Language and Education
The problem of conversing with each other was immediately apparent to both Europeans and natives, who employed a number of expedient and creative solutions to bridge the initial gap. Cortés’s use of a native woman, known to history as Doña Marina, to communicate with Nahuatl speakers is one well-known example. Europeans quickly sought to circumvent such ungainly procedures by encouraging, even kidnapping, young people to learn European languages, then bringing them back as interpreters. Squanto, who was of such great help to the Pilgrims in Plymouth, had spent time in Europe. And to facilitate trade, native groups developed pidgin dialects, or jargons, of their own languages to communicate with Europeans.
Missionaries, who recognized the importance of speaking the native tongue of their parishioners, developed vocabularies and dictionaries to learn local languages. In North America, the dual goals of Christianization and education soon mandated that missionaries teach their parishioners to read.
Native groups did not always embrace the efforts of missionaries and others to educate their children, noting that education often diminished understanding of traditional culture. Other Native Americans viewed education as a way of appropriating useful technology. Many Indians learned to communicate using European alphabets, and Sequoyah, a Cherokee, developed a written representation of the sounds of his language as early as 1812.
Daniel Claus. A Primer for the Use of the Mohawk Children. Montreal: F. Mesplets, 1781.
Born in Germany, Daniel Claus immersed himself in the study of Mohawk soon after he arrived in Philadelphia in 1749. To facilitate his studies, he lived in the Mohawk Valley with the families of Indian leader Joseph Brant, and Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indians in Canada. He joined the Indian Department as an interpreter and Johnson’s secretary in 1755, and was named Deputy Secretary of Indian Affairs five years later. The unsettled Revolutionary War years forced him to relocate to Canada, where he developed this primer, a bilingual attempt to teach Mohawk children the alphabet and to read Christian doctrine in both Mohawk and English.
Alonso de Molina. Aqui Comiena un Vocabulario en la Lengua Castellana y Mexicana. Mexico, Iu[n] Pablos, 1555.
Molina (d. 1585), a Franciscan priest who came to Mexico as a youth, compiled this Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary for the use of the clergy. It is the first known dictionary published in the Americas. This unique copy contains handwritten definitions in the Matlatzinca language added by Father Andrés de Castro, a Franciscan missionary who preached in the Matlatzinca language. The resulting tri-lingual compilation is still studied by scholars interested in how languages change over time.
Alfred Longley Riggs. Wicoie Wowapi: Wowapi Pehanpi Kin/ The Word Book Wall Roll. New York: Published for the Dakota Mission by the American Tract Society, [n.d.].
Alfred Riggs (1837-1916) was a member of a well-known family of missionaries to the Dakota Indians. He developed this Wall Roll to teach Santee Dakota children to read. This classroom aid taught Indian students Dakota vocabulary words with illustrations drawn directly from Euro-American life. This dichotomy continued into the latter part of the twentieth century, as many Indian children looked in vain for visual representations of their own lives in their reading materials.