Reviews of Books

The Brainerd Journal: A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1823. Edited and introduced by Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips. Foreword by Philip H. Viles, Jr. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. xx, 584. $65.00.)

While an earlier generation of scholars sought to describe Indians as essentially "oral" and therefore fundamentally in opposition to alphabetic literacy, a new batch of scholars, most of them Latin Americanists, has been seeking to redefine the relationships between native peoples, reading, and writing as longstanding and productive. Among this new generation is Hilary E. Wyss, assistant professor of English at Auburn University, who in her carefully researched and sensitively written first book, Writing Indians, declares emphatically that it is time to acknowledge the "extensive" tradition of native "Christian writing" that she dates back "at least to [John] Eliot's first converts" (p. 155) in the middle of the seventeenth century. Wyss sets aside Renaissance literary historian Stephen Greenblatt's caveat in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991) that all documents Euro-Americans produced to describe colonial encounters are fatally contaminated and therefore incapable of communicating anything reliable about native history. Instead, she decides to rely warily on the technique of "reading through" Euro-American documents to recover and interpret Indian voices and experiences. Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips add energy to this impulse with their richly annotated typescript of the journals Congregationalist missionaries at Brainerd, Tennessee, sent to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) concerning their attempts to school Cherokee students between 1817 and 1823. Writing Indians is a work of critical analysis in which Wyss examines a variety of written documents for evidence to support a thesis; the Brainerd Journal provides precisely the kind of evidence scholars in Wyss's camp use to show Indians attaining the literacy skills they needed to describe and resist colonialism. Together the two books signal an exciting trend in the history of literacy in North America.

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Wyss does not claim that her evidence, which she lays out in five chapters about King Philip's War, the Christian Indian community on Martha's Vineyard, the mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the mission at Brotherton, New Jersey, and the writings of William Apess, respectively, sheds light on any kind of universal, traditional, "'authentic Native voice' speaking to us from the past" (p. 3). Using a concept Mary Louise Pratt advances in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992), Wyss thinks deeply about "autoethnography" (p. 4), which she explains as the process by which native peoples appropriate the terms and communicative modes of their conquerors. Literate Christian natives did not translate pristine, pre-contact experience into English, she explains; instead, they described their own thoughts, which were authentic to the complicated conditions and times in which they lived. Wyss complains that scholars have spent their energies longing for an "authentic Indian voice" that is "out there somewhere." When they have not found this voice, they have concluded that the voices inscribed in Christian Indian writings are evidence only of degradation, decline, and "loss of traditional values" (pp. 4, 9). Wyss acknowledges that Barry O'Connell, in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst, 1992), demonstrates the kind of autoethnographic consciousness scholars need to adopt. However, she argues, too many scholars have been content to let Apess stand as a first, ignoring evidence of the many other Indians who came to Christianity and literacy through their contact with Protestant missionaries.

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