Early Indigenous Literatures

Bible Title Page Annotation 1

The title page has some words that are translated and some that are not.  The words “God,” “Testament,” “John Eliot,” “Cambridge,” and “Sam Green” all remain in English. There is a translation for Bible- “up-Biblum.”  Round expands on the notion of not translating certain terms, writing that “The signifier ‘God,” for example, resists translation because the missionaries believed the Algonquian dialect itself was ‘by no means sufficient to convey… the knowledge of Divine things.’… In the Algonquian edition, the concept of ‘book’ itself is untranslatable.”[1] Translation difficulties are incredibly detectable, as languages have their distinct priorities and needs. Both groups had concerns; while Euro-Americans missionaries did not believe Algonquian languages had the words to describe religious beings, Indigenous contributors struggled to translate the word book since their concept of the term drastically varied.

To further elaborate, translation is a challenging practice since languages have pressing matters that conflict. Brooks writes that “Algonquian languages express kinship through pronouns like ‘my,’ ‘our,’ and ‘his.’ Yet these terms do not denote possession, but rather evoke responsibilities and shared histories that bind people to each other and the land.”[2] Meanwhile, English strongly stresses the importance of possession by explicitly naming the words “my,” “our,” and “his” as literally possessive pronouns, and when using these words in a sentence, they denote ownership. This example not only demonstrates a large distinction between the languages, but their linguistic decisions also speak to their altering stakes in their everyday practices. While Euro-Americans prioritize possessing land and people, Indigenous communities categorize distributed responsibilities and no ownership to the land as the most urgent practice. Euro-American and Indigenous decisions and prioritizations with their languages and their everyday actions definitely coincide.  
 
[1] Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880, (2010), 29.
[2] Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, (2018), 29.

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