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Book Review
| Bringing Indians to the Book. By Albert Furtwangler. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. xii + 266 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $22.50, paper.)
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This immensely readable book tells a fascinating story about Indian-white encounters in the Far Northwest that will be of interest to the general reader as well as to the specialist in western history. Furtwangler has an argument to make—essentially, that a literate populace may ascribe too much power to literacy and overestimate its role in the preservation of knowledge. But the argument, as interesting as it is, seems at times a kind of afterthought, an obligatory addition to the engrossing story whose telling is the real purpose of the book. |
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Furtwangler relates the experiences of the earliest Protestant missionaries to Oregon, who were also the first white settlers in that region, explaining that the missionary enterprise had its origins in an odd and oddly-documented event that occurred in 1831, when four Indians (whose tribal affiliation is not clear) crossed the Rocky Mountains to St. Louis and met with William Clark, whose previous travels with Meriwether Lewis had brought him into contact with many Indian people in the Northwest. While Clark apparently left no record of the St. Louis meeting, other interested parties provided their own accounts, describing the Indian visitors as being specifically in search of more knowledge of the Christian religion and eager to embrace it. The several accounts of the meeting vary in their content but are, according to Furtwangler's meticulous analysis and careful, close readings, demonstrably unreliable and increasingly exaggerated. By the time the inflated story was picked up by the (New York City) Christian Advocate and distributed to the Protestant faithful, it had become evidence that the Indian population in the Far West was uniformly eager for conversion to Christianity and would welcome missionaries with open arms. |
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The result was an exodus of dedicated but misinformed and ill-prepared missionaries who had been "badly misled by print," not only by the published accounts of the William Clark story, but also by contemporary representations of Native people produced from a distance by people who had never been west of the Rockies (p. 117). These missionary settlers thus brought knowledge gained entirely from their reading to their contacts with oral, non-literate cultures whose ways and worldviews were, as the missionaries were to discover, "unimaginable to the literate" (p. 5). With no apparent sense of the implicit ironies, the missionaries also wrote copiously about the frustrations of their experiences, leaving a written record of the disappointments and shocks their life among the Indians produced. Their accounts, Furtwangler observes, preserve a record of just how persistently the missionaries misunderstood the people they had come expecting to convert and assimilate. These failures of understanding, he concludes, may in fact be the most valuable part of the missionaries' legacy, since they can serve to remind us of the significant limitations of literacy as a way of knowing or a means to power. |
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| Lucy Maddox
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| Georgetown University |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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