1. Works in this vein are reviewed in Ronda, James P., “‘We are Well as we Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 34 (Jan. 1977): 66. For the debate in general, see Frederick Fausz, J., “Anglo-Indian Relations in Colonial North America,” in Scholars and the Indian Experience: Critical Reviews of Recent Writing in the Social Sciences, ed. Swagerty, W. R. (Bloomington, 1984), 79–105. For a discussion of the Canadian context, see Adams, David W., “Before Canada: Toward an Ethnohistory of Indian Education,” History of Education Quarterly 28 (Spring 1988): 95–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For example, Ferris, Florence L., “Indian Schools in Colonial Days,” Journal of American History 6 (1st quarter, 1912): 141–58; Stitt Robinson, W. Jr., “Indian Education and Missions in Colonial Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 18 (May 1952): 152–68; Tanis, Norman Earl, “Education in John Eliot's Indian Utopias, 1646–1675,” History of Education Quarterly 10 (Fall 1970): 308–23. See also Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York, 1970), 157–63, 194.Google Scholar

3. Ronda summarizes this approach, “‘We are Well as we Are,”’ 67; Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Williamsburg, Va., 1975); Bowden, Henry Warner, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago, 1981), ch. 4. “Cultural revolutionary” is in Ronda, James P. and Axtell, James, Indian Missions: A Critical Bibliography (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), 4; “delimited” is in, for the post-colonial period, Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington, Ky., 1965), xi.Google Scholar

4. James Axtell is one of the leading proponents of this view, in his The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1981), and The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985). Cf. Morrison, Dane A., “‘A Praying People’: The Transition from Remnant to Convert among the Indians of Massachusetts Bay Colony” (Ph.D. diss., Tufts University, 1983), 31.Google Scholar

5. Axtell, James, “Some Thoughts on the Ethnohistory of Missions,” Ethnohistory 29 (no. 1, 1982): 35–41; quotation in Axtell, The Invasion Within, 332. Cf. Coleman, Michael C., “The Responses of American Indian Children to Presbyterian Schooling in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Missionary Sources,” History of Education Quarterly 27 (Winter 1987): 473–97. Margaret Connell Szasz evaluates the “success” of educating the Indians by whether or not they became “cultural brokers.” Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1988), ch. 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. The colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven (then a separate colony) all passed such legislation between 1642 and 1655; Plymouth in 1671. Cremin, , American Education, 124–25.Google Scholar

7. The distinction is somewhat artificial: for example, Cressy's, “qualitative” study cited below presupposes his largely “quantitative” study, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, Eng., 1980). However, studies with a predominantly quantitative basis include: Lockridge, Kenneth A., Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974); Beales, Ross E. Jr., “Studying Literacy at the Community Level: A Research Note,” journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (Summer 1978): 93–102; Auwers, Linda, “Reading the Marks of the Past: Exploring Female Literacy in Colonial Windsor, Connecticut,” Historical Methods 13 (Fall 1980): 204–14; and Gilmore, William J., Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760–1830 (Worcester, Mass., 1982). Predominantly qualitative discussions include Cremin, American Education, 544–49; Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989), ch. 1; Hall, David D., “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. Joyce, William L. et al. (Worcester, Mass., 1983), 1–47; and Cressy, David, “The Environment for Literacy: Accomplishment and Context in Seventeenth-Century England and New England,” in Literacy in Historical Perspective, ed. Resnick, Daniel P. (Washington, D.C., 1983), 23–42. For more general discussions of the history of literacy, see Clifford, Geraldine Jonçich, “Buch and Lesen: Historical Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling,” Review of Educational Research 54 (Winter 1984): 472–500; Kaestle, Carl F., “The History of Literacy and the History of Readers,” in Review of Research in Education, ed. Gordon, Edmund W. (Washington, D.C., 1985), 12: 11–53; Venezky, Richard L., “The Development of Literacy in the Industrialized Nations of the West,” in Handbook of Reading Research, vol. 2, ed. Barr, Rebecca et al. (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

8. For a roundup of discussions on the validity of using the signature as an indicator of literacy, see Kaestle, , “History of Literacy,” 12–13; for a discussion of the validity of using the mark as an indicator of illiteracy, see Jennifer Monaghan, E., “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” American Quarterly 40 (Spring 1988): 18–41; “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Davidson, Cathy N. (Baltimore, 1989), 53–80.Google Scholar

9. Proponents of this view are detailed in Monaghan, , “Literacy Instruction and Gender,” note 7.Google Scholar

10. Experience Mayhew, , Indian Converts: Or, Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a considerable Number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard, in New-England (London, 1727). I used the New York Public Library's copy of this rare book.Google Scholar

11. Simmons, William S., “Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans' Perception of Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (Jan. 1981): 69. For an illuminating discussion of the causes of the Vineyard conversion that relates it to Thomas Mayhew's success in usurping the powwows' powers of healing and sorcery, see Simmons, William S., “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” New England Quarterly 52 (June 1979): 197–218. Simmons calls it “an example of deep and rapid voluntary change to colonial ideology.” Simmons, , “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” 215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Ronda, James P., “Generations of Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha's Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (July 1981): 369–94. Ronda's discussion of the literacy of the Vineyard Indians, within that article, inspired my essay, and his article provides the broader context for my own.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Banks, Charles E., The History of Martha's Vineyard, Dukes County, Massachusetts , vol. 1, General History (Edgartown, Mass., 1966), 80–83.Google Scholar

14. The Indian population of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket combined has been estimated to be five thousand in 1642; outbreaks of disease, such as those of 1643 and 1646, soon caused a population decline. Cook, Sherburne F., The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century (Berkeley, 1976), 43–44. For contacts between the Vineyard Indians and Europeans before 1643, see Salisbury, Neal, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York, 1982), 88–89, 95–96, 120, 129.Google Scholar

15. For “Nope” as the name of the Martha's Vineyard dialect, see Pilling, James C., Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages (Washington, D.C., 1891), 252. Opinions differ on the extent of the differences between the dialect of the mainland (which was also the dialect of Nantucket) and that of the Vineyard Indians. Goddard, Ives, “Eastern Algonquian Languages,” in Handbook of North American Indians, ed. Sturtevant, William C., vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Trigger, Bruce G. (Washington, D.C., 1978), 72, cites (in support of his contention that the dialects “differed enough… to make communication difficult”) a 1710 letter by Cotton Mather which Samuel Sewall had copied into his letterbook: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., 12 (Feb. 1873): 373. Mather, however, was using the differences as part of his argument against printing a new edition of the Indian Bible. Experience Mayhew, on the other hand, considered the dialects very similar and believed that the Indian Bible had helped reduce the differences between dialects; Experience Mayhew, Observations on the Indian Language (Boston, 1884), 5–6. As Mayhew spoke the language and Mather did not, Mayhew is the more credible witness.Google Scholar

16. Prince, Thomas, Some Account of Those English Ministers who have successively presided over the Work of gospelizing the Indians on Martha's Vineyard, and the adjacent Islands (London, 1727), in Mayhew, Indian Converts, 280–81; Banks, , History of Martha's Vineyard, 1: 127, 213–14.Google Scholar

17. Simmons, , “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” 206–10. For the functions of powwows (also called shamans), see Vogel, Virgil J., American Indian Medicine (Norman, Ok., 1970), 22, 31.Google Scholar

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19. Prince, , in Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 302–306.Google Scholar

20. Kellaway, William, The New-England Company, 1649–1776: Missionary Society to the American Indians (New York, 1962), esp. ch. 6. The original “Society for…” was later called the “Corporation for…” and then the “New England Company.”Google Scholar

21. Gookin, Daniel, “An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England, in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677,” Archaeologia Americana. Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (Cambridge, 1836), 2: 444; Winslow, Ola E., John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians” (Boston, 1968). For a fuller account, see Szasz, , Indian Education, 111–15.Google Scholar

22. Kellaway, , The New-England Company, ch. 6. Weis, Frederick L., “The New-England Company of 1649 and Its Missionary Enterprises,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 38, Transactions, 1947–1951 (Boston, 1959), 216–18, lists forty items in the Indian Library. These include all the Company's publications, some of which were in English, a few in other Indian languages, while others were new editions of older works.Google Scholar

23. Mayhew, Matthew, A Brief Narrative of the Success which the Gospel hath had, among the Indians of Martha's Vineyard (and the Places Adjacent) in New-England… (Boston, 1694), 22; details of Folger's life are provided in Banks, History of Martha's Vineyard, 2: 67–70, and in Szasz, , Indian Education, 122–24.Google Scholar

24. Pulsifer, David, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England. Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, vol. 2, 1653–1679 (Boston, 1859), 167, 205, 245, 262, 277, 296, 317, 331.Google Scholar

25. Mayhew, , A Brief Narrative, 39. For a 1674 report by Mayhew, Thomas Sr., see Gookin, Daniel, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (1792; rpt. New York, 1972), 65. For a 1698 report, see “Account of an Indian Visitation, A.D. 1698,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., 10 (1809): 131–32.Google Scholar

26. “An Appendix. The Present Condition of the Indians on Martha's Vineyard, Extracted from an Account of Mr. Experience Mayhew,” in Mather, Cotton, India Christiana (Boston, 1721), 88–89 (quotations, 89, 93).Google Scholar

27. Ibid., 93–94. For Mayhew as the translator of the Massachuset Psalter, see Kellaway, , New-England Company, 149, 152–53. Mayhew's account accords well with an inventory of the books in the New England Commissioners' possession, drawn up on 1 May 1724. This shows stock on hand that included 894 copies of the “New primmers” (i.e., the 1720 edition), 408 Confessions of Faith, 45 Practice of Piety (the 1685 edition), 48 Sincere Convert, and 324 copies of the Massachuset Psalter, Mayhew's translation of the Book of Psalms with the Gospel according to St. John. Kellaway, New-England Company, 164.Google Scholar

28. The summary of laws was Cotton Mather's The Hatchets, to hew down the Tree of Sin… Or, The Laws, by which the Magistrates are to punish Offences… (Boston, 1705).Google Scholar

29. Cf. attestation by Cotton Mather and others, in Mayhew, , Indian Converts, xvii–xviii, attributing the decline in part to the Indians' “Love of intoxicating Liquours,” xvii.Google Scholar

30. Mayhew, , Observations on the Indian Language, 8.Google Scholar

31. Ronda, , “Generations of Faith,” 372.Google Scholar

32. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, x, xi.Google Scholar

33. Prince, Thomas, in Mayhew, Indian Converts, 309, claims that, “Contrary to the ungenerous and unworthy Aspersions” cast by some critics, there have been “such Zealous Endeavours“ to Christianize the Indians as to deserve “a very grateful and respectful Mention.”Google Scholar

34. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, ix, x. Mayhew took such pains over the accuracy of his work that at one point in his manuscript he left a space for a place name he intended to ascertain. The gap is faithfully reproduced in the printed text; “and set him on Shore at;” ibid., 245.Google Scholar

35. John Sommerville, C., “Breaking the Icon: The First Real Children in English Books,” History of Education Quarterly 21 (Spring 1981): 51–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, xxiii.Google Scholar

37. Mayhew, records with obvious regret that he mistimed Jacob Sockakonnit's impending death in 1721, and so was absent when it occurred; ibid., 119.Google Scholar

38. The figures in Indian Converts are as follows:Google Scholar

Chapter I (Church-related men):Google Scholar

Total: 22; readers: 15; writers: 3 Google Scholar

Supplement:Google Scholar

Total: 8; readers: 2; writers: 0Google Scholar

Chapter II (Men not holding a church position):Google Scholar

Total: 20; readers: 8; writers: 2Google Scholar

Supplement:Google Scholar

Total: 17; readers: 0; writers: 0Google Scholar

Chapter III (women):Google Scholar

Total: 30; readers: 19; writers: 1Google Scholar

Supplement:Google Scholar

Total: 9; readers: 0; writers: 0Google Scholar

Chapter IV (children):Google Scholar

Total: 22; readers: 16; writers: 3Google Scholar

(No supplement)Google Scholar

Grand Total (chapters and supplements):Google Scholar

Total: 128; readers: 60; writers: 9Google Scholar

39. The Day Breaking if not the Sun Rising of the Gospel with the Indians in New England (London, 1647; rpt. New York, 1865), 1.Google Scholar

40. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 91, 79.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., 3–4; Mayhew, Thomas, letter, 7 Sep. 1650, in Whitfield, Henry, A Farther Discovery of the Present State of the Indians in New England… (New York, 1865), 4.Google Scholar

42. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 20; 63–64; cf. 87.Google Scholar

43. Ibid, 113, 115; cf. Akoochuk, 101.Google Scholar

44. Ibid, 37, 45, 106, 110, 148, 151, 154, 156, 158, 175, 188, 197, 203, 207, 212.Google Scholar

45. Ibid, 212. There is a problem of interpretation here. The wording “took care to teach her to read” should probably not be interpreted as equivalent to “taught her to read themselves,” but rather “took care to see that she was taught to read” (by an unidentified teacher). A mother who actually did the teaching herself is indicated by the wording, “did her self teach” her child to read, like Mary Coshomon (see below, note 49). This interpretation is supported by the case of Samuel James, who was “taught to read when he was a Child, and otherwise well instructed by his godly Mother” (ibid, 106). His mother was “Old Sarah,” who was illiterate (see below, note 92).Google Scholar

46. Ibid., 197, 148. Mayhew spells Caleb's last name “Cheshechaamog.” For Caleb, see below, note 95.Google Scholar

47. Ronda, , “Generations of Faith.” Google Scholar

48. Hiacoomes's son Samuel Coomes, for example, was “a carnal Man” in his youth; Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 91; cf. 67, 111.Google Scholar

49. Ibid., 131, 37–38, 152, 179, 180–81; cf. Wunnanauhkomun and his greatgrand-daughter, 18, 151. For examples of two-generational family literacy, see Amanhut, John and his daughter Abigail Manhut (ibid., 72, 219); Panu, Joash and his son Laban (ibid., 64, 248).Google Scholar

50. Ibid., 145.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., 45, 223, 232, 222, 17–18.Google Scholar

52. Ibid., 102–103.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., 64, 53.Google Scholar

54. The Indian “Humanequinn” reported to have sent an account “written with his own hand” is actually Hiacoomes: Whitfield, Henry, Strength out of Weakness: or a Glorious Manifestation of the Further Progress of the Gospel among the Indians in New England (New York, 1865), 24–25.Google Scholar

55. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 57.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., 103, 110, 111,51–52.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., 178, 240, 245, 212.Google Scholar

58. Ibid., 212, 215.Google Scholar

59. The first Massachusetts school law of 1647 required every township of over fifty families to engage a master to “teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and reade.” Shurtleff, Nathaniel B., ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. 2, 1642–1649 (Boston, 1853), 203; Jennifer Monaghan, E., “Readers Writing: The Curriculum of the Writing Schools of Eighteenth Century Boston,” Visible Language 21 (Spring 1987): 167–213.Google Scholar

60. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 49–50. The “Anabaptists” were Baptists.Google Scholar

61. Ibid., 38–39.Google Scholar

62. Ibid., 65.Google Scholar

63. Ibid., 15. Tackanash served as a “teacher” at the church where Hiacoomes was a pastor. For the distinction, see Hall, David D., The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Williamsburg, Va., 1972), 11, 95–96. A schoolteacher was not called a teacher, but a schoolmaster.Google Scholar

64. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 18.Google Scholar

65. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E., The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, 1982), 110–11, 143–45, 148.Google Scholar

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67. Ibid., 202.Google Scholar

68. Ibid., 194, 184. ⁶⁹ Ibid., 111.Google Scholar

70. Ibid., 145.Google Scholar

71. Ibid., 176.Google Scholar

72. Ibid., 68.Google Scholar

73. Ibid., 198; cf. 70, 207.Google Scholar

74. Ibid., 168. Mayhew seems to be mistaken here, as the work is not documented as part of the Indian Library. Eliot, John is said, however, to have translated this work: Pilling, Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages, 131.Google Scholar

75. Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 57, 199; cf. 119, 163, 188.Google Scholar

76. Ibid., 70. For the Massachuset Psalter, see below, note 102.Google Scholar

77. Pilling, , Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages, 348; Evans, Charles, American Bibliography, vol. 1, 1639–1729 (1903; rpt. New York, 1941), 199.Google Scholar

78. As Mayhew indicates the children's ages when they died, usually to the month but in all cases within a couple of years, it has been possible to calculate the children's dates of birth. The children's ages at death ranged between four and twenty years old; the latest date of death was 1724.Google Scholar

79. Ronda, , “Generations of Faith,” 388–89.Google Scholar

80. Last words were recorded by two fathers for three girls, two of whom were sisters: Mayhew, , Indian Converts, 240, 245, 246; 249.Google Scholar

81. Ibid., 222, 235, 224.Google Scholar

82. Ibid., 244; cf. 219, 251, 269.Google Scholar

83. Ibid., 263–64, 269.Google Scholar

84. Ibid., 223, 224.Google Scholar

85. Ibid., 234–35.Google Scholar

86. Ibid., 261, 269, 255.Google Scholar

87. Ibid., 18, 184, 255–56. Cf. Mayhew's, Matthew comment, in 1694; some Indians “who are too far distant from any School are often taught by some of their Neighbours”: Mayhew, , A Brief Narrative, 39.Google Scholar

88. Ibid., 244, 251.Google Scholar

89. Ibid., 219, 222, 232; 226, 236.Google Scholar

90. Ibid., 247–48, 232.Google Scholar

91. Ibid., 256; 257–59 (quotations, 258, 259); 236–37; cf. 226–27. These portraits of the importance of reading are comparable to those in James Janeway's Token for Children, first published in 1671 and reprinted in America from 1700 on. Mayhew was no doubt familiar with the work.Google Scholar

92. Ibid., 144.Google Scholar

93. Mayhew, , A Brief Narrative, 35.Google Scholar

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96. See above, notes 74, 68, 87. Mayhew described Hannah Sissetom as knowing how to read “tho not very well,” whereas her grasp of reading was so poor that she was unable to help her daughter Bethia with her elementary reading lessons.Google Scholar

97. Conversion was much aided by the fact that Hiacoomes and his family had been left unscathed by disease in the first years of proselytism: Simmons, , “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” 206–10.Google Scholar

98. In a 1674 report on 497 Indians (mostly living on Cape Cod), 142 were said to be able to read Indian, 72 to write it, and 9 to read English: Gookin, , Historical Collections of the Indians, 57–58.Google Scholar

99. Ronda, , “Generations of Faith,” 385–88, 392–93.Google Scholar

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101. Hambrick-Stowe, , Practice of Piety, 157–75; Hall, , “The Uses of Literacy,” 21–24.Google Scholar

102. For primers, see Kellaway, , New-England Company, 139–40, 148, 150, 160, 162–64. The first Indian primer was John Eliot's Indian Primer… (Cambridge, Mass., 1669).Google Scholar

A primer that is no longer extant was printed in 1699 or 1700. The “new primer” was The Indian Primer Or The First Book. By which Children may know truely to read the Indian Language. And Milk for Babes (Boston, 1720). The subtitle of the 1709 Psalter (translated by Mayhew) suggests that it may have been used as the next text after the primer, as was the case for reading instruction in English: The Massachuset Psalter: Or, Psalms of David With the Gospel According to John, in Columns of Indian and English. Being An Introduction for Training up the Aboriginal Natives, in Reading and Understanding the Holy Scriptures (Boston, 1709). For discussions of Indians learning to read, see Eliot, John, A Grammar of the Massachusetts Indian Language, ed. du Ponceau, Peter S. (Boston, 1822), 4–5; Bowden, Henry W. and Ronda, James P., eds., John Eliot's Indian Dialogues: A Study in Cultural Interaction (Westport, Conn., 1980), 108–9.Google Scholar

103. “Account of an Indian Visitation, A.D. 1698,” 134; Matthew Mayhew's comment, “in diverse places are lesser schools,” may refer to dame schools: Mayhew, , A Brief Narrative, 39.Google Scholar

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105. The Algonquians seem not to have used picture writing. Russell, Howard S., Indian New England before the Mayflower (Hanover, N.H., 1980), 42. Algonquians were, however, familiar with certain symbolic representations. For instance, Massachusett Indians signing land transfers used depictions of animals for signatures. For writing systems in general, see Walker, Willard, “Native American Writing Systems,” in Language in the USA, ed. Ferguson, Charles A. and Heath, Shirley Brice (New York, 1981), 145–74.Google Scholar

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107. According to a 1792 note by the Massachusetts Historical Society, many native Americans, whose numbers on the Vineyard had been reduced to 313 by 1764, began intermarrying with African Americans in the 1760s. By 1792 there were some 440 persons of Indian or partly Indian ancestry, 276 of whom lived at Gookin, Gay Head., Historical Collections, 103, n. 18.Google Scholar