Unscripted America

In 1664, French Jesuit Louis Nicolas arrived in Quebec. Upon first hearing Ojibwe, Nicolas observed that he had encountered the most barbaric language in the world—but after listening to and studying approximately fifteen Algonquian languages over a ten-year period, he wrote that he had "discovered all of the secrets of the most beautiful languages in the universe." Unscripted America is a study of how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages withintransatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Unscripted America contends that what scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words. By examining the foundation of the literary nation through language, writing, and literacy, Unscripted America revisits common conceptions regarding "early america"and its origins to demonstrate how the understanding of America developed out of a steadfast connection to American Indians, both past and present.

Rivett's interventions are as numerous as her readings and also affect Native studies. It is especially her side by side readings of French and English sources that both respond to a long-identified need for multilingual work in early American studies and do so inways that are simultaneously rigorous and innovative., Unscripted America is a meaningful contribution to a surge in scholarshipthat has explored the relation between intellectual history, Native studies, and the literary history of colonial America and the early US republic. Its focus on the scientific study of indigenous languages makes it particularly worth reading ... Rivett offers a scrupulously detailed study of the cultural history of the colonial Americas, a simultaneously wide-ranging and deeply probing account of the linguistic exchanges at the heart of colonial encounter. Making thought-provoking connections between linguistic and theological writings and the literatures of the early republic, Unscripted America is an indispensable text for scholars examining the history of cultural exchange in Native North America., Unscripted America is an enthralling work of cultural history that brings together early American literature, theology, and indigenous studies in original ways ... Rivett's scholarly achievements in Unscripted America are many and meaningful., This book is an account of encounter and (dis)encounter. Coming from the field of literary history [...] the author's study of the missionary linguistics of colonial North America deserves our attention because, reading beyond the lines, it is not just about the history. The problems of mistranslation, misinterpretation, and appropriation discussed by the author are faced by all field researchers working in indigenous communities today., Unscripted America is a meaningful contribution to a surge in scholarship that has explored the relation between intellectual history, Native studies, and the literary history of colonial America and the early US republic. Its focus on the scientific study of indigenous languages makes it particularly worth reading [...] Making thought-provoking connections between linguistic and theological writings and the literatures of the early republic, Unscripted America is an indispensable text for scholars examining the history of cultural exchange in Native North America.

Sarah Rivett is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (UNC Press, 2011), which won the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History.