On Eloquence Embodied

This is an excellent study of North American colonial history that we generally give very little thought to—how people communicated. Normally, one question is the first that we ask when we first learn about the earliest encounters between Indigenous peoples and Europeans: “How did they speak?” I remember someone asking this in my high school history course, and it’s one that invariably appears in university-level courses as well. The answers are multifaceted, of course: basic information can be exchanged through pointing and demonstration; there was little rich conversation between Native Americans and Europeans for years, after which they understood one another a bit better; they had Indigenous companions who spent time in Europe; etc.

In this text, Carayon is most interested in the first answer and pushes back against historians who argue that communication was limited to basic gestures. In fact, Carayon offers a great deal of evidence supporting the richness of sign languages and gestures—the book starts off with Samuel de Champlain’s account of learning from Indigenous interlocutors about winter conditions and about the American turkey (which he had never seen before). Of course there was misunderstanding—frequent misunderstanding—but this is no different from spoken language, which seems to bring perpetual misunderstanding as well. Moreover, sign languages did not cease once the French learned indigenous languages and vice-versa—they continued well into the eighteenth century.

Supplementing this larger contribution, Carayon argues that communication was so effectively largely because Indigenous peoples had been communicated with one another in this manner for a long time before Europeans ever came, meaning that they were trained in a wholly North American Indigenous epistemology regarding language and communication. This is some great stuff.

All together, this is a must-read for those interested in colonial North America, comparative empire, and indigenous American history.