Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation by Sarah Rivett (review)

European colonization of North America employed many tactics, including the devaluation and eradication of Indigenous languages. Yet, as Sarah Rivett underscores in the opening pages of her erudite new book Unscripted America, “Indigenous tongues were not simply erased; they were also preserved” (16). Her study recounts the seemingly paradoxical history of language preservation as a strategy of erasure while also seeking to recognize the ways that the “untranslatable aspects of indigenous languages have a disruptive impact on universal truths of either Scripture or Enlightened taxonomies” (11). Colonists’ prolonged immersion in the radically alternative cosmologies apparent in Indigenous languages troubled their beliefs about language, history, place, and culture, and forced white missionaries and natural philosophers to navigate thorny questions about how to translate words and concepts in the absence of established guidance and direct correlation.

The introduction presents Rivett’s argument, methodology, and key terms, and then previews the remainder of the book. To make her case and focus her narrative, Rivett homes in on the northeastern portion of North America from roughly the seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth. This scope builds on her expertise in Protestant theologies, Enlightenment empiricisms, and early New England missions—as showcased in her first book, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Omohundro, 2011)—and enfolds the French, British, and US colonization of Native nations speaking Iroquioan and Algonquian dialects like Mohawk, Wôpanâak, and Lenape. Her methodology, therefore, is explicitly comparative, which here means between Franco-Catholic and Anglo-Protestant practices. She contends that despite “[d]ifferences of theology, colonialism, and imperialism,” “the outcome—specifically the challenges that the untranslatable phrase or concept presented to Christian and Enlightenment universals—was largely commensurate across national and linguistic borders” (6). Because her study ranges across travel narratives, theological and philosophical treatises, natural histories, vocabularies, dictionaries, hymnals, catechisms, novels, and more—many of which are printed, some of which are in manuscript—her conclusions emerge from a substantial and impressive collection of colonialist writing.

The first six chapters address the linguistic discoveries and analyses of temporally coterminus Catholic and Protestant missionizations and demonstrate how they progress more or less in concert. First-generation colonists like Paul Le Jeune in New France with the Montagnais and Roger Williams in New England with the Narragansetts learned Indigenous languages and produced vocabularies and catechisms for white missionaries in order to abet Native proselytization. Then, colonists such as Chrestien Le Clerq (who developed an ideogrammatic system to write Mi’kmaq) and John Eliot (who shepherded the printing of the Bible and other texts in Wôpanâak) promoted the generation of Christian books for Indigenous use and for Europeans interested in linguistics and theology. By mastering and scripting Indigenous languages, white linguists could strip them of their supposed savagery and provide Europeans with the materials to access again the divine truths and origins contained in language but lost, so it was thought, with the Tower of Babel. Third-generation missionaries like Experience Mayhew and Jacques Gravier, who benefited from learning Indigenous languages as children or from their predecessors, shifted away from “attempt[ing] to enfold American Indian languages into Christian cosmologies and scriptural history” (91). Though they contributed to linguistic archives, their interests were often personal, pastoral, and aesthetic, as European scholars on the other side of the Atlantic now understood languages to be autonomous and culturally specific rather than spiritually and historically interconnected. By the early eighteenth century, the European colonial system approached language as part of an interimperial strategy: language was the key to making alliances with Native nations and controlling Indigenous populations inside colonial borders. Missionaries’ knowledge of Indigenous languages served martial and political rivalries because through language one European empire might gain victory over another.

Chapters 5 and 6 delve into this final point. Great Awakening Anglo-Protestants like Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd saw spiritual value in Indigenous languages as tools of conversion and as repositories of imagery and aesthetics that...