What do we imply by such a belief? Preser-vation, or change?

Henry Whitfi eld (1597–1657) was a founder and the fi rst minister of the church in Guil-ford, Connecticut. His home (1639) still stands today and is the oldest stone house in Connecti-cut. He returned to England in 1650. He is the author of Strength out of weaknesse; Or, A glorious manifestation of the further progresse of the gospel among the Indians in New-England (1652), as well as The light appearing more and more toward the perfect day; Or, a farther discovery of the present state of the Indians in New-England (1651), from which this quotation is taken

Mayhew, like other Puritans, felt that the “excessive” grief of Algonquian mourning rituals expressed a doubt either of God’s saving grace, God’s goodness, or the salvation of the deceased. See Stannard, Puritan Way of Death, 100.

I must needs give him this Testimony after some Years Experience of him, that he is a Man of a sober Spirit, and good Conversation; and as he hath, as I hope, received the Lord Jesus in Truth, so I look upon him to be faithful, diligent, and constant in the Work of the Lord, for the Good of his own Soul and his Neighbours with him.

distinguish them from the rest of their Neighbours

Tawanquatuck,65 one of the chief Sachims of the Island, invited both Mr. Mayhew and Hiacoomes to preach to himself and such of his People as would hear them

Teacher of others; communicating to as many as he could the Knowledge he himself had attained: And some there were that now began to hearken to him, yet seemed not to be duly affected with the Truths taught by him, and many utterly rejected them; but God now sending a general Sick-ness among them, it was observed by the Indians themselves, that such as had but given a Hearing to the things by Hiacoomes preached among them, and shewed any regard to them, were far more gently visited with it than others were; but Hiacoomes and his Family in a manner not at all.

Probably an ABC or hornbook, or Coote’s English Schoole-maister. See Cremin, American Education, 129. John Eliot’s Indian primer was fi rst published in 1669; the fi rst solely Puritan educational manual in English was Benjamin Harris’s Protestant tutor (1679). Ford, The New England Primer: A History, 34 –35.

And that he might be in a Way to learn more than he had done, he now ear-nestly desired to learn to read; [4] and having a Primmer59 given him, he carried it about with him, till, by the Help of such as were willing to instruct him, he attained the End for which he desired it

David Silverman estimates that the outbreaks of 1643 and 1645 eliminated half the Wam-panoag population on Martha’s Vineyard. Thomas Mayhew’s success in helping provide cures during the epidemic enhanced his prestige and brought converts to Christianity. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 22–24, 74.

very strange Disease among the Indians

As Kathleen Bradgon notes, the relative status of individuals in Wampanoag culture deter-mined the form that interactions took, and the people’s deference to communication etiquette, and status, helped acknowledge and reinforce an individual’s power. Lower-ranking individuals would often display their deference to and esteem for the sachems with the phrase “Cowauncka-mish ‘my service to you’ ” and by stroking the sachems’ shoulders and torso. Bragdon, “Emphat-icall Speech and the Great Action,” 103–5, 108.

Ruling elders

But now, observing in this Hiacoomes a Disposition to hear and receive Instruction; observing also, that his Countenance was grave and sober, he resolved to essay in the fi rst Place what he could do with him, and immediately took an Opportunity to discourse him; and fi nding Encouragement to go on in his Endeavours to instruct and enlighten him, he invited him to come to his House every Lord’s-day Evening, that so he might then more especially have a good Opportunity to treat with him about the things of GOD, and open the Mysteries of his Kingdom to him.

See “The Wetu or Native House”; and Scott, “The Early Colonial Houses of Martha’s Vineyard,” 1:50–52.

Traditional rulers. Although sachems ruled by consent, the position was usually inherited on the island. People of “mean” descent who married into royal families would produce off-spring who could not inherit the sachemship. See Plane, “Customary Laws of Marriage,” 192. Even so, Mayhew is probably exaggerating the social hierarchies on the island to increase the miracle of Hiacoomes’ rise to grace and power.

Egdartown

Hiacoomes was the father of Samuel Coomes (convicted of fornication with colonist Abigail Norton), Joell Iacoomes (an early student at of Harvard), John Hiacoomes (a preacher), and possibly Philip Coumes. WGH, 133

Richard Archer, Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001), 60.

Goodwin, “The Government and Discipline of the Churches of Christ,” 16, 19, 22.

MINISTERS

justly esteem’d godly Persons

And tho consider-able numbers of the Indians have learned to read and write, yet they have mostly done this but after the rate that poor Men among the English are wont to do: Nor have our Indians the same Advantage of Books as our English, few of them being able to read and understand English Booksin any measure well. Moreover, there be but few Books comparatively yet published in the Indian Tongue

It must indeed be granted, that the Indians are generally a very sinful People

Now I fear that this may have occasioned some of us to think too highly of our own Nation; and at the same time to think and speak too meanly of the Indians, whom GOD hath not done so much for.

more vital Work in our Proselytes

The Indians being so successfully instructed in the Word of Truth, and Gospel of Salvation,17soon had Schools erected among them; and learning to read and write, this indefatigable Servant of GOD fi rst of all translated the whole BIBLE into their Language; and added a Version of the Psalms inIndian Metre, whereof they became skilful and graceful Singers

Nor have I confi ned my Enquiries about them to those of their own Nation only; but have also obtain’d the best Information I could of their English Neighbours, who were best acquainted with them

Between 1760 and 1820, Calvinist Congregationalism gradually lost sway with Wampanoags on the Vineyard, and the Baptist church gained supremacy.

ducation offered by missionary schools provided Wampanoag children with a way of understanding the very real changes they saw around them and an alternative authority for the lan-guage and leaders that they had lost.

José Rabasa argues that literacy for the colonized was often as much a form of disempowerment as a form of empowerment

sent to schools such as Moor’s Charity School rather than being indentured were often forced to learn rudimentary chores rather devote themselves primarily to schoolwork.

Moreover during the fi rst two-thirds of the eighteenth century, as “more and more Natives served indentures, Indian literacy rates stagnated or declined”; only late in the eighteenth century did literacy rates begin to rise again, as servants began to be educated by white women in the home.2

n the nineteenth century, as more careers became open to women, Native women became teachers and even Baptist ministers

Education opened job opportunities for Wampanoag converts, both within the church (missionizing, teaching) and in the general community (writing letters, petitions, legal documents; record-keeping, and the like)

Although literacy disrupted Wampanoag traditions, it became necessary for success within both the Algonquian church and colonial society.

fl uid and adapts the stories according to context, circumstance, and audi-ence

The Muse Learns to Write,

iteracy entails not only learning to read and write but also learning to value the printed word itself. Thus the invasion of print into island life had radical implications not only for Wampanoag education but also for the Wampanoags’ historiography and notions of truth.

In some of the most interesting cases, however, marginalia can help us trace the life history of an individual Bible as it moved through the hands of generations of worshipers, as in the case of one Eliot Bible originally used in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and now owned by the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The marginalia in Algon-quian Bibles range from the mundane to the spiritually poignant: for some, the Bible represented a place to practice writing the alphabet or one’s name; for others, it provided a space to refl ect upon the relationship between the text and the precarious state of one’s soul.

Whereas in Europe literacy often helped cement communities, for Wampanoags it just as often divided them

their experience of literacy often differed dramatically from that of their white counterparts, in both the violence it entailed and the dislocation

As José Rabasa argues, for the colonized, education itself is often a kind of violence, a process that “seeks to implant an institution of knowledge and European subjectivity.

Missionary schools gave Wampa-noags access to this sacred language and, almost as important, trained them in how to think about this language and the divine through the practice of logic.

Literacy

Indentured children often not only lost the abil-ity to speak the Wôpanâak language and the opportunity to learn folkways but also—given their physical absence—were excluded from certain Wam-panoag religious educational experiences that would have allowed them to take part in traditional Wampanoag social structures.

Changes in the perception of children’s rights by children and their families alike may have been the result both of the internalization of white views and of economic necessity.

Mary Occom, the wife of minister Samson Occom, to Rev. Eleazer Wheelock about her son, who was attending Whee-lock’s school. Mary comments that she writes “with Joy to hear that my Son has behaved himself the least so well as to give Reason to think that there is some hope of his Reforming” and to thank the minister “for taking so hard a task upon yourself as to take such vile Creature as he was into your Care.”

In the fi rst case, from 1675, we see white settlers defending the right to beat Wampa-noag children and a Wampanoag family defending their child’s right not to be beaten.

children who were indentured, seems to have decreased Wampanoags’ leniency: corporal punishment of Wampanoag children increased, and children’s involvement in traditional religious life decreased

Mayhew and other Puritan writers had commented (sometimes dispar-agingly) on the loving and often indulgent relationship between Wampa-noag parents and their children. 162 In contrast, Puritan theology considered children sinful from birth and in dire need of restriction and instruction.

introduction 59The experience of Wampanoag children paralleled that of Wampanoag women. Whereas the shift toward modernity is usually associated with an increase in the status of children, Wampanoag children on the Vineyard suffered a decrease in status during the eighteenth century.

by the 1860s Wampanoag women were being hired both as preachers and as schoolteachers

as adults, Native women often taught their children to read and write at home.

education: early island schools, whether run by whites or not, were church-sponsored and open to girls as well as boys.

benefi

Wampanoag women’s roles on the island became increasingly domestic and private, and their leadership was temporarily curtailed.

Puritan goodwife that was often in sharp confl ict with the assertive, proud, and infl uential role that royal Wampanoag women took for granted

Whereas white women could not hold offi ce or vote in colonial government, some Wam-panoag women held the offi ce of the sachem on the Vineyard.

Massachusetts did not legally bar Wampanoags and other Algon-quians per se from voting, but the high rates of debt and indenturement in the eighteenth century made suffrage unlikely at best.

The nuclear monogamous family functioned as the building block for society

Calvinism encouraged women, children, and servants to see themselves as completely subordinate to the patriarchs of the family.

Hermes, “Justice Will Be Done Us,” 127.

Confl icting under-standings of the meaning and role of reciprocity continued to confuse white and Wampanoag relationships throughout the colonial era

In 1692 the island was annexed by the colony of Massachusetts, which wrested control of the government and courts from Mayhew hands

Though the sachemship

Mayhew redistributed parts of “his” land to his Watertown neighbors, including John Daggett, who would become one of the fi rst settlers and whose son would later marry the daughter of a sachem.142 The result of this redistribution was that settlers increasingly saw the lands of Noëpe as owned by separate white colonists rather than by group of Wampanoags or sachems

“managing his territory’s eco-nomic resources, hosting prominent visitors, maintaining relations with

other communities, caring for the destitute, arbitrating disputes, punishing criminals, and organizing defense.”

Royal families did have a higher status than ordinary com-munity members or resident nonmembers (such as slaves), but sachems ruled by consent and with the help of an advisory council of ahtaskoaog, or “principal men.”

Before Thomas Mayhew Sr. arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, the island was governed by sachems. Noëpe was divided into six sachemships (see map, page xvii): (1) Aquinnah/Gay Head, (2) Nashawakemuck (north), (3) Nashawakemuck (south)/Squibnocket, (4) Takemmeh, (5) Nunpauk, and (6) Chappaquiddick.

Wampanoags moved from a relational political system, with sachems at the head, to a colonial theocracy led primarily by non-Wampanoags

Naomai Omausah narrated a will in which she not only left property to her kin but also indicated how the material goods served as symbols of preexisting relationships.

animal husbandry.

At the time of the fi rst English settlement on Martha’s Vineyard (1642), Wampanoags lived there in a subsistence economy. Thus after the impact of disease, perhaps the most radical effect of colonization for the Vineyard Wampanoags was the shift in the economic base of the community

The island sachems (leaders) maintained greater and longer control of their lands than did sachems of most places on the mainland, and converts were not expected to conform as strictly to white cultural practices as were Algonquian converts in mainland towns such as Natick.

Calvinism succeeded on Martha’s Vineyard because it helped Wampanoags make sense of economic changes.

Max Weber’s

1) the shift from a society based on agricultural surplus to one based on technologies that allowed people “to reproduce their resources indefi nitely” and the infl uence of this change on the landscape; 123 (2) the change in political structures; (3) the changing role of women and children; and (4) literacy.

Second, change on the island was due to external intervention, not internal impetus.

Although some early converts such as Wuttunnohkomkooh, the mother of Japheth Hannit, claimed a modicum of tradition by insisting that Christianity had been revealed to Wampanoags before the arrival of the English, this sort of plea is rarely made by the post-contact generations in Mayhew’s work, and even in Wuttunnohkomkooh’s case it does not posit a long-standing basis for the religion

Calvinism emerged in early modern Europe as an attempt to heal the rifts caused by the social, psychological, economic, and philosophical innovations of modernization

Elis” (Alice) Daggett, a half Wampanoag, half white woman who had three illegitimate children by three different men and who was punished by the courts for each transgression.

Drin

the Gay Head Community Baptist Church is the oldest Native Protestant church in continuous existence in the country.

separation between the State and the Church

the autonomy and physical iso-lation of the community allowed this congregation to blend Traditional and Christian practice more openly than others did

more cut off from white interference by virtue of their location in Gay Head

As David Silverman notes, it is probably not a coincidence that “the Baptists’ popularity spiked soon after the New En gland Company pressured the Aquinnah and Nashakemuck Congregationalists to replace their deceased pastor, Japheth Hannit, with Experience Mayhew.

Wampanoags led the Baptist congregation themselves. Being self-led was a crucial selling point for Natives in the area: they had repeatedly emphasized their prefer-ence for Native preachers.

it was more autonomous; it was limited to Gay Head; it more openly blended Traditionalism and Christianity; and it practiced the Baptist creed

Wampanoag Educational Center, Gay Head,

schoolmaster Peter Folger (1617–1690); however, Wampanoag oral tradition names Mittark, an important sachem, as the originator of the island sect

The Baptists served as a midpoint between the Saints and the Traditionalists: they blended the strengths of innovation with their earlier autonomy

Gay Head Community Baptist Church in Aquinnah.

mis-sionaries’ documents that record confl icts with settlers and Saints, and wills and deeds that record land transfers and transactions made by sachems.

thirty-six manitous.

polytheist

David Silverman has argued that most Christian Wam-panoags did not segregate themselves from nonbelievers but rather lived in long-standing communities to which they added new churches

Saints, there were at least three other spiritual communities of Wampanoags who organized their lives around religious beliefs and practices: the Traditionalists, the Baptists

avoid the negative consequences of these trends by creating a new social hierarchy through the church, by raising their economic status through education and the church economy, and by redefi ning and extending their community to the larger world of Algonquian converts across New England.

an erosion of the offi ce of the sachem, increased debt, loss of land, and a rise in indentured servitude often accompanied by physical dislocation from the island hub.

independence of the Native church

1) early “precontact” Calvinism (1536–1642): the intro-duction and popularizing of Calvinism in Europe as a means of coping with threats to “the old conservative, mythical ethos”; (2) the early Puritan importation of Calvinism onto Martha’s Vineyard and its emergence as a Wampanoag form of religion that could plausibly grapple with the colonial world (1642–1730); (3) the Calvinist revival of the First Great Awakening (1730–60) caused by the infl ux of the Enlightenment into New England; and (4) the gradual erosion of Wampanoag Congregationalism in favor of the Wampanoag Baptist Church (1760–1820).

First, it is highly Eurocentric: it assumes that after European contact, Wampanoag society developed in a predetermined evolutionary pattern that was only margin-ally, and briefl y, impeded by Wampanoag culture itself

“modernization,

On the mainland and on the Vineyard, new “liberal” forms of Christianity gained acceptance in white communities during the second half of the eighteenth century. By 1811 most of the Wampanoags at Aquinnah (Gay Head) had also switched their allegiance, from the Calvinist Congregationalism to the Baptist church.

Why was it that a highly segregated, nonenthusiastic, imported European religion prospered on the Vineyard during the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century and then had lost sway by the nineteenth century?

interracial

lgonquians were increasingly dislocated from traditional religion by indenturement with white families.

analogous

David Silverman makes a similar argument in Faith and Boundaries: Chris-tianity’s appeal to the Wampanoags, “was primarily ideological in character. Indians joined the meeting in anticipation of worldly results, particularly good health, but that hope was ultimately grounded in their conviction that a spirit of unrivaled power favored Christians for their adherence to him.... In a world wracked by epidemic disease, their choice rested on the belief that Christianity was the best way to regain some control over their lives.”83 For Silverman, the missions were successful primarily not because of offering a specifi c form of Christianity but because of directing “Wampa-noag prayers toward a new, unprecedentedly powerful spirit, and reform-ing Wampanoag behavior to conform with His laws, thereby easing His wrath.”

In the words of Jill McMillan, Calvinism allowed Wampanoags to achieve “plausibility alignment”: that is, it allowed the Wampanoag community to maintain “a correspondence between its worldview and information imping-ing on the group from the social context in which it resides.”

Calvinism is better understood as a religion that allowed Wampanoags to make sense of the newly “modern” world that emerged on the island between 1640 and 1720.

(1) Christianity provided Algonquians with a new god (manitou) who appeared to be more effi cacious than the manitous that they had previously worshiped, and (2) Christianity often came in a form compatible with precontact religious traditions.

although the physical presence of the settlers did not immediately disrupt island life, the diseases they brought most certainly did. The tragedy caused by death and disease continued as later epidemics swept the island.

Historian David Silverman estimates that the outbreaks of 1643 and 1645 took half of the Wampanoag population on Martha’s Vineyard

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became the meeting place of two other currents: classical Wampanoag society and early modern English culture.

there is another Algonquian word for island (aquiden), and noëpe probably refers to the fact that this island was the meet-ing place of currents coming from the northeast and southwest.7

ames P. Rhonda’s “Generations of Faith” (1981), in which he argued that on Martha’s Vineyard, converting to Christianity was not antithetical to maintaining a strong Wampanoag identity

indebted to the Wampanoag oral genre of the memorate: a concrete account of a personal encounter with the supernatural.

incorporates elements of Wampanoag oral tradition into the tra-ditional New England genre.

during the eighteenth century, Wampanoag women and children were often disenfranchised and dislocated from the community because of increasing debt and indenturement to white masters.

Japheth Hannit of Chilmark

It reclaims the effi cacy of the dying Indian saint to represent suffering and spiritual redemption; it also contradicts a general trend in American literature following King Philip’s War in which Native Americans were cast as villains and in which white women took the place of Christianized Indians as “emblems of suffering souls rescued by God through the heroic efforts of Englishmen.”49 For Mayhew, suffering Wampanoags are fi gures with whom he and his readers can and should identify.

The First Great Awakening had posed a considerable threat to the Calvinist theology

A major theological tension haunts Indian Converts, however, for despite his closeness to Mather at the time the book was written, in the 1740s, less than two decades later, Mayhew was accused of betraying Calvinism. In fact, Mayhew’s fi nal sermon, Grace defended (1744), has often been lauded as an early example of American Arminianism—a “heresy” that both fed the major controversies of the First Great Awakening and became the well-spring of what would become Unitarianism.

Experience was neither educated nor ordained as a min-ister; hence, he fulfi lled the position of teacher rather than preacher.

Like Indian Converts, Mayhew’s 1720 tract should be read within the context of increasing pan-Protestantism and the theological war against Catholicism

Brief account (1720) summarizes general trends more than it details lives of individuals.

Brief account of the state of the Indians on Martha’s Vineyard (1720).

Matthew’s tract is more a natural history than a religious one

My analysis of the relationship between Indian Converts and New England Puritanism addresses Mayhew’s combination of orthodoxy and innovation in the context of, fi rst, the May-hew clan and island life, and second, New England literary history.

Established in 1649 and also known as the Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating of the Gospel in New England, this society mainly supported missionaries who espoused a Calvinist and Congregational creed.

(1) the changing landscape of New England Puritanism leading up to the fi rst Great Awakening, and (2) the changing landscape of Wampanoag cultural and religious life.

Written on the cusp of the fi rst Great Awakening, Indian Converts helps to illuminate the theological upheaveals that rocked New England in both English and Native communities

In the 1720s and 1730s, New England Protestants increasingly saw themselves as part of an international war against Catholicism in which Protestant missionary suc-cess would be an important harbinger of the second coming of Christ and the millennium. For ministers Benjamin Colman, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Wadsworth, Joseph Sewall, and other backers of Mayhew’s book, Indian Converts was an essential confi rmation that Protestants—not Catholics—were winning the theological war for America, and clear evidence that New England was doing important missionary work

The history was unprecedented in scope and content. Although written in English for a primarily British audience, Mayhew’s Indian Converts (1727) drew upon the Wampanoag sermons, oral history, and dying speeches that he and his family had been collecting and translating for over eighty years (1642–1727).

These 128 total biographies cover four generations of converts who lived on the island between the early 1600s and the 1720s, when Mayhew was writing.

Whatever Mayhew’s original intent, today his history provides the most extensive information we have about any Algonquian community during the early English colonial period.

Grace and dignity are of large importance in all good sign-talk. Ugly or vulgar gestures should be abandoned.

starting point for the future.

all are the same in the Sign Language because it expresses ideas, not words

7th. It is practical far-talk

Plains Indian

unaware of the other’s existence.

fabricate an unnatural, localized code, when there was awaiting them ready-made, and already established, a system founded on universal human nature, old as the hills, full of the charms of grace and poetry, and so logical that any one of any race can learn it in a tithe of the time required for the acquisition of the merest smattering of a spoken language, and the adoption of which would at once have greatly lessened the handicap of the deaf.

Again the Indian method is strong in its dignity. The deaf often spoil their sign-talk by grimacing, the Indian never does so. One may occasionally help the idea by facial expression, but it should be used with great reserve, as there is nothing more unlovely or likely to harm the study of the Sign Language than the excessive grimacing that one sometimes sees in an uneducated deaf-mute.

The first involving a certain amount of spelling is limited to those who can read, and who use that word.

A comparison of the Deaf and Indian Codes seems to emphasize the superiority of the Indian. The Deaf was intended to convey, word by word, a vocal language; it assumes that you know the other man’s speech, and can spell. Whereas, the Indian was invented to over-ride linguistic barriers and, knowing nothing of spelling, deals only with ideas.

The Cheyennes originally lived in a central region where they had intercourse with a dozen tribes whose spoken language differed from their own; so they became very expert sign-talkers, perhaps the bes

the northern, which is a whole hand and a two-hand dialect; the central and southern, which is a finger and one-hand dialect.

Deaf Code and the Sign Language of the American Indians. Only the two last are widely established and at all complete as languages to-day.

Evidently, then, the Sign Language is used of necessity in much of our life where speech is impossible.

This was in England. In America the sign “Pax,” or “King’s cross,” is called “King’s X,” “Fines” or “Fins” or “Fends,” “Bars up” or “Truce,” meaning always, “I claim immunity.” This is a very ancient sign and seems to refer to the right of sanctuary. The name “King’s cross,” used occasionally in England, means probably the sanctuary in the King’s palace. In general I found about 150 gesture signals in established use among American school children, namely:

But the American Plains Indian is undoubtedly the best sign-talker the world knows to-day. There are, or were, some thirty different tribes with a peculiar speech of their own, and each of these communicated with the others by use of the simple and convenient sign-talk of the plains. It is, or was, the language of Western trade and diplomacy as far back as the records go. Every traveller who visited the Buffalo Plains had need to study and practise this Western Volapuk, and all attest its simplicity, its picturesqueness, its grace, and its practical utility.

To the Reverend Walter C. Roe (since dead) of Colony, Oklahoma, for many notes and comments. He was so expert that he preached every Sunday in the Sign Language.

1896. Arunta Sign Language, E. C. Stirling. Rep. Horn Scientific Exped. to Central Australia; IV, pp. 111–125. A considerable discourse on the Sign Language as used by the very primitive races. Many figures.

1878. The Gesture Language, by E. B. Tyler, in his studies in “Early History of Mankind,” third edition, 1878, pp. 14–81. An interesting but not very important dissertation on the Gesture Language in use among the deaf, the Cistercian Monks, and the American Indians. No illustrations.

1854. Dactylologie by Louis de Mas-Latrie. “Dictionnaire de Paleographie.” Tome Quarante-septième, pp. 179 to 366. An extended study of Finger-talking as used by the deaf, the savages, etc. About 30 American Indian signs are described and compared with those of the deaf. No illustrations.

1910. The Sign Language, by Prof. J. Schuyler Long, State School for the Deaf, Council Bluffs, Iowa, published at Washington, D. C., 1910. A valuable dictionary of about 1,500 signs used by the deaf, with 500 admirable photographic illustrations. Of these signs a large number seem to be arbitrary, but many are evidently of good construction and quite acceptable to Indian sign-talkers.

About twenty-five years ago there lived in Anadarko, Indian Territory, an enthusiastic missionary worker named Lewis F. Hadley, known to the Indians as Ingonompashi. He made a study of Sign Language in order to furnish the Indians with a pictographic writing, based on diagrams of the signs, and meant to be read by all Indians, without regard to their speech. Pointing to the Chinese writing as a model and parallel, he made a Sign Language font of 4,000 pictographic types for use in his projected works.

1885. The Indian Sign Language

1881. Sign Language Among the North American Indians compared with that among other peoples and Deaf Mutes, by Col. Garrick Mallery; 290 page quarto, 286 illustrations, an elaborate examination of the history, origin, and nature of the Sign Language, with extensive vocabularies. Published in 1st Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1881.

The following are the chief printed works on Sign Language:

My attention was first directed to the Sign Language in 1882 when I went to live in Western Manitoba. There I found it used among the various Indian tribes as a common language, whenever they were unable to understand each other’s speech.

rimitive beliefs

errific struggle that was raging within the soul of Terra- maugus; a battle between affection and duty; the grim alternative between evading a personal sorrow or liberating his people from the curse of the god.