Study Guide Children and Education
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Wampanoag Education and the Oral Tradition
While Puritan culture was bibliocentric, Wampanoag culture has long valued orality as a means of maintaining tribal histories and beliefs. Both the style and content of Wampanoag Oral traditions have impacted Wampanoag culture and early writings. Wampanoag oral tradition comes in a variety of forms including chants, songs, and longer narrative cycles. Chants, like Puritan hymns, were used during rituals and emphasize the ability of language to shape reality. Songs can often be on secular subjects (such as love) and may or may not be designed to change the world. Narrative Cycles are groups of stories that tend to focus around particular characters and include standard events and elements. Examples from the Wampanoag tradition would include creation stories, cultural hero stories, migration legends, and contact stories. Famous characters from these legends include Hobbomok, Maushop, Squant, and the “little people.” These “other-than-human beings” interacted with the manitos of the upper and under(water) worlds (Bragdon 1996:188). In the stories these other-than-human beings are associated with “specific powers…sacred directions, colors, and elemental substances such as fire, water, and minerals” (Bragdon 1996: 188). In order to fully understand or see allusions to the oral tradition related by Wampanoag speakers in Indian Converts, one would want to be conversant in the characters, themes, and elements of the Wampanoag oral tradition. One starting place for learning these themes is William Simmons’ Spirit of the New England Tribes, a collection of Native New England Stories from the colonial era onwards. Another is Manitonquat’s Children of the Morning Light: Wampanoag Folktales, which presents some enduring legends as told by a contemporary Wampanoag elder. Like the Iliad or Odyssey of Homer, many of these stories were passed down for hundreds of years before they were transcribed onto paper. Some of these stories were recorded in the colonial era, and others much later.
In addition to looking at the content of the stories, one could turn to the style of Wampanoag speech in Indian Converts to examine the influence of the oral tradition, particularly on the speeches and writings made by Wampanoags that Mayhew inserts into his text. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong argues that the "oral style" is characterized by the following attributes: additive (not subordinate) sentence structure, aggregative (v. analytic) thought clusters, redundancy, a traditionalist mindset, proximity to the ‘human life world,’ an empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced narrative position, homeostasis (irrelevant memories are discarded), and an emphasis on situational rather than abstract concepts” (Ong 36-49). In his autobiography, journal, and “ethnography” of the Montauk Indians, Mohegan minister Samson Occom reveals that he used learning strategies more typical of oral cultures, rather than the very "literate" teaching styles employed by white ministers. White minister Eleazar Wheelock's educational philosophy was based upon the work of John Eliot who relied upon syllogistic "logick" and abstract books of grammar to teach his Indian "converts.” Books such as the Logick Primer reveal the emphasis on analysis and abstraction--two techniques which linguists such as Walter Ong have identified as appealing to members of literate cultures (Ong 42-45, 49-57). The content, form, and methodology used in these lessons would have almost certainly been foreign and counterintuitive to New England's oral-based cultures: indeed, Occom explains that as a child he found white instructional techniques off-putting and ineffective (Occom "SN" 942).
In contrast, Occom's autobiography shows him turning to strategies more consistent with the oral tradition when teaching his Montauk pupils to read. These strategies would have helped de-emphasize disparity between reading and knowledge already possessed by his students. Trudie Lamb Richmond suggests that in the Algonquian oral cultures of New England, children learn by watching, following, and doing--not through abstractions and logic exercises (Lamb Richmond 6-7). In his own teachings, Occom emphasizes concrete and experiential education. For example, realizing that the Montauks were unaccustomed to recognizing printed letters, Occom pasted letters on wood chips and had students retrieve them until they could recognize the letters (Occom "SN" 945).(1) Occom notes that this strategy was much more successful--and popular--than standard means of teaching the alphabet (Occom "SN" 945). Although Mayhew does not detail the strategies and techniques of Native American teachers on the island, it is worth considering that, like Occom, they also made their pedagogy more in keeping with traditional educational practice.
Notes
(1) Occom also employed strategies which mirror the oral tradition for teaching adults and children about the Bible. The most famous of these is Occom's two decks of "Christian Cards"--one of the Old Testament and one of the New. Members of meetings would be given a card with a biblical passage, then Occom would expound upon the significance of the passage for the individual and the group at large. This method of personalizing and adapting canonical stories is reminiscent of storytelling in the oral tradition. Occom mentions using his "Christian Cards" throughout his journals, and they are also discussed by his biographer William De Loss Love (Love 278). As Love notes, distribution was not random and discussion was not preordained; rather, the "art was in the appropriateness of the card to the person" (Love 278).
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