Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906
304
Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906
304eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
By the 1820s, Cherokees had perfected a system for writing their language—the syllabary created by Sequoyah—and in a short time taught it to virtually all their citizens. Recognizing the need to master the language of the dominant society, the Cherokee Nation also developed a superior public school system that taught students in English. The result was a literate population, most of whom could read the Cherokee Phoenix, the tribal newspaper founded in 1828 and published in both Cherokee and English.
English literacy allowed Cherokee leaders to deal with the white power structure on their own terms: Cherokees wrote legal briefs, challenged members of Congress and the executive branch, and bargained for their tribe as white interests sought to take their land and end their autonomy. In addition, many Cherokee poets, fiction writers, essayists, and journalists published extensively after 1850, paving the way for the rich literary tradition that the nation preserves and fosters today.
Literary and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820–1906 takes a fascinating look at how literacy served to unite Cherokees during a critical moment in their national history, and advances our understanding of how literacy has functioned as a tool of sovereignty among Native peoples, both historically and today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806151243 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 11/04/2013 |
| Series: | American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series , #58 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820â"1906
By James W. Parins
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5124-3
CHAPTER 1
WRITING IN EARLY AMERICA
Humankind's decision to inscribe speech so that a more or less permanent record was created was not a one-time event whose ramifications later spread around the globe. However, various claims have been made for the birth of writing (using several definitions of the technology), including a recent assertion that the alphabet that led to Semitic writing was invented by the Canaanites in the nineteenth century BCE; most of these theories on the genesis of alphabets in the Middle East agree that writing was a refinement of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Early writing took many forms: letters or symbols carved on rocks, painted on walls, indited in ink on papyrus, or pressed into clay tablets using wedge-shaped tools.
In Mesoamerica, scholars have long focused on Native arithmetic systems, especially as they relate to calendars and maps. In the past two decades, however, archaeologists have discovered tablets, walls, and other stone surfaces inscribed with figures that appear to be more than ornamental. Examination of patterns in the figures has led linguists to conclude that these figures represent syllables in various languages from the region that relate the histories of these civilizations. Many of the cultures of the region shared some common symbols that later became the basis for writing. The Olmecs used these symbols to create texts early on, according to the scholarship done in the 1990s and early 2000s based on artifacts. In particular, a small stone tablet called the Cascajal block contains a text dating to between 1000 and 800 BCE. Before 300 CE, the Zapotecs and Mayas developed Mesoamerican writing systems that followed the general outline of the early Olmec writing. Later, down to the year 1500CE, writing systems appeared among other peoples, all based on the earlier patterns. Mayan writing, which lasted until around 1700 CE, has been especially studied and is very rich. It consists of a full set of phonetic signs that represent all possible sounds of the language, long passages that represent linguistic units such as nouns and verbs, and units that represent actions and ideas, that is, clauses and phrases. This system allowed Mesoamericans to create syllabaries for their various languages, a departure from the alphabetic approach favored among Middle Eastern peoples.
After the Spanish conquest, the new rulers regarded the Native texts as "pagan" and ordered their destruction, except for a few works that they considered valuable for the administration of the subjected peoples. These preserved examples of Native writing were often accompanied by glosses in Spanish. Native scribes were taught the Spanish language and the roman alphabet and began to write their languages in the new orthographic system of their conquerors. In this way, although the ancient method of writing was lost, creation and other myths, poetry, and religious texts were preserved. In time, the nation-states that grew out of the Spanish colonies became so assimilated that they emphasized their Spanish rather than their Indian traditions. Still, many of the people remained close to their roots and preserved their languages and traditions. In the 1990s, there was a revival of Mayan culture, including interest in and study of the ancient writing.
Among Mesoamericans after the Spanish invasions, the written word took on a cultural importance that portended Cherokee strategies later. The Spanish policy of putting an end to "pagan" practices did much to obliterate the Native cultures. Rituals were forbidden, including the singing of hymns and observances of recurring days of devotion. David Tavárez, however, reports that among the Zapotecs of northern Oaxala, tribal intellectuals appropriated some European literary practices, as well as characters from the Latin alphabet, to create an alphabetic representation of the Zapotec 260-day religious calendar and thus preserved important aspects of the Native culture. These calendars were distributed among Zapotec settlements and used as guides by their leaders. This operation presupposes literacy among these people, albeit only among the intellectual elite. Nonetheless, the calendars demonstrate that the Zapotecs understood the power and efficiency of the written word.
The Mayans of the Yucatán Peninsula had an elaborate system of writing in their language before the Spanish invasion. But like the Cherokees later, the Natives also saw the merit of adopting the conqueror's writing methods, and so in addition to their traditional symbolic system, the Mayans developed alphabetic literacy like that of the Spanish as early as 1570. Moreover, as John F. Chuckiak IV has pointed out, the Mayan intellectual elite used these systems vigorously, compiling libraries in both symbolic and alphabetic characters. It is especially interesting that the Native people resisted their conquerors by using written words both to communicate in armed rebellions and to carry out surreptitious activities against the Spanish.
According to the noted linguist James Constantine Pilling, the study of Native American languages by whites seems to have begun in 1545 with the compilation of a Huron vocabulary by Jacques Cartier in Canada. Around the same time in Mexico, the Spanish were furnishing paper to the Aztecs on which older Native texts were transcribed that served as property records. Scientists surmise that these older texts had been written on bark, leather, or cloth and had used symbols—for example, hearts, arms, arrows, and bones—to accompany drawings of land plots.
In North America, some early attempts to write the Indian languages found there began in the seventeenth century. Many of the Christian missionaries who approached the Native tribes in North America, including the Cherokees, were eager to learn the native languages in order to preach the gospel in the vernacular. The Massachusetts language was written from the 1660s through the 1750s, when it apparently became extinct. John Eliot's Bible was written in an alphabetically rendered form of Algonquin dialect used as a trading language. These documents were produced by Christian Indians in the "praying towns" among the Massachusetts, Narragansetts, and Wampanoags in the present-day northeastern United States. Native ministers or elders taught reading and writing in the Native languages until the mid-eighteenth century, when they were replaced by white missionaries who taught in English. The Massachusetts speakers who produced these early documents learned their orthography from John Eliot and his associates. The documents consist largely of records of the praying towns. The Mahican language was written in orthographies that were invented by the missionaries and were based on English in the Stockbridge missions and on German in the Moravian missions. The younger Jonathan Edwards wrote in Stockbridge after moving there at age six in 1751. Natives John Quinney and Hendrick Aupaumut translated the Congregational Assembly's Shorter Catechism into Mahican in the early nineteenth century, and other writings in Mahican were produced in both German and English orthographies.
The English were not the only missionaries interested in bringing the word of God in print to the Indians in North America. Early on, the French learned Native languages to aid them in governing the Indians and to allow the priests to proselytize them. Expertise in the indigenous languages was also provided by intermarried couples, who were widespread in New France but unusual in the English-speaking colonies. Catholics early introduced presses for printing religious texts in Canada and the Great Lakes areas.
A number of missionaries invented written forms of Native languages based on the roman alphabet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, relying on Native aides when they had difficulties with the languages. Asher Wright printed an astounding number of his own texts in Iroquois dialects in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Henry Spaulding produced texts among the tribes of the Columbia River valley a little later. Linguist John Pickering sought a way to bring the various orthographies together, and in 1820 he published his influential Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America. His system was embraced by many of the mission societies because it allowed printing in the roman alphabet and negated the need to have expensive special type cast for each language. The missionary societies, working with Pickering and other linguists, devoted much time and energy to constructing a universal orthography that might be used for all of the Native peoples' languages, but although Pickering's orthography was modified for use in a number of languages, it by no means fit all Indian languages and was not as widely used as expected because of the variety of sounds in unrelated languages. Although publications in Native languages reached some of the people, they still required the teaching of alphabets and their corresponding sounds and demonstration of how they related to the spoken language. In time, educators began to have some success in teaching English, and once more uniform curricula and government schools were introduced, use of Native languages was discouraged.
With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the number of missionaries in North America increased for two reasons. First, a vast territory was now rid of domination by Catholic, non-English-speaking European nations and became open to missionary efforts that grew out of the United Kingdom. Second, the purchase coincided with the U.S. government's civilization policy, which sought to bring education and the word of the Christian God to all the Native peoples within the boundaries of the United States. The missionary societies that had organized to bring their religion to the "benighted" non-European peoples of the world were, by nature, evangelistic; that is, their doctrinal reliance on the word of God as revealed in the Bible led them to promote literacy so that their audiences could read the scriptures. They were aided in this effort around the beginning of the nineteenth century by technological advances in printing; presses had become power driven and designed for countless repeated operations, which made them much less labor intensive and faster and increased their productivity exponentially over that of hand presses. Other printing advances followed, including the use of stereotype, which eliminated much of the tedious typesetting work for long runs of publications, such as pages from the Bible. At the same time, advances in paper chemistry led to the introduction of cheaper, wood-based paper. The impetus for literacy and the availability of cheap reading materials allowed the missionaries to bring their efforts to the "foreign" missions, including the Native populations of North America.
The missionaries' campaign to bring literacy and printed materials to Indian country was supported to a great extent by their sponsoring agencies, such as the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, a Congregationalist/Presbyterian organization, and similar groups among the Baptists, Moravians, and Methodists. These governing boards, in turn, were supported in their printing efforts by two influential organizations, the American Bible Society, founded in 1816, and the American Tract Society, founded in 1825. Although their aim was to bring affordable religious texts to all Americans, they had a significant effect particularly on Indian communities through their production and distribution of free or cheap materials. They were especially appreciated by missionaries who lacked the means to print their own Bibles, hymnals, and catechisms. All these factors were to influence Native literacy, writing, and the use of indigenous languages.
The study of linguistics was a popular but highly speculative undertaking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Part of the attraction of these studies was the common belief that languages of "primitive" humans were by definition less developed and therefore simpler and easier to learn than the "civilized" languages. Serious linguists, of course, soon discovered the highly intricate and heavily nuanced nature of most of the North American languages and gave them the scholarly attention and respect they deserved. However, the field was riddled with pretenders, often clerics who knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew but had little other linguistic acumen. Europeans, many of whom never left their home continent, made various attempts to learn North American languages. Missionaries and other visitors to the tribes attempted to develop vocabularies and to publish translated word lists, using various Native informants. By modern standards, these publications were inaccurate to varying degrees, but this fact did not deter scholars, albeit mostly amateur ones, from creating highly speculative theories. One of the most prevalent of these speculations involved using Native languages, even though they were understood imperfectly, at best, to prove that the Indian nations were the biblical lost tribes of Israel. In some cases involving faux linguists and "antiquarians," linguistic hoaxes were manufactured that lived on for years. The most famous of these was the Walum Olum affair.
A self-styled antiquarian, Constantin Samuel Refinesque, allegedly translated some Lenni Lenape texts from birch-bark and cedar tablets around 1830. This translation was published as Walum Olum shortly after it was produced and has remained in print ever since, despite the fact that the translator had little experience with language and was a naturalist, trained in zoology, botany, and meteorology. Once revered as a sacred religious text from the Delaware Nation's ancient past, it purported to present the tribe's creation story, its account of an ancient flood, and other historical and religious texts. Although Refinesque's work aroused some suspicion in later years, no one undertook a detailed analysis until David M. Oestreicher's work in the 1990s. Oestricher found that Refinesque translated his own English text into Delaware using word lists that had been in print in 1830. Although it was used for years to demonstrate Lenni Lenape writing, Walum Olum is today considered a fraud because Oestreicher's work has been corroborated by other authorities.
Some credence was given to Refinesque's claims because Native Americans of North America have been keeping birch-bark scrolls for centuries, according to Indian reporters and contemporary white observers. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft reported that the Mide societies, which were the caretakers of traditional beliefs and history among the Ojibwe people, used scrolls containing pictographs and cryptic symbols. Schoolcraft's informant, his wife, Jane Johnston, was an unusually accurate historian of her people, and the pair's assertions have been corroborated by later scholars. Obviously, these scrolls constitute texts employing writing known to those for whom the texts were created, and they were most likely passed down by the Midewewin, members of the Mide, from generation to generation as a means of preserving ancient knowledge. However, the writing systems used by the Ojibwe secret societies today are probably not shared with all members of the community. This practice differs from that of early European societies in which the priests and nobility withheld writing from the general population in that modern Ojibwes have other means of written communication.
An interesting topic in relation to writing in the Sequoyan syllabary within the context of earlier Native writing systems is the initial insistence of officials, missionaries, and white linguists (as well as a number of assimilated Indians with classical educations) on writing the Native language using various orthographies, that is, using alphabets, rather than attempting to invent syllabaries that would reproduce the sounds of speech. The whites and their converts were steeped in "Western" systems of writing, including Middle Eastern, Greek, and roman alphabets, and so were reluctant to abandon that methodology in favor of what they considered a less elegant or more "uncivilized" mode of expression, the syllabary. This partially explains the initial opposition to Sequoyah's work and the efforts of John Pickering and others to develop orthographies for Native languages. However, the tradition of using syllabaries, as we have seen, lies deep in Native American history and learning. One of the major reasons for this tradition is the rapidity and ease with which any syllabary can be put to use. Once native speakers learn the relatively few (as opposed to, say, Chinese) symbols, they can read and write perfectly. Thus this system is extremely efficient in comparison with any system employing an alphabet. In the latter approach, the native speaker must learn the alphabet and its corresponding sounds, then learn to form words from combining these orthographic figures, and then, after years of study, become more and more proficient. Cherokees, on the other hand, learned to read and write in a matter of weeks or even days. Missionaries who were not native speakers of Cherokee did not share this advantage, however, and took the course that was easier for them than for the beginning reader. Moreover, these advantages were lost, for the most part, on missionaries and linguists, steeped in centuries of their own traditions. The adoption of an orthographic system over a syllabic one became an ethnic prejudice rather than an intellectual preference.
Sequoyah, however, was not hampered by preconceived ideas. His task, as he saw it, was to provide the sounds of his language with symbols, thus enabling it to be written down and read by any speaker who had memorized the symbols corresponding to the sounds. With this system, the process of learning to read and write took a very short time and in this regard was superior to the European and Middle Eastern models.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820â"1906 by James W. Parins. Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Writing in Early America,
2. Literacy in the Cherokee Nation,
3. The Cherokee Phoenix,
4. Education after Removal,
5. The Cherokee Language and the Sequoyan Syllabary,
6. The Cherokee Advocate and Other Indian Newspapers,
7. Four Cherokee Writers,
8. Political Writers and Feuders,
9. A Steady Stream of Cherokee Writers,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,