A Dictionary in the Archives

Abstract

'A Dictionary in the Archives' investigates First Nations and French transcriptions of Indigenous languages through the Chaumonot manuscript held at Brown University's John Carter Brown Library. This approach responds to diffuse narrative arcs regarding colonization that, through the writing of Carlos Ulises Deceno, I term 'tacit historiography.' In light of the move to revive North American languages repressed in the course of colonization, I address recently authored histories of North-Eastern and North-Central North America—here, modern day Ontario, Oklahoma, Quebec and Michigan—alongside the path-setting work of Wendat First Nations linguist Megan Lukaniec, poet, scholar and historian Georges E. Sioui and teacher and translator John Steckley. Reviving what Lukaniec calls the 'slumbering' language of Wendat/Wyandotte, a language Euro-American scholars previously described as 'extinct,' involves drawing from seventeenth-century French translations and transcriptions in archives in order to return the language to everyday use. This reflection on the Chaumonot manuscript, as well as Gabriel Sagard's 1632 phrasebook of French and 'Huron,' attends to codexes' materiality as well as to the social and embodied movements of reading's structural and scriptive codes. I investigate performatives and performance structures in the texts, theorizing 'trans-scriptive things' in the archives to address translation/transcription in cross-cultural, cross-linguistic and cross-temporal contexts. This work investigates Robin Bernstein's study of the 'scriptive thing' in Racial Innocence (2011) as well as Mel Chen's conceptual and linguistic 'ontologizing' structures (2012). Here, trans/performance traces the force of movements across and between languages as well as between spoken and written systems of memory, including the impact of translations on nonbinary gender and matrilineal authority.

Notes

1 For a version of the manuscript digitized by the John Carter Brown Library as the ‘French-Huron Dictionary and Vocabulary,’ see: https://archive.org/details/frenchhurondicti00chau. The date of the manuscript (JCB Manuscripts, 1-SIZE Codex Ind 12). Attributed to Pierre Joseph Marie Chaumonot is contested (ca. 1640 to 1693).

2 For a multilingual version of Sagard’s Dictionaire de la langue huronne (1632), see Sagard and Steckley (2010).

3 In 1999, 350 years after the Wendat peoples’ strategic scattering in the face of epidemics, war and European munitions, the nations reasserted their Confederacy across present-day Quebec, Canadian and US borders. See ‘Reconnecting the Modern Diaspora, 1999’(Labelle 2013: 190–5).

4 The translations occlude a gender-unspecified ‘indefinite third-person’ in Wendat (Sagard and Steckley 2010: 7–8).

5 The turtle who sheltered Aataensic on his back to form a ‘turtle island’ offers the political signifier for a pan-Indigenous North America: ‘Turtle Island’.

6 Steckley, for example, suggests a Wendat notion of two souls in his analysis of Sagard (2007: 17).

7 Lukaniec and Sioui both work in French and English, highlighting the important relationship in their work to francophone Quebec as well as to Wendat and Indigenous culture and scholarship.

8 On the tacit, see Decena (2011: 19).