Hidden Literacies

Writing and Literacy

Mary Occom used writing and literacy in several ways, from penning a letter to refusing to write in English.  She writes some letters to Wheelock, and she sometimes signs her name with an X in a letter to Wheelock written by his financial manager.  While some scholars have read this signature as raising the question of Mary’s own literacy in English, I want to ask instead how Mary’s interactions with various forms of literacy might signal how and to what ends she uses paper, writing, signatures, and so on.6  She undoubtedly understood how accounts of multiple forms worked and how to interact with them.  She sent a letter to Wheelock on November 8, 1766, just after the account with Shaw begins, asking for help with her son Aaron, who “trys to run me in dbt by Forging orders.”  The letter is brief, and she tells Wheelock that “being in haſte cannt write So much as I would, but the bearer here of Squib, is an Honeſt man & will Speak the truth, and he can relate the whole.”7  Later, when Shaw refuses to sell supplies to her, Mary writes to Wheelock’s daughter to inform her of the family’s needs and to elicit her assistance in the absence of her father’s support.  These letters show that Mary is aware of the power that deceitful or forged orders can have and of the ways that writing can affect colonists’ accounting, perhaps by convincing them to reverse a refusal to sell goods or by stimulating actions they might take to fulfill their promises to pay debts.  Reading these letters alongside the account with Shaw positions that document as one reflecting Mary’s understanding of forgery and debt, and actions she took to ensure that the account lists only items she actually bought. We might linger again on the “pot returned”: perhaps the return indicates Mary’s correction of a forged order, or perhaps a decision to pay off a debt she calculated she could not pay otherwise.  These letters suggest that the account with Shaw is one that Mary carefully curated to ensure its correctness, one she had a hand in shaping, not just through purchases but by monitoring expenses and contesting forged orders.  
And Mary accounts not just for goods and money but also for feelings—she interacts with accounting as both a numerical and an affective project, one meant to extract both money and gratitude from Indigenous people.  A January 1767 letter from Samson suggests she find a “Capable Hand to write you Letters of thanks, to the Ladies who wrote you Letters, and sent you Preſents from Briſtol.”8  Perhaps Samson makes the suggestion that she find an amanuensis because Mary preferred not to write her own letters, or perhaps she was in haste as she was when she wrote to Wheelock, the letter shows that Mary must negotiate the forms of colonial accounting that involve measuring and accounting for thanks.  Whether she found a “capable hand” or wrote letters herself, Samson’s letter points to the ways that she made strategic use of other peoples’ hands to settle her accounts.
For Mary, accounting extended to her transactions with Shaw and to expectations from Wheelock and British ladies, and these interactions illuminate her astute understanding of how accounts work, how she might use them to ensure accurate records, and how they might be used by colonists to exact both money and gratitude.  Reading for both linguistic content and for such interactions not only brings into view Mary Occom’s various forms of literacy but also situates her as part of larger histories of literacy throughout the northeast.  For example, Lisa Brooks’s work on Pocasset women like Weetamoo shows how they keenly observed how colonists used land deeds, noting the distance that often opened up between an agreement, a written record, and colonists’ actions in defiance of that agreement.  We might also think of the young Pequot woman Katherine Garrett, who gave an account of her life that contested narratives of guilt and degradation before she was executed for alleged infanticide.9  These Native women maintain an understanding of how colonists used accounts, debts, exchange, and circulation, often to ends that were detrimental to Native communities and individuals.  As Mary’s account shows, interventions in those ends were often small, quotidian acts that aimed to circulate alternate interpretations of and uses for accounts. Such literacies are hidden, not so much because of obscure archives or uncatalogued texts (Mary’s account with Shaw is catalogued as part of Samson Occom’s archive at Dartmouth and digitized as part of the Occom Circle Project), but because they involve forms of use and literacy that require new readerly practices to see them.

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