Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880

Epilogue: The View from Red Cloud’s Grave

( 223 ) Epilogue the view from red cloud’s grave the preceding chapters have argued that books and writing played constitutive roles in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tribal communities. From the northeastern woodlands to the Great Plains, alphabetic literacy and printed books became integral elements in emergent,transitional cultural formations for indigenous nations threatened by European imperialism. From the 1660s, when John Eliot successfully petitioned the English government to support a Native-language literacy enterprise in New England, through the development of modern publishing practices such as stereotype printing , proprietary authorship, and reprinting, Native peoples approached the coming of books as both opportunity and threat, engaging them in countless different ways. I have arrived at this conclusion by applying interpretive techniques drawn from American Indian literary nationalist criticism and book studies to the manuscript and print practices of tribal communities across Indian Country during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the perspective of the history of the book, the book practices I have uncovered reaffirm that Native textuality “cannot be understood except as a phenomenal event.” Although books were material objects in the imperial nexus, they entailed a “set of events, a point in time (or a moment in space) where certain communicative interchanges [were] being practiced.”¹ Such events are understandable only within the context of the Native communities where they were produced and consumed and thus where they gained meaning.However much the subscribers to missionary journals like the Panoplist wished to believe in the ideology of book conquest, Native peoples clearly had other ideas. Thus my study of the production of alphabetic literacy and book objects in Indian Country has ( 224 ) Epilogue reaffirmed a central premise of book studies—that reading is fundamentally a culturally specific “act of construction.”² From the point of view of tribally centered, “nationalist” literary studies, print and manuscript books have provided essential “opportunities” for many Native peoples. The “acts of construction” that these texts have involved have never replaced cultural traditions but have merely supplemented them. In the process, they enabled many tribal communities to establish new kinds of “publics,” discursive spaces made up of communicative practices and modes of social governance that helped them resist and regroup after forced removal, prohibition of religious practices, erasure of language, and genocidal warfare. Yet, as we have seen in the many case studies outlined above, each of these book practices imposed its own set of stresses on the community. More often than not, Native nations were brought to the brink of civil war by the factionalism involved in the construction of new public cultures. My study concludes in the 1880s because that was the decade that saw both the infrastructure and the ideology of print culture established in enough tribal communities to support a new generation of Native writers and alphabetically literate activists. In their interactions with the federal government and the Euro-American literary establishment, these writers and activists would engage in the cultural formations and material practices that have been handed down to the American Indian intellectuals of today. By the end of the nineteenth century, a Native-run printing press operating on the Ojibwe reservation near Hagersville,Ontario,proudly printed an ad in its newspaper,the Indian: “Job printing on the reserves!”³ In 1918, Garnett Mosley, a Chickasaw student from Bromide, Oklahoma, wrote a valedictory essay for the Indian School Journal, the official publication of the Chilocco Indian School, entitled “Why I Am a Printer.” Mosley celebrates his “important vocation” as ranking “fifth in the United States” for an emerging middle class. Printing gave Mosley not only a lucrative career but also an art. “I am proud to be called a printer,” Mosley wrote, “because I believe it is the greatest mechanical art of the age.” Sounding very much like Elias Boudinot nearly a century earlier , Mosley invoked the powerful liberalizing influence of print in the public sphere: “The truths that pass through the printing press can almost never be lost.”⁴ At the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Potawatomi storyteller Simon Pokegon famously distributed a birch-bark codex, The Red Man’s Rebuke, to interested attendees. The book’s contents, a scathing critique of the “disappearing Indian” motif so common in American literature and even Epilogue ( 225 ) in some of the Exposition’s exhibits, was tempered by its birch-bark covers , which seemed to hark back to earlier times, and marked the book as both...