Hidden Literacies

An Approach to Sideline

There is at least one more approach to the account, that would follow scholars like Ann Laura Stoler by reading “along the archival grain” to examine how the account might illuminate the workings, anxieties, and shortcomings of colonial power. Given the colonial obsession in the eighteenth century with accounting for Native people’s actions, histories, spiritual and mental states—for example, Eleazar Wheelock’s work to collect his students’ writings in order to display their progress or lack thereof to funders—this is a mode of reading has much to reveal about the contexts in which Mary and Samson Occom interacted with ministers and merchants. But I want to sideline this reading for now, in order to focus on the question what we can learn about Montaukett women’s literacies through the account. See Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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