Introduction

Somewhere east of Jamaica, in 1775, aboard an English merchant ship, a formerly enslaved person and an Amerindian man sat together, poring over an illustrated book. The subject was at once grand and grim—a series of vivid woodcuts depicting the violent martyrdoms of Protestant saints—but the company was surely welcome for both men. Olaudah Equiano, recently freed through his own industry and with the help of friends interested in his religiosity, had sought out the young Miskito to draw him into the Christian fold. Yet on a long journey, and aboard a vessel, the Morning Star, creaking with both weather and the jibes, subtle and crude, of their white fellow passengers, fellowship and curiosity beckoned as well. Like Equiano, Prince George of the Miskito tribe had an unusual past, for thanks to the peculiarities of that tribe’s long relationship with Britain, the man spoke, dressed, and was named like an Englishman. Surely, given such preparation, the heart of the Miskito prince could be won for the supreme God?

The lessons went well at first. George was an eager learner, and Equiano, a passionate recent convert himself, used his own experience as a guide. Yet the notion of hell was a stumbling block for the Miskito prince. What would an afterlife be without one’s friends, Christian or otherwise? Equiano pressed him: the glories of the afterlife were only for the godly. Their fellow passengers pressed George too. Why listen to the African, when there was the ready raucous sociability with them to be had on board? Eventually Prince George turned away from both parties. “He became ever after,” Equiano tells us in his narrative, “during the passage, fond of being alone.”1 The two went to a church service once they arrived in Jamaica, but it seemed clear that the desired conversion was not to be had. Equiano, ever industrious, carried on: “Our vessel being ready to sail for the Musquito shore, I went with the Doctor on board a Guinea-man, to purchase some slaves to carry with us, and cultivate a plantation,” he writes. “I chose them all my own countrymen.”

This episode, a brief one in Equiano’s expansive narrative, shimmers with difficulty for today’s student of colonial America. Regarded as a hero by many, Equiano wrote a narrative that is arch, earnest, and rare—one of the few works that is today regularly assigned across history courses and both English and American literature surveys. The story of his struggle out of slavery through literacy, then into the British political sphere is at once a touchstone of the era and a rebuke to past narratives of the Enlightenment. What to make, then, of this journey on the Morning Star, in which first his rhetoric and then his morality seem, to latter-day eyes, to falter? What to make of the ex-slave involved in enslavement, this former heathen now piously colonizing a young Amerindian leader’s mind, refusing George’s ethos of reciprocity and fellowship? In the end, Equiano’s patience and persuasiveness seem to have reached their limits with the prince, with whom he fails to forge a lasting bond despite being a fellow cosmopolitan traveler in the crucible of the Black Atlantic. What is to be understood by the silence of the Miskito prince?

The difficulties posed by these questions are matters of both history and historiography. One problem is how to recover the contexts of moments like this from the colonial record—to dig through the archives and the published accounts, to listen to the oral histories of descendants, and to piece together the fabric of cosmologies clouded by time. Such recovery, in the case of the enslaved and the colonized people of the Atlantic, is often unachievable by mainstream, empirical means. Another problem is to confront the fact that what we today are able to read or feel in those archives and accounts is partly a function of what we desire to learn from such narratives and what we want others to think about them. Who are to be the heroes or models here? What is the template for improving relations across the boundaries of language, belief, and habit? Prince George’s silence—the deliberate choice of isolation by a colonized Indigenous person—and Equiano’s choice to describe his acts of colonization, proselytization, and slave trading stand as emblem and enactment of the challenge of writing about colonial history while we are still living within it.

There was a time when the writing of such histories was intended to extend colonialism. Things have changed. Now when scholars tell the story of colonial America, they often intend to reveal the injustices of the past. James Brooks summarizes the state of affairs among scholars of Native history as demonstrating “a scholarly generation’s commitment to emphasize indigenous actors as agents rather than ‘people without history’ who inevitably succumb to the expansion of global mercantile capitalism,” people for whom “emerging markets and military alliances often served their own strategic ends.”2 The racism, classism, and sexism of today, recent scholarship reveals, emerged out of the imperial contests and settler colonial incursions of the past, along with their religious and economic effects. Yet Equiano’s well-intentioned attempt to convert Prince George hovers over these attempts to reveal the truth as well. There is often as much silence as sound in the disciplinary channels between Indigenous studies and history today. What language, what stories, and what silences, if any, can bring about an end to colonization?

Above, in phrasing some queries provoked by Equiano’s account of the Morning Star voyage, I used five concepts that this book will interrogate: cosmopolitanism, piety, patience, reciprocity, and understanding. Each of these words has been crucial to the scholarly attempt to improve the present by means of describing the past. The Silence of the Miskito Prince argues that misunderstanding, slippery definitions of cultural reciprocity and patience, and violent forms of cosmopolitanism and piety shaped cross-cultural relations in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It also argues that they haunt the very conceptual apparatus that scholars, in the last forty years of cultural historical research, have hoped would promote intercultural dialogue. The terms we use when we write about scenes like the one on the Morning Star stubbornly seem to depend on differences between entities we have designated as “cultures” and leave unresolved the paradox of violent reciprocities and the failures of understanding to produce peace. How can we tell such histories in a way that invites conversations across group boundaries, engages the complexity of forms of affiliation under colonialism, and bridges the disciplines and desires of Native American and early American studies? What words do we use? By confronting the disturbing dimensions of the common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies, in its long historical depth and through a series of archival explorations, The Silence of the Miskito Prince calls for new ways of framing scholarly conversations that use the past to think about relations among peoples today.

The reflections in this book were spurred by my work in early American studies. In a previous book, The Networked Wilderness, about the information technologies of the early settlement of New England, I treated Indigenous American communications systems—things like wampum, baskets, paths, stories, and rock carvings—as information technologies because I wanted to argue against the idea that cultures could be described as “oral” or as “literate,” much less that the possession of certain technologies indicates cultural or intellectual superiority. During my reading in volumes of historical, anthropological, and literary research on Native America, I found that two continually recurring words—words I went on to use in that book—describe the better future of relations between the academy (and indeed the United States at large) and Indian Country: reciprocity and understanding.

Yet nobody seemed quite to agree on just what reciprocity was. Certainly scholars did agree in positioning that concept at odds across a cultural divide, with reciprocity suggested to be the basis of Indigenous North American ethics, as opposed to a Western individualism that blinded settlers to Native ways. I had also been warned not to trust “understanding” as a scholarly motive by both my poststructuralist literary training (everything is relative; the reality that would ground understanding is perspectival, a social and linguistic construct) and by Sioux writer Vine Deloria Jr.’s hilarious 1969 send-up of anthropology, “Anthropologists and Other Friends.”3 Of the two influences, Deloria’s offers the more practical argument for thinking hard about what we mean by understanding and how to live without it. The more I began to think about these terms, the more I began to wonder. How are the relationships assumed by the terms “reciprocity” and “understanding” imagined? How are those terms used, and what are they used instead of? Toward what liberatory or ameliatory end are they invoked, on what occasions, and to what measurable effect? They mediate “cultures,” to be sure, whether one is speaking of establishing a reciprocal relationship across human groups or among humans and also with the environment, as in Indigenous views. Take Equiano and Prince George’s conversation, for example. Christian ideas of reciprocity and those of the Miskito might have been as much a point of disagreement as potential harmony. Certainly “understanding” is a frequently cited panacea to racial, cultural, and religious conflict, imagined as a thing that scholarship can increase to positive ends. What, though, are “cultures” after reciprocity and understanding take hold? To what extent do we imagine cultural boundaries in part through inscrutability, or at least partly closed economies?4 As positive but never-quite-achievable ideals, what boundaries do reciprocity and understanding help create or maintain? What do we make of the dark side of these concepts—the possibility, for example, that at some level, or seen from some perspective, the Aztec sacrificial ritual is premised on a concept of reciprocity, or that Palestinians and Jews really do understand each other, but still fight? Did George’s silence signal the failure of understanding on the Morning Star, or its accomplishment?

The Silence of the Miskito Prince takes up these questions by analyzing the concepts we use to describe solutions to cross-cultural communication challenges and how those concepts emerged from, and continue to evolve within, colonial dynamics. It argues that notions key to the interpretation of Indian–European relations in the colonial period are also meaningful to how we think about and enact relations among human groups today. Two main concepts, reciprocity and understanding, are investigated with three related ones: piety, patience, and cosmopolitanism. These are all key theoretical terms in colonial American studies, but they are seldom treated as theoretical in scholarship of the early part of this period. Together, these terms form a web of ideas about human relationships and about how to improve or mend those relationships, the conflicted history and ethics of which have seldom been interrogated by scholarship that has depended on appeals to these words.

Concepts like cosmopolitanism, reciprocity, piety, patience, and understanding can seem to be timeless, describing behaviors, states, or attitudes that we today might share with people in the past. They seem to leap the barrier between the past we describe and the historiographic act of trying to change the present. History, however, as Édouard Glissant once wrote, is “a highly functional fantasy of the West.”5 Modern coloniality, the ongoing context of deeply embedded inequalities in which we communicate with each other today, is entangled with the historically destructive contexts and structures that count as knowledge. We therefore cannot depend on knowledge as a window onto the colonial past. “Scholars recapitulate the interpretive quandary facing seventeenth-century French Jesuit missionaries in Canada,” writes Kenneth Morrison. “How to make sense of the Native American other when an adequate self-understanding was, and is, not commonly available.”6 Morrison’s “was, and is” points to the crux of the historiographic problem of understanding under colonization. Hindsight is far from twenty-twenty.

Yet acknowledging one’s ethnocentrism can also perpetuate colonialism. One often sees the claim, both within and beyond the academy, that the ways Europeans understood their exchanges with Natives and the ways Indigenous people understood such exchanges were at odds because of deep-seated sociocultural differences, even in the case of diplomatic agreements that endured. Such a claim seems to say two comforting things: first, that was then, this is now, and we know better; and second, the failures of treaties to maintain peace and equality were inevitable products of supraindividual forces. No individual today is to blame; nor are your ancestors. Yet not only do we know both circumstantially and from their recorded admissions that settlers often understood perfectly well what Indigenous expectations of treaties were, but we also know that Indigenous people kept (and keep) telling settler authorities that such violations of treaties were violations of the Western ideas of trust on which mutual understanding’s benefit was premised, including Christian doctrines, the violation of which could result in eternal damnation.7 Sharing a set of values across groups does not prevent parties to an agreement from violating it.

“How we have come to know intimacy, kinship, and identity within an empire born out of settler colonialism,” writes Jodi Byrd, “is predicated upon discourses of indigenous displacements that remain within the present everydayness of settler colonialism, even if its constellations have been naturalized by hegemony and even as its oppressive logics are expanded to contain more and more historical experiences.”8 This is to say that how we know what we think we know is not just a product of the histories of resistance to hegemonic nationalism or imperialism or expansionism that the critical academy values; our knowledge is also born of the pervasive normalizations of the imagination of living with colonialism that subsist even in the vocabulary of that resistance. Bridging human communities has a conceptual vocabulary, an imaginary wrought in words whose genealogies we can sketch. The cacophony of competing representations of the “Indian” over time was generated in part by related competitions in the West’s lexicon of cross-cultural rapprochement.

In light of this problem of history’s fantasticalness, this book attempts to unsettle the present by rendering less presumable some of the terms on which historiography’s beneficent mission depends. To do so, I engage in a philological investigation, sometimes comparative, of these terms, whose pasts may indeed seem like another country. Our distance in historical time from the early colonial era constitutes a methodological and evidentiary challenge. Yet it also places a mirror in front of the historian or theorist: the tasks of interpreting the past and acting in the present, when it comes to Native–settler cultural interaction, are shaped by each other, enacted in a language wrought through colonial inequalities.

“There are no terms that can be simple foundations of indigenous resistance,” write the editors of the book Native Studies Keywords. “These words cannot be taken for granted. Rather, a constant interrogation and reinvention of language and terminology is part of the process of decolonization itself.”9 Such is the spirit of The Silence of the Miskito Prince. There is a long history of such interrogations.

In a series of influential essays, historian James Merrell reflects on the fact that the lexicon of American colonial history has not changed much, despite decades of work focusing on indigeneity in the era. Historians keep decentering Native historical perspectives and cosmologies. “The root of the problem lies in the very words used to tell stories about olden times,” Merrell writes.10 Indigenous people have been making this point for a long time, as evidenced by the epigraph by N. Scott Momaday that opens this introduction. From the persistence of the concept of “discovery” to the trope of “barbarism” (problematic whether applied to Europeans or Natives), Merrell finds a retrograde vocabulary. The Keywords book series from New York University Press widens the range of disciplinary areas that may be approached in this way, from American studies to environmental studies and beyond.

The words taken up in The Silence of the Miskito Prince are not discussed in Merrell’s critiques, or in the keywords addressed in the American cultural studies volume, or in Raymond Williams’s foundational Keywords, which set the model back in the 1980s. They are neither buzzwords at the forefront of academic conversations today—words like “sovereignty” or “commons”—nor good old saws of the past, like “wilderness” or “encounter.” Many of those concepts will make an appearance, but I focus instead on words that function at an even more basic level—words like “understanding” or “patience”—or that inform the imagination of an ideal multicultural world—like “cosmopolitanism” or “reciprocity.” That imagination is shaped by these terms both within and beyond academic conversations. Nor is my goal to turn these terms into buzzwords (“cosmopolitanism,” for example, has already had a turn or two in the limelight). Instead, these words are methodological portals, ways onto ways. By investigating the colonial histories of these terms and their functions in scholarship that wants to bring us a world beyond colonialism, I offer both a reflection on how we got here and a technique for rethinking many other words that are just as crucial as these, which hold us to our better or worse pasts.

“When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ we mean something more general,” Williams reminds us: “that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest.”11 In the case of both the linguistic encounters of early America and those that have generated and sustain the period’s study today, those distributions of energy and interest have concerned the viability of competing cultural and political regimes. Although none of my central terms appears in it, Keywords informs my approach (as it has the approach of many others), with its simple but powerful attentiveness to words with problems of definition that seem inextricably bound up with the problems they have been used to discuss. “Some important social and historical processes occur within language,” Williams argues, rather than language merely reflecting such processes. In contests over words, in the spectacular or quiet renegotiation of their meanings, change can happen, not least by altering the available imaginative options—what Williams describes as “new kinds of relationship, but also new ways of seeing existing relationships”—within a society sharing a vocabulary.12

One of Williams’s other key contributions was to put the term “culture”—a form of which appears in this book’s subtitle—into question. His inquiry has been extended and deepened in the work of cultural anthropologists since that time. The historical scenes in this book, in which language circulates stories about interactions, offer examples of how colonialism itself unfolds in everyday moments of negotiation or problem solving, and how a kind of inertia builds simultaneously in power relations and in the conceptual vocabularies of relationality itself. The terms that I take up have consequently accrued their meanings within the context of colonial power struggles and the rise of a particular conception of boundary definition among human groups—or cultures—that enabled colonial operations. “Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought but who steer clear of its chaotic journey,” writes Glissant. “Evolving cultures infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity–diversity.”13 Yet having already been put under erasure in anthropology, Native American studies, and poststructuralist-informed literary studies, “culture” is still a little-questioned placeholder in the discipline of history, particularly in the most popular forms of colonial historiography.14 So although I begin with the trope of “cultural dialogue,” I hope that in the end the reader will see my suggestion that we imagine across definitions of culture—both synchronous ones at the moments in time I analyze here and diachronic ones, as the concept emerged as central to the maintenance of settler power in North America. “Because the components of a culture, even when located, cannot be reduced to the indivisibility of prime elements,” Glissant argues, neither a posited culture’s internal nor its external dynamics can be defined. “But such a definition is a working model,” he insists. “It allows us to imagine.”15 Imagination plays a central role in Glissant’s analysis of colonialism’s effects on relationality, but also in his theory of what analysis itself might look like in the age of relativism. As we learn from the history of transgroup interactions, we are reminded of the condition of time in which we operate as analysts, necessarily invoking the imagination in a poetic relationship with the past. The terms of colonialism’s culturalization of human association were built on redefinitions of relation and responsibility that were the product of struggle among all parties involved, and that substantially involved transformations in language itself.

Williams’s other important emphasis is on how historical process-bearing keywords cluster, or interrelate in ways difficult to pull apart, but the analysis of which is aided by beginning with the single word and moving to examples or delineating a few important connections that qualify the isolated reading of a word. The meanings of keywords like “race” and “class,” for example, depend on each other in profound yet historically shifting ways. “This is not to impede but to make possible the sense of an extended and intricate vocabulary,” Williams explains, “within which both the variable words and their varied and variable interrelations are in practice alive.”16 In this notion of the functional aliveness of words, Williams begins to approach the idea of the sacred quality of words expressed by Momaday. Words have both individual and collective lives, and as such, under a traditional Indigenous cosmology, they are beings we must negotiate both through and with.

Merrell was sure that certain words were preventing historians from conceptualizing a Native-centered history. Others have suggested that even using the words well might not be enough. Robert Berkhofer Jr., writing in the heyday of postmodernism’s challenges to the habitual naive realist mode of historical writing, argued that historians should take a reflexive, multicultural approach, borrowing from some of the insights of anthropology and cultural studies. Native thinkers have argued that scholars must go further still, committing their research programs and their time and effort to Native community-guided projects or political activism.17 Decolonizing the activity of history writing would involve not only changing how we write, speak, and walk in the academic professions but also returning the land to Native people.18

One step I can take toward that return is to generate discomfort about a few of the more idealistic, seemingly consensual terms in my field. My approach has been to unsettle the words that link depictions of the past to the imagination of an intercultural future.19 The problem is not just the persistence of colonial or colonialist language in historiography. More basically, language itself functions a bit like colonization. Its reproductive capacity effects linguistic persistence by assimilating each new person to its norms, which in exchange for recognition demand subjugation and a measure of conformity. Yet just as is the case with colonization, no such assimilation or performance of conformity is ever absolute. As a consequence, the chapters that follow do not attempt to produce an ethnographically accurate understanding, exactly. What I hope to encourage is not so much understanding as a stance.

The Silence of the Miskito Prince has an argument to make in one corner of the academy, for harder thinking in colonial studies about the metaphors we use to describe our ideal pathways to improved intergroup relations. That harder thinking might lead first to an awareness of the ways common historiographic terms and frames maintain colonial relations, and second to goals for and modes of history writing more engaged with Indigenous and other conceptions of relationality and its ethics. I choose the North American, settler colonial, and Indigenous frames in part because they speak to a particularly Anglo-American set of effects or assumptions underwriting the five concepts studied here that impede resistance to ongoing colonization. Those assumptions are certainly at work in other academic and popular contexts, but I have deliberately constrained my focus to paint a richer picture, and I hope that the effort may nonetheless be useful in other domains. My goal is not to produce a countermythology but rather to offer coordinates for interrogating concepts that anchor notions about what the cross-cultural study of colonial America can accomplish, where, and how. There are, and will emerge, other such terms, but I hope the manner of my investigation will provide a path for sensing and questioning them as they begin to cohere.

Notwithstanding that constructive intention, the philological reflections that follow might at times feel, with their endless destabilizations, a bit depressing. I have drawn inspiration from critical traditions, such as queer pessimism and Afropessimism, that are powerfully skeptical about the potentials of liberal reform in societies and under governments deeply structured by racism, homophobia, and xenophobia.20 Still, I am optimistic about both the capacities of historical storytelling and the chances for new concepts to emerge that would take us into a more relational form of dialogue about colonialism and how settlers can begin to relax their death grips.

Despite the difficulties of creatively navigating a critical vocabulary saturated with colonial power relations, it is possible for historiography to turn toward justice, as well as to turn its readers from their accustomed ways. Achieving those ends requires dismantling some of the expectations of and about historiography, along with its place in the settler colonial political economy. The seamless mastery of a past landscape conveyed by historical narratives—indeed, a mastery required of professional academic historians—is driven by a need to reinforce a sense that some definitive version of the past is actually attainable. History writing and reading are usually pursued as a kind of unifying enterprise—a means of getting readers all on the same page, as it were. The historian sets out to provide a definitive, or at least enduring, account of a past era. But the colonial relation disrupts the coalescence of a common desire that could ground such a consensual enterprise. With a readership made up of those who have settled and those who have been dispossessed, each act of storytelling about the past inscribes a power difference in the present. The link between domination of an imagination of the past and domination of the land is short and strong because stories motivate, justify, and create bonds among some people out of divisions from others and their stories. To turn to the past is not to escape the present but rather to shape the future; it is not merely the content of the story, as this book suggests, but rather the most basic rationalizations for its telling or assumptions about its values that inscribe difference even in the act of attempting to break down difference.

This book has been shaped by a range of intellectual movements. In addition to queer theory and Afropessimism, it participates in approaches and attitudes from queer temporality scholarship, postsecularist religious studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies’ interrogations of sovereignty and identity, as well as the unrelenting fugitive irony of Native writers like Gerald Vizenor.21 Practitioners in these areas are not all, or not always, focused on questions of decolonization; at times they express a separatist antagonism to each others’ emphases. Yet their bodies of work share a focus on the persistence of regimes of oppression and the problem of imagining a way out of the representational webs those regimes have spun over a long stretch of time. These approaches’ positive contributions can be enhanced through an awareness of the degree to which they have been shaped by colonial contests over power (including resource struggles within the academy) and the settler norms that have both erased common ground in some areas and created a self-serving illusion of it in others.

The ontological turn in anthropology, particularly as it emerges from the work of Andeanists on Indigenous–settler relations in Peru, plays a structuring role in this book. These scholars’ focus on translation and the relay among conceptual worlds within that landscape and history has produced fascinating new stances for scholars to take, including Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of controlled equivocation. If equivocation is, as he writes, “a failure to understand that understandings are necessarily not the same, and that they are not related to imaginary ways of ‘seeing the world’ but to the real worlds that are being seen,” then one need not despair at the disjunction. It is possible for “the referential alterity between . . . positions” to be “acknowledged and inserted into the conversation in such a way that rather than different views of a single world (which would be the equivalent to cultural relativism) a view of different worlds becomes apparent.”22 Taking such an approach to the distant past means also treating temporal difference as equally relevant to world crossing as cultural and linguistic difference.

From time to time, I make reference to scholars who are doing that kind of work, in Indigenous studies and beyond. Writing about colonization could be informed by poetry’s suspension of “understanding” as a goal, as in the work of Glissant; by the evocative apposition of interpretation and archive, as in the work of Susan Howe; by a collaborative authorial dynamics that decenters scholarly authority, as in Siobhan Senier’s work with Northeastern Native archivists and storytellers; by a disruption of historiographic clarity, as in the work of Saidiya Hartman; and by a narrative approach that multiplies perspectives, archives, and interpretations, as in the work of Lisa Brooks.23 These writers both improvise and unearth the past, to help readers (not quite) understand the past, and as a consequence to understand their present a bit less, all to the end of opening conversational potential. These approaches have created space, directly or indirectly, within the conversation about colonialism for new kinds of reckoning between Indigenous and settler people, or for interpretations that do not require consensus, or for collaborations that may not end in books.

In different ways, all of these critical thinkers warn us, as William Faulkner did, that the past isn’t past. That condition is one we live inside as individuals feeling and exercising prejudices, affiliations, blindnesses, and the like, but also in our unequal treatment within legal, economic, religious, and other regulatory systems. But as scholars, too, we are caught in a welter of desire, projections, and misidentification when we study the past. We too often go there looking for a thread to ourselves or our communities rather than looking for something radically other, or something we will never understand. The threads may well be there, but we cannot always see them, even when we find the smoking gun (a telling metaphor) in the archives. To be surprised by identification across the supposed forms of difference that make us who we are, and to be startled at the absence of a thread where we presumed there was one, to someone who seemed to be like us, or to have been related to us, in the past—those emotions might be as significant in shaping a narrative as any methodological parsing of historical data or overarching narrative of social change. In both cases, we turn out to be something other than we thought we were; to induce such emotions is a power both transformative and seductive for the historian to wield.

A wise man once told me never to relinquish the power of irony, that unsettling mode of talk. So these chapters recount contradictions and present possibilities, but they leave much unsaid, or said sideways. In the end, however, the point of this book’s linguistic unsettling is to promote a material unsettling. The less comfortable scholars are believing that, in Audra Simpson’s words, settlement is “‘done,’ ‘finished,’ ‘complete’”—a fait accompli on whose canvas academic inquiry unfolds, folds its hands, wrings its hands—the more likely they might be to see how Indigenous sovereignty can benefit us all. Perhaps I’m less a cruel optimist, as Lauren Berlant might have it, than a strategic pessimist.24

This book, partly as a consequence of these inspirational scholarly movements, is a product of reflection on what drew me to study its subject. The Puritans initially struck me as interesting aliens, ancestors somehow of the evangelicals that I grew up with in western Kentucky. I became fascinated with the way dissenters insisted on the inscrutability of God’s mind with a fundamental, humbling nonknowingness, the implications of which reached into every corner of human existence—politics, economics, sexuality, hospitality, everything. Locked in a struggle with a parent religion that, as the Calvinists saw it, betrayed this commitment to skepticism by emphasizing outward displays of godliness over inward conviction, they profoundly theorized a tension that was at the heart of the development of science, new forms of public governance, perhaps even the feelings—the recognizability—of individuality and of collectivity as many people in the West know them today. With such a generative gift, such a potentially beneficent skepticism, why had the Protestants who settled North America not lived up in deed to what they were supposed to feel at heart?

Some of those settlers were ancestors of my own, on my mother’s side. But their beliefs, with the exception of the golden rule—which was big in our household—had eroded by the time my mother raised me. She insisted on a patient inquiry into the other-than-human people around us—the insects, animals, and trees, as well as the Blood River, which I grew up on. Instead of a catechism, I had Shel Silverstein’s devastating The Giving Tree. My parents, nonworshippers themselves, encouraged my brother and me to attend all of the various churches of the friends with whom we spent weekends, and to think of their congregants as worthy of careful attention and inquiry as well. It would have been hard for me, once I became a student of the past, not to conclude that, by and large, the settlers had neither kept nor lived up to their word, and that the Indigenous people of the continent, by and large, had. Yet if the spiritual leaders of Indian America are right that, in Simon Ortiz’s words, the original occupants of the land are engaged in “a long outwaiting” of settler occupation, then it is no less true that evangelicals are and will continue to do the same, although with a different end in mind. All of these stories have power, as Equiano must have known when he opened Foxe’s book of martyrs to Prince George, and as Prince George must have known when he began to withhold his voice and companionship.

For those caught in the complex webs of dependency, concern, and necessity that structure the North American economy’s daily experience, thinking deeply about the past and the language that brings it to us, or pausing to consider the effect of a word on the large pattern of our daily interactions with other people, seems like a luxury. So in the brief space of reflection offered by this book, I spend time with a few words that are parts of the environment of language in which we tend to think about the colonial American past. Each chapter is a meditation on a concept that is part of the infrastructure of the scholarly imagination. The violent or appropriative cosmopolitanism of settler Protestants and the Pequot tribe alike calls into question the liberatory potential of that term. Piety’s centrality to the lexicon of Puritan studies emerges as an obstacle to imagining intercultural cosmologic practices. Patience appears less as a common virtue than as a site of spiritual and political contest, through a reading of the texts and contexts of Roger Williams’s debates with the Quakers of Providence Plantations. The embeddedness of the concepts of reciprocity and of intersubjective understanding in deep histories of Western geopolitical and philosophical programs offers a caveat to the use of those terms for describing the colonial past.

Each chapter also asks a common question: what stands between knowing what a term means and the actuation of the ethos for which it seems to stand? Tracing the backgrounds of these words leads us back to their roles in the social-intellectual fabric of the academy today. This dimension of the book led me to keep the chapters short, assignable alongside commonly taught texts from the early colonial period in North America. There is some insider talk from time to time in what follows, but those beginning the study of this period and place have been at the forefront of my mind in writing The Silence of the Miskito Prince. Like all elders, those working in this field have their own time-tested ways of teaching these matters. I hope that this book will, even and perhaps especially in its weaknesses, assist their efforts. The settler nonconformists were right about the limits of knowledge, and the catch-22 is that as a result, we can never truly know what any of them thought or felt. But if those of us who study the American past want to live up in deed to our words as they did not, we can think about our words broadly and deeply, as they function across different communities and cosmologies.

“How do individuals and communities reckon with a past of almost unspeakable cruelties and dispossessions, the effects of which have persisted through centuries of racialized thinking and policy-making?” asks Christine DeLucia in a searching study of violence and memory in the Northeast. “How do they—we—conceive of ourselves as complicit in these violences, or as witnesses, victims, survivors of them?”25 Like Morrison’s “was, and is,” DeLucia’s “they—we” captures the mode in which moral reckoning under ongoing colonization takes place. “In a region still strongly shaped by settler colonialism,” DeLucia advises, “‘collaborative’ arrangements ought to be viewed as pragmatic, time- and site-specific connections that proceed imperfectly, rather than as long-term, finalized agreements to dissolve differences—or as bids for reconciliation, a perhaps premature endeavor in places where cultural contact still seethes and where foundational political dilemmas about the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty remain profoundly unresolved.”26 While the seething region in question here is New England, this approach could be applied to all colonized space.

The notions of cosmopolitanism, patience, understanding, reciprocity, and piety discussed in this book each express the hope and yearning for the good and for justice that many of us feel. As such, in different ways, they reach out across cultures, however defined. They also point to the effects of colonialism on the possibility for clear conversation between peoples, and the ways in which such reaching out may fail by virtue of its own often unrecognized premises. These concepts are also structured by long-evolved power contests rather than consensus. Indeed, at times Native people have appropriated these terms to community-building ends. My intention is not to hamper those uses of any of these terms, especially perhaps the application of reciprocity. Still, given the histories of these words, some reflection on the past they carry seems wise. Perhaps such an exercise can help encourage a habit of awareness of the noncongruity of worlds as well as of their overlaps—an equivocation that opens time and space for agonistic, protracted relations rather than judgment and violence.

If ever there were two groups of people who thought deeply about words and their sacredness, it was the Indigenous people of North America and the religiously motivated settlers who invaded it. The colonial record, from descriptions of the earliest exploratory encounters to Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America to the writings of Samson Occom and beyond, shows the mutual curiosity about language that resulted. That shared passion for language and meaning alone did not produce harmonious coexistence—or in some cases sustain coexistence at all. Studying this period both affords its students leverage and demands humility.

Some of the most difficult-to-solve problems of this world, problems in which our daily lives are nested, have been built out of violent reciprocities, rooted in deep understandings. This book is meant as a tool for rethinking some of the key terms that we are using to talk our way out of the dark legacy of violence and inequity. By its own logic, it cannot promise understanding; nor can it offer a prescription for balance. It can, however, carry forward a conversation. Instead of imagining understanding as our goal in the study of the past, we might see an opportunity to build relationships, kinships of many kinds, so we can stay in touch about our changing needs, share grief over the disasters and betrayals of the past, and celebrate the glimpses it gives us of happy partnerships or beautiful creations. In all of this, we make an effort to treat each other well because we enact our mutual dependency in the very search for the past itself—whether, like Equiano and the Miskito prince, we understand each other or not.