Hidden Literacies

Page 6 - How Coosaponakeesa Demonstrated Her Literacies

     In the case of Coosaponakeesa’s writings, the kinds of literacies that have been hidden include ones in addition to the ability to read or write English or any other alphabetic script on paper. She must also read and write personal and diplomatic relationships, political and legal principles, and cultural values. What, then, are her technologies of literacy? What tools, supplies, and circumstances did Coosaponakeesa use to read and write these memorials and press her case? That same opening statement—“I Mary the wife . . . of Tho.sBosomworth”—helps answer this question because even as it hides her literacies, it also signals her pragmatic willingness and skilled determination to convert her connections. A review of the three memorials reveals multiple moments where she leverages personal and communal relationships not only rhetorically but materially. This is no more clear than in the 1754 memorial, which also includes a copy of a 1750 document wherein seven Creek leaders grant Coosaponakeesa “full power and Authority to Say, Do, Act, Transact, Determine, Accomplish, and Finish, all Matters and Things” on their behalf and on behalf of the “Whole Nation.” To strengthen her claims, she has gathered a collection of leaders’ signatures and used that collection to write herself as a new leader of her nation. Indeed, it is around this time in her life that she begins to call herself Coosaponakeesa, or Coosa Language Bearer, where Coosa refers to a river as well as a multi-village member of the Creek Confederacy. For her, Creek leadership in the eighteenth-century colonial southeast requires more than wisdom, oratorical aptitude, or military prowess; it requires being able to assemble and hold the language.      When it comes to early American literatures, uncovering hidden literacies requires more capacious approaches to reading and writing and asking different questions about what the technologies of literacy are. In this instance, doing so not only shows how the first Native readers and writers in English were interweaving new linguistic skills with other models of communication, narrative, and publication, but also may produce connections to contemporary Native authors. Perhaps they too are interweaving multiple literacies, including tribally specific ones, in order to produce English-language texts. How contemporary Native authors understand literacy, reading, and writing may even offer insights with which to return to earlier works. To those ends, the poem “Coosa” by Jennifer Elise Foerster, a contemporary poet of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent and a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, offers a tantalizing comparison, in part because its title evokes Coosaponakeesa’s name as well as a Creek place. Rather than offer an interpretation, this essay concludes by following the excerpt with several additional questions that Foerster’s poem helps us ask about Coosaponakeesa’s hidden literacies.  Here is an excerpt:

In the last days of my marriage to god,
I wandered his spiraled library to read in the dark blank imprints of trees.
Relentless navigation through the stacks
of shell-tempered mortuary offerings,
sandstone saws recovered from the caves.
I lingered on the stairs of the convent
to write these things, to recollect myself.
Around midnight the mountains returned.
The clouds dispersed into semicolons
and I with them, into a new language,
its boat temporary, invisible.
I knew I would be traveling like this
for centuries. This was my first attempt
at vanishing. I would return before
anyone noticed poems to be found
in the forest, not the mind.
There’s a canyon between this version of me
and the shadow in the corner that is mine.
I wear this canyon like a blank eye.

     This excerpt, written in the first person, presents a figure reading, writing, and moving within a space that is both natural and constructed, perhaps by “god.” For Foerster and Coosaponakeesa, how does place function as a source of literacies? How might place be read? How might place be written? What role does memory play? In what ways are Coosaponakeesa’s texts imaginative and poetic? In what ways is Foerster’s poem diplomatic and political? In what ways are they part of the same Creek tradition of hidden literacies?

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