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Reviews
BRINGING INDIANS TO THE BOOK
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by Albert Furtwangler
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2005.
Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 238 pages. $22.50 paper. |
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| Besides horses, steel, firearms, and immunity to disease, as Jared Diamond observes in Guns, Germs, and Steel, another advantage that Europeans brought to their conquest of the Western Hemisphere was literacy. Albert Furtwangler applies this idea to early contacts between Pacific Northwest Indians and their nineteenth-century "bookish invaders" (p. 115). He contends that reading and writing created cultures distinctly different from those in which individuals relied on memory and speaking — "a point so obvious or transparent it has easily been ignored" (p. 8). Humans facing each other from opposite sides of this language chasm — whether sea captains, explorers, trading post managers, or missionaries — all experienced confusion, conflict, and collapses for complex reasons that neither side fully understood at the time and that remain elusive even today. |
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Furtwangler begins with Lewis and Clark, who in 1805–1806 came bearing maps, written instructions, books, pen and ink, journals, and diaries. Thirty years later — compelled by a published account about four Nez Perce Indians traveling east supposedly to plead for the Gospel — Jason Lee, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Henry Perkins, Henry Spalding, and Asa Smith, all "badly misled by print" and bearing not only pen, ink, paper, and books but also the Book, arrived in the Pacific Northwest (p. 117). The act of reading had fired the missionaries' zeal to evangelize illiterate Indians into believers, a zeal largely lacking in Lewis and Clark and Hudson's Bay Company employees, for whom exploration and profit were the main goals. "The explicit task of the missions," writes Furtwangler, "was to reach out across this [language] difference and bring the Indians into a new understanding of the universe. But ... the Indians could not hear [mission] literacy any better than [missionaries] could read the Indians' voices" (p. 117). The missions from New England failed. Yet, after their exposure to merchant ships, fur posts, army captains, and Protestant missionaries, all armed with writing, life was never the same for Native peoples. |
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Furtwangler demonstrates how both camps, literate and oral, had advantages and disadvantages. His final fifteen pages provide a valuable analysis of this language quandary. At times, the author's discussion of misguided Protestant missionaries' patriotic expansionism, intolerant ethnocentrism, cruelty, and lack of compassion may seem harsh, yet he successfully evokes sympathy for missionaries as complicated and sincere human beings, "weakened in body and spirit," engaged in an effort that was doomed by their language limitations (p. 114). In this sense, the early Oregon missionaries resembled most people, including us, as they acted out unconscious habits and assumptions. Human limitations of the 1840s persist. The sad story from that time can provide lessons in humility for anyone setting out to save other people in foreign lands. |
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Given its considerable virtues combined with a few instructive shortfalls, this book is a model for demonstrating historical research methods to students. Among Furtwangler's strengths are his persistent self-awareness and self-criticism, his digging into such untapped sources as the life of Margaret Smith Bailey, and his ability to find new meanings in old places. Also valuable is his deft use of anthropology, literature, and linguistics, including critiques of each discipline. Finally, the author takes a sharp look at venerated pioneer missionaries, declining to accept their conventional nobility at face value. |
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Problems and cautions with the book include rather sparse archival citations, insufficient documentation in places, some excessive psychology, and too many long quotations (nearly a quarter of the text). These decisions and judgments by an author are exactly what students — indeed, every alert reader — should be taught to recognize. |
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Our hypothetical learners can now turn to a larger question: To what degree does history inform the present? What pragmatic motives, if any, stimulate us to study the past? I suggest that Albert Furtwangler may have a timely message for current American foreign policy architects: Pay close attention to the experience of Lewis and Clark and the first missionaries in Oregon. |
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| ROBERT H. KELLER
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| Western Washington University, Bellingham |
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