Inscribing Sovereignties

Phillip H. Round's new book follows in a line of intellectual enquiries over the last 20 years, including Hilary Wyss’ Writing Indians (2003), Lisa Brooks’ The Common Pot (2008), my own Red Ink (2012), and Round's previous monograph, Removable Type (2010), that delve into the nature of the written word and how it worked within the context of settler colonialism to transform Indigenous lives on the North American continent. As established by these previous works of scholarship, western literacy was not the miraculous portal into civilization that settler colonial agents often purported it to be. Because Native peoples already had their own highly developed traditions of inscription and history-keeping, they were generally flexible and adaptive in responding to western literacy, finding ways to incorporate it into their own practices when compelled to engage with it. Building on this, Round's study seeks to introduce readers to the surprising “variety and scope of script in languages from Indigenous North America” and to survey the many ways “that Native communities adopted, adapted, and invented writing systems” to meet their various political, social, and cultural needs (36).Although Native peoples are often represented as having very little intellectual, cultural or historical infrastructure in colonial times, this illusion has largely been maintained by the privileging of European accounts that offer narrow self-interested depictions, designed to justify the appropriation of lands, lives, and resources from their Native hosts. Alphabetic literacy was not only tirelessly marshalled toward the cause of converting Natives to “the word” of Christian faith. It served, under the preponderance of European reporting, as an agent of erasure, actively unwitnessing the intricacies of Indigenous civilization and making it appear as though the demise of Native presence on this continent was always already imminent. Round argues, however, that when alphabetic literacy made its way into Native space, it was often transformed into a kind of “media network” incorporating oral ceremony, song, material culture objects, and the ritualized conditions of traditional gatherings (84).What makes Round's latest intervention both useful and compelling is its specific focus on Indigenous orthographies and what he refers to as the “interplay between Native vernacular orthographies, tribal sovereignty, and colonialism” (25). Round examines how orthographies were developed, the challenges they presented, and the transformations they underwent as they made their journey into Native space. Mainly focusing on three case studies involving orthographies developed for Iroquoian, Siouan, and Central Algonquian nations, Round provides a more precise ethnographic lens into how these orthographies came to be and the conflicting uses to which they were put by Native and colonial agents.Scholars have noted how the diplomatic protocols of Haudenosaunee wampum exchange were transferred to the medium of alphabetic writing. But Round's exposition of this journey, drawing from little-known archival materials as well as more well-traveled sources, offers fresh insights into how and why this proved beneficial. As he notes, the protocols embedded in the “Good Message” at the heart of wampum diplomacy, were “never about the letter of the law” (92). Nevertheless, “war, disease, and dislocations had broken so many of the ‘chains’ that had once linked members of the [Haudenosaunee] confederacy together that new media were needed to forge new ties and relations against the implacable force of the colonizing institutions” (96–97). Mohawk leaders and holy men appear to have emerged both independently and collectively to engage with pre-existing missionary orthographies to develop a “composite hybrid text” with which to preserve their ancient archive. Far from being just a “salvage” operation, Round's research suggests how figures like Mohawk leader John Deserontyon or those who furthered the teachings of the Seneca Prophet, Handsome Lake, were using Mohawk orthography in conjunction with ritual wampum exchange practices to bind their communities together during periods of upheaval. By the 19th and 20th centuries, such writing practices had advanced from private correspondence to public histories, testimonies, and the proliferation of Indigenous language newspapers that proved vehicles for cultural celebration as well as language preservation.A further example of this can be found in the Dakhota orthography developed by Christian missionaries in the late 19th century. Although the colonial endeavor to irradicate plains culture was well under way by this time, Round finds that the adoption of alphabetic literacy was never exclusively the project of Native conscripts to Christianity. He writes that, “the Lakotas found alphabetic literacy in the 1880s to be a potent means of social formation for tribal members of many different political allegiances, fostering new ways of constituting personhood and community” (168). Representative of this is the testimony of the visionary Nicholas Black Elk. Black Elk was a member of the Titonwan, or Teton Sioux, whose words were famously co-opted by the white poet John Neihardt to reflect the common settler view that Indigenous culture was flickering out, unable to adapt to the spread of European modernity. What is not elevated in Neihardt's text, however, is the fact that Black Elk himself was literate.In Black Elk's first extant letter, written while he was a young man traveling through Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, he expresses joy that the Lakota language is being preserved and translated. His correspondence, written in the L/D/Nakota orthography, refers directly to the Iape Oaye (Word Carrier), a missionary newspaper being published in that same system. Even as a young man, then, Black Elk felt a visceral attachment to the possibilities inherent in the written word, and he used an Indigenous orthography to express it. When Neihardt first arrived at Black Elk's home to record his testimony in 1930, he was surprised to find that, rather than shepherding this process, he was invited into a ceremonial space in which Black Elk employed a “Lakota verbal genre known as hanbloglaka” used in the recounting of visionary narratives (137). As Round informs us, this required oral and pictorial testimony, with Black Elk's famous vision rendered on Buffalo hide. It included feasting, dancing, and other ceremonial rites. In other words, Black Elk incorporated a range of traditional media to relate his story to the white poet, despite being capable himself of writing it down in his own dialect.Whether discussing Haudenosaunee translation of wampum protocols, the Dakhota Iape Oaye, or the Paw-pa-pe-po of central Algonquian use, Round delves into the linguistic particularities of each language, drawing from original archival documentation, and offering fresh insights into historical characters and narratives. He is keen to suggest how Indigenous orthographies not only served as a means of preserving language and culture, but how “writing in a vernacular script engenders a new set of social practices” that are marshalled for ongoing claims of sovereignty for Indigenous peoples on the North American continent (218)

Appropriation · Civilization · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Indigenous · Literacy · Mohawk · Traditional knowledge · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Latin American history and culture