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Early Indigenous Literatures

A stamp of Alfred Mitchell's name in Various Sermons by Eliphalet Adams

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“The Confession and Dying Warning of Katherine Garret” as Paratext Katherine Garret, a Pequot woman, was executed in 1738 for the murder of her newborn child. Leading up to her death, she converted to Christianity, and a white settler minister named Eliphalet Adams delivered a sermon on the day of her execution. The sermon was published later that year by T. Green alongside an account of Garret’s life, written by Adams, and a text entitled “The Confession and Dying Warning of Katherine Garret.”

Katherine Garret’s confession is an enduring example of 18th-century Native American authorship, albeit produced in unfree conditions and likely heavily mediated by Adams himself.[1] While it proves impossible with any certainty to disentangle Katherine Garret’s authorial voice from Adams’ or other editorial interventions, it is nonetheless essential to affirm the presence of Garret’s voice in her confession. This affirmation requires a turn away from the dominant contemporary notion of authorship as a purely individual act. Weyler’s framework of “outsider authorship”[2] as “collaborative”[3] and Round’s assertion that all texts are inherently “produced in a composite way”[4] both challenge individual definitions of authorship for Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous texts.

Nonetheless, the “co” in “collaborative” is complicated by the power dynamics at play in the production of a text such as Garret’s. As Weyler explains about the accounts of other condemned Indigenous figures, “As objects of condemnation and punishment, each prisoner was forced to surrender final authority over his or her words in order to grasp limited agency as speaking subjects. Even so, the New England elite ultimately controlled how their stories would be interpreted.”[5] In line with this notion of “limited agency,” I argue that Garret’s authorial voice is present yet indistinct in her confession. In the following page, I share “critical[ly] imagina[tive]”[6] ways of reading the language of Garret’s confession, with an eye to moments when Garret’s voice may come through in resistance to the settler-controlled narrative of her life and death. Before delving into the text itself, however, I first offer a framework for understanding how the conversion of Garret’s confession into paratext worked over time to decenter her authorial presence and appropriate it for the purposes of settler narratives.

Along its journey through settler print culture, Garret’s confession was sidelined as paratext for Eliphalet Adams’ writing. To trace this development, it is important first to consider the original form in which Garret’s confession was presented to the public. According to Eliphalet Adams’ account of Garret’s “Behaviour after her Condemnation,”[7] “Her Warning left in writing was publickly read to which she added many Other Warnings and Counsels by word of mouth, Lifting up her Voice as she could that she might be the farther heard.”[8] While her “Warning” had likely already been mediated and shaped by Adams leading up to Garret’s speech, nonetheless on the podium of her execution Garret was able to present her confession in her own voice, at the center of attention of a large crowd.[9] Her speech was not an addendum to Adams’ sermon, which he had delivered earlier in the day, but constituted the main event. Adams notes Garret’s spoken addition of “Other Warnings and Counsels,”[10] which went unprinted and are lost to the archive. While it is impossible to know what Garret said when she strayed from the script, this omission in Adams’ account allows us to imagine more than the loss of Garret’s voice. Te Punga Somerville proposes an approach to the archive that “assum[es] Indigenous presence and proximity rather than focusing on distance and loss.”[11] The very act of Garret’s straying from the settler-approved script is itself an assertion of authorial presence and can open up what Warrior terms the “critical imagination” of readers.[12] While we do not know what Garret said, we do know that the form in which the words were delivered was unmediated by print culture, passing directly through Garret’s voice to the throngs of listeners.

Following Garret’s execution, the publisher T. Green printed an edition of Eliphalet Adams’ execution sermon, with the title, “A SERMON Preached on the Occasion of the EXECUTION OF Katherine Garret, an Indian-Servant, (Who was Condemned for the Murder of her Spurious Child,) On May 3d. 1738. To which is Added some short Account of her Behaviour after her Condemnation. Together with her Dying WARNING and EXHORTATION. Left under her own Hand.”[13] The title’s framing of the sermon as the central text, and the account and confession as “added” to it, relegates Katherine Garret’s confession to paratextual status. Her confession serves to support Adams’ narrative of her death, rather than vice versa. The title page provides some attribution to Garret as a writer through the line “Left under her own Hand”; however, this nod to Garret’s authorial status is subsumed under the stronger stamp of authorship: “By Eliphalet Adams.” The visual design of the title page, including the varying font sizes and styles, further reveals what the published text aims to emphasize:

This printed edition of the sermon with the account and confession attached was later bound into a collection of Adams’ sermons, now housed at the Newberry Library’s Special Collections. The text appears to have been professionally leather-bound, but features handwritten front matter subsequently pasted into the book and a handwritten label on the spine. Donald Mitchell, a settler and son of Reverend Alfred Mitchell, was the likely owner of the volume and writer of the front matter, as his signature on both pages attests.[14] The volume’s circulation within his family is clear from the name of his father stamped onto the first page of the first sermon in the volume. The contents page lists the sermons in order and cites the author and original publisher of each sermon (in each case Eliphalet Adams and T. Green, respectively), alongside the page length for each entry. At the bottom of the contents page is written the date 1892, also in Mitchell’s hand. These pages were therefore written as paratext for Adams’ sermons over a century after the original publication of the execution sermon.

This bound collection, along with Mitchell’s added front matter, further relegates Garret’s confession to paratextual status. The book was clearly compiled with Adams’ sermons as the objects of interest, and not with an eye to Native American stories or authorship. Mitchell’s inclusion of a timeline of Adams’ successors in the front pages further indicates an interest in the genealogy of Adams’ church, and perhaps a broader interest in the history of Christianity in New England. The front matter does not, however, indicate an interest in Indigenous people, history, or authorship. While Katherine Garret’s confession is included alongside Adams’ sermon, Mitchell does not list her work as its own section or subsection on the contents page. Her "dying warning" is buried deep in the text of this volume. Her confession’s relegation to paratext for Adams’ writing is thus even more pronounced in Mitchell’s 19th-century front matter than in the 1738 title page.

Despite the efforts of publishers and editors to render Garret’s "dying warning" a paratext for settler Christian writing, her presence as an Indigenous author in the archive persists. On the next page I will offer readings of Garret’s confession as a site of potential resistance to the prevailing narrative of her condemnation.

[1] Lisa L. Moore (ed.) et al., “Katherine Garret (Pequot; ?-1738),” in Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2012), 101.
[2] Karen Weyler, “Introduction: Outsider Authorship in Early America,” 1.
[3] Ibid., 23.
[4] Phillip H. Round, “Introduction: Toward an Indian Bibliography.” 16.
[5] Karen Weyler, “‘Common, Plain, Every Day Talk’ from ‘An Uncommon Quarter’: Samson Occom and the Language of the Execution Sermon,” in Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2013), 122.
[6] Robert Warrior, “Introduction: Reading Experience in Native Nonfiction,” xv.
[7] Eliphalet Adams, “A sermon preached on the occasion of the execution of Katherine Garret, an Indian-servant (who was condemned for the murder of her spurious child,) on May 3d. 1738. To which is added some short account of her behaviour after her condemnation. Together with her dying warning and exhortation. Left under her own hand,” printed and sold by T. Green (New London, 1738), sermon title page.
[8] Ibid., 42.
[9] Ibid., 42.
[10] Ibid., 42.
[11] Alice Te Punga Somerville, “13: ‘I do still have a letter’: Our sea of archives,” 121.
[12] Robert Warrior, “Introduction: Reading Experience in Native Nonfiction,” xv.
[13] Eliphalet Adams, “A sermon preached on the occasion of the execution of Katherine Garret, an Indian-servant (who was condemned for the murder of her spurious child,) on May 3d. 1738. To which is added some short account of her behaviour after her condemnation. Together with her dying warning and exhortation. Left under her own hand,” sermon title page.
[14] Mitchell-Tiffany Family Papers (MS 701). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/4063 Accessed December 01, 2022.