In this digital age, scholarly work is accessible as never before. A large number of publications are available to researchers around the world with just a few mouse clicks. However, in spite of the availability of this scholarship beyond the physical holdings in a traditional library, work in what one might call rather marginal research fields, including that concerning Australia and the Pacific, is often only read by those researching and writing in the same field. That is the case even though the findings of work on certain topics might also benefit those from areas that are – at least geographically – much further removed. In that sense, the value of some of the scholarship of and on Australia and New Zealand – of the Pacific – has yet to be discovered, including by many of those working in American studies.

I discovered the value of much of this work by virtue of living in Australia and being exposed, almost coincidentally, to some of the scholarship on Indigenous peoples produced there and in New Zealand. Most recently, I have drawn on scholarship on writing and speech for what I refer to as an ethnohistorical analysis of Native American letter writing in the removal era. While I would have been able to conduct this project without Australian and New Zealand scholarship on Indigenous writing, the works that I did read from that part of the world opened my eyes to phenomena I might have otherwise missed, and that also benefited my analysis in a number of other ways that, one might say, describes my very own “Pacific Turn.”Footnote ¹

One of the most important books on Indigenous writing in Australia and one which influenced my own work on Seneca and Cherokee letters in the removal era is Penny van Toorn's Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia.Footnote ² In it, Van Toorn suggested that literacy is culturally situated, arguing, “Writing and reading entered Aboriginal life-worlds clothed in the ideas and information supplied by white acquaintances, but always these alien elements were understood within Indigenous frames of reference.”Footnote ³ This argument is made most successfully when analysing a letter by Bennelong, an Australian Aboriginal man who had been in close contact with the Governor Arthur Philip, and in 1792 had even travelled to England with him. Following Nicholas Thomas, Van Toorn calls this letter an “entangled object,” by which she means “a product of intercultural engagement.”Footnote ⁴ She contends that

In other words, even though he himself was not able to write, Bennelong had some understanding of the conventions involved. However, it also emerged from Van Toorn's analysis that the fact that he composed a letter, and drew on some settler conventions to do so, did not mean that Bennelong had surrendered his own. To the contrary, as Van Toorn reveals, he had composed a letter that “could potentially both fulfil his traditional Indigenous social obligations, and work in his favour in the gift economies of both British patronage and Aboriginal trade relations.”Footnote ⁶

Writing Never Arrives Naked foreshadowed some of the arguments made so impressively by Lisa Brooks in her The Common Pot, published two years after Van Toorn's study and focussing on Native Americans in the northeastern United States.Footnote ⁷ It was mainly these two books that have shown what can be hidden behind words and through writing, and also the fact that the mere use of alphabetic writing did not necessarily mean that all Indigenous ways had been erased in those doing the writing.Footnote ⁸ Brooks, for instance, revealed that the self-deprecating tone of Native petitions should not be taken too literally.Footnote ⁹ This is how I came to scrutinize Cherokee and Seneca letters for diplomatic and other Indigenous traditions and Native American customary law.Footnote ¹⁰ It also became clear to me through the work of Van Torn and Brooks (and many others) that not everyone who contributed to something written necessarily had to put pen to paper themselves. There is also what I have termed “oral writing.”Footnote ¹¹ Native Americans literally made writing their own by finding ways of incorporating illiterate members of tribes into the writing process and thus adapted it to their needs. By adopting such methods, Native American letter writing in the removal era can thus be seen as a Native American literary tradition. Brooks, Robert Warrior, David Martinez and others have called attention to the fact that such traditions have often been missed or ignored.Footnote ¹² However, in the US, few beyond Brooks have conducted the kind of analysis that, like parts of Van Toorn's, also significantly emphasizes the Indigenous elements of Native American writing.Footnote ¹³ This particular aspect of Native writing has often been overlooked or even denied, as many otherwise worthy and insightful analyses focus mostly on what was said rather than on how it was said.Footnote ¹⁴

Another aspect of Indigenous writing that appears to be a universal one is the denial of Indigenous writing, whether this be by deeming writing a non-Indigenous skill that Native peoples could never truly possess, or by viewing its adoption as a surrender of indigeneity. Brooks and many others have pointed out that even now Native writing is seen as a sign of inauthenticity, of supposedly having surrendered one's indigeneity.Footnote ¹⁵ While a number of scholars have called attention to this phenomenon, no one has explored it quite as elegantly as another Australian scholar, Inga Clendinnen.Footnote ¹⁶ In her “Reading Mr Robinson,” she writes about how George Augustus Robinson, the chief protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District of what is now the Australian state of Victoria, steals – or “takes” without feeling the need to ask – a pencil he finds with a group of Aborigines. Clendinnen deduces from this action that Robinson feels that the “instruments of literacy belong to him.”Footnote ¹⁷ Hilary Wyss has similarly determined that New England Missionary schools wanted to create readerly but not, as she terms it, writerly Indians who “used written discourse to manage their own sovereignty.”Footnote ¹⁸

Other Australasian scholars have contributed to the exploration of Indigenous claims to literacy as their own and as a tool in their fight against colonialism. For instance, in 2006, the same year that Van Toorn's book came out, New Zealand scholar Lachy Paterson published Colonial Discourses: Niupepa Maori 1855–1863.Footnote ¹⁹ In this work, he showed how Maori turned Maori-language newspapers by Pakeha (settler) editors into something they could treat like speaking in a traditional marae (meeting ground).Footnote ²⁰ Maori, Paterson explains, wrote many letters, including to each other, and often incorporated oral styles.Footnote ²¹ The presence of oral styles is something I was also able to trace in the letters I analysed. For instance, Seneca letters in the removal era were at times still written in the style in which wampum, belts or strings made from shell beads, had traditionally been used. These letters included a retelling of the history of interactions and old agreements between parties, which had once been a way of retaining the knowledge of such events and of reinforcing their continued validity. Other letters appear to have originated as speeches, and often included the repetition of fixed phrases, such as, on one occasion in 1855, some Cattaraugus residents exhorting Commissioner of Indian Affairs George W. Manypenny to “Listen while the Senecas speak,” and used “brother” to address him, almost as if they were facing him over a council fire.Footnote ²²

The newspapers analysed by Paterson were also a place where one could find out about Maoris’ sentimental attachment to land, something I also found for the letters I was working with, which at times pointed to birth places and burial sites to explain an unwillingness to move away.Footnote ²³ Paterson was thus able to show through a number of concrete examples that the adoption of writing and even the participation in European publications cannot necessarily be interpreted as a surrender of indigeneity and thus of Maori authenticity.

Like Van Toorn's book, Paterson's also at least partly anticipated some elements of a study that was to be published in the United States on a topic related to Native American writing. Four years later, Phillip H. Round published Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880.Footnote ²⁴ Like Brooks, Van Toorn, Paterson and others, Round argued that Native Americans were not always the victims of literacy.Footnote ²⁵ Drawing on literary scholar Arnold Krupat's work, Round argued that all texts can be seen as (bicultural) composites, something like Van Toorn's entangled objects.Footnote ²⁶ Looking at Native memorials, he pointed out that these “were often corporately written texts that employed oral and written, Native and non-Native discourse practices.”Footnote ²⁷ However, he did not go into as much detail as Paterson or Van Toorn when it came to actually identifying these Indigenous practices.Footnote ²⁸ And while Paterson highlights Maori agency in his book, Round's generally fine analysis somewhat more conservatively situated Native Americans as walking a fine line between sovereignty and submissiveness, potentially overlooking important aspects of Indigenous agency from within Native American customary diplomacy, such as the appeals for pity he refers his readers to in the example discussed.Footnote ²⁹

When it comes to what constituted and, more importantly, what did not constitute submissiveness, taking inspiration from an example from New Zealand might again lead to a more nuanced analysis. Historian Lyndsay Head’s article “Wiremu Tamihana and the Mana of Christianity” emphasized that the mere adoption of Christianity cannot necessarily be interpreted as surrender or even loss of authenticity or as submission. While she acknowledges that Christianity was very much the face of empire, Head also holds that belief

Like writing, Christianity was something that Indigenous peoples could instrumentalize and that could help them fight for what they saw as worthy of preservation. The adoption of Christianity by Indigenous peoples in New Zealand, Head's analysis makes clear, was not a sign of submission, as long as it was undertaken by choice. In the Seneca and Cherokee letters I have analysed in my most recent work, I have found the same to be true in another area as many of the letter writers seemed to have genuinely wanted to keep elements of what was at the time referred to as civilization.Footnote ³¹ However, they steadfastly reserved the right to make such choices themselves and refused to allow the US federal government to dictate these to them.

Writing, in whatever form it took, was one of the ways Indigenous peoples around the world could make their decisions known to government, and also a means to explain their choices to the recipients. As another New Zealand scholar, Tony Ballantyne, has argued, “Talk and print were threads that began to reconnect native and newcomer in the colonial public sphere.”Footnote ³² As this statement suggests, speech and writing are not as far removed from one another as is at times believed. “For Maori,” Ballantyne has pointed out, “the spoken word was valued because it was creative, performative, and had the power to sway and even transform the listener.”Footnote ³³ It is thus not surprising that Indigenous peoples sought to make use of these strengths of the spoken word in their writings as well. The letters and petitions by Cherokees and especially Senecas show evidence of some elements of traditional speeches, such as repetition through recycling and recasting, and the use of fixed phrases and stylized repetition.Footnote ³⁴ This was even the case for the supposedly so very civilized Cherokees. For instance, on an occasion when bicultural chief John Ross was not involved in composing the letter in question, the message sent showed signs of having evolved from a speech. In June 1838, Assistant George Lowery, Thomas Foreman and others sent a letter to Major General Winfield Scott, who was initially put in charge of removing the Cherokees from their homelands, to try and dissuade him from removing them at this time of year and in such haste.Footnote ³⁵ In a manner reminiscent of a speech, which significantly departed from the civilized form of a letter, thus potentially marking them as “savage,” the authors of this message kept reiterating the term “Sir” within the body of the letter, using a “civilized” terminology in a traditional way.Footnote ³⁶

All of this is not to say that an investigation of Native American letters in the removal era could not have been conducted without “Pacific” or “Australasian” scholarship, nor that others could not succeed without taking this scholarship into account. But without the above and other examples, my work would have been much the poorer. I am also not claiming that Australasian scholarship was the only source of knowledge and inspiration that I drew on – the vast majority of it was from US scholars and focussed on Native Americans. On Indigenous nonfiction writing in particular there is much excellent work that has been and is being done in the US, even though the majority of it has so far focussed on the eighteenth century and may at times lack the deep involvement with writing's Indigenous elements that marks some of the best work in and from Australia and New Zealand.Footnote ³⁷ Much excellent work in the area has also been done elsewhere, and especially so in or on Mexico.Footnote ³⁸ On a cursory examination of the impact, it appears to have been as limited as the work done in the Pacific, in spite of the geographical distance and the fact that much of it has been written in English.Footnote ³⁹ While at times seen as something almost exotic, work by UK scholars on the United States has been appreciated somewhat more in the US, and in connection to Native writing one might mention especially David Murray's contribution.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, at a recent conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), where Australians formed the largest minority, attendance at panels on Australia, New Zealand, or the Pacific more generally drew a noticeably smaller audience than those dedicated to the US (or even Canada).

Of course, the problem of highly selective consumption of scholarship due to publication pressures that is likely at least part of the reason for the neglect of scholarship from the Pacific is not one limited to the US and American studies alone. Another part of it may be a somewhat insular sense of what constitutes the discipline, and of who does and who does not matter there. Again, this is not something that is limited to American studies. When I was training as a Latinamericanist in Germany and then moved, temporarily, to the US, I was struck by how little of the work done in Germany from within Latinamerican studies was read there. At the time, I thought this was because the majority of publications would have been written in either German or Spanish. However, Latinamericanists the world around speak – and especially read – Spanish. Largely ignoring almost an entire area of scholarship could not be said to have been an accident or a coincidence. It may be that a certain inward focus within the US is actually linked to a self-understanding of the United States as the center of scholarship, something that has also happened in other countries.

Wherever one is based and what area of Indigenous studies one is in, it is commendable that Indigenous writing is now a growing field of study internationally. Traditionally, it was not an easy area of study to choose. As again Lyndsay Head has observed, writing “may not be an easy strategy to warm to when the defiance of ‘ka whawhai tonu matou, ake ake ake’ (we will fight on forever) echoes down the years, but it may be that colonial chiefliness lies in the courage to continue to engage with the state.”Footnote ⁴¹ Head contends that most scholars are attracted more to the study of those taking up armed resistance, a method much more spectacular than writing. At least now scholars the world over have the courage to study how Indigenous peoples engaged with the states they came to be encompassed by.Footnote ⁴² If we can add to this courage a determination to look beyond national boundaries, we might in the future reap the benefits of transnational Indigenous studies. As sketched out above, Indigenous peoples across the world often faced similar challenges, such as the denial of their ability to write without surrendering their authenticity. The transnational study of Indigenous responses to this and other challenges can help scholars to spot similar phenomena elsewhere and open their eyes to dimensions they might otherwise have missed. What we will find out in the resulting studies may help to inform and inspire future generations of activists and scholars. This is why we owe it to our area of study to cast the net wide and look for excellent research around the world. That is why everyone needs to finally discover the Pacific.