In July 2014, Rep. Henry Bear of the Maine House of Representatives traveled to Watertown, Massachusetts, to attend the annual commemoration of the Treaty of Watertown, a defense pact struck between the United States and the Mi'kmaq and St. John River (Maliseet) Indians during the American Revolution. Bear came to Watertown as a descendant of Ambrose Bear, a Maliseet leader who had signed the treaty on July 19, 1776, in the same house where, the day before, patriots had proclaimed the Declaration of Independence from a second-story window. Two hundred thirty-eight years later, Rep. Bear stood on the steps of that house and reflected on the treaty. “When I placed my hand on the treaty at the very place it had been signed by Ambrose Bear, a great pride swelled within me,” he remarked. “It was a reminder of the pride I feel whenever I observe the flag of the United States of America, the American flag, and the pride I feel whenever the Eagle Feather is brought forward before us in the tradition of my ancestors and elders.” For Bear, the treaty was not just a historical artifact, but an enduring “companion” to the Declaration of Independence. And like the declaration, it was “still in force” and “deserve to be honored to this day” (HSW [2021]).
Since colonial times, scholars have been interested in how Americans recorded and remembered treaties. Europeans were quick to write down their treaties with Native Americans, or so we are told. This gave them an advantage in future negotiations and made it difficult for Indians to have their say later on. In the nineteenth century, the United States compiled and printed treaties. By then, a small but growing number of Native leaders had access to printing presses, and with that access, the ability to put their own views before the American public. With the dissolution of European empires in the twentieth century, American treaties took on yet another meaning. Indigenous intellectuals—empowered by anticolonial struggles worldwide—published anthologies of treaties that emphasized their connection to global imperialism. Treaties became an object of study in the academic fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, and the then-emerging field of American Indian or Native American studies. Treaties were evidence of cultural difference, records of human diversity that undermined Eurocentric claims about history and politics. In recent years, the US Supreme Court has shown a new willingness to enforce old treaties. In the meantime, tribes like the Maliseet Indians have maintained their own records of the past. Those records may not always look like what the United States counts as official documents, but when it comes to treaties, isn't it the intention that counts?
The negotiation of treaties and their lasting record is a subject of great interest to Jerome McGann in his book Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement. McGann is well known to scholars of literature for his work in the fields of Romanticism, textual studies, and the digital humanities. He has also written about American literature, notably in The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel (2014). In his rich and provocative new study, Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes, McGann turns his attention to the archive of treaties between English-speaking colonists and Native North Americans. McGann has a specific interest in this material: not the history or politics of treaties but their implications for American literature. This makes his book a distinctive contribution to the centuries of scholarship on this subject. But his particular angle also raises methodological problems that are sure to be of interest to scholars in literature, history, and Native American studies. Are colonial treaties just artifacts from the past, or do they still make claims on us today?
McGann's approach is informed by his work on philology. A term rarely heard these days, philology usually refers to the study of languages and their histories. Across his decades of work (most directly in A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction [2014]), McGann has used the term in a much more expansive way. Culture and Language is equally wide-reaching in its approach to literature. Drawing on the work of Hugh Amory, William Charvat, and D. F. McKenzie, just to name a few scholars, McGann starts from the following observation: When it comes to the records of the past, “the sign system and even the discursive fields of language were shaped in the first instance by the materials, means, and modes of the records’ production.” Seen in this light, “documents record much more than a set of authorized intentions.” They “take place in a field full of folk with whom they are variously engaged.” The “folk” to whom McGann refers are the source of the “crossed purposes” in the book's title, and their intentions, in his view, are the motley from which every document emerges. Every document is shaped by the intentional acts of numerous people, and no theory could ever account for all the “traversals” that cut across every record (4). But that's where philology comes in. The job of the philologist is not to start with some grand unified theory but to grab onto some textual object, however minute, and describe it as exactingly as possible. “Its aim is not to generalize,” McGann writes of philology, “but to fill out what Wallace Stevens called ‘the course of a particular’ ” (5). That means pursuing, as far as possible, all of the crossed purposes that contributed to a text's creation and circulation. It also means recognizing what we do not (and perhaps cannot) know. The work of philology will never culminate in any synthesis; “failure stalks in every word” (8).
From his remarks on philology, it is apparent why McGann is interested in colonial America. As he observes, much early American writing is of the practical type. Its authors were trying to do something—found a community, destroy an enemy, get to heaven. And because it had such practical aims, colonial literature was pervaded by the words and intentions of others to an unusual degree, often in ways that undermined (or “unsettled”) the author's intentions. Nowhere was this the case more than in treaties, a genre that, by definition, relies on the agreement of opposing parties. In McGann's view, it's this dependence on the uncertain intentions of others that makes treaties paradigmatic of colonial literature. “Treaty-makers never doubted the uncertainties—the unsettled character—of what they were prosecuting,” McGann writes, “and a similar ethos pervades the canonical and strictly English works of the period” (13). These qualities make treaties and the literature they influenced an ideal subject for philological investigation, which takes as its starting point the crossed purposes in literary works.
At this point in his argument, McGann launches into a discussion of treaties that's meant to lay the groundwork for the interpretations of American writers that come later in the book. But here he encounters some difficulties. The problem he faces is how to follow “the course of a particular” when that course traverses such different worlds as European Protestantism and Native North America. This problem is not unique to McGann's work, but his handling of it reveals with unusual clarity some of the methodological cruxes any scholar in the field will face.
McGann begins by positing that Europeans and Native Americans viewed the world in different ways. “Treaty-making was conducted within two different space-times,” he observes (9). “One was Western European and early modern, the other was American and neolithic” (11). When it comes to describing the “space-time” that Western Europeans brought to treaty-making, McGann quotes Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” As McGann glosses this, it means that “seventeenth-century immigrants were trying to make a new history athwart their English homeland and its European context” (9).
When it comes to Native space-time, McGann relies on a different conceptual tool kit. Here, he reaches for Jon Parmenter's work on kaswentha, an Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) practice of maintaining peaceful coexistence through gift exchange. But while Parmenter mostly focuses on the history of kaswentha in colonial-era Haudenosaunee negotiations around the Great Lakes, McGann employs the concept widely. Not only was kaswentha “the foundation for uniting the Iroquois league” (10), but “kaswentha protocols were being adopted and adapted by other neighboring nations” (15) and “greatly influenced Indian treaty-making across the entire eastern littoral” (231n4). The growing reach of these “peace-and-friendship ceremonials” was politically transformative (107). According to McGann, kaswentha spread an ethos of equality across the continent. “Fundamental to native American treaty-making throughout the colonial period was the assumption of an equal authority between the treaty-making parties,” McGann writes (41).
This is a sweeping application of kaswentha to regions distant from the Great Lakes—and one that strays from McGann's stated emphasis on the particular. The meaning of kaswentha among the Haudenosaunee has been intensely debated by historians (Parmenter argues for its coherence from early contact onward). But there is little evidence other tribes directly adopted it from the Iroquois, especially since (as McGann acknowledges) the Iroquois Confederation was at war with so many of its neighbors. Other tribes and language groups had their own traditions of diplomacy. For example, Powhatans in the Chesapeake Bay engaged in gift-giving diplomacy throughout the Late Woodland period (900 – 1650). The archaeological research tells a similar tale for the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Eastern Woodlands (today called New England). An account that takes Iroquois kaswentha as the canonical form of Native treaty-making—and sees it spreading from the Great Lakes outward—therefore risks overlooking the history of tribal practices elsewhere, not to mention their distinct meanings in specific instances. For example, when McGann tells us that the Wampanoag leader Massasoit's outreach to the Pilgrims “involv[ed] a full-blown set of kaswentha protocols” (16), we learn little about Wampanoag traditions of diplomacy (which were distinct from Iroquois ones). That makes it harder to understand where Massasoit was coming from and what he was trying to accomplish with his famous act of outreach.
Still, many accounts of treaty making and gift giving draw on political practices from better-documented regions, like the Great Lakes, to explain ones where less documentation survives. Perhaps kaswentha does give us a rough analogue for how things worked in other places. But there is a deeper consequence to McGann's application of kaswentha. Europeans and Native Americans tend to appear in his account as possessing different types of agency. Europeans arise as flawed historical actors trying and failing (à la Marx) to prosecute some commercial, religious, or political enterprise. Native negotiators, by contrast, appear as preservers of ritual and ceremony. At times in this book, Native Americans seem to care more about protocol than substance. McGann even goes so far as to blame violations of kaswentha for the wars that raged along the coast in the seventeenth century. “The Virginians plunged almost immediately into their decades-long wars with the Powhatan Confederacy (1610 – 46) exactly because, unlike the Plymouth colonists, they refused to accommodate to native gift-exchange ceremonies and expectations,” while “violence in New England was delayed for a few years, but the outbreak of the Pequot War (1634 – 38) and its even more devastating sequel, the 1675 – 76 Narragansett War, were a direct consequence of the failure of the Puritan colonies to keep up the original peace-and-friendship treaty-making” (107). Here, as in other moments in the book, colonial conflicts appear to be motivated less by material disagreements—such as disputes over land or resources—and more by the colonists’ disregard of Native protocols.
This centuries-long disregard and its cultural legacy undergird McGann's interpretation of the American literary canon. Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes has a unique structure. It begins with chapters about method and treaty making, then follows with a sequence of chapters about major works of colonial literature from the Puritan and Enlightenment eras. These are broken up by “interchapters” that delve into treaty documents in detail. McGann's aim here is to demonstrate that the problems inherent in treaty making (such as the reliance on the intentions of others, and the failure of one's own designs) shaped literary culture in scenes remote from tribal diplomacy. For example, McGann juxtaposes a discussion of William Bradford's daybook and its failure to grasp Wampanoag kaswentha with an account of Bradford's late-life attempts to learn Hebrew. His discussion of Anne Bradstreet's poetry culminates in a terrifying account of her vision of a land cleared of Canaanites, a literary achievement that draws its rhetorical energy from a bracing failure to see the Algonquian-speaking people around her. Moving into the era of the Enlightenment, McGann offers extended discussions of Benjamin Franklin's uncertainty about the United States and the difficulty of reconciling racism and democracy in Thomas Jefferson's writings. What connects these discussions is a finely grained attention to the composition and organization of each corpus of texts, with a close interest in the way other voices—colonial and Native—pervade and unsettle them, often at cross-purposes with their authors’ intentions.
Notably, McGann allows his own interpretations to be pervaded by other voices, as he engages in a running commentary with some of the major scholarship in the field of early American textual studies. It's one of the rewarding things about this book. As McGann reads Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), for example, he carries on a dialogue with Reiner Smolinski's foundational work on that subject. He does the same with Abram Van Engen's eye-opening scholarship on the Arbella sermon (1630). Through these conversations with other scholars, McGann emphasizes how textual studies can inform our broader understanding of the humanities. Culture and Language culminates in insightful readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau on the question of methodology and the vocation of the American scholar. Here, McGann defends philology not just as a research method but as an embodiment of ethical principles, even (and perhaps especially) when a scholar's attention focuses on small or seemingly irrelevant records. In an era of grand theories that float above the factual world, philologists just try to tell the truth about what they are looking at. “Whether the document being searched has ideas with current social relevance is, for these adepts of truth, beside the point. Indeed, apparent irrelevance might be exactly to the point for people surrounded by the defactualizations of our fiercely just-in-time present” (216).
But while this is a persuasive (and even inspiring) description of the calling of scholars of literature, colonial treaties may require a different approach. Like the literary works in which they were frequently embedded, many colonial treaties today are the object of scholarly investigation and not much else. And McGann, working from a philological perspective, mostly leaves them in the past. He expresses regret at how colonists ignored the possibility of more equal relations with their Native neighbors (and is eloquent in his description of the consequences of their doing so), but he approaches treaties as historical documents, relics of a prior moment of mendacity and failure. It is here that the difference between treaties and literature becomes important. Treaties can be read as narratives, but that is not their primary purpose. Like the Declaration of Independence, treaties are what J. L. Austin called a “speech act”: an utterance or gesture that changes some state of affairs (147). Is a speech act still binding if the people responsible for enforcing it choose to forget about it? In his speech at Watertown in 2014, Henry Bear had an answer to that question: Yes, it is. It's true that over the centuries American authors have engaged in elaborate rhetorical displays to write people like the Maliseet Indians out of history and forget their agreements with them. Some writers, in turn, have ruminated on the consequences of that forgetting. There is much to be learned in the minute examination of the textual record of that process. But not everyone forgot about the Treaty of Watertown. Native signatories have maintained their own archives of treaty records. If we cannot find what we are looking for in the American literary tradition, maybe it's time to broaden our view.
