Hidden Literacies

Literacy and Nonliteracy

     The memorial represents a conventional dichotomy between literacy and illiteracy, or nonliteracy, insofar as Newsom, the scribe, was educated at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, whereas the “undersigned memorialists” employed marks: you can see on the final page where some of them made x’s and Newsom filled in their names. “An x-mark is a sign of contamination,” according to the Ojibwe/Dakota scholar Scott Richard Lyons. “There were no ‘treaties’ before the arrival of the whites, no alphabetic writing or ‘signatures’ at all.”3 Yet although in this regard the memorial resembles one-sided treaties, and especially land cessions, it is also very different, not only because Newsom was a trusted collaborator, but also because there is every indication that the Munsees were full participants in the literacy practices that generated the petition, and indeed that they are the authors of its content. Most likely, many of them could read, as they had had a considerable exposure to European literacy as members of the Moravian Church. They just didn’t have the training that Newsom had.
     Moreover, as Lyons and other scholars point out, while alphabetic literacy was introduced by the colonists, native peoples had and continued to employ other media of memory, such as wampum and oral traditions. The memorial exhibits a complex interrelation between alphabetic literacy and indigenous media. The Munsees, construing the government of the United States as continuous with the British (as well as the earlier Dutch) colonial administrations, reminded President Taylor of the 1757 treaty they had been parties to at Easton, Pennsylvania. The Easton Treaty itself hearkened back to the Great Treaty of Peace with William Penn, with the friendship lasting “whilst the Sun Shines and the Rivers run,” or in the Munsee petition, “as long as the Sun would be seen, and as long as Rivers run, and Trees grow."4 According to the Munsees, a Commissioner named Capt Bullen “told our people to commit it to Memory in their feeble way of entering into Record, such important national matters. Thus a Wampum Record was made out directly to that effect, which now still remains in our hands to this present day.”5
     It is unclear whether the Munsees are attributing the characterization of wampum as “feeble” to Bullen, or, whether, in writing, they are making a self-deprecating reference to a non-alphabetic medium. But the memorial also expresses the dynamism of wampum as a living record of community memory. The wampum belt was to serve as a record of the agreement and a token of the colonists’ continuing obligation. According to the memorial, the “Wampum is divided into thirteen parts, which signifies Friendship strongly established, by the authorized Commission of thirteen Governors of the thirteen original states.” The various transcripts, or written representations, of the Easton treaties make numerous references to wampum changing hands, but no such descriptions of belts – and a belt with “thirteen parts” seems unlikely from 1757; the colonial parties were Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But the wampum belt was not a record of a past agreement, but of a continuous and renewable one, and it may have been given at a later time, and been both retroactive and proactive. Thus the written “memorial” cites a wampum belt, which contained a treaty agreement, which in turn cites previous agreements. More properly, both artifacts are components in an inter-medial “chain of memory” that reaches into the distant past.6

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