The Good News in Print and Image: Catholic Evangeliteracy in Native America

Abstract

In the comparative study of New World colonialism and the culture of writing, I am interested in how Christian missionaries?especially Roman Catholics? employed writing in their evangelism, and how the Indians of the Americas have responded?primarily within the regions now controlled by the United States. How important was literacy in the evangelical process and how important in the indigenous reply? One might say that the colonial epoch ended in 1776, or perhaps in 1821, or one might perceive its persistence to the present for these colonialized peoples. There is a colonizing continuum between past and present; therefore, I am looking at five cen turies of evangeliteracy?a word I have coined to indicate that the spreading of the word and the writing of the word have often gone hand in hand. Today a sharp dichotomy is made between cultures of the book (evolved from religions of the Book) and Native American understandings of land1; indeed, one critic calls Western culture in America one big paper chase.2 In 1969 Lakota the ologian Vine Deloria, Jr., provided rhetorical flourish to this distinction: It has been said of missionaries that when they arrived they had only the Book and we had the land; now we have the Book and they have the land.3