Reviews of Books

Both white and native champions of aboriginal expression have pursued the "native people had writing, too" claim with avidity. Unfortunately, such projects often unconsciously assume that the written word is the pinnacle of civilization or at least of communication. While there are a certain number of "discovery" projects represented in the present collection--and instances of a related type of project, "native people used writing to subvert European culture"--most articles here go further by exploring communication beyond the parameters of writing and even speaking and by denaturalizing European communication practices or ideas about language along the way. Ironically, perhaps, attention to the importance of gesture, image, and speech in European discourses and recognition of the multiplicity of European ideas about language during the contact period turn out to facilitate a fuller portrait of the vicissitudes of translation between aboriginal and European discourses and languages and even of aboriginal communicative practices themselves. Critics might suspect that, by turning its focus back toward Europe, this work would amount to navel-gazing. But given the enduring power of the association of writing, Europe, and sophistication, it goes beyond solipsism to note, for example, that European languages were only beginning to be "reduced" to grammars at the same time American languages were, or to pursue implications of the observation that when Europeans--or Native Americans--spoke, wore clothes, waved their arms, and carried objects, whether or not they wrote or read, these behaviors may have formed systems of signs.

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