Introduction

1 Puritan missionary John Eliot (1620-1690) published numerous texts related to the language of the indigenous populations where he had settled in Natick, Massachusetts. He also published texts with presumably fictionalized accounts of Native Americans’ confessions of sin and their turn towards Christ, and among his writings published from 1654-1689, which have become known as the “Indian Library,” Eliot published a controversial account of a fictitious Christian commonwealth. Eliot’s publishing output related to the Massachusett dialect of the Algonquin language culminated with printings of the New Testament and the entire Bible translated into Algonquin. This article will examine a survey of Eliot’s publishing output to argue that Eliot’s use of print and translation served to subjugate the indigenous peoples around him. Far from being what early biographer Cotton Mather called “Apostle of the American Indians” (61), I am following more recent critical trends in Eliot scholarship that have linked his project to larger agendas of imperialism and what Stephen Greenblatt famously referred to as “linguistic colonialism,” which several critics have appropriated for studies of Eliot and his writings (Rivett, “The Algonquian Word and the Spirit of Divine Truth”; Dippold; Stanley; Bigelow).

2 In the first part of this article, I provide historical and bibliographical context for Eliot and his associates to demonstrate that Eliot’s immediate religious, cultural, and political milieu informed Eliot’s initiatives in the New World; in the second part of the essay, I focus on a survey of Eliot’s printed texts to demonstrate that Eliot’s religious and political perspectives are intertwined; and in the third part of the essay, I provide an account of some post-colonial theories that suggest Eliot’s use of print and translation served larger colonial agendas that sought to win, or maybe conquer, the indigenous populations’ mind, body, and soul.

Historical Context - Puritanism

3 New England missionary work had as much to do with behavior modification as it did with leading the convert to salvation. To this end, according to Richard Cogley, Puritans believed in separate stages of the missionary process (6). In the first stage, missionaries sought to “train the Indians in what was almost always termed ‘civility’”; in the second stage, missionaries sought to “teach the Indians about Protestant Christianity,” in which “indoctrination of the natives required the eradication of their traditional form of animism, which colonists variously described as superstition, idolatry, and devil worship” (Cogley 6). Similarly, the Puritan congregant also had to progress through stages to reach salvation. Puritan clergy described “five stages in the pilgrim's progress toward God: election, vocation, justification, sanctification, and glorification” (Cogley 20). Election refers to the controversial Protestant double-bind of predestination, God’s choice of individuals who are predestined for salvation. The vocation stage saw “first, the Spirit's offer of the grace that enables the pilgrim to seek contrition and faith and, second, her cooperation with the Spirit in turning toward God”; sanctification refers to the “state in which the new saint lived after her justification. One of the elect would presumably reflect her new state by her actions. A new person, she would behave in a way that was markedly more holy than her former life”; glorification enabled the “removal of all such uncertainties regarding one's election” (Cogley 20). Puritanism’s path to salvation, therefore, leads the congregant through the double-bind of belief in predestination, a leap of faith upon which all other aspects of Puritan thought is based.

4Eliot’s moniker of “Apostle to the Indians” has fallen from favor among more recent critics and historians, as has the frontier myth view of North American exploration. In The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) Francis Jennings reshaped the scholarly understanding of early modern colonial work by arguing that the “conquerors of America glorified the devastation they wrought in visions of righteousness” by acting under the belief that “Christian Caucasians of Europe are not only holy and white but also civilized, while the pigmented heathens of distant lands are not only idolatrous but dark and savage,” such that “the absolutes of predator and prey have been preserved, and the grandeur of invasion and massacre has kept is sanguinary radiance” (6). Opposing the “frontier” understanding of European and Native American encounters, which relies on the civilization-savagery myth, Jennings favors the perspective of the ethnohistorian, which in examining America’s past “finds not the triumph of civilization over savagery, but an acculturation of Europeans and Indians that was marked by the interchange or diffusion of cultural traits and the emergence of social and cultural dominance by the Europeans in a large society by a submerged Indian sub-culture” (10–13). Jennings argues that the

basic conquest myth postulates that American was virgin land, or wilderness, inhabited by nonpeople called savages; that these savages were creatures sometimes defined as demons, sometimes as beasts ‘in the shape of men’; that their mode of existence and cast of mind were such as to make them incapable of civilization and therefore of full humanity; that civilization was required by divine sanction or the imperative of progress to conquer the wilderness and make it a garden; that the savage creatures of the wilderness, being unable to adapt to any environment other than the wild, stubbornly and resisted God or fate, and thereby incurred their suicidal examination; that civilization and its bearers were refined and ennobled in their conquest with the dark powers of the wilderness; and that it was all inevitable. (15)

Jennings’ book has influenced most subsequent scholarly work on North American colonization and European interactions with Native Americans.

5James Axtell, for instance, writes in Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985) that early observers of the North American Native Americans missed the usual signs of “institutionalized religion” that would have been apparent to any foreigner entering a contemporary English or French town: “churches and meetinghouses; prominent crosses or other images; religious specialists whose demeanor, hairstyles, and dress distinguished them from the general populace; private or public acts of prayer, worship, or sacrifice; and printed texts—Scripture—that codified national beliefs and prescribed ritual observances” (Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America 12). The New England Puritans’ printed texts in particular impressed many Native Americans. Axtell notes that the Native Americans’ “admiration” of the Europeans’ books was an “appreciation of the sheer technological novelty of thinner-than-birchbark paper, uniform typefaces, gold-stamped bindings, and illustrations of strange faces and unfamiliar places. A book was a totally foreign object, complicated in craftsmanship and thus obviously the work of a manitou or great-spirited being” (“The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands” 304).

6 It goes without saying that the advent of print had a profound effect on the early modern period, and this is especially true in the case of Eliot’s publications. Matthew Brown argues that “Christian education—reading as internalization—was only one goal of the mission's literacy advocates. Book objects were part of the ‘visible civility,’ including town resettlement and instituted government, that was to discipline native subjects” (Brown 180). However, New England biblical culture was not as rigid as one would expect—according to Lisa Gordis, it was characterized “not by the closed fists and closed minds [. . .] but rather by interpretive fluidity that was both generative and troubling, producing both a flowering of richly intertextual literature and a series of divisive interpretive controversies” (2). Gordis argues that a complete understanding of New England’s cultural and religious life requires an understanding of “the vexed theory of reading and interpretation that guided Puritan Bible reading, and thus shaped not only Puritan preaching, but also both Puritan literature and church polity” (Gordis 5). Manipulation of language through translation and scripture through hermeneutics permeated the early modern period.

7Like print, translation played a key role in the development of early modern intellectual culture, particularly with translations of the Bible. Sarah Rivet argues that Protestants thought that translation, both from oral communication to written communication and Christian culture into Massachusett culture, made words transparent to the extent that they gradually revealed proof of God’s existence (“Conversion, Communication, and Translation in the Seventeenth-Century Protestant Atlantic” 191). For Rivet, translation was not merely textual but had more to do with culture than with words on a page. Likewise, David Silverman refers to what he calls the “religious translation” that occurred on Martha’s Vineyard, which acknowledged that Christian and Native American beliefs were analogous in critical ways (196). Translation, in other words, can reveal similarities among cultures. Allison Bigelow argues that through the translation of Native American expressions into religious and discursive forms, Eliot enabled readers to understand how the Algonquin language readied the path to American conversion (Bigelow 103). Bigelow places translation into a political realm that has implications beyond the cultural. Translation for European settlers, therefore, had cultural significance that went far beyond the conversion of Native Americans to Christianity.

8In addition to bridging the linguistic gap between the English and the indigenous inhabitants of New England, Eliot’s linguistic texts served to influence his audience and realize his mission to convert as many Native Americans as he could (Stanley 5, 8). Eliot’s project to translate the entire Bible into Algonquin raises questions about the nature of translation itself, as well as the role of Scripture and print’s power in the New World, but it more importantly highlights Puritan epistemology’s relationship with language (E. G. Gray 55). Eliot was exclusively Puritan in his publishing endeavors, but in addition to highlighting Puritanism’s understanding of language, his publications reveal traces of Puritanism’s strict control over the body.

Literary Context

9 English initiatives to learn and document Native American languages began in the sixteenth century. Thomas Hariot (1560-1621) and William Strachey (1572-1621) provided the groundwork for Roger Williams’ (1603-83) A key into the Language of America, which was printed in 1643. Hariot was a mathematician and astronomer who met Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) as a math tutor. Hariot later provided astronomical and navigational advice for Raleigh’s expedition to Roanoke Island in the mid-1580s and accompanied Raleigh on one of his expeditions. Hariot published A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia in 1588, which includes 33 words in the Algonquin language in addition to personal names and place names. A Brief and True Report was reprinted in Richard Hakluyt’s (1552–1616) Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, which was published in multiple volumes from 1589–1600. Hariot also devised a phonetic alphabet that he used to translate the languages of the Native Americans in Virginia.

10William Strachey settled in Jamestown, Virginia, and wrote The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia in 1612 (the text remained in manuscript until 1849), which contains over 800 Native American words (Geary, “The Language of the Carolina Algonkian Tribes” 877). Strachey mingles commentary on the languages of the Native Americans with ethnography:

These are the most straung people of all those countreys, both in language and attire; for their language yt may beseeme their propositions, sounding from them as yt were a great voice in a vault or cave, as an eccoe; their attire is the skyns of beares and woulves; some have cassocks made of beares’ hides and skyns, that a man’s neck goeth through the skyn’s neck, and the eares of the beare are fastened to his shoulders behind, the nose and teeth hanging downe his brest, and at the end of the nose hangs a bear’s paw. (Strachey 40)

11The wearer of this attire speaks a language that is commensurate with their exotic appearance. However, James Geary questions the accuracy of Strachey's citations of Native American words because of the instability of English spelling in the early seventeenth century (Geary, “Strachey’s Vocabulary of Indian Words Used in Virginia, 1612” 900). Learning the Algonquin language highlighted the weaknesses of English language as it existed in the seventeenth century, particularly in the context of publications related to language acquisition.

12 Building on the work of Hariot and Strachey, Puritan minister Roger Williams published A key into the Language of America in 1643.

13In this text, Williams lists Algonquin vocabulary grouped by subject along with grammatical inflection and morphology. Interspersed throughout the vocabulary lists, Williams provides observations based on his personal experiences meeting the Native Americans in New England. The earliest attempts in print to explain the Algonquin language thus appeared alongside ethnography.

14 Williams’ A key into the Language of America is notable to print historians for two reasons. First, Williams’s Key is the first vocabulary or study of a Native American language printed in English (Chapin i). Second, as Nicole Gray observes, Williams’ text is unique because it mixes languages and genres while he records conversations and encounters, and the attempt to render all of this into print “creates a unique visual result, a combination of vertical lines, space, and letterforms that yields something between art object and language object” (66). In other words, form informs function and vice versa.

15The clash of cultures between European explorers and the indigenous populations of North America highlighted ethnic differences that had considerable implications. The Puritans did not seek to connect to the Native Americans through the similarities between their two religions and instead emphasized the differences between Native American religion and Puritanism by characterizing the former as devil worship (Bowden 122). The “Praying Indian” towns sought to convert the Native Americans not just spiritually but culturally and transform them into Englishmen, as they were expected to live permanently in the praying towns and, as Henry Bowden notes, the Native Americans were expected to “cut their hair, wash off the bear grease that protected their skin, wear European clothes, and dwell as nuclear families in separate houses” (126–128). They were also expected to assume new loyalties to the Puritan church as what Bowden calls a “new identity-giving structure” that supplanted the previous reliance upon patterns of kinship, and many of the Massachusetts Native Americans had to change the psychological attachment they had to the land (128–129). Although they retained their language, many apparently went through a radical behavioral change (Bowden 129). This means that in addition to translating languages the colonialists attempted to translate cultures.

John Eliot

16Born in Widford, Hertfordshire, England in 1604, Eliot came from a financially well-off yeoman family with significant land holdings. In 1619, Eliot graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied Hebrew, classics, and philosophy. He worked at the academy of Puritan leader and “father of Connecticut” Thomas Hooker (1586-1647) until Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud (1573-1645) closed the academy in 1630, ending Eliot’s employment and leading to Hooker’s retreat to the Netherlands to avoid persecution. In the words of Cotton Mather, Eliot “first appearance in the world after his education in the university at Cambridge, was in the difficult, and unthankful, but very necessary employment of a schoolmaster, which employment he discharged with a good fidelity” (6). To avoid the same religious persecution for his dissenting Puritan beliefs, Eliot left for New England in 1631. After arriving in the New World, he participated in the prosecution of Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) for her un-Puritan beliefs, which resulted in her banishment from the Massachusetts colony. He then established the Roxbury Latin School and a similar school in Jamaica Plain, New York, the latter of which educated English, Indian, and African students together (Fausz). According to Mather, Eliot was “pleasant and witty in company, and was affable and facetious, rather than morose in conversation; but he had a remarkable gravity mixed with it, and a singular skill of raising some holy observation out of whatever matter of discourse lay, before him; nor would he ordinarily dismiss any theme without some gracious, divine, pithy, sentence thereupon” (Mather 11). Eliot presented himself as a man of God who sought to save as many Native American souls as possible.

17New England was ravaged by violence during Eliot’s tenure in the New World, and after he arrived in New England, Eliot almost immediately witnessed the horrors of colonial enterprises. Pitting the Pequot tribe against European settlers, the Pequot War raged in New England from 1636-1637, climaxing in the slaughter of 500 men, women, and children by Puritan soldiers commanded by Deputy Governor of the Connecticut, John Mason (1600–1672) in 1637. Neighboring rival tribes, the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, fought alongside the English Puritans until the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 “declared that the Pequot tribe and name was to be permanently extinguished” (Luder 477).

18Things were not much better back in England. Just two years before Eliot left for the New World in 1631, Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629, and the English Civil Wars began thirteen years later, lasting until Charles was beheaded in 1649. The Commonwealth of England lasted until the Restoration of the monarchy and coronation of Charles II in 1660. These violent conflicts in England occurred while the Thirty Years War raged on the Continent from 1618-1648.

19In another violent development near the end of Eliot’s missionary work, King Philip’s War began in 1675 and lasted one year, spreading from Plymouth to New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. King Philip, a grand sachem (an Algonquin chief) of the Wampanoag tribe, led a military campaign to drive away every single colonist from New England (Hermes 440). The effects of King Philip’s War were devastating to Eliot’s missionary endeavors, and many of Eliot’s Algonquin Bibles were destroyed because of the conflict. Eliot’s missionary work, therefore, occurred during an era of violent conflicts.

20 Eliot began learning the Massachusett dialect of the Algonquin language in 1643 and within three years, he had started preaching rudimentary sermons in the language (Bowden 117). Eliot first attempted to preach to the Massachusett Native Americans in 1646, but this attempt was met with, in the words of Norman Tanis, “silence and disgust” (310). Eliot eventually mastered the Algonquin language, which is supposedly more difficult to master than Latin, ancient Greek, and Hebrew. The Algonquian family of languages are polysynthetic, which means that they employ many compounds, and they use an animate/inanimate hierarchal system, meaning that they conceive of nouns as having relative aspects of being alive versus being inanimate. This family of languages also employs relatively free word order.

21Before he began developing his “Indian Library, Eliot actively documented the conversion confessions of the Native Americans who turned towards Christianity. In Tears of Repentance (1653), Eliot and Thomas Mayhew (1593-1682) provide accounts of Native American confessions of sin and allegiance to Christ.

22The prevailing theme of the confessions in Tears of Repentance is a fear of eternal damnation. For instance, a confession by a Massachusett named Totherswamp expresses a fear of Christ’s all-seeing gaze in addition to an angry God:

You taught, That Christ knoweth all our hearts, and seeth what is in them, if humility, or anger, or evil thoughts, Christ seeth all that is in the heart; then my heart feared greatly. because God was angry for all my sins; yea, now my heart is full of evil thoughts, and my heart runs away from God, therefore my heart feareth and mourneth. (Eliot and Mayhew 4)

23When asked why he loves God, Totherswamp says,

Because he giveth me all outward blessings as food, clothing, children, all gifts of strength, speech hearing; especially that he giveth us a Minister to teach us: and giveth us Government; and my heart feareth lest Government should reprove me: but the greatest mercy of all is Christ, to give us pardon and life. (Eliot and Mayhew 5)

24Totherswamp’s “confession” is framed for political purposes here to establish the ethos of the missionaries who created the praying towns, and Totherswamp’s confession is characteristic of many other accounts of Native American confessions in the seventeenth century.

Eliot’s “Indian Library”

25This section focuses on six of Eliot’s publications: The Indian Primer (1654), The Christian Commonwealth (1659), Eliot’s translation of the New Testament into Algonquin (1661), Eliot’s translation of the entire Bible into Algonquin (1663), The Indian Grammar (1666), and The Logick Primer (1672). Examining these texts’ physical presentation on the page as well as their use of paratexts reveals how the printing of these texts used form to complement the function of the words, sentences, and paragraphs contained in them.

26Eliot’s “Indian Library” includes approximately 20 titles that were printed from 1654-1688. Eliot’s first publication in Algonquin appeared in 1654 as a catechism entitled The Indian primer; or, The way of training up of our Indian youth in the good knowledge of God, in the knowledge of the Scriptures and in an ability to read. On the cover of The Indian Primer appears a translation into Algonquin of Proverbs 22.6, which in the King James Bible reads, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

27Native Americans had been considered childlike in addition to cannibalistic since well before Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” was published in 1580 and such characterizations continued well after Eliot’s death. For instance, in his biography of Eliot, Mather writes of the Native American’s lack of European technology: “These abject creatures live in a country full of mines; but our shiftless Indians were never owners of so much as a knife, till we came among them; their name for an English-man, was a knife-man; stone was instead of metal for their tools” (59). Mather is also incredulous at their lack of industry:

Their way of living is infinitely barbarous: the men are most abominably slothfal; making their poor sqaws, or wives, plant and dress and barn and beat their corn, and build their wigwams for them. In the mean time, their chief employment, when they will condescend unto any, is that of hunting; wherein they will go out some scores, if not hundreds of them in accompany, driving all before them” (60–61).

28The appropriation of an Old Testament verse from the book of Proverbs reminds those able to read Algonquin that Native Americans were children to be instructed in proper behavior and controlled by Puritanical norms.

29 After the citation from Proverbs, The Indian Primer begins by including the Roman alphabet in lower case, upper case, and italics, after which appear the vowels and two pages of vowel and consonant combinations. Following the alphabet and consonant combinations is the Lord’s Prayer in Algonquin immediately followed by a section entitled “The Ancient Creed. Expounded,” i.e., the Apostle’s Creed, in English. After the Apostle’s Creed is “The Large Catechism” in Algonquin, likely based on Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) Der Große Katechismus (first published in 1529), which includes the Ten Commandments, The Apostles Creed, The Lord’s Prayer, Holy Baptism, and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Following the Large Catechism is a three-page “Short Catechism,” which like refers to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a text written in 1646 and 1647 by English and Scottish theologians that consists of a series of questions and answers about the nature of God and salvation. The purpose of the Westminster Shorter Catechism was to unite the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. Eliot’s Indian Primer, therefore, is more focused on indoctrinating Algonquin speakers into reformed Christianity that it is on providing instruction into how to learn a new language.

30According to William Mounce, “There are 5,437 different words in the New Testament. They occur a total of 138,162 times. But there are only 319 words (5.8% of the total number) that occur 50 times or more” (18). The Old Testament includes a total of approximately 5000 words in the Masoretic text, but these words are based on approximately 2000 root words. By contrast, the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary includes definitions for approximately 170,000 words. In addition to having limited vocabularies, the Old Testament and New Testament are written using relatively simple grammar and syntax compared to other contemporary texts. In other words, Eliot did not teach the “Praying Indians” to speak, read, and understand English; he taught them to speak, read, and understand a very limited selection of English for the sole purpose of indoctrinating them into Puritan Christian ideology.

31Eliot continued his agenda of political theology with The Christian Commonwealth (1659), in which he outlines rules for the establishment of a Christian society and government based on Mosaic law from the book of Exodus.

32Throughout this text, he develops his plan for a model government using extremely authoritarian language, including innumerable uses of the word “order.” God of course has ultimate authority over the people of a society in Eliot’s system, but within that system Eliot establishes a hierarchy of Rulers, the Ruled, and servants that he loosely based on biblical precedent. Eliot outlines an extreme model of disciplinary procedures designed to maintain order in the Christian Commonwealth:

It is also necessary to have persons (b), and all other Instruments, for the inflicting of all kindes of Punishments, which the Law of God appointeth. But touching the several Punishments of Cost, Shame, or Smart; and touching the several ways of putting to Death, by Stoning, Burning, Strangling, or by the Sword; as also touching Banishment, I am here silent. They more properly appearing in the handling of such Laws which do inflict several punishments, according to the demerit of the sin, or use of terrour unto others, proportioning them to the Standard in the holy Scriptures. (Eliot, Christian Commonwealth 6)

33This anti-monarchical book was printed in London, and at the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the book came under attack in England and in the colonies because of the high tensions between the newly restored Charles II and the Puritan colonies (Hall 128). Tanis argues that Elliot followed a governmental scheme for his “Indian Utopias” that “had its origins in his book, The Christian Commonwealth, written during the Interregnum as a guide for Puritan legislators, who had just abolished the English monarchy. The book was ignored by the legislators, but eventually it brought considerable embarrassment to Eliot after the Restoration” (Tanis 315). Eliot had to write and have appended an apology and retraction to subsequent editions.

34Two years after The Christian Commonwealth was printed, Eliot’s Algonquin translation of the New Testament was printed in Cambridge in 1661. Two years later, his translation of the entire Bible was printed in 1663 and was the first complete Bible printed in North America. The Algonquin title of Eliot’s complete translation of the Bible is Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe: Up-Biblum God, Naneeswe Nukkone Testament, Kah Wonk Wusku Testament (1685).

35Eliot completed the translation with the help of Job Nesutan and John Sassamon, two Native American Christian converts, and Eliot printed the Bible with the assistance of another convert, James Wowaus, who became known as James the Printer (Amory 89).

36In addition to being the first Bible printed in the colonies, Eliot’s Algonquin Bible was unique because it was the first Bible to be printed in a non-European language and the first printed Bible that included an entire phonetic writing system (Rivett, “The Algonquian Word and the Spirit of Divine Truth” 159). As Phillip Round observes, the layout of Eliot’s Algonquin Bible generally follows conventions of earlier English Bibles with some departures, with text appearing in “in two columns of Roman type preceded by an elaborate initial” along with glosses in the margins, and the Algonquian version “includes the English language overview of the chapter that the English text provides” (27). The Massachusett Bible, however, has more ornamentation than other English Bibles of the 1660s, as it employs “typographic ornamentation instead of rules and rule frames to separate text from title” (27). Round writes that a cursory reading of the entire text reveals literal translation and slightly more elaborate typography and ornamentation extend throughout the work, making it a useful and practical text as well as an attractive gift; Robert Boyle and Charles II received copies sent across the Atlantic (28). Round sees Eliot’s Bible as a “supplement” to the “inadequacies” of Native American languages and an “introduction to an ideology of the book in which printed words are wholly ‘other’ to Native life,” such that Eliot’s Bible was the “disciplinary technology” most scholars have seen it to be (30). Very few copies of Eliot’s Bible have survived, and as Sandra Gustafson suggests, this may have resulted either from Algonquins who were hostile to the colonists or from colonists who were hostile to the Algonquins (39). Eliot’s translation of the Bible, therefore, became a means for controlling the Native Americans as well as eventually becoming a site for anger and resentment for both colonialists and Native Americans.

37 After completing the massive project of translating the entire Bible, Eliot turned to more technical matters related to the Algonquin language and published The Indian Grammar in 1666. In the prefatory letter addressed to Robert Boyle, Eliot expresses concern for the Native Americans’ souls: “I humbly present it to your Honours, and request your Animadversions upon the Work, and Prayers unto the Lord for blessing up all Essayes and Endeavors for the promoting of his Glory, and the Salvation of the Souls of these poor People” (The Indian Grammar Begun A3r).

38The text proper provides grammatical rules through explications of parts of speech, morphology, and syntax, and interspersed among these rules Eliot provides anecdotes about his experiences meeting and communicating with the Native Americans in Natick. For instance, Eliot writes that the Native Americans “quickly apprehended and understood” spelling and syllabification and soon learned how to read (The Indian Grammar Begun 4). After grammatical charts explaining morphology, Eliot provides a postscript in which he writes, “God first put into my heart compassion over their poor Souls, and a desire to teach them how to know Christ and to bring them into his Kingdome” (The Indian Grammar Begun 66). Like Williams, Eliot provides ethnography alongside linguistic instruction, and he does so specifically for the salvation of Native Americans through Puritan indoctrination. Eliot’s Indian Grammar was received positively by comparative philologists, including S. Du Ponceau (1760-1844), John Pickering (1777-1846), and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), all of whom afforded Eliot’s text an important place in the classification and characterization of Native American languages (Swiggers 42).

39Numerous grammars had been printed before Eliot’s Indian Grammar. Edward IV’s (1537-1553) royal decree had established William Lily’s (1468-1522) Royal Grammar as the standard grammar for Britain; the text was reprinted 350 times, and in 1659, Bassett Jones (1613/1614 – date of death unknown) published Herm'aelogium; or an Essay at the Rationality of the Art of Speaking, which provides rational syntax to Lily’s text derived from a neo-Aristotelian philosophy of language (Subbiondo 87). In 1660, French Jansenists Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) and Claude Lancelot (1615 – 1695) published the Port-Royal Grammar (Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle), and in 1662 Arnauld and Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) published the anonymous Port-Royal Logic. Eliot’s Indian grammar thus appeared in the wake of the codification of grammar in the seventeenth century intellectual milieu.

40The printing of books on grammar and logic in the seventeenth century was in keeping with larger contemporary projects of classification. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault argues that the Port-Royal Grammar and Logic are constitutive of the Classical age’s (seventeenth century) episteme, which Foucault defines as an “arrangement in terms of the articulated system of a mathesis, a taxinomia, and a genetic analysis” (82). Beginning in the seventeenth century, according to Foucault, the arrangement of signs became binary because it was defined by the relationship between sign and signifier (Foucault 46). The Port-Royal Grammar and Logic connected theories of knowledge, signs, and grammar, as the Port-Royal Grammar was a “complement and natural sequel” to the Logic, “the former being connected to the latter by a common analysis of signs” (Foucault 84). For Foucault, then, the classificatory impulse in the seventeenth century resulted in epistemic and monolithic attempts to codify grammar and logic itself and not just the languages involved. Eliot similarly sought to codify something beyond grammar and logic, as his primary purpose for his Indian Library writings was to indoctrinate the Native Americans in Puritanical right thinking.

41Following the precedent of the Port-Royal publications (a Grammar followed by a Logic), Eliot published The Logick Primer in 1672. This text explains syllogistic and formal logic in Algonquin with inter-linear English translations.

42Aristotelian, syllogistic logic had been the dominant form of logic during the Middle Ages among the clergy, but its popularity had waned in many intellectual circles since the beginning of the early modern period. The Logick Primer defines the constituent parts of logic and grammar and uses biblical passages for all examples, such that learning logic by reading this book is epistemologically united with learning passages from the Bible. In the preface, Eliot writes that his purpose for writing the “few short Logicall Notions” was to “guide them to follow me through the principal and most useful Principles, whereby they may in some measure enabled to understand, open, and improve the plain things of the Kingdome of Jesus Christ revealed in the Scriptures” (Logic Primer A3.v). Eliot then quotes the Eunuch from Acts 8:31, which in the King James Version (1611) reads, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” “Lord Jesus help me to help them,” Eliot writes, “that they may come to the knowledge of thy Truth” (Logic Primer A3.v). Like the Logic Grammar, Eliot’s sole purpose for writing the Logic Primer was, therefore, the Christian conversion of the Native Americans in Natick and not to teach logic. In other words, if all you give someone is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.

Eliot’s Printers

43Eliot worked with notable colonial publishers for most of his works, such as Marmaduke Johnson (1628-1674) and Samuel Green (1614-1672), who were involved in several of Eliot’s publications. Johnson was plagued by personal and professional problems, so he accepted a three-year commission to move to Massachusetts to work on Eliot’s Bible translation and left for Massachusetts in 1660 (Ashe). Johnson and James the Printer established a printing house in New England and published Eliot’s Indian Grammar, Indian Primer, and the Logick Primer, and Greene published The dying speeches of several Indians.

44Johnson worked with Samuel Green, who had the only printing house in Massachusetts at the time (in Cambridge) and became the manager of the first printing house in New England. In 1649, Parliament established the Act for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England, and Green was selected to publish Eliot’s Native American texts. For most of the seventeenth century, Green was the only printer in the British North American colonies, and he was forced to print under close supervision of the government. Johnson’s first publication was written by Eliot, a tract entitled Communion of Churches (1665), which sought to unite Presbyterians and Congregationalists and to “propose a Way to bring all Christian Nations unto an Unity of the Faith and Order of the Gospel” (Ashe).

45Livewell Chapman printed The Christian Commonwealth and was no stranger to the authorities. He associated with and printed texts in favor of the Fifth Monarchist Protestant sect, which held millenarian views during the Interregnum. He printed James Harrington’s (1611–1677) controversial Commonwealth of Oceana in 1656 and frequently found himself at odds with the Cromwell government because of his Fifth Monarchist sympathies. He was arrested several times for printing texts that enraged Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Eliot thus worked with printers who were both groundbreaking and controversial.

46Eliot did not have the luxury of choosing printers, as the labor pool for printing in New England was relatively limited. However, Eliot himself was no stranger to controversy. He questioned John Winthrop’s 1634 treaty with the Pequots, and he testified against Anne Hutchinson in 1637 (Ditmore 88) He also had to append a recantation to The Christian Commonwealth in 1661. Eliot’s departure from England was surrounded by controversy as well, as the school where he worked was forced into closure because its owner, Thomas Hooker, fled to Holland to escape persecution from William Laud. Eliot’s use of controversial printers, therefore, is consistent with many other aspects of his life. While Eliot may have had genuine soteriological concern for the Natick Algonquins, his life and his life’s work are shrouded by controversy, questionable associations, and political entanglements.

Paolo Freire and Oppressive Pedagogy

47 In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1967-68), Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire (1921-1997) argues that the colonial dynamic dehumanizes the colonized such that the oppressed see in their oppressor the correct model for “manhood” (46). Freire proposes a “pedagogy of the oppressed” as a means to think critically about this domination of the oppressor over the oppressed, arguing that the oppressed must “discover themselves to be ‘hosts’ of the oppressor” before they have the “critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization” (48). Freire characterizes the pedagogy of the oppressed as being “animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity” and “a pedagogy of humankind” (54). For Freire, pedagogy that starts with the oppressor’s egoistic interests cloaked in a false paternal generosity transforms the oppressed into objects of its own humanitarianism to embody and maintain oppression such that it is an instrument of dehumanization (54). Freire lists self-deprecation as another attribute of the oppressed that derives from the internalization of the oppressor’s opinions about them, as the oppressed consistently hear how they are “good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything—that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive—that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness” (63). Freire opposes what he calls the “banking concept of education,” in which:

[...] knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence—but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher. (72)

48Freire’s comments about education could easily apply to the European accounts of Native Americans’ confessions as well as the Native American’s own self-assessments during the confessions that were fictionalized for printed publications.

49Freire was influenced by a variety of theoretical and philosophical perspectives, including those of the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who had appropriated the idea of the “double consciousness” from American sociologist W.E.B. Dubois’ (1868-1963) Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which Dubois famously wrote,

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,––a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,––an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (8)

50Fanon also relied heavily upon the distinction between colonizer and colonized. For instance, in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Fanon writes, “The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people” because the “hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs” (52–53). Two years after the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi (1920-2020) published The Colonizer and the Colonized in 1965, in which Memmi distinguishes between colonized, colonizer, and colonial:

A colonial is a European living in a colony but having no privileges, whose living conditions are not higher than those of a colonized person of equivalent economic and social status. By temperament or ethical conviction, a colonial is a benevolent European who does not have the colonizer's attitude toward the colonized. All right! Let us say right away, despite the apparently drastic nature of the statement: a colonial so defined does not exist, for all Europeans in the colonies are privileged. (54)

51In Freire’s account of the pedagogy of the oppressed, the terms oppressor and oppressed could easily be replaced with colonizer and colonized.

52 Eliot was part of what was called The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, which was also known as the New England Company (or Corporation) for Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, which was founded in 1649. While the words “company” and “corporation” obviously did not have the same connotation in the early modern period, Eliot and other seventeenth-century missionaries engaged in what might be called a “banking” model for educating the indigenous inhabitants of the New World.

53 In his famous essay, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” Stephen Greenblatt argues that it is an exaggeration to think that Europeans had “rehearsed their encounter with the peoples of the New World, acting out, in their response to the legendary Wild Man, their mingled attraction and revulsion, longing and hatred” (29). Europeans often thought that the indigenous peoples of the New World did not have any language at all, Greenblatt notes, while many depictions of European encounters with peoples of the New World frequently depict the opposite, the seemingly immediate capacity for the two groups to understand and be understood (37). Greenblatt attributes this phenomenon to the difficulty arising from an inability to depict language barriers in sixteenth century narratives because of the deeply ingrained belief in in an “isomorphic relationship between language and reality” (38). In the seventeenth century, Greenblatt argues, linguists did not believe that English, Latin, or Hebrew shaped reality, but rather advocated “the discovery or fashioning of a universal language that would do so” (38). These two extremes for Greenblatt—the belief that the peoples of the New World had little or no language versus the belief that that there was in fact no language barrier—"reflect a fundamental inability to sustain the simultaneous perception of likeness and difference, the very special perception we give to metaphor. Instead they either push the Indians toward utter difference—and thus silence—or toward utter likeness—and thus the collapse of their own, unique identity” (40).

54Greenblatt’s essay was published originally in 1976, but it foresaw what Homi Bhabha calls the “cultural hybridity” of the colonizer/colonized dynamic in The Location of Culture (1994), in which Bhabha defines hybridity as “the name of this displacement of value from symbol to sign that causes the dominant discourse to split along the axis of its power to be representative, authoritative. Hybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn” of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification - a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority” (113). The influence from Foucault in Bhabha’s formulation is obvious here, with its “questioning” of the dominant colonial authority by a subject always already caught up in the discourse of the colonizer in this failed resistance.

55 While Eliot’s primary purpose was to save Native American souls, his writings served a greater political role in disseminating soteriological propaganda and linguistic strictures through which the Native Americans were ultimately subjugated. The unintended consequences of Eliot’s writings, in particular his writings on the Algonquin language, cast an ominous shadow over Eliot’s altruistic agenda to spread Christianity. Following the ethnographic precedents of previous writers on the Algonquin language, Eliot’s writings created indelible markings of authority onto the Native American consciousness, and because he incorporated a Native American language into what was likely a sincere missionary agenda, he inadvertently translated and rewrote that Native American consciousness. Through his writings, Eliot imported a European Christian perspective into the colonial discourse, and through this discourse Eliot left behind a unique collection of texts that highlight his missionary agenda as well as unconscious colonial impulses that eventually collapsed because of King Philip’s War. Eliot’s texts, therefore, provide a glimpse into a colonial mindset that reveals hidden biases and agendas that must be acknowledge alongside his missionary aims.