Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on boarding schools established by New England missionaries, English Letters and Indian Literacies explores the ways Native students negotiated the variety of pedagogical practices and technologies of literacy and managed those technologies for their own ends.
Trade Review"Wyss's emphasis on the material culture of native experience and the missionary schools is fresh and compelling; her analysis of the Wheelock-Occum letters is perhaps the best reading of them to date; and the book's highlighting of figures whom history has shuffled aside-such as the Cherokee David Brown-make this volume well worth the read." *
Journal of American History *
"Hillary Wyss's English Letters and Indian Literacies quite fruitfully revises and expands existing accounts of Native participation in networks of written English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." *
American Literature *
"Wyss skillfully draws on the fascinating history of literacy and literacy instruction in early New England to show how the process of learning to read was taught separately from the ability to comprehend the meaning of written words and how the act of learning to write was taught separately from the skill of self-expression." *
History: Reviews of New Books *
"
English Letters and Indian Literacies promises to advance our understanding of the encounter between American Indians and Protestant English missionaries significantly. It deserves much attention from scholars in religion, literature, and history focused on the colonial period, Native responses to contact, the history of education, and literacy studies." * Laura M. Stevens, University of Tulsa *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction: Technologies of Literacy
Chapter 1. Narratives and Counternarratives: Producing Readerly Indians in Eighteenth-Century New England
Chapter 2. The Writerly Worlds of Joseph Johnson
Chapter 3. Brainerd's Missionary Legacy: Death and the Writing of Cherokee Salvation
Chapter 4. The Foreign Mission School and the Writerly Indian
After Words: Native Literacy and Autonomy
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
