Native Women Writing: Reading Between the Lines

As we celebrate Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature on this its twenty-fifth anniversary, we would do well to note what is still absent, as well as what is present, despite the very best efforts of scholars in women's studies. As others in this issue of TSWL so aptly point out, not only through their scholarship but also in their lived experiences in the academy of the last twenty-five years, women's studies as a field has variously inspired, enraged, ignored, and celebrated women of color as historical presences as well as living, active members of the academy today. Through my scholarship on colonial Native literature and literacy, I have struggled to articulate and respond to the issues that others in this journal have eloquently documented, particularly the place of women's texts in the larger story of literary production. My own contribution to this ongoing debate is modest: it is perhaps better defined as the story of what I have missed than what I have uncovered. However, I hope that my work on early Native women's fraught connection to textuality has something to contribute to women's studies more generally.

My investigation of Native women's writing started as a small piece of a larger project on narratives of Native education in colonial America. "It will be fun," I thought—nobody's really done much with this before. My early assessment of how this would turn out was certainly naive—it has been frustrating, fascinating, always stimulating, and often poignantly charged with a sense of loss and heartache. It is also increasingly clear why nobody has done much with this topic before: there simply isn't much writing by Native women to examine. My focus is on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England where, conventional wisdom suggests, the investment in literacy was higher than elsewhere. My terms are admittedly limiting: I'm looking specifically for documents written in the hand of and authored by Native women; this is a particular form of English literacy that marks its participants as members of a rapidly growing colonial world. This restrictive delineation of my project eliminates rich documents like "as told to" reports, petitions attributed to women but written by a scribe, and oral court testimony by women. It also excludes indigenous forms of communication like wampum belts, basketry, weaving, and other crafts. These are rich sources of information, and they perform some of the functions of writing, such as recording events and relating messages, but they hold an entirely different kind of cultural position than do the words Native women themselves have written with pen, ink, paper, and, most importantly, access to the conventions of English literacy. While my work and that of others have begun to uncover the rich archive of Native women's material production beyond the written word, I still believe that attention to the problem and promise of English literacy has much to tell us. What I outline in this essay is a series of speculations about Native American women's writing during the colonial period that are informed by recent work in women's studies and the recovery of texts by underrepresented women in particular. What these speculations offer, I hope, is some sense of not only what is lost but also what we might find if we consider women's textual production in terms of conventional notions of literacy, textuality, and voice.

Access to English literacy was no small matter for early Native Americans; from the earliest missionary campaigns of John Eliot and his colleague Thomas Mayhew in 1646 to Eleazar Wheelock's Charity school of the 1760s, the goal was (famously) to "reduce [the Indians] to civility." The thinking was that, having shed their chaotic and prideful Native ways, Indians would be ready to accept Christianity.¹ The acquisition of literacy was, at least in the minds of the missionaries involved, central to the conversion of Indians and to the cultivation of the American wilderness in which they dwelt.

The general interest in education combined with the missionary policy of spreading literacy would seem to provide...