Beginnings: Native Oral Traditions, Contact, Exploration

This is Unit Three of American Literature, part two of two: what happened where the two layers met, and the procedures for reading the documents that came out of it. Part one closed on the promotional tracts and the quarrel at Merrymount, which is to say on Europeans writing for European readers. Now the unit's governing idea pays off. Always ask who is holding the pen, and this part is where that question does the most work, because these are the texts where two peoples are both present and only one of them is usually writing. A successful Pueblo rising survives chiefly in the letters of the Spaniards it defeated. Pontiac's speech survives because a Frenchman inside the besieged fort wrote it down. Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister, writes his own life in the vocabulary the missionaries taught him, and the choice is deliberate. The captivity narrative, the colonies' first bestseller, is a colonist's form about Native peoples. Then three procedures take all of it back to the exam: sorting a document by its purpose, reading one for its assumptions, and dating one from its prose. By the end you will be able to describe the Pueblo Revolt from its own documents. To place Occom and Pontiac and say how each reaches us. To say what contact literature leaves out. To recognize a captivity narrative and sort exploration writing by purpose. And to read a contact document for its assumptions and date it from its prose.

Five entries on the collision: a successful rising, a Native autobiography, a speech, what the archive omits, and the colonies' first bestseller.

A rising the Spanish lost.

AML 0217 The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in Its Own Documents

The Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, also called Popé's Rebellion, drove the Spanish out of what is now New Mexico. The witness counts four hundred Spaniards killed and two thousand settlers expelled. Popé, who had been seized in sixteen seventy and tried for sorcery, organized the rising after his release. Those figures are the witness's, and the surviving letters tell one side.

A life written from inside.

AML 0218 Samson Occom and *A Short Narrative of My Life*

Samson Occom, a Mohegan who became a Presbyterian minister, wrote *A Short Narrative of My Life* in seventeen sixty-eight. It opens by saying he was born a heathen and raised in heathenism until he was sixteen or seventeen, among a people living by hunting and fishing. That opening adopts the missionaries' own vocabulary, and it does so deliberately.

A vision, turned into a war speech.

AML 0219 Pontiac's Speech at Detroit

Pontiac's speech at Detroit, given about seventeen sixty-three and surviving in a French journal of the siege, retells a Lenape prophet's journey to find the Master of Life. The vision instructs the people to put aside European goods and return to their own ways. The speech survives only in a Frenchman's record of it.

Ships read as whales or islands.

AML 0220 What Contact Literature Leaves Out

The anchor notes that Native accounts of first contact place the strangers inside familiar categories: the ships read as whales or as islands, the pale skin as illness or as divinity, the gifts accepted out of courtesy rather than credulity. Recorded later, those accounts trace how help given was repaid with land taken. Both sides wrote, and one archive was kept.

Seizure, ordeal, return, providence.

AML 0221 The Captivity Narrative as a Genre

The captivity narrative tells of seizure by an enemy, an ordeal, and a return, and it was the first best-selling American form. Written by colonists, it doubles as a spiritual autobiography in which affliction tests faith. The exam expects both the shape and the religious argument running through it. It is a colonist's form about Native peoples.

Six entries to close: three procedures, the question of who kept the archive, and what the whole period establishes.

Four purposes cover the field.

AML 0222 Sorting Exploration Writing by Its Purpose

Exam questions about early writing are answered from purpose more reliably than from content, and four purposes cover the field. A document written to a patron reports and justifies, so it emphasizes what was found and explains what went wrong, as Columbus's reports do. A document written to attract settlers promotes, so it lists resources and minimizes danger. A document written to defend the writer argues, and Smith's accounts of his own exploits belong there, which is why they grew more dramatic with each retelling. A document written to persuade a people to act exhorts, and Pontiac's speech is that example, built from a vision rather than from evidence. Ask who paid for the writing, who was meant to read it, and what the reader was meant to do. A single text can do two of these at once, and the question usually asks which is primary. The test is what the document asks its reader to do, not what it spends the most words describing.

Assumptions hide in ordinary words.

AML 0223 Reading a Contact Document for Its Assumptions

A contact document carries its writer's assumptions in ordinary words, and three habits bring them out. First, notice the words of possession, because taking possession, claiming and granting all assume the land was available to be claimed, and that assumption is the document's argument rather than its background. Second, notice how the inhabitants are described, since counting them as souls to be saved, as hands to be used, or as obstacles to be removed tells you what the writer intends. Third, notice what the writer finds worth recording about the landscape, because a list of harbours, timber and mines is a commercial inventory whatever else the passage claims to be. The exam asks what such a passage reveals about its writer, and these three are where the revealing happens. Do not confuse the writer's admiration for respect. Paradise language about a landscape and its people sits comfortably beside a plan to take both.

Capitals, clauses, vocabulary, then content.

AML 0224 Dating a Colonial Passage From Its Prose

A passage from this period can be placed without a date attached to it. Spellings and capitals are the first clue, since early modern printing capitalizes nouns and varies spelling freely, so a passage capitalizing Heathen, Religion and Ways is seventeenth or eighteenth century and not later. Sentence shape is the second, since long accumulating clauses joined by and, with the verb arriving late, belong to the period before the Revolution. Vocabulary is the third: providence, affliction, deliverance and mercies mark a Puritan frame; commodities, plantation and adventurers mark a promotional one; and the period's own words for Native peoples mark a colonist writing about them. Content then confirms, since a narrative of capture and return is a captivity narrative, and those cluster in the late seventeenth century. A Native-authored text of the period uses the same religious vocabulary, as Occom's narrative does, so vocabulary places the period and not the writer.

The recorder is part of the text.

AML 0225 Native Voices in an Archive Kept by Others

Almost every Native text on this exam was written down by a colonist, a missionary or a folklorist, often centuries after it was first spoken, and sometimes translated twice over. Occom and Pontiac reach us in English and in French records. This course names the recorder whenever it names the text, because the recorder is part of the text.

Three layers, and one question.

AML 0226 Before the Nation: What the First Texts Establish

The exam's first period opens before there is a nation to write about, and the writing it collects comes from three directions that never quite meet. The oldest layer is oral and Native, surviving only because outsiders wrote it down: the Iroquois woman falling into a world of water, caught by ducks and carried on a turtle's back that grows into an island; the Cherokee earth hung from a sky of rock by four cords, with mud fetched from the bottom by a diving beetle; the Pima world rubbed from the body of a person floating in the dark. These are not myths in the loose sense of untrue stories. They are accounts of how a present arrangement came to be, which is why they end by explaining maize and weeds, illness and its cures, or the existence of stories. The second layer is European and written to be read in Europe: Columbus reporting a paradise and noticing gold, Cabeza de Vaca writing the only Spanish account composed on foot, John Smith defending and enlarging himself in print, and the tracts that sold a continent by listing its harbours and forgetting its winters. The third layer is the collision, and it produced the period's best-known forms: the captivity narrative, which turned seizure and return into a bestseller and into an argument about providence; the Pueblo documents, in which a successful rising is recorded by the people it defeated; Pontiac's vision-speech surviving in a Frenchman's journal; and Occom writing his own life in the missionaries' vocabulary. The argument is not that one layer is truer, but that a reader must always ask who is holding the pen. The period's characteristic error is to treat the surviving archive as the whole record.

That closes the beginnings, and the habit this unit teaches carries through the rest of the course. You can describe the rising of sixteen eighty that drove the Spanish out of what is now New Mexico, with the four hundred killed and two thousand expelled attributed to the witness who counts them, and you know it survives chiefly through the letters of the side that lost. You can place Samson Occom's narrative of seventeen sixty-eight, which opens in the missionaries' own vocabulary on purpose, and Pontiac's speech at Detroit, which retells a prophet's journey and reaches us only in a Frenchman's record. You know that Native accounts of first contact read the ships as whales or islands, and that both sides wrote while one archive was kept. You can recognize a captivity narrative by its seizure, ordeal and return, and by the argument about providence running through it. You can sort any early document into reporting, promoting, defending or exhorting by asking what it wants its reader to do. You can read one for its words of possession, its description of the inhabitants, and its commercial inventory. And you can date one from its capitals, its clauses and its vocabulary, remembering that vocabulary places a period and not a writer. Unit four takes the Puritans.