John Eliot's Playing Indian

Abstract

ions or absolutes. The acts of Indian performance that grounded mission posed challenge to missions ground: assumption of an originary moment against which all performances be judged real or feigned. I say that this challenge was fundamental because it underlies medium that made mission possible: medium of translation.7 Missionary-authors, it is true, harbored dream of colonial translation identified by Eric Cheyfitz: a universal empire with universal language, involving the obliteration or complete marginalization of difference (122); and toward that end, they leaned heavily on textual forms that cir cumscribed Indian utterance, placing particular emphasis on that favored teaching tool, catechism. Yet for all their desire to nail Indian utterance to point of origin, problematics of translation surface throughout mission literature, calling attention to missionaries' inability to get fix on contexts of Indian performance. Though essential to bearing Christian Word to Indians and Indians' words to Christians, acts of translation through which tracts were forged appear not as This content downloaded from 157.55.39.29 on Tue, 12 Apr 2016 09:24:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 8} EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME 42, NUMBER 1 transparent communications (D. Murray 128) but as tentative, tortured and opaque excursions into murky realm of performed speech. Thus, on one hand, missionaries regularly construe Indian tongues as fugitive and unsettled, hostile to normalization or control. In words of William Leverich, minister inspired by Eliot to proselytize heathen: [T] hough Indian tongue be very difficult, irregular, and anomalous, and wherein I cannot meete with Verbe Substantive as yet, nor any such Particles, as Conjunctions, c more commonly, he emerges as lowly functionary handed an assignment to which he is unequal not so much in flesh as in tongue. For one thing, missionary-authors regularly?and remarkably, given effacement of translation and dialogue (D. Murray 7) in most colonial writings?give notice to Native speakers without whom missions work would not have been possible, in one instance describing their interpreter as one who oftentimes expresse our minds more distinctly then any of us could ([Shepard] 8s).8 For another, Eliot s ability to communicate Gospel truth appears radically circumscribed; on visit to Indians in remote places about Cape Cod? Shepard testifies, wee first found these Indians (not very farre from ours) to understand (but with much difficulty) usuall language of those in our parts_I say there This content downloaded from 157.55.39.29 on Tue, 12 Apr 2016 09:24:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms