Early Native American Writing

Abstract

The earliest known document by a Native American employing western notions of literacy in North America is a 1663 letter written in Latin by the Wampanoag, Caleb Cheeshateaumauk. When I tell people this they hardly know what to make of it. Native peoples in the seventeenth century are supposed to be sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with Pilgrims or raiding unsuspecting frontier villages, not corresponding with Puritans in arcane scholarly languages. The phrase itself, “early Native American writing,” must strike many as an oxymoron, an inherent contradiction in terms, given that America’s indigenous peoples are largely assumed to have been primarily oral cultures standing in fast resistance to the forces of western civilization. While such an assumption is not entirely incorrect, it simplifies the dynamics of colonization in ways that are highly beneficial to the colonizer. Cheeshateaumauk’s seemingly paradoxical document opens a path into a much richer and possibly revolutionary understanding of America’s early colonial and precolonial history – one in which Native people write.