American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Reading and writing, often coupled, are really two separate skills and their effects can be dramatically different, especially within a colonial situation. Reading, particularly in the language of the dominant group, enables Native people to receive messages that the power-holders choose to channel to them. While not precluding Native people’s selection from among these available reading materials, literacy does in part serve to move information from the power center to indigenous communities. Writing, on the other hand, taught as a simple and natural accompaniment to reading, has the potential to reverse this information flow. It places in Native people’s hands the ability to express their own ideas and desires in such a way as to be comprehensible to bureaucrats and policymakers. Writing enables communication to travel up the political hierarchy. Colonialism worldwide, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, included the promotion of literacy in European languages. Missionary schools, government agencies, and international aid programs, assumed that reading and writing constituted a substantial, unquestionable, and above all self-evident, benefit. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) shared this belief and after the mid nineteenth century increasingly budgeted for boarding and day schools. That agency viewed literacy as both a component and a measure of “progress” and implied that “benefits” would accrue to Native people who learned these skills, such as access to wage employment. Early-nineteenth-century anthropological theorists followed the thinking of their times and interpreted literacy as a unitary and inherently beneficial phenomenon. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, analyses were more critical and proceeded to refine concepts and distinguish among various literacies.