Indigenous Cosmopolitics and English Literacy in the Pacific Northwest

Abstract

ABSTRACTWestern ideologies of literacy continue to affect outsiders’ understanding of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. The acquisition of print literacy and even the Christian beliefs of the main literacy teachers – missionaries – did not, in fact, assimilate Indigenous people in the ways the ideology promised. They have their own uses for and theories of literacy. As they combine two worlds and two powers – that of literacy and modernity and that of tradition and nature – they engage in what has been called cosmopolitics. However, early signs of this activity were erased by anthropologists who defined authentic stories as pre-contact and often filtered out signs of modernity, literacy, English language knowledge, and any content likely to offend their readers. However, a few seriously inauthentic early stories which explain Indigenous understandings of the centrality of ‘paper’ for colonial rule made it into print, and these stories are now being used to revitalise oral cultures. Western ideas about literacy and authenticity absorbed by contemporary non-Indigenous scholars and our ‘expert’ literacy skills continue to make it difficult for us to understand oral stories, even those about literacy aimed directly at us.