“A Singular Gift from a Savage”

Four captivity narratives set in the Great Lakes region during the second half of the eighteenth century feature scenes in which Native Americans present the authors with books. These book presentations were symbolic interactions, in which the Indians affirmed their recognition of the value of books to the colonists. When the adopted captive James Smith lost his books, he feared for his life; by finding them and restoring them to him, his Kahnawake Mohawk kin paradoxically enabled his immersion in their society. For the diplomat Thomas Morris, who was detained by Miamis, and Thomas Ridout and Charles Johnston, who were both captured by Shawnees, their books facilitated their participation in secular literary culture. For Morris and Ridout, especially, the books furnished striking allegorical parallels to their experiences.

Silent Books, Talking Leaves

The watershed for the scholarship on A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), is Henry Louis Gates’s influential essay on “The Trope of the Talking Book.” But the widespread classification of the episode in which John Marrant presents his Bible to a Cherokee “king” and his eldest daughter as an instance of an Anglo-African “trope” ignores the narrative’s Cherokee ethnohistorical context. This chapter reads Marrant’s account, despite questions about its reliability, as a reflection of the encounter between evangelical literacy practices and Cherokee beliefs about witchcraft and European literacy.

Fulfilling the Name

This chapter uses onomastics, the study of names, to compare the intersecting stories of two women who lived in the Iroquois-Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake. The Iroquoian concept of requickening may lend insight into how Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, may have modelled her life after her baptismal namesake, St. Catherine of Siena. The Jesuits’ choice of Marguerite, after St. Margaret of Antioch, as a new baptismal name for John Williams’s captive daughter Eunice may have been intended as an allusion to her rescue from heresy. Her eventual marriage to a Mohawk man fulfilled her Mohawk name, Kanenstenhawi, just as Kateri Tekakwitha’s vow of chastity fulfilled her Christian one.

Psalm 137 as a Site of Encounter

References to the famous 137th Psalm (“by the rivers of Babylon”) by colonial captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Isaac Jogues, John Williams, and Elizabeth Hanson are different from those of other Christian writers. Elements of the psalm were recapitulated in the ethnohistorical context of Indian captivity. These include the riverine landscape and pagan captors (verse 1), the compulsion to sing “songs of Zion” (verse 3), and infanticidal violence (verses 8-9). The question posed by verse 4 – “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” – may have been as relevant to the Christian Indians who were confined and persecuted by settlers during King Philip’s War as for any other Christian community.

Rowlandson’s Captivity, Interpreted by God

This chapter presents an “inside out” reading of Mary Rowlandson’s famous narrative of her captivity during King Philip’s War, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682). It focuses on nine passages that she recounts reading in a Bible that an Indian bestowed upon her early in her captivity, and therefore pertain to the diegesis, or narrated action, instead of the commentary on her experience. It posits that these compose a coherent, primordial interpretation of her captivity, issued, in her understanding, by God, who directed her selection of scriptures, and, through these, influenced her perspective and behavior. Rowlandson defines the boundaries of her discourse community by contrasting her orthodox literacy practices with those of the Christian or Praying Indians.

Captivity as Literacy Event

The introduction uses James Smith’s 1799 narrative of captivity during the French and Indian War to illustrate key concepts adapted from sociolinguistics, academic literacy studies, and narratology. Representations of literacy events, or action sequences involving reading and writing, express the captives’ affiliation with their discourse communities, which share literacy practices and language ideologies, including the widespread belief that literacy entails a cultural superiority over native peoples. The analysis distinguishes between conventional textual references, such as allusions, that belong to the author’s discourse, and texts that appear as part of the captive’s story. It presents the concept of the reception allegory, an application of another text to one’s present circumstances, and emphasizes the ethnohistorical context for the captive’s experience, as opposed to the cultural context for the author’s narrative.

Conclusion

The Conclusion uses Fanny Kelly’s 1871 narrative of her captivity among Lakotas to recapitulate the claims of Allegories of Encounter. Kelly’s narrative illustrates how both captives and captors saw literacy as a sign of cultural difference. Its intertextual references indicate her participation in a cosmopolitan, Christian literary culture and also suggest how she allegorized her unfolding experience.

Captive Literacies in the Eastern Woodlands

This chapter compares the captivity accounts of the Jesuit priest Isaac Jogues, in The Jesuit Relations and related sources from the 1640s, with the Puritan minister John Williams’s Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (1707). Jogues used literacy to connect to his elite discourse community and to transcend the circumstances of his captivity among Mohawks, who spectacularly embodied scriptural antagonists; his eventual martyrdom entailed an identification with the types of his saintly predecessors, especially the Jesuit founder Ignatius de Loyola and Jesus Christ. Captured along with his neighbors in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, Williams used the Bible as a line of communication with God; once he was delivered to Canada, he attempted to use literacy to sustain his captive, dispersed congregation.