Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation by Sean P. Harvey (review)

SEAN P. HARVEY’S Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation features an ambitious title. The book’s contents are no less ambitious, spanning two centuries and investigating the myriad and knotty connections between language and race, science, colonialism and morality. Tracing the co-emergent sciences of biology and linguistics (particularly philology), Harvey points to the ways the study of language shored up essentialist understandings of racial difference in the colonial United States and how, in many cases, language study was used to buttress racist policies of assimilation or removal. The book demonstrates, largely successfully, the philological influences—both reinforcing and destabilizing—on the U.S. colonial project in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Native Tongues begins with the earliest language encounters between Indians and Europeans and chronicles the long and often intricate debates engaged by the most influential language scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with traders and missionaries (and their often divergent means and ends for understanding Native speech), Harvey details hotly contested debates about whether Native languages should be acquired or extinguished, whether they were full languages at all, how Native languages affected Native thought, whether and how to create Native orthographies, and finally whether language could be used as evidence for emerging ideas about racial difference. Alongside this narrative Harvey chronicles the solidification of linguistics as a science: from a necessity for traders and clergy to the pastime of presidents (Thomas Jefferson was one of the most avid early collectors of Native languages) to a discipline with fully fledged practitioners and professional groups by the end of the nineteenth century.

With all these intersecting and entangled narratives, Harvey can hardly be blamed if the book seems sometimes unnecessarily repetitive and at other times circuitous. The confusion is helped along by the book’s organization into chapters that are not strictly chronological, and not strictly thematic, but a bit of an amalgam of both. The net result can be disorienting: amid the details of who influenced whom in budding linguistic circles (not to mention who disagreed fervently) it is sometimes up to the reader to connect the dots between philology, ethnography, and government policy that shape the narrative.

When Harvey does elaborate examples of the direct link between linguistics and U.S. colonialism, the results are often astonishing. The section titled “Federal Philology: Collection and Reservation Consolidation,” for example, details how essentialist language-based theories of the “Indian mind” came to profoundly influence the BIA’s education policy. It details how Henry R. Schoolcraft, author of a multivolume philological text propounding the connection between Indian languages and the savage state of Indian minds, became a superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1839. Under his influence the Bureau began a campaign to extinguish Native languages, and by 1881 it declared that “Native Children had to be compelled to learn English” (180). Philosophical and political shifts like this one can be linked to boarding school programs that aimed at assimilation and the extermination of Native languages.

Probably the book’s most rewarding passages are those that reveal the deeply ambivalent nature of Native language study: the way it not only shored up settler-colonial narratives, but at times undermined them, and the ways Native people themselves sought to enter and deploy language debates. Fascinatingly, for example, some nineteenth-century European philologists insisted that Native languages were essentially unique; that is, they were not related to known European or Asian languages. This essential difference was used as evidence of racial difference and inferiority. At the same moment, Native philologists made nearly precisely the same argument, in order to suggest that their languages were “tied to the American land in a way that colonizers’ tongues could never be,” (163) an argument that resisted removal and confinement on reservations. The book is full of such revelations, which open the door for a richly textured debate about the influence and agency of Native speakers, while continuing to probe...