Misunderstandings

Did Europeans and Indigenous Americans understand each other in those early encounters—or ever? Trying to answer versions of that question has brought colonial studies into wide-ranging theoretical debates about the nature of communication and its place in cultural studies. Richard White, in his influential book The Middle Ground, crystallizes an insight that troubles intercultural analysis: even those moments in colonial history that we might today identify as the most ethically promising for intercultural relations unfolded as much through misunderstandings between Natives and Europeans as through understanding. “The middle ground,” White says, is “a process of mutual and creative misunderstanding.”13 Nancy Shoemaker’s A Strange Likeness takes a related tack, suggesting that the perception of similarity could, seemingly paradoxically, exacerbate cultural difference. “Indian and European similarities,” Shoemaker argues, “enabled them to see their differences in sharper relief and, over the course of the eighteenth century, construct new identities that exaggerated the contrasts between them while ignoring what they had in common.”14 The better they understood each other, the further apart they grew.

In a hemispheric study of French and Indigenous colonial interactions, Céline Carayon argues not only that these two groups had much in common but that they could communicate effectively across language barriers, even from the earliest days of encounter. “In early French–Indigenous America, communication consisted of much more than words, and there were no insurmountable linguistic barriers,” Carayon claims.15 Despite linguistic differences, French explorers, traders, and men of the cloth navigated the Indigenous Americas, built trading posts, negotiated political alliances, and established missions. In turn, Native communities encountering the French quickly deciphered newcomers’ designs and maneuvered them into positions physical, emotional, and political that served the needs of the people. Much of this was accomplished through nonverbal communication rather than rapid or widespread mutual language acquisition. Against the image of either a chaotic or happily tolerant landscape rife with misunderstandings, Carayon posits a French colonial realm in which real and at times long-standing relationships—alongside a distinctly French sense of cultural mastery—were generated more through gestural signs, touch, dance, and other physical demonstrations than through language. “Moreover,” she reminds us, “mutual linguistic fluency has never precluded misinterpretations.”16

Just as importantly, however, violent conflicts emerged from mutual understanding. These conflicts cannot be reduced to signaling problems, whether nonverbal or linguistic; if minor conflicts and accidents were a function sometimes of a failure to communicate, then the major ones were rooted for the most part in European cupidity and religious prejudice. “Regional and cross-regional patterns or similarities formed connecting threads,” Carayon writes, “which Europeans were often all too happy to seize upon to develop generalizations about ‘Indian ways.’”17 Those functional generalizations often evolved into “understandings” with fatal consequences for Native communities. Recall Columbus, describing an interaction with the people of Guanahaní during his first voyage: “I had taken some Indians by force from the first island that I came to, in order that they might learn our language, and communicate to us what they knew respecting the country; which plan succeeded excellently, and was a great advantage to us, for in a short time, either by gestures and signs, or by words, we were enabled to understand each other.”18 For the admiral and subsequent invaders, mastery could always be enforced by violence, should knowledge or understanding fail to produce it. Recounting an incident during his third Canadian voyage, Jacques Cartier wrote of the seemingly welcoming Native people that “one must not trust all these fair manifestations and signs of joy, for if they had thought they were the strongest, they would have done their best to kill us.”19 Was Cartier’s reading right or wrong? Whatever the case, his skeptical bearing seems to have been perceived by his interlocutors and to have affected their actions. One’s attitude toward understanding shapes the set of potentially interpretable interactions that would constitute evidence of understanding. Cartier’s insistence that “trust” was at stake is premised on the notion that, had the situation been different, trust would have been impossible too; only force would have ruled the day. Why not trust the other’s signs of joy when you think you are in the superior military position?

If understanding can bring rejection or historical violence, and misunderstanding produce harmony, then perhaps we might demote the historian’s attempt to define past intentions and the notion of a determining, underlying cultural sensibility when we approach these interactions from the past. That is, we might bring to our historiography the lessons that seem only to pertain to history. Whether with Stephen Greenblatt we believe that European records only ventriloquize or project their authors’ own idea-worlds, or with Carayon that embodied experiences are legible in them, it is unclear that trying to produce “understanding” from these methodologies is the only path. Is an embodied gesture, after all, any less a projection, any less rhetorical, than a narrative? Will “knowing” the past in this way heal or absolve in the present, and if so, how? To recover as much as we can of the lifeways of Indigenous people through the ages is surely a good thing. Can we inscribe this recovery with the same question mark we wish the colonizers had tended to put after their own “knowledge”? On the one hand, it seems reasonable to suggest that understanding solved few long-term conflicts in colonization. On the other hand, it seems a bit much to say that “understanding” was even an option. The problem here has less to do with the evidence about or the outcomes of colonization than with the conceptualization of understanding itself as a measure of such things. “Understanding” is the core of the humanistic quest, a form of desire, and the structural mainstay of a cultural stance, and it has a long history as such. Here is one version of that history.

Understanding Understanding

In the early modern era in the West, “understanding” was an element of what is known as faculty psychology, part of a set of supposedly inborn attributes of mind and body that also included the passions, the will, the memory, and the imagination. “In general,” writes Abram Van Engen, “faculty psychology moved down a hierarchy from the understanding through the will to the affections, and it identified disorders as, in part, a rebellion of the passions.”20 In the Northeastern American woodlands, however, Indigenous people often encountered English notions of understanding filtered through a theological lens, in which the understanding was a more equal faculty. Puritan divine Isaac Ambrose offered a guide to the use of the faculty of understanding for those seeking godliness in a 1649 treatise, Media: The Middle Things, in Reference to the First and Last Things. The faculties were to be put to work to prepare or “quicken” the heart to receive God. “Work we upon our own hearts, by our understandings,” he wrote, for “as the striking of the Flint and Steel together begetteth fire, so the meeting of these two faculties, having an internal life in them, do quicken the soul.”21 True to his book’s title, Ambrose steered a middle course between enthusiasm and intellectual preparation, warning that theological debate “may clear the understanding” but not, perforce, excite us “to duty, to the love, and life of Christ.” Their duties properly apportioned in the mental army of godliness, each of the faculties, being God-given, could become delighted in piety: “There joys the understanding, by a perfect knowledge and vision of God; there joys the memory, by a perfect remembrance of all things past; there joys the will, by enjoying all maner of good, without all fear of evil.”22

In the hands of American ministers, this Protestant psychology became more distinctly about the heart, and understanding sank still lower. “God is not to be understood but to be adored,” as Perry Miller put it.23 Minister Thomas Shepard’s The Sincere Convert, for example, insists that “the understanding, although it may literally, yet it never savingly, entertains any truth, until the affections be herewith smitten and wrought upon.”24 One might, for example, be perfectly aware of one’s sinfulness, yet without the emotional commitment to change, the understanding might live with sin. Shepard indicts the understanding for a host of negative tendencies—he calls them “drunken distempers”—from craven rationalization to a constitutive incapacity to picture God’s beauty.25

This insistence on a particular relationship among invisible faculties as a qualification for godliness meant that Indigenous Americans at the outset posed a test for psychotheological theories. One of translator and missionary John Eliot’s early Native converts gave a sense of the challenge, worrying

that hee prayed in vaine, because Jesus Christ understood not what Indians speake in prayer[.] He had bin used to heare English man pray and so could well enough understand them, but Indian language in prayer . . . he was not acquainted with it, but was a stranger to it and therefore could not understand them. His question therefore was, whether Jesus Christ did understand, or God did understand Indian prayers.26

In part the difficulty here is that in prayer, speaking in tongues was frowned on (because the supplicant knows not what he or she says), and praying while unconvinced was also frowned on (as a superficial act rather than one born of subjection). Problems like this one, in which “understanding” as cognition of a text and “understanding” as a predicate of prayer collide, were exacerbated by conceptual gaps that manifested not just in cosmologic dispositions but in everyday English and Algonquian syntaxes.

To the transitivity, explicit in the verb form and implicit, as we will see in a moment, in the nominal form of “understanding” in English, was added the highly situational nuance of Algonquian word forms. Take the Massachusett tongue, for example, into which Eliot (presumably with assistance from Native partners) translated Shepard’s Sincere Convert.27 Massachusett is heavily inflected, its words commonly compounds of noun or verb stems with prefixes and suffixes—but also sometimes stem modifications—governed by common temporal and modal concepts, a sophisticated differentiation by animateness, and by the situation of the speaker or the discourse. Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon note also that

Massachusett word order is of a type often referred to as free word order. . . . The observed patterns suggest that word order often has a discourse function, that is, that it has to do with the presentation of the entities being talked about within the framework of a segment of text, consisting of several sentences, or of the whole document, or within the context of the real-world situation in which the document was created and intended to be used. Word order, then, may function to emphasize something or someone being mentioned, to bring something forward as a topic, to focus on something, perhaps in contrast to something else, or to perform some similar function.28

The term used to translate “understanding” in Shepard’s tract, for example, is often wohwohtám8onk. Its root form, wáw-, indicates something like “that which is known”—a reasonable approximation of understanding in the dissenting theological sense of man’s knowledge or the process of coming to knowledge. As a noun in Massachusett, though, “the understanding” as a faculty is not only gendered but marked as animate or inanimate.29 And because phrases in Massachusett can be interrupted by words that are not part of a phrase, allowing a speaker to link different phrases together in intricate ways, interpretation of them requires an iterative or recursive act of comprehension, as successive sentences weigh in on the meaning that went before. In this way, “understanding” operates in Massachusett within a different constellation of comprehension and interpretation than it does in English.

There is evidence that Northeastern Algonquian speakers were aware of the distinctions among English uses of the faculties beyond the conversion fields. A Mashpee petition of 1752 to the New England magistrates pleads, “Oh! Oh!, gentlemen, hear us now, oh! ye, us poor Indians. We do not clearly have thorough understanding and wisdom. Therefore we now beseech you, Oh!, Boston gentlemen.” Goddard and Bragdon observe that “the reference to ‘understanding’ and ‘wisdom’ echoes Biblical passages, notably ‘And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding’ (waantamóonk kah wohwohtam8onk, 1 Kings 4:29; cf. Prov. 4:5).”30 This kind of usage suggests, to paraphrase Roy Wagner, that the Mashpee understanding of the English was not the same as the English understanding of the Mashpee—that the “understanding” that missionaries hoped to inculcate was marked as English and Christian, rather than either referencing or creating a parallel concept in Algonquian.

For all its theological confidence, the ministry was only one voice in a wide-ranging seventeenth-century intellectual struggle over the role of the faculty of the understanding in human will, for how, precisely, did human beings process sensory information, or come to agreements across languages or religions? Could one draw a hard line between imagination and understanding? Thomas Hobbes was skeptical of university-based debates about such matters. “Nay for the cause of Understanding also,” he writes in Leviathan, “They say the thing Understanding sendeth forth intelligible species, that is, an intelligible being seen; which comming into the Understanding, makes us Understand.” Such beams of comprehension would have made for a convenient materialist explanation; Hobbes mocked the theory as “insignificant Speech.”31 Hobbes’s own definition of the faculty was more mainstream: “The Imagination that is raysed in man . . . by words, or other Voluntary signes, is that we generally call Understanding. . . . That Understanding which is peculiar to man, is the Understanding not onely his will; but his conceptions and thoughts, by the sequell and contexture of the names of things into Affirmations, Negations, and other formes of Speech.”32 For Hobbes, understanding was a faculty linked to signifying, producing linguistic agreement or parsing. “When a man upon the hearing of any Speech,” he explains, “hath those thoughts which the words of that Speech, and their connexion, were ordained and constituted to signifie; Then he is said to understand it: Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech.”33 Yet that last clause betrays the contingencies of those before it, whose predicates have dogged theologians and philosophers for millennia. Who does the ordaining, in this vision of understanding?

The problem of the will shaped the development of influential philosophical approaches to understanding in the eighteenth century. In Kant, for example, understanding is a faculty (or, as he put it, a mental power) that provides form or unity for signals coming from the senses and from the imagination. It has the power of combining signals and images, but it does not operate completely on its own. Consequently, it is not the means by which intersubjective unity of mind between individuals could be induced. Kant is skeptical about the possibility of obtaining direct evidence from the mind, and his model of judgment features an intense interdependence of the faculties.34 Although the German philosopher shared Ambrose’s and Shepard’s belief that they lived in a God-afforded world, for Kant, understanding prepared the way not for the Puritan divine’s “heart” but for the exercise of Reason.

The pressure of scientific method on philosophers—recounted elegantly and rigorously by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method—forced an evolution in debates about understanding. Philosophers came to center their claims about understanding around questions of alterity—of self and other. Those questions weigh heavily on the study of relations across social groups. For philosophers thinking about the implications of physical understanding—the fact that perception of any kind, perhaps even reflection, is conditioned by passing through the body—all forms of encounter are characterized by radical alterity. Understanding is a fraught concept because it is possible that there is no built-in set of concept generators we all share. It is possible that what we call the “world” is reconstituted in each person each time communication happens; on the other end of the spectrum, it is possible that we are all linked by a shared machinery of perception, or linguistic sensibility, or atomic, cosmic commonality; and so on. “The world is indubitably one if you look at it one way,” notes William James, “but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another.” The fact that we sometimes seem to understand each other is a proof, both positive and negative, for those who think about the human condition through the lens of the individual.35

For philosophers, “understanding” is an unavoidable term because without it, there is no platform for discussing humanity as a generality. An analyst’s model of “understanding” is a model of the human. It entails positing human capacities, a claim about what makes humans different from other beings, and a sense of the limits of and potential for human cooperation. The question of the “I” and the “Thou,” or the Self and the Other, pivots on the concept whose name has been given as “understanding.” For Gadamer, there is no “understanding” outside the three-part relation between two people and a thing, usually a text or utterance. Language makes coming to an understanding possible, as in Hobbes, but reaching understanding also requires an attitude, a stance of openness to change or convergence on the part of the interlocutors. Thus Gadamer modifies previous philosophers’ attempts to identify a mechanism of understanding (most famously Kant’s a priori cognitive categories), turning instead toward a version of understanding that focuses on emergence rather than origin and negotiation rather than the absolute.36

Gadamer asks how understanding is possible. This places “understanding” under a shifting sign. Gadamer agrees with Martin Heidegger that because human beings have to interpret before all other things, the problematic of understanding, rather than a predictable mechanism for it or universal condition of potential agreement, sits at the heart of all scholarly study—indeed, all that goes by the name of study. Understanding here unfolds within the determination of an unknowable history within which we are always catching up to the truth of our own perceptions and motives. “In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late,” Gadamer concludes, “if we want to know what we are supposed to believe.” Understanding is the experience of meaning. It is not solving problems, deciphering, or thought alone, but rather a set of feelings and memories that cohere, as opposed to a mental chaos that makes us feel like we do not really exist. Consequently, “there is no understanding that is free of all prejudices” (or, as Édouard Glissant puts it more forcefully, “a generalizing universal is always ethnocentric”).37 This is a daunting definition for historians whose most common underlying claim is that human understanding, and thus happiness, can be advanced by the tales about to be told in their books.

Such a historian might be relieved to find that at the root of Gadamer’s arguments are a host of assumptions and universal ideas common to Western thought with which Native American thinkers might disagree. Among the most fundamental of these is this: “Man is characterized by a break with the immediate and the natural that the intellectual, rational side of his nature demands of him.”38 Without this monadic, individualistic break, and the presumption of a definition of the “rational” or of what is “nature” and what is not, the notion that “understanding”—as opposed to direct revelation, or simple harmony, or a continuity between what are called the conscious and unconscious modes of mind—is necessary at all steps aside, and in its place rises the more limited sense of understanding as a kind of temporary, delimited, and not-quite-perfect agreement about something. Such a stance would qualify the habitual scholarly declaration of understanding as something a historical narrative can produce. Each act of historiography could only be one part of a set of social embodiments of history that extend well beyond the pages of the book that will outlive its author. Non-Natives often study Natives to find a truth about themselves outside of themselves—a root from which to fight exploitation perhaps, but also around which to form an identity. In Indigenous groups, however, this is the function of the tribal or the kinship philosophy—to find that truth from within a world not constituted of selves and others, humans and objects, a rigorous separation of the living from the nonliving. On that path, definition and understanding are not so much wrong as beside the point.

When we turn to the study of the early American colonial period, things get even more complicated. Most obviously, history writing itself has been a weapon of colonization since before the English began to arrive in North America.39 History writing as a discipline and the profession of historian have both changed a great deal since the sixteenth century. The Western historical profession’s commitment to engaging preceding historians—preserving if modifying the tribal knowledge, if you will—has meant that, as Gadamer would point out, a double veil has been cast around the subjects and objects of colonial studies, before one even confronts a historian’s individual biases. The “knowledge” scholars have received as narrative has been profoundly shaped in every historical field by Western ideas of civilization, progress, justice, equality, and so on. To cut through these, or even to suspend their naturalness, might sacrifice the coherence of a historiographic project, and with it readerly attention. Thus a seemingly natural, professionally wise, disciplinary piety casts a further shadow over the telling of the already dark history of colonization. The second veil, familiar to all students of the Native past, is an evidentiary one. So much of colonization’s success depended on not understanding Native life, or pretending that one did not, or pretending one did when one did not; and so much depended on erasure. Misunderstanding, often masquerading as or built into a larger model of understanding, was an engine of colonization. Language, material culture, song, dance—the evidentiary record of Native life in the colonial Northeast customarily consulted by historians is ragged compared to that of the colonists. The irony is, without the deadly historians of the past, we might not even have that much, for they were also preservers of a sort.

Understanding as a concept rests on the idea that individual consciousness must be the basis for the formation of the self and its interpretations. This conception sets aside—in some cases even derides as unscientific superstitions—non-consciousness-based forms of self-shaping, including, among many others, mystical inspiration, kinetically induced somatic knowledge, communication by smell or pheremones, or starvation- and disease-induced mental states. As Irving Hallowell observed long ago of the Ojibwe, “If, from the standpoint of the people being studied, the concept of person is not, in fact, synonymous with human beings but transcends it,” then liberalism’s parameterization of political personhood—indeed, its conception of society itself—as bounded by living Homo sapiens is at a loss to provide representation.40 In the hands of phenomenologists or new materialists, the scope for potential understanding has been expanded, but in many cases, it continues to proceed with the “I” of the West as its implicit end, both subject and object. “Understanding” is a good liberal idea. But how badly do we need it?

Understanding the Miskito Prince

In late 1775, Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved man, sailed for Central America from England as part of a plantation-establishing venture. The English planters were headed to the contested Mosquito Coast in what is now Nicaragua, and they brought with them four Miskito people who had journeyed to England a year before on a diplomatic mission, “during which,” Equiano tells us, “they had learned to speak pretty good English.”41 Equiano, a recent convert to Methodism, befriended George, the son of a prominent Miskito leader and destined to become king, and began to instruct him in English reading and writing, and in the basics of Christianity. George began to exhibit signs of interest, but not long before the ship reached its first stop, Jamaica, some fellow seafarers began to mock his emerging belief. Equiano, in his now-canonical Interesting Narrative of 1789, tells us that these jibes “caused the prince to halt between two opinions.”42 Here is how he relates the tale:

In our passage I took all the pains that I could to instruct the Indian prince in the doctrines of Christianity, of which he was entirely ignorant; and, to my great joy, he was quite attentive, and received with gladness the truths that the Lord enabled me to set forth to him. I taught him in the compas of eleven days all the letters, and he could put even two or three of them together, and spell them. I had Fox’s Martyrology with cuts, and he used to be very fond of looking into it, and would ask many questions about the papal cruelties he saw depicted there which I explained to him. . . .

Thus we went on nearly four-fifths of our passage, when Satan at last got the upper hand. Some of his messengers, seeing this poor heathen much advanced in piety, began to ask him whether I had converted him to Christianity, laughed and made their jest at him, for which I rebuked them as much as I could; but this treatment caused the prince to halt between two opinions. . . . Thus they teazed the poor innocent youth, so that he would not learn his book any more! He would not drink nor carouse with these ungodly actors, nor would he be with me even at prayers. . . . At last he asked me, “How comes it that all the white men on board who can read and write, and observe the sun, and know all things, yet swear, lie, and get drunk, only excepting yourself?”43

Equiano answers that it is because they do not fear God as they should, and he clarifies the tortures of hell that such an attitude will bring. This conversation “depressed his spirits much,” Equiano reports, with the result that George “became ever after, during the passage, fond of being alone.”44 The phrase “halt between two opinions,” echoing 1 Kings 18:21, may suggest that Equiano had hopes that the prince would, like the followers of Baal convinced by Elijah, come around to worshiping the Christian god. But no such conversion happens, and we hear little substantive of Prince George again in the Interesting Narrative.

Is this scene a drama of the failure of understanding, of a missed chance at cross-racial, international harmony? Certainly for Equiano, operating under the aegis of Protestantism, it was. But how do we read it from a great historical distance? Our desires to read or teach Equiano in a certain way are almost as powerful as his religious motivations may have been. Consider the ruling controversy about Equiano’s life and narrative, which frames itself in a way that will be familiar to readers of Native American literature and criticism. If black writers joined the contractual system of European liberalism, religiosity, and capitalism, the thinking goes, then they pose for us a dilemma. Are we to conclude that they were making the best of a bad situation and trying to tweak that system from within its discourse and behavior? Or should we rather take them to have been coerced at best and collaborative at worst in the liberal individualist speculative capitalist system that would eventually deprecate slavery but leave the more persistent phenomenon of racial and class dispossession in its place? “By viewing Equiano through the optic of minority literature or making him represent an African American or black British slot in an ever-expanding canon,” warned Srinivas Aravamudan, “the modern reader also edifies nation into imperium,” for as we can see in this brief excerpt alone, his narrative cleaves to colonialism in no small measure.45

Ian Finseth has proposed a reading that steps outside this debate’s terms. Finseth considers the role of irony in the representation of the linguistic foundations of contract by authors of early slave narratives. The use of irony expanded the category of the contract to include not just religious covenant or individual self-possession and economic responsibility but also ideals of friendship. “For narrators such as Brinch, White, and Equiano,” Finseth writes,

interpersonal duty, or the contract of feelings and words that weave together the social fabric, provides a measure of stability amid the vicissitudes of slave life. . . . Here and elsewhere, the basic social contract—a promise between emotionally linked individuals—is not some abstract concept or rhetorical device, but a way of stitching together black communities and forging a new black subjectivity in the Atlantic crucible.46

This notion of friendship, a bond with the reader or a familial commitment as equal groundings for an understanding of contract and thereby a revision of hegemonic modes of it (liberal, legal, financial, philosophical), is refreshing, and speaks to the three-way relationship Equiano attempts to establish between himself, the prince, and the reader (whom he is also attempting to convert, in a way). Yael Ben-Zvi goes so far as to suggest that Equiano

mounts a diasporic indigenous critique of Eurocentric denials and subversions of the universal entitlement decreed by eighteenth-century conceptions of reason and Christian theology. . . . This inclusive perspective recasts the world’s population as a community united by horizontal, nonhierarchic relations that Equiano offers as a challenge to Eurocentric commitments to a vertical, hierarchic global order and to the idea that property and mastery are the foundations of civil society.47

For these critics, then, the scene of George’s conversion would represent an attempt to reach out across racial or ethnic boundaries, exemplifying the ways Christianity or friendship could help build solidarity among minorities in the special space of the ship, a microcosm of a contested Atlantic world.

Certainly the revolutionary Atlantic of the eighteenth century, embodied by sailors and slaves—the “motley crew” whose histories Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker dramatize in their book The Many-Headed Hydra—was one context for Equiano’s representation of himself as orderly, legalistic, economical, and rational. That context also influences his depictions of coming to religious awakening. Equiano learned that terror “was the fate of both sailors and slaves,” in Linebaugh and Rediker’s words, and that cross-racial education and collaboration were important to achieving material and spiritual freedom.48 Irishman Daniel Quin helped Equiano learn to read the Bible; Equiano makes his friendship with Richard Baker a central part of the narrative; and sailors and reformers from a range of backgrounds (including poverty and criminality) and countries aided him along his way. Equiano is studied and admired to this day for what Linebaugh and Rediker term his “miracles of social alliance . . . in the making of the United Irishmen, the English working class, and the Scottish convention movement.”49 For Finseth, Equiano weds friendship, commerce, and Christianity to build an alternative Enlightenment; for Ben-Zvi, that new universal vision is trans-Indigenous; and for Linebaugh and Rediker, Equiano’s partnership with the Miskito tribe is one of many social miracles.

This Miskito emissary, however, was neither sailor nor slave. He was not a commoner or a criminal. He was one of a ruling Indigenous elite that shared the reins of colonial power, a people whose seafaring might and tributary networks were necessary to the success of English endeavors in Central America. Indeed, his father, King George, had recently promised the British government Miskito support against the colonial rebellion in North America. Although Equiano, like many Indigenous writers of his time and after, insisted that “the horizontal logic of human relations reflects Christian values better than prevalent European practices do,” in Joanna Brooks’s words, he did not take up the mutual covenant hinted at by George.50 So let us take another look at this scene.

Equiano in this interaction was a good reading and writing teacher but a poor proselytizer.51 He himself had been led to the fold in part by reading about the conversion of Native Americans in two books: Thomas Wilson’s 1740 An Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians and the twenty-four-page The Conversion of an Indian, in a Letter to a Friend, first published in 1774.52 The latter is in the voice of a Native from “the province of New-York” leaving on a diplomatic mission, written to his friend, Drurow, a fellow Native, and depicts the narrator as naturally prepared for Christianity (he fears loss of neither property nor life at sea, for example) and curious about religion.53 The book is less a programmatic conversion text than a Methodist evangelical indictment of English impiety, a claim cemented in a passage that links the worlds of Equiano and Prince George: the English, “altho’ they are distinguished by the name of Christians from many other nations, yet as far as I can learn, they have no more regard to the reality of this book [the Bible], than our poor slaves, who have never heard of its being in the world.”54

Equiano’s account of his shipmates’ mockery of his conversion attempts mirrors that criticism. Yet it was perhaps from other experiences that Equiano got the idea of using John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments to draw in a potential American convert, with its vivid illustrations of the tortures of Protestants by Catholics.55 From George’s perspective, Equiano tells us, these silent parts of the text spoke the most compellingly, counteracting the potential for linguistic misunderstanding. Foxe’s Acts had been eloquent by this time for over two hundred years of Protestant education (it was first published in 1563), calculated as it was to head off direct competition for souls from Catholic imperialists, the ancestors of the colonizers against whom the English were competing in Central America.56 Foxe’s book of martyrs may have held an appeal for Equiano structurally similar to one it held for many in the English Atlantic multitude in that it speaks the history of a persecuted minority into the dimensions of a cosmologic struggle. The act of trying to convert George might be regarded as a return of the favor of help to Christianity that Equiano received from all of these texts. At the same time, that act was the fulfillment of the model of English, Christian behavior advocated in books like An Essay and Conversion of an Indian. (Many observers have pointed out that grammatically, at least, George’s question implicitly makes Equiano white: “All the white men . . . only excepting yourself.”) Equiano’s description of the prince, and his later ethnography of the Miskito as a group, exhibits a rhetoric familiar from Conversion of an Indian—that these Natives are already prepared to receive the gospel, needing only literacy and (Protestant) Christian guidance to become eligible for grace.

Despite the help of these models, Equiano’s evangelizing failed. The drunken cursing of the tempters did not seduce Prince George either. By publishing the story, however—by exposing the withdrawal of the Miskito prince and by wrapping his critique of English behavior in a Christian interpretation—Equiano may have succeeded in filling out the role of the proselytizer. George’s self-imposed solitude calls us to think again about the history of attempts to cross cultures and the difficulties of telling that history. Those attempts had complex motives. Equiano had been formerly enslaved, but he was involved here in an extractive venture and an attempt to replace an Amerindian cultural way with Western Christianity. Yet the unruly seafarers who questioned the joys of Christian order seem themselves to have offered no friendly place, for this Native at least.

In their turn, elite Miskitos such as Prince George were important agents in enslaving members of their neighboring tribes through warfare. Their presence on this English ship was part of a complex power struggle with both local Indigenous groups and competing European empires. The Miskitos were supremely strategic in their negotiations with the English, as the English themselves noted. In their agreement to help the English expedition against the Spanish fort El Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepción, for example, the Miskitos made it clear that they would not be compelled to labor, and they required that the English “take every Step that the Soldiery have little connection with them in Order to avoid the possibility of Disgust on their Side.”57 That ethnic caution may have been at work in this scene too; it is precisely the silence of the Miskito prince, his refusal to make a transracial contract with Equiano, that gives particular weight to this episode.

The connection did not fail for lack of opportunity. For all that Equiano shows an awareness of Miskito–English power dynamics, and for all his evident efficiency at teaching reading and writing, he appears, or makes himself appear, somewhat inattentive to what George was asking by way of his question. That inattention is a function of a potential conflict over what the process of learning to read might afford beyond Christianization. George’s question is about literacy and intellectual ability, and its role in creating a happy social world:

At last he asked me, “How comes it that all the white men on board who can read and write, and observe the sun, and know all things, yet swear, lie, and get drunk, only excepting yourself?” I answered him, the reason was, that they did not fear God; and that if any one of them died so they could not go to, or be happy with God. He replied, that if these persons went to hell he would go to hell too. I was sorry to hear this; and, as he sometimes had the toothach, and also some other persons in the ship at the same time, I asked him if their toothach made his easy: he said, No. Then I told him if he and these people went to hell together, their pains would not make his any lighter. This answer had great weight with him: it depressed his spirits much; and he became ever after, during the passage, fond of being alone.58

Fellowship is the shared ground that the prince proposes: sinners all, we will be in hell together, and that at least will make our pains easier to bear. But friendship is the metatopic here—friendship between Equiano and the prince. Equiano has befriended George through learning how to read and looking at woodcuts of martyrs in books. George begins to spend his time alone when Equiano insists that, in effect, friendship does not survive the torments of hell. Equiano’s gesture of “covenanting together” with the Miskito prince is interpreted in Prince George’s response as a stage for thinking about the long-term entailments of friendship. The social space between the two that is opened by the jeers of the ship’s company and the relaxing of institutional force at sea (force, that is, of church, state, or homeland) resonates with the themes of Christian brotherhood, and it offers an occasion for a sort of cross-cultural bonding under the rubric of friendship or fellowship.

“Friendship” is a key term for Equiano, frequently used in the Interesting Narrative. Having described a compact of love and friendship with his sister and then with Richard Baker, Equiano strangely does not come through in this case, and it ends the missionizing transaction, even if the prince has been given pause about fraternizing with the ship’s rowdies. Prince George refuses to be remade into a Christian, but more important, he refuses to be made to fear the end of relationality (in the separation of souls after death into saved and unsaved) and its material implications for relations between living people. Even if Equiano’s respect for the silence of the prince indicates that he includes the Miskitos in his universal human rights scheme—which is by no means on the surface of the narrative—his narration nonetheless enacts a Christian kind of colonialism, one Equiano desires to continue in Africa when the Interesting Narrative has done its work. The failed conversion comes as a result, the narrative implies, of his shipmates’ unchristian static, a confusion of voices that renders subjective silence. Sublimated in that way of telling the story is that the silence may be a protest or criticism. In its failure, Equiano’s conversion scene shows his potential to convert Africans under the right conditions. Viewed in the grand scheme of English conversion efforts to that historical moment, Equiano is actually at his most English when he fails to convert Prince George.

That failure in turn opens potential meanings of the prince’s silence to Equiano’s readers today. These potential meanings are not ethnographic. They are, rather, warnings about the limits of understanding as a rubric for what scholarship can achieve in the assessment of moments like this one and the texts that represent them. If Equiano’s goal was to include all indigenous people, African and American and beyond, in a transformed scheme of human rights, then the price of the prince’s universal rights is cultural silence—or even merely the silence of uneffected friendship. Not quite sovereign, and certainly not English, Prince George remains apart both in his moment and in literary historical, critical time. What George’s specific alternative vision of friendship or fellowship might have been is made unavailable by the same mechanisms that Equiano hoped would enchant George with Christian piety: the book, the engraving, learning to read and write, spending time praying with a fellow former heathen, conversation. Indeed, it might have been rendered beyond understanding by Equiano’s very attempt to depict his own scene of persuasion within the terms borrowed from those supposedly culture-crossing technologies.

Then again, what if precisely the opposite were the case? Why does Equiano let the prince walk away into silence? Perhaps Equiano, in depicting his failure to convert, was not just displaying martyrdom on the English model but was also suggesting he could handle a gap of understanding—its impossibility—in a way that did not parse according to the civilized–barbarian binary, the quantification of conversions, or the scholarly guides for converting the heathen. Might not Equiano have been hinting at that which cannot be understood as a means of any sort, withholding his own instrumentality in a way parallel to the prince’s self-isolation? The prince, after all, also fails to convert Equiano, in his way.

I don’t know. The feeling of immediacy in the passage about Prince George and Equiano is seductive. It feels teachable to me, dramatic, just rough enough to be reportage. That feeling, however, is partly a function of the media of our time, or of our generic and narrative lenses and habits, rather than those of the eighteenth century, whether the prince’s or Equiano’s. Wary of why it appeals to us, we need not become Equiano in the metaequation of historiographic encounter. George’s silence as represented by Equiano makes it possible for his readers to regard it as an act of distancing sovereignty, imminent hybridity, autocritique, a more exoticizing mystification, and any number of unthought-of other possibilities. It is possible that colonial discourse has some inherent characteristics, or that it observes a poststructuralist order of endless differentiation, but it is important to the life of criticism for us to suspect sometimes that it does neither—that there may be multiple and coexisting practical ontologies of representation. Equiano and the Miskito prince warn us that imagining we understand the structure or parameters of a discourse has its limitations, even dangers. Equiano’s text hints that depending on achieving understanding as the fulcrum or measure of our work may be the very thing that renders understanding as such impossible and unnecessary at the same time.

Beyond Understanding

“Can this being together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question?” ask Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.59 “Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark,” as Audre Lorde puts it. “Only then does the necessity for interdependence become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”60 Equiano, fugitive product of the ship’s hold, and the Miskito prince, held in an Atlantic imperial scheme, question each other, but they leave much unasked and unanswered. The silence between them might signal the collapse of an undercommons relationality on board the Morning Star, or it might signal a mutual accommodation to the colonial project in which they each shared in different ways—perhaps an act of resistance, perhaps an echo of solidarity in respecting each other’s difference. As an event about which we write, it is both an apposition and an invitation to historiographic improvisation. “After all,” says the narrator of David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr Apelles, “when confronted with death we mourn the past, but when confronted with silence we mourn the present and the future as well.”61

The Miskito prince’s silence could be thought of as a form of what Marisol de la Cadena and Audra Simpson call Indigenous refusal—an engagement of an outside politics that resists and constitutes its own world by refusing its terms.62 Understanding is deliberately set aside in the gesture of refusal. Such refusal is an intervention, but one that keeps its distance and refuses to reproduce the terms of engagement set by colonizing forces. Yet if George’s silence is considered as such a refusal, it is also the case that what was refused was fellowship with a formerly enslaved subject, one of the Atlantic world’s other others. It is also the case that what was refused was not just the Christian paradigm (the eighteenth-century version of which only uncomfortably maps onto what would be called “politics” today) but a political alliance that the Miskito people might benefit from forging. This is to say it was an individual act and an act of sovereignty on behalf of a community, but, crucially, only to the extent that the notions of “individual” and “community” function across the historical distance from which we observe Equiano recording this refusal.

This equivocality is daunting, but scholars of Indigenous politics in the Andes have embraced it, to productive ends. “Equivocations, if controlled,” writes de la Cadena, can occasion productive disagreements that are based on “the understanding that the interlocutors both understand and do not understand the same thing by the same words.”63 The goal is not to “settle” on one definition in, say, a civic dispute—which would be settling in two senses of the word—but to draw out something of the difference that constitutes the equivocation from each side. That is, disagreeing about the uses of terms can create an occasion for agonistic exchange around world visions rather than seeking to have one world vision (and hence definition) supersede or graft the other. Even if, in successive linguistic interactions, these worlds do not become mutually “understood” to each other, the habit of embracing equivocation and opacity, and of the temporal dilation and sharing of space necessary to these, may and in some contexts already does—de la Cadena offers the example of successful collaborations between Indigenous Peruvians and ecological activists—transform the nature and to an extent the content of conversations among settler regimes and Indigenous peoples.

“If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency,” writes Édouard Glissant. “In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.”64 To prevent the negative consequences of this demand—Glissant notes that hierarchy is not inevitable in this reaching across solidities, but that it is a colonial norm—he suggests that we have somehow to eliminate the scale. It is not merely that normalizing difference as a right is required; we must “agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.”65 Crucially for settlers engaging the history of colonialism, the opacity of which Glissant speaks is both a matter of public interactions and policies and a more intimate, psychological transformation: “It does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me.”66 If this were so with each of us, to accept the opacity of the other might be easier. Glissant implies that there is a reflexive reaction between being at ease with not seeking always to master ourselves and a politics that creates time and space for not knowing.

The scenes analyzed in this book offer occasions for an appositional, equivocal practice of historiography that both respects the right to opacity and models its value. Without understanding Equiano or George completely—either as individuals or representatives of affiliative communities—and without choosing Algonquian over nonconformist patience, without being certain what group might claim this or that practice of engaging the invisible world, we can narrate the past into a creative relation to the present. To enact study of what are called “cultures” as a poetics might give us new languages, concepts, or concerns around which to focus dialogue across differences. It might at times obviate the prince’s felt necessity of silence on one side and Equiano’s felt necessity of conversion on the other. Not a definitive accounting but “an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance” could be produced.67

Experiments in enacting this stance beyond understanding are happening in many places today. Consider another example from Peru. How can people who have lived through the intimate violence of a localized civil war, like the one Peruvians experienced during the Sendero Luminoso days, manage to live with each other in peace once more? Medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon asked the people in Ayacucho, with whom she had been periodically living and working since before the conflict. Although her informants at times mention understanding as part of their healing process, it seems clear that something more complex was being generated through both Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and local efforts for justice and accommodation. “We have laws now, to civilize us,” one says, “to make us understand each other.” The law is a point of mutual consent, however, a set of agreed-on behaviors rather than enforcement of mutual knowledge. There was far too much mutual knowledge in this environment: brothers were assassinating brothers, with small neighboring villages falling into cycles of revenge. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and local groups forged official moments of confession, occasional public punishments, and a collective fiction of forgetting. The amelioration is constitutively dynamic and relational, at times improvisational, but it persists—for now. “This local moral idiom is one of condemnation and transformation,” Theidon writes.68 Justice neither guarantees nor depends on understanding, in the intersubjective sense. Hannah Arendt’s admonition that retribution, not revenge, and forgiveness, beyond mere toleration, are required to put a stop to the cycle of violence was exemplified in Peruvian postwar rapprochements, in which communal rituals forged, in Theidon’s words, “socially acceptable truths that involve a mnemonic readjustment both for those who confess and repent and for their audience.”69

In the bright sunlight of May 21, 2017, I found myself on a trailer behind a tractor in Neligh, Nebraska, with a small party of activists. Art Tanderup, farmer, ex-schoolteacher, and charming representative of the Cowboy–Indian Alliance, was driving us out to his fields to plant sacred Ponca blue corn and trees in the projected path of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Like many of the events organized by the Cowboy–Indian Alliance, a collaboration between Native people of the region and settler farmers and ranchers, the event featured Native rituals, shared meals, and a distinctly unhierarchical, relaxed feel. There were professional activists, families, farmers, goths, professors, and tribal leaders, all coming and going freely. There were Ponca rituals whose roots were (deliberately) only partly explained, as well as an invocation, distinctly historical but not naming particular settler names, of the deep past of Native presence and of colonial dispossession. The city folk present followed the farmers’ rules for how properly to plant the corn and trees. This event offered a platform for comparing pasts and learning about different lifeways, without requiring complete mutual knowledge or harmony. It was action with an understanding, but not understanding. Native activists and farmers and ranchers do not need to mean precisely the same thing by the terms “land” or “water” (in both cases, these terms are always sacred for many Plains Native people but only on specific occasions for most settlers, especially Christian ones) in order to accomplish both political and spiritual ends. For such equivocation to work requires a shared set of goals and practices, however temporary or emergent. It also requires a mind-set, a stance of awareness of the other’s world, and a forbearance with respect to mastering it or demanding that what is meant on one side by “land” is paramount.

How to interpret the expressions and ways of people with utterly different ideas about the cosmos, authority, humanity, and the natural world? To me, this task seems, or feels, benignly impossible—impossible because if there is anything the Puritans and the Indigenous people of America have to teach us, it is that you just never know, that it’s good for body and soul to have a little habitual uncertainty, and benignly because there are so many other ways to study the past, and turn that study into the cultivation of Lorde’s “fund of necessary polarities,” or Harney and Moten’s informed improvisation, or Glissant’s sense that the opacities within each of us might guide our appreciation of difference outside of us. This book itself witnesses my belief that all of us today have inherited and enact in some way—whether as heritage, antagonism, anxiety, or something else—the ideas, concerns, conceptions, habits, and even gestures of all of these long-dead people. I hope that it also may serve as an instrument to help make that space that Joy Harjo describes, a place where “we will wind up back at the blues standing on the edge of the flatted fifth about to jump into a fierce understanding together.”70