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QUEEQUEG'S COFFIN

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................................xiINTRODUCTION. "A NEW WORLD STILL IN THE MAKING".....................................................................................11 WRITING AND COLONIAL CONFLICT.....................................................................................................172 NEGOTIATING PEACE, NEGOTIATING LITERACIES The Undetermined Encounter and Early American Literature...............................493 WRITING IN THE CONFLICT ZONE Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno.....................794 INDIGENOUS LITERACIES, MOBY-DICK, AND THE PROMISE OF QUEEQUEG'S COFFIN............................................................111Afterword...........................................................................................................................139Notes...............................................................................................................................145Works Cited.........................................................................................................................185Index...............................................................................................................................201

Chapter One

The indigenous peoples of what is now Mexico were not surprised when the Spanish arrived with their paper and ink. They had a similar, centuries-old tradition of writing on agave bark paper, amatl, to keep records. As in Europe, such literacy was not widespread. Scribes, tlacuilo or amatlacuilo, were a distinct professional class, serving the elite as scribes generally did in Europe. Because the manuscripts of Mesoamerican peoples resembled European scrolls, they attracted the attention and interest of the Spanish. Indeed, the earliest reaction on both sides seems to have been philological curiosity. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, for example, worked with Mexica students at Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, compiling indigenous histories, translating them into alphabetic script, and teaching Mexica students how to write in Spanish.

Sahagún used native scribes and employed parallel texts in Spanish and alphabetized Nahuatl. He gathered information through dialogue and conversation. Thus, Sahagún and his fellow workers created a site of linguistic and semiotic exchange where different forms of writing inter-animated each other on the pages of the manuscripts they produced. In the Florentine Codex, alphabetic and pictoglyphic Nahuatl writing were "part of a dialogue" that was linguistic, oral, and textual. Nahuatl speakers in the process acquired alphabetic literacy, which they subsequently used to produce some of the earliest alphabetic texts written in the region.

Indigenous people in North America also lived in a literate universe of documents, contracts, and public signs. Jesuit priests observed and sometimes used these established systems of writing in early missionary efforts. For example, Sbéastien Râle noted that the Abenaki of Maine communicated via pictography "as well as we understand each other by our letters." Likewise, Barthélemy Vimont wrote that the Montagnais at Quebec recorded missionary teachings with "certain figures which represented for them the sense of some clause." Boasting of the eagerness with which his Abenaki students took to Catholic teachings, Father Gabriel Druillettes stated in a report in 1652 that they "wrote out their lessons in their own manner.... They carried away this paper with them to study their lesson in the repose of the night." Abbé J. A. Maurault, who edited Druillettes's report, added in a footnote that he had noted similar activity among other native Woodlands people: "We often saw during our instructions or explanations of the catechism that the Indians traced on pieces of bark, or other objects very singular hieroglyphs." According to Maurault, the students would then spend the night studying "what they had so written, and in teaching it to their children or their brothers. The rapidity with which they by this manner learnt their prayers was very astonishing."

Regardless of whether seventeenth-century missionaries were bragging about the eagerness of children to learn the gospel or attempting to translate it into indigenous scripts, such accounts testify to the existence of already established systems of literacy in the Northeastern Woodlands. As in central Mexico, these non-alphabetic, indigenous forms of writing remained viable in the area long after initial contact. Almost a century later, Joseph-François Lafitau documented the continued and ubiquitous use of such "hieroglyphic" marks not only for private purposes but also for public notices and other forms of communication. For example, Lafitau described how warriors on war expeditions would strip the bark from trees and use a specially prepared waterproof ink to leave messages for other, separate groups following behind them. Upon returning home, warriors might similarly debark trees to create a surface on which to post an account of their exploits. The fact that warriors traveled with waterproof ink and produced numerous public postings suggests, along with accounts of children taking private notes on birch bark, that literacy was common and not limited to certain privileged classes, as in Mesoamerica. The Northeastern Woodlands can then be understood as a site of widespread literacy used for public and private purposes.

We can surmise the extent of such literacy based on a brief passage in The Jesuit Relations from 1636, which reveals that the Huron had a word that meant "to write." Jean de Brébeuf uses the verb "ahiaton" to exemplify one class of conjugations in a discussion of Huron grammar. The existence of a word for writing is significant because societies name practices with which they are familiar. Equally important for understanding indigenous literacy in the region is the fact that the verb can be conjugated for all subject positions, indicating that "to write" was a common and familiar practice in Huron society. Brébeuf discusses at length the difficulty of talking about phenomena with which the Huron are not familiar. He requests permission to translate "the Father" as "our Father" in his missionary work because the Huron insist on indicating relation when using the term "father." If the missionary use of a word like "father" must accommodate Huron linguistic practices, and if a word for "to write" exists with a full range of conjugations, writing must have been a practice familiar to the Huron, not needing special translation or linguistic invention. Conjugations for the subject positions I, you, he, they, and we indicate that this activity was practiced by all, or many, members of society.

The use of hieroglyphic writing was not limited to the Huron. Algonquin people throughout the Northeastern Woodlands employed similar forms of writing, as did indigenous people west of the Great Lakes, along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far south as the Choctaw homelands in what is now Alabama and Mississippi. In the...