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1. 1 2021-02-16T20:07:58+00:00 Joelle Thomas 0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141 Index Joelle Thomas 10 Index of all pages vispath 2021-02-16T21:23:12+00:00 Joelle Thomas 0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141

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• 1 2019-07-15T13:41:30+00:00 Method Two: Looking At 3 Wisecup Page 4 plain 2022-11-14T17:46:42+00:00 Let's turn now to the second way we might read the account, by moving from looking through to looking at.  This reading considers the account as a material object, one that was carefully stored and regularly taken out and updated to reflect purchases and payments. Here I want to suggest that we think about Mary as a participant in its creation and use, even if she does not write the account itself.  Looking at requires that we account for literacy as encompassing not just the ability to read, write, or calculate, but also an understanding of the social power of texts and ability to use textual objects accordingly.  This knowledge is what Karen Weyler has called a “functional understanding of literacy” which she describes as an understanding of how print worked and how to access it.  Functional literacy allowed people with a range of relations to reading and writing to participate in print culture.  As Weyler writes: “By participating in the conventions common to popular genres, outsiders, including people of color, found ways to enter into particular kinds of discourse communities and to frame their experiences so that they could be understood by readers whose social, economic, and legal circumstances were fundamentally unlike their own.”5
  
  The term “functional understanding of literacy” might seem a misfit here: Mary’s account with Shaw isn’t printed, nor is it made or intended to circulate in a printed public sphere; its circulation is probably limited to Shaw and perhaps his shopkeepers, the Occoms, probably Wheelock, and the people who settled Shaw’s estate upon his death.  But we can expand Weyler’s “functional understanding of literacy” to encompass a range of interactions with textual objects, including reading and writing as well as other interactions with paper, ink, letters, and words.  These myriad uses for writing and reading are relational and require moving among them rather than placing them into hierarchies or selecting one over another.
  
  Expanding literacy to include myriad interactions lets us think about accounting in capacious ways—going beyond numbers tallied on a page to the ways that people defined a debt and kept track of debts owed and paid.  We can pay attention to the many Native people who had a functional understanding of how record keeping and making worked—whether in alphabetic orthographies or other forms—and an understanding of the power of a page of accounts as a representation of exchanges. Looking at thus offers an avenue for conceptualizing literacy in ways that attend to Native peoples’ diverse experiences of and relations to textual matter.