The World of Indigenous North America (Routledge Worlds) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781136331992
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

In one of Samson Occom’s sermons in Bristol in the 1770s, he spoke of a natural human resistance to the Bible, and the importance of supernatural inspiration in receiving the Christian message. Like writing itself in the biblical Paul’s formulation, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6), books in Occom’s vision are magical, yet necessary to salvation. “The whole Bible was a sealed Book to them,” Occom proclaimed, “till the Spirit revealed it; but now they know what it is, they understand the Scriptures so as to receive them; it is sweet to their Taste: Then they see the Sinfulness of their Nature” (in Occom and Whitaker 1776: 26). This vision, in which the power of books lives not just in their material form as technology, but in how they patch you into supernatural power, accords reasonably well with what have been claimed as traditional American Indian ideas about how humans and their other-than-human means of communication relate to each other. Yet Occom’s vision is at odds with another famous claim about books: “We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the commonplace are one,” argues Lame Deer (Sioux), while to Westerners “symbols are just words, spoken or written in a book” (quoted in Lincoln, 1985: 52).

This juxtaposition reminds us that controversies over the book are inscribed in the history of colonialism and its larger pressures, not just the history of a particular information format. The history of books in Indian country thus offers a lesson to book historians not unlike the one implied by the National Museum of the American Indian’s controversial “Bibles and guns” exhibit: both books and book history have been tools of colonization, inseparable from the kinds of force that have created the persistently colonial relationship between Indigenous North Americans and everyone else who reads. The history of the book in Indian country is only beginning to be told, and the story will be a long and challenging one.

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