introduction England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and (2) by including brief explorations of the primary texts to help close the critical gap between these resources and the contemporary reader. Thus, signatures, wills, baskets, pictographs, petitions, confessions, and sermons are paired with short essays that provide the contextual material through which they can be understood as markers of literacy in colonial New England. The focus of this collection is the range of materials through which Algonquian individuals and communities in southern New England up to roughly the year 1800 expressed their identity in a colonial context.Algonquian is a (primarily linguistic) term that is understood to include Algonquian-language speakers with similar cultural backgrounds who lived along the eastern seaboard of the United States: For our purposes, we focus on the region that stretches from what we now know as Massachusetts to Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island—an area that includes the Pawtucket, Massachusett, Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, Narragansett, Pokanoket, Niantic, Mohegan, Pequot, Mahican, Montaukett, and Wampanoag people. New England in the colonial period referred to the four colonies (Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven) brought together in a loose coalition by the Articles of Confederation in 1643. By the eighteenth century, Algonquian peoples who lived in this area were often simply called the New England Tribes, a name that recognized both the close interrelations of these tribal groups and their existence as members of a new colonial order. We have narrowed this anthology geographically and temporally to enhance coherence of the materials and to explore the richness and variety of a group of interconnected Native cultures often flattened into a stereotype of “Indianness .” We are aware that our decision to limit the materials in this way emphasizes a colonial historical narrative, reflecting the colonizers’ idea of “New England” rather than the Native residents’ cartography. Nonetheless, we hope that our efforts will serve as a useful corrective to colonial literary histories that have...

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