Early American Literature

For countless generations the Massachusett people of the Eastern Algonquian language group used speech customs to adapt to social and natural change. They dominated the seaboard around Massachusetts Bay until "virgin soil epidemics" contracted from European traders in the 1610s killed up to 90 percent of their population and disrupted the continuity between generations essential to a society without written records. When, in the wake of this holocaust, English settlers began building on Massachusett land a new culture founded on the written word, the indigenous culture appeared doomed to fulfill American Indian author N. Scott Momaday's warning that the "ancient chain of language we call the oral tradition" is "always but one generation removed from extinction" (10).

Yet the apparent frailty of oral traditions may mask a resourcefulness that, under special conditions, enables them to survive. Momaday's generational lease for oral traditions emerges from a story told by his father. A Kiowa sitting with his wife making an arrow sees, through a tear in their teepee's fabric, a stranger outside. Tribesman or enemy? The Kiowa stretches the arrow on a bow and speaks as though addressing his wife but loudly enough for the stranger to hear, "I know you are there. . . . If you are a Kiowa, you will understand what I am saying and will speak your name." The silence outside is telling: one without the language cannot be one of the people. The Kiowa releases the shaft "straight to the enemy's heart." For the arrow maker and his story, Momaday writes, "language represent[ed] the only chance for survival" (12). The same might be said for the stranger and any story he might have told. Spoken texts or, by extension, entire oral cultures may perish when their last speakers die. Yet they also may adapt to new conditions: Momaday knowingly extends the oral tradition beyond "the private possession of a few" by rendering it in a language other than Kiowa and a medium other than speech (3). [End Page 437]

A similar vulnerability and adaptability characterized the Massachusett culture. Repeated epidemics interrupted the transmissions from speaker to listener and elder to younger that constitute speech communities. "In a place where many inhabited," Thomas Morton wrote in 1637, "there hath been but one left alive, to tell what became of the rest" (23). As with the Kiowa tradition, however, something of this people and their story lasted, even as the language, medium, and audience changed. Not for two centuries would the last Massachusett speakers die or disperse to other ethnic groups. Even now the language and culture maintain an afterlife in print because a remnant of its speakers interacted with an English culture largely defined by writing.

Records that might outlive the Massachusett oral culture required listeners who could translate and inscribe its spoken expressions. William S. Simmons's collection of Algonquian oral traditions, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984, offers evidence of this recurrent activity. In the seventeenth century the principal agents of such transcriptions were Puritan missionaries who learned the Massachusett language, especially John Eliot on the mainland and the Mayhew family on Cape Cod and the Bay islands. These missionaries recorded, translated, and published speeches made by "Praying Indians" who gathered in "Praying Towns" to learn new beliefs and ways, including reading and writing in their native tongue.

The field of interaction between speech and writing created by the Praying Towns prolonged and preserved elements of Massachusett oral culture. This model of "interdependence," developed by medievalist Brian Stock, complicates scenarios in which traditional orality and modern literacy monolithically oppose or supersede each other (Listening 6). For Stock, functions associated with written or spoken mentalities may appear in either domain, and "oral exchange, if recorded, may still preserve many of its original features" (Implications 12, 13). The "aspects of everyday life" recorded by such a field of exchange in early New England are documented in Simmons and in Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon's Native Writings in Massachusett (1). However, three sets of speeches spoken in Massachusett by Praying Indians, translated to English, and printed...