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• 1 2020-01-21T20:56:51+00:00 Page 1 - The Construction of an "Unlettered" Image 3 Round page 1 plain 2020-02-11T16:14:21+00:00

  At Christmas time in 1840, a Jesuit missionary named Nichola Point visited the Kickapoo Mission near present-day Leavenworth Kansas. He was appalled by what he found when he visited the Native community during their Sunday Mass. “The Indians listened open-mouth to . . . a Charlatn,” Point reported to his superiors, whose only “proof of his mission was two inches wide and eight inches long, which was inscribed with outlandish characters symbolizing the doctrines he undertook to teach.  What Point described is a Kickapoo Prayer Stick (circa. 1830) of the sort depicted above, and associated with the church led by the Kickapoo leader Kenekuk (1790-1851).The Prayer Stick, which is housed in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., embodies may of the issues raised by other objects in the Hidden Literacies archive: Why have some communities constructed alternate textualities that demanded unique literacy practices, sometimes in direct competition with those promoted by the US Common School system and Anglo-American middle-class sociability? 

  These Kickapoo texts, for example, draw their meanings from a set of literacy practices whose immediate context is the Indian Removal Act of 1830. It is a law that purports to “provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states and territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.”1 Like most legal language this preamble to the text of the statute obscures as much as it reveals, soft-peddling the forced relocation (often by Federal troops) of thousands of Native peoples to unfamiliar and often hostile ground far from their homelands. The Removal Act’s importance for literacy history is often overlooked because of its other, more devastating effects on indigenous life in North America. Yet, in Supreme Court Justice John McLean’s concurring opinion in Worcester v. Georgia 31US515 (1832), a case that ruled on (among other things) the constitutionality of Removal, the Justice expressed concern about “how the words of the treaty were understood by an unlettered people.”2 In a sense, McLean thought that the implementation of the Removal Act ought to be considered in light of the differing levels and kinds of literacy that prevailed among the parties involved. He made it clear that “the rules of construction” regarding this legislation should take Indian literacy into account. While scholars have often sought the literacy issues McLean mentions in the subsequent memorials to Congress that many Native nations wrote in disagreement with Removal, these Kickapoo texts suggest that there were many, varied literacy responses among the indigenous peoples adversely affected by the Removal Act. By creating this Prayer Stick and its non-alphabetic script, Kenekuk seems to have presented his community with a viable alternative to the “unlettered” image that the lawmakers in Washington forced onto the Native peoples of the US.