The Wampanoag Word: John Eliot’s Indian Grammar, the Vernacular Rebellion, and the Elegancies of Native Speech

In the 1640s, God began to speak Wampanoag.¹ He formed his first words in the new tongue when John Eliot in his early years as Puritan missionary of Massachusetts Bay started translating Christian doctrine into the native language of southeastern New England. Yet aside from such divine polyglossia, the linguistic richness of Native American speech from this world at the back of beyond had not even dawned on European minds. One of the first Eliot tracts reporting on the progress of Indian mission contains an exquisite metareflection on the ontology of Native American language and the power of speaking to God in that tongue. The tract details John Eliot’s encounter with the Indian leader Waban in October 1649 and some of the questions the Puritan minister was asked by prospective Indian converts. A Nipmuk man tells Eliot a story about praying in his wigwam, in which another man of his tribe interrupts him and says:

that hee prayed in vaine, because Jesus Christ understood not what Indians speake in prayer[.] [H]e had bin used to heare English man pray and so could well enough understand them, but Indian language in prayer … he was not acquainted with it, but was a stranger to it and therefore could not understand them. His question therefore was, whether Jesus Christ did understand, or God did understand Indian prayers.

(Clark 85)²

Here, a native gives voice to the vexed status of Indian tongues: the contested value, that is, of vernacular New World languages and their ability to communicate spiritual truth. Introduced in studied casualness, the dialogue takes us to the very core of colonial language politics. Explicitly, the scene addresses native concerns: could the God of the English understand prayers in Wampanoag? More directly perhaps, the scene articulates lingering apprehensions of Eliot’s English audience. Could the locutions of “savage barbarians,” as Governor William Bradford put it in Of Plymouth Plantation (31), render the complexities of Christian faith? Which is to say: could God really speak in Wampanoag? Questions of language engrossed Eliot’s generation on both sides of the Atlantic. The seventeenth century was a period acutely attuned to issues of speech, linguistic diversity, and the discursive foundations of spiritual legitimacy. As over ten thousand novel words flooded into English, freshly coined and borrowed from afar, lexicographers and grammarians busily charted the standard of the nation’s vernacular.³ It is within this larger context that Eliot answers the Nipmuk’s query about whether God was familiar with Indian tongues or if they “prayed in vaine.” Citing divine omniscience, Eliot’s response accommodates conflicting linguistic orders, pagan and English, within a single Christian universe of discourse. “If he [God] made them both [English and Indian],” Eliot sermonizes, “then hee knew all that was within man and came from man, all his desires, and all his thoughts, and all his speeches, and so all his prayers, and if hee made Indian men, then hee knows all Indian prayers also” (Clark 85). The creator who made all things supposedly understands all tongues.

Eliot’s response argues for linguistic equality between the Old and New Worlds and between radically different verbal practices. By and large, however, scholars have assumed that European settlers never contemplated such a possibility for equality. Native Americans, so the received opinion of the encounter goes, were imagined as either lacking language or as prattling in heavily corrupted tongues. In Learning to Curse, Stephen Greenblatt famously theorized this paradigm as “linguistic colonialism” (17). Here the usurped Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who could only “gabble like a thing most brutish” (3066), stands for the European denigration of indigenous tongues. But might it be that we all too quickly generalize this model of linguistic imperialism? This essay seeks to rattle Caliban’s imperial prison house of language and focuses on Protestant Anglo-American renderings of native speech and their transatlantic traditions between 1640 and 1670.

While Caliban has served as a powerful model feeding the lively current of postcolonial studies on the polemics of exploitation, racism, and...