English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750-1830

Abstract

There are two kinds of Indians in Hilary E. Wyss's narration of native missionary schools in colonial and antebellum America: readerly and writerly. On the one hand, “readerly Indians” represent the missionaries' “gendered fantasy of a passive, docile Native figure” who conform to white norms and expectations (p. 6). “Writerly Indians,” on the other hand, have mastered writing and reading, are “fluent in the cultures and conventions of colonial society,” and exhibit “different notions of Christian experience, political autonomy, and personal identity than what missionaries had assumed” (pp. 6–7). Using this general frame of reference, English Letters and Indian Literacies undertakes a close reading of the sources relating to several key Indian missionary boarding schools (especially the Stockbridge Indian School in Massachusetts; Moor's Indian Charity School and the Cornwall Foreign Mission School in Connecticut; and the Brainerd School in Tennessee) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using literary and material cultural lenses, Wyss intertwines the intentions of white missionaries, the educational curricula of the schools, the experiences of native students, and the tension between native identities and Christian practices and cultural expectations to show how natives took up the “technologies of literacy” to negotiate power in the relatively constrained contexts of Indian boarding schools (p. 4).