Hidden Literacies

The Nature of the Account

Accounts may seem like strange objects for pursuing hidden literacies, especially the alphabetic and numerical literacies of Native women.  Accounts seem removed from the rich world of Native women’s knowledge of many linguistic and material systems: of Indigenous languages, basket-construction and the designs that adorned them, and the design of wampum strings and belts, to name a few.  Accounts, moreover, seem to distance readers from the people who made and used them: accounts are designed to foreclose rather than open up interpretation.  They present columns of debts and credits that ideally support one conclusion—how much a customer owes a merchant, or a shop owner’s profit over a given period of time.  Accounts enumerate and record by distilling transactions among multiple people into neat columns of goods and numbers, purchases and payments, allowing a bookkeeper to see at a glance the status of their accounts.  It’s often hard to locate speakers, writers, experiences, or selves in accounts, and this is no mistake: accounts are made to make and trace objects.  It is objects’ circulation and exchange that fuels the entries on the page and the list’s completion or closure.  So accounts obscure or sometimes outright lack the elements that scholars are trained to seek and interpret: narrative, plot, the sentence, aesthetic qualities, even a signature.  

This account also obscures the person who selected and paid for the objects listed.  It lists expenses charged to the Mohegan man Samson Occom by the New London, Connecticut, merchant Thomas Shaw between November 1765 and May 1767.  But during this period, Samson Occom was in England, where he was securing donations in support of a mission school run by Eleazar Wheelock, as well as preaching, advocating for Mohegan land rights, meeting the king, countesses, and influential religious leaders, and seeing what he calls “many Curiosities,” including the “Kings Lions Tygers Wolf and Leopards &C.”1  Samson’s absence means that his wife, Mary Fowler Occom, purchases the items from Shaw, while she is living at Mohegan, Samson’s home community and one with which Montaukett people like the Fowlers had long-standing relations.  Mary married Samson in 1751 during the time when he served her community as a teacher, healer, and minister, and the couple lived on Montauk until 1764, when they paddled across the Long Island Sound and moved to Samson’s home at Mohegan.  In 1765-67, while Samson is encountering curiosities and British royalty, Mary Occom is managing a recalcitrant son, instructing her daughters—probably teaching them to read—and managing her household, which at that point included seven children.

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