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

Prologue

( 1 ) Prologue sometime between 1838 and 1841 in rome, a young Native American man worked patiently on a manuscript entitled “Conversión de los Luiseños de Alta California.” The story was part of an assignment he had been given by his teacher, Giuseppe Caspar Mezzon Fanti (1774–1849), chief custodian of the Vatican Library. The young man, Pablo Tac (1822–41), was studying at the Urban College after having been taken from his California homeland in 1832. Tac’s manuscript, written in Spanish, tells the story of his people, known in their own language as the Quechnajuichom. Although intended for a European audience, the central story of the author’s conversion at times gives way to the sentiments of a seventeen-year-old whose pride in his tribal community equals his sense of duty to his new overseers. After two paragraphs of mission history,Tac launches into a description of his community’s most fearsome enemies, the Quichamcauchom (Kumeyaay)—their surprise attacks and their war regalia and weaponry. In the end, his nation turns to the Spanish for protection, and—as Tac approvingly relates—“merciful God freed us of these miseries through Father Antonio Peyri, a Catalan.”¹ Tac’s little-known manuscript is interesting for many reasons. For one, it voices resistance even as it celebrates Christian conversion. In the paragraph after his panegyric to Father Peyri, Tac relates how his tribal leader, upon first meeting the Spaniards, challenged them, “What is it you seek? Get out of our Country,”² thus undercutting the triumphant tale of conversion. For another,it is but one of hundreds of such manuscripts produced by the Native peoples of North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that scholars have yet to explore for the richness and variety of American Indian interactions with alphabetic literacy,manuscripts,and print during the period. Tac’s manuscript features not only an alphabetically literate Luiseño man’s narrative but also his drawings. At one point when describing a tribal dance, he produces an image of Luiseño ceremonial life that is striking for its immediacy (figure 1). The “Indians” in this sketch are not seen through an ( 2 ) Prologue outsider’s ethnographic gaze. They evoke no stereotypical stoicism, no demonic irrationality. They appear happy, dancing with the joy that ceremony and celebration bring to those who commune together in such dances. Thirty years later, another group of American Indians was offered help by the representative of another non-Indian group, this time in the form of lined ledger books and colored pencils.The man offering them was a prison warden, Colonel Richard Pratt.It was 1875,and the men,mostly Cheyenne and Kiowa warriors, were serving extended sentences in a special prison at Fort Marion, Florida. The colonel believed that the paper and pencils might help raise his prisoners’self-esteem. Perhaps their drawings could even be sold as souvenirs to help defray the cost of their upkeep. Although the beautiful drawings of the Fort Marion prisoners have been studied for some time, they have rarely been examined in light of their portrayal of yet another American Indian community coming to terms with the book—not the book-as-Bible, emphasized in so much of the scholarship of Native life during the period—but the “blank book.” These ledger books were printed and bound codices intended for business record keeping and personal journal writing. Viewed from the perspective of book history, these warriors created not only what has come to be known as “ledger art,” a term that refers to the transfer to bound blank books of traditional Plains pictorial art, but also a place for books in a Plains society that had never had a need for them before. Figure 1. Pablo Tac, “Luiseño Dancers,” in his “Conversión de los Luiseños de Alta California” (ca. 1838–41). Courtesy of Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library. Prologue ( 3 ) The cover illustration of one such book, captured by American troops from Cheyenne leader Dull Knife’s village in 1876, speaks volumes about the complex cultural dynamics at play in the use of books in Indian Country (figure 2).Two stock figures from American nineteenth-century popular culture, the frontiersman and the African bondsman, dramatize the blank book’s place in the colonization of America.The backwoods teacher points to a printed map on the wall, while a printed book lies casually on...