The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (review)

Matt Cohen explores New England “communications” in the very early years before the printing press was established in Cambridge in 1638 and he pushes well beyond printed sources, using “traps, paths, wampum, monuments, medical rituals, and other messaging systems” (4) as his central texts. He argues against the dominant paradigm of oral versus literate when describing Native and European communications systems, and suggests that everyone struggled to understand everyone else in a dizzying “multimedia combat”: “If Natives and English were both oral and inscribing peoples, then they constituted each others’ audiences in ways scholars have only begun to consider” (2). Drawing on thick literary criticism, the history of the book, and Native American studies, Cohen questions the methodologies of each of those fields. The book’s essential structure is built on the “publication event,” defined as an “embodied act of information exchange” where the “participants are aware that the act of communication is intended” and both Native and European audiences performed and mattered (7–10). Cohen offers a close reading of four publication events, all of which are iconic episodes in early American history and well known among scholars in the field: Thomas Morton’s maypole, Massasoit’s constipation, Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America, and the Pequot War. While the primary action of these events occurred centuries ago, Cohen argues that our understanding of them is inextricably informed by texts written about them, and by modern controversies over gaming, land claims, and tribal recognition. He also explores “the role of academic authority in speaking about shared American pasts,” as scholars leave the ivory tower to sit in the witness box as “experts” during modern court debates about Native identities (28).

The book’s strengths lie in Cohen’s very close reading of certain events of the early colonial past. Morton’s Maypole becomes more than a fun-loving challenge to stereotypically prudish Puritans, and instead Cohen invites readers to see posture, poetry, political challenge, and multivalent audience interpretations wrapped around that pole. The slips of paper may have been English, but the buckhorns were Algonquian, and Morton may not have been thumbing his nose at the colonial established power as much as he was trying to claim it. Cohen’s sources are a powerful challenge to the once-dominant idea that historians lacked evidence for native history: local herbs, the tonic that Winslow made and Massasoit drank, the animal dung, Massasoit’s body (and feces), Markham’s The English Huswife, Winslow’s dead duck, Massasoit’s practical joke, and Good News from New-England all serve as texts in the second publication event.

Cohen offers some lovely methodological reminders. The minds of the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers are nearly as unintelligible to modern scholars as the Native Americans, pun on Perry Miller fully intended. The printing history of texts is crucial, for example, Morton’s text was printed in Holland, which gave it “a dissenting vibe” (52). Cohen is really at his strongest when diving into text history: the link between New English Canaan, the tulip, gardening books, marginalia, and the sexuality of hybridization is intriguing. The chapter devoted to Williams’s Key into the Language of America offers a powerful reading of this seminal text in early American Native studies; Cohen suggests that when Williams depicted the Narragansetts, “he attended both to how they moved through the forests and to the practices they used to convey, remember, and parse information” (94). Cohen reminds us that Williams physically walked the hardened dirt paths he describes, and that these paths were spiritual for Williams, but also displayed “ad hoc networks, invisible to the settlers, available to Natives …” (103). The ability of Natives to manipulate speech and sound to unsettle the Europeans highlights “the adaptability of Native information architectures” as “particularly crafty in episodes of international conflict” (113). Far from seeking European technologies, Native systems disrupted them. Williams’s reading habit, his attention to page layout, and marginalia figure...