Indians and immigrants: Survivance stories of literacies

• Main Author: Anderson, Joyce Rain
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository 2005
• Subjects: Language; Rhetoric and Composition; Sociology; Ethnic and Racial Studies; History; United States; algonquin
• Online Access: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/298; https://scholars.unh.edu/context/dissertation/article/1297/viewcontent/3198003.pdf

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. This project stems from my mixedblood heritage and from a community of mixedblood scholars. In this text, I relate stories of the early colonization of Southern New England, of the zones of contact between whites (primarily English) and Indians (primarily Massachusett or Wampanoag). I offer perspectives on competing views of literacy and explored texts translated from Massachusett Algonquin to see how Indians used writing to enact rhetorics of survivance which challenged the prevailing assumptions of the dominant culture. Within these texts we see how Indians continued to define themselves in the Metis spaces of colonization and missionary attempts to change them. Moreover, I extended my discussion to look at other missionary efforts in the eighteen century. I read letters in English which also uncover ways in which Indians described themselves and the events brought upon them. From there, my focus turns to the newly-formed United States government which was determined to solve the "Indian problem," and invested in a program of cultural genocide, or a David Wallace Adams calls it "education for extinction." During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the off-reservation federal boarding school system was developed, English-only became the strictly-enforced policy, and vocational education programs were designed to remake the Indian into an industrious and useful citizen who would assimilate into white culture---everyone would all be part of the same homogenous pot. However, notions of racial superiority ensured the Indians would find themselves being educated in the ways of the whiteman, but unable, for the most part, to participate fully in the whiteman's world. They were trained for trades and domestic work, and not expected to achieve much beyond those vocations. Thousands of children were taken from their homes and languages, rituals, and beliefs from their cultures were stripped from them. Yet, in the writing produced by these Indians, ...