“An Uncommon Quarter:” Reading an Indigenous Intellectual Tradition in Vast Early America

Why does American intellectual history begin with the Puritans and remain largely dominated by New England voices through the colonial period? In this canonical reading of American intellectual history, American thought commences with John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon on the deck of the Arabella and remains dominated by New England voices through the American Revolution. The seventh edition of the American Intellectual Tradition made some adjustments to its table of contents, but it has hardly diversified its cast of early American thinkers, nor has it contextualized these New England luminaries in the early America’s vast intellectual landscape. Deracinated from this context, Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” ennobles American settler-colonialism rather than acknowledges the Indigenous foundations on which the Puritans literally established their new “city.” Indeed, it reifies the myth that the Puritans were on an errand into a howling “wilderness” rather than populated Indigenous lands with well-established intellectual traditions.

This is not merely a case of special pleading to integrate Native voices into an early American intellectual canon dominated by Calvinist theologians. Rather, I contend that historians need to conceive of the American intellectual tradition as European vine grafted onto Native American roots. If we locate the origins of the English-language intellectual history in the early ethnographies of Plymouth colonists, William Bradford and Edward Winslow we recognize the importance of Indigenous interlocutors in the productions of the first American histories and ethnographies. Colonists and Native peoples interacted on a daily basis through economic, intellectual, spiritual, and sexual exchanges. The colonists’ Algonquian speaking neighbors resided in matrilineal villages where women wielded real political and spiritual power. These communities posed an ideological threat to the militantly patriarchal Puritans, fueling the sort of social anxieties which necessitated Anne Hutchinson’s banishment from Boston during the Antinomian Controversy. As historian David Thomson has shown, this controversy led directly to John Eliot’s efforts to missionize Native peoples through the establishment of praying towns and establish an Indian school at the newly founded Harvard College.(1) The college’s first president, Henry Dunster, envisioned the institution as “the Indian Oxford as well as the New English Cambridge.”(2)

Even if Harvard never fulfilled Dunster’s inclusive vision, its early years demonstrate a vibrant exchange of ideas between Native peoples and the Puritan newcomers. Some of the earliest publications from the Harvard Press consisted of religious tracts in the Algonquian language. This underappreciated intellectual enterprise was born out the collaboration between the Nipmuc James Printer and the missionary John Eliot. Harvard’s first Indigenous students received a classical education, with an emphasis on English, Greek, and Latin. While Harvard’s Indigenous students composed poetry and translated ancient texts in their second and third languages, some of their Puritan peers training for missionary work failed because they could not show reciprocal mastery of Native languages. Puritan scholars lacked the aptitude for Native “texts” in the form of maps, wampum, birch bark scrolls, pictographs, and oral history to say nothing of dance, music, and ceremony. Few colonial thinkers bothered to do the remedial work required to engage this intellectual tradition, particularly after the bitterly fought King Philip’s War of 1675-76. Thus, these intellectual threads have remained largely illegible and ignored by most non-Native intellectual historians for the past three centuries.

In light of this vibrant intellectual exchange between early colonists and Indigenous peoples, Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks asked, “why aren’t we reading excepts from Wôpanâak [Wampanoag] books alongside Bradford’s Plimoth Plantation and Anne Bradstreet’s poetry today? What would the American canon look like if these texts were restored? What would it mean to ask twenty-first century students to wrestle with the few extant writings of the Harvard Indian College, the multilingual and multinational texts revealing the intersections among the numerous languages read, written, and spoken in “early America?”(3) It is certainly not for lack of primary documents or open-access online resources. Indeed, this gap in our classroom curriculum partly derives from lack of recognition in canonical readers, such as the American Intellectual Tradition. But these pedagogical omissions also stem from the academic tradition of considering Indigenous texts as the purview of anthropology, Native American Studies, or borderlands historiography rather than a discreet field of intellectual history.

Indigenous intellectual history persisted in the face of settler violence, disease, and dispossession. Mapping continuities in Native American thought into the eighteenth century pushes back against the settler mythology of “vanishing Indians” by recognizing their intellectual contributions despite demographic decline. By integrating texts from what historian Linford Fischer has termed the “Indian Great Awakening,” we broaden and enrich our understanding of this dynamic period in the development of American thought. Jonathan Edwards’s sermons compelled settler and Indigenous audiences to remake their spiritual landscapes in a response to his call to action. Likewise, Recognizing that our students have limited attention spans when it comes to doing the readings (to say nothing of their overextended teachers), what would happen if we swapped out the Reverend Charles Chauncey’s “Enthusiasm Described and Caudion’d Against” in favor of a sermon from the Mohegan Samson Occom? Occom observe that while “the world is already full of books; and the people of God are abundantly furnished with excellent books upon divine subjects,” his book “comes from an uncommon quarter, it may induce people to read it, because it is from an Indian.”(4)  If we want to understand the far-reaching implications of the Indian Great Awakening, we can assign our students excerpts from David Cusick’s 1828 Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations. A Tuscarora educated at the Hamilton-Oneida academy, Cusick’s sketches is the first tribal history of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy printed in English. Within the spiritual crucible of the Second Great Awakening, this text informed a fanciful Native American past envisioned by Joseph Smith in The Book of Mormon.

Indeed, I am not suggesting that we merely engage Native intellectual discourses at the beginning our class. Like Jazz, American intellectual history represents the fusion of Indigenous, African, and European elements into a distinctly American synthesis. Yet Native contributions to this intellectual tradition remain conspicuously absent from Hollinger and Capper’s second volume. Rather than situate Native reformers like Ely Parker and Charles Eastman alongside W.E.B. du Bois and Jane Addams, they’re conspicuously missing like a Jazz ensemble without percussion or bass. Likewise, I’m thrilled to see that Betty Freidan, Martin Luther King, and Edward Said loom large in the final sections. But I am equally troubled that our undergraduate students must look elsewhere to put them in conversation with Native American activist-thinkers like Vine Deloria Jr. Wilma Mankiller, or Richard Oakes even after paying $60 for the anthology.

To that end, I’m unlikely to assign Hollinger and Capper in my own courses. Its early American content skews too much to New England settlers to the expense of other regions and perspectives. The price tag is too high for a volume that does not represent the vastness and diversity of early American thought. Its myopic focus on New England would not be so problematic if it engaged Native thinkers, exchanging geographic breadth for regional depth. Perhaps we will have to wait until the eighth edition.

As scholars and teachers, we can recognize the sovereignty of Native American intellectual history without reducing it to a domestic, dependent subset of American historiography by ensuring that our intellectual history surveys critically engage North America’s extensive Indigenous intellectual tradition. By recognizing this unbroken intellectual through-line from the earliest colonial encounters to the present—and allowing these ideas to disrupt some of our cherished assumptions about what makes American thought distinctive in the world—we can transform our classrooms into sites of decolonial praxis while enriching our journey through millennia of American thought.

[1] David Thomson, The Antinomian Crisis: Prelude to Puritan Missions,” Early American Literature 38, 3 (2003): 401-35.

[2] Alden T. Vaughn, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620-1675 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 281.

[3] Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 89.

[4] Samson Occom, A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (New Haven: T&S Green, 1772)