It is a curious coincidence that the Scottish Highlands and Appalachian Mountains once composed a single mountainous uplift, separated over time by a widening crack in the Atlantic Ocean. Margaret Connell Szasz attempts to bring the two together again with her study of indigenous education, focusing on the Society in Scotland for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Founded in 1709 in Edinburgh, the SSPCK played an active role in educating Gaelic Highlanders and Native Americans during the eighteenth century. Although the Highland and Native American contexts differed in some respects, Szasz finds points of cultural similarity and a common impulse within the SSPCK to remake both Highland and Native America cultures in the image of the modernizing, Anglicizing Scottish Lowlands.
Szasz begins by identifying cultural similarities between the Highland Gaels and the Iroquois and Algonquians of America. The most obvious similarity is that both organized themselves into clans, which served as the basis for political and social organization, and patterned traditional ways of work, marriage, and warfare. Highlanders and Native Americans were also amalgamated peoples, for whom intermarriage was common. For Szasz, the comparison extends beyond even these structural similarities: both Gaelic Highland and Native American cultures were rooted in oral traditions that perpetuated mythopoeic worldviews transmitted by traditional storytelling, the principal means of educating the young. These stories, she posits, illustrate the common ways in which both groups understood human relations to land and animals as interrelated.
Szasz then explores the growing fissure between the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands, which was present in the Middle Ages but intensified in the seventeenth century under the Stuart monarchs. Highland traditions persisted, however, just as the Scottish Lowlands came more to resemble its southern neighbor in its promotion of religious orthodoxy (Presbyterianism in this case), the English language, the commoditization of land, and the supremacy of the nation state over traditional clan loyalties. The impulse to accelerate this transformation in the Highlands eventually led a group of Edinburgh gentlemen to establish the SSPCK in 1709, just two years after the unification of Scotland and England.
The SSPCK began work in 1711 and by 1783 established over 170 schools in the Highlands. Charitable contributions provided the means; the persistence of Highland Jacobitism provided the stimulus for those contributions and influenced SSPCK pedagogy. Implementing that pedagogy were the society's schoolmasters, the “shocktroops” (82) of Presbyterianism responsible for eradicating certain elements of Gaelic Highland culture. Most schoolmasters were Lowlanders themselves and sympathetic to the society's promotion of monolingual English education and Presbyterianism steeped in Calvinism. The society's adherence to its English-only policy proved to be an impediment to learning, however, as most Highland pupils were monolingual Gaelic speakers. To overcome the language gap, the SSPCK eventually lifted the prohibition on Gaelic in 1766 and accepted bilingual education. Also, the fact that SSPCK schoolmasters were outsiders made them less effective as teachers, so the SSPCK began recruiting prized Highland pupils from within its school system to become schoolmasters themselves.
Success in the Highlands eventually led the SSPCK to look abroad to North America. After several failed attempts in the 1730s to establish its presence among southern Indian tribes, the society then turned north, where the Great Awakening had prepared the way for missionary activity. Faced with stiff competition there from New England Congregationalists, the society eventually found success in New Jersey by supporting the work of David Brainerd and his brother John, who served as missionaries to a small band of Lenape (Delaware) Indians living in New Jersey. Although David died soon after establishing the mission, John carried on for thirty-five years, instructing Lenape children under the auspices of the SSPCK.
The SSPCK's other major educational venture was its support for Moor's Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut. The school's founder, Elezear Wheelock, was a Congregationalist but established an “eclectic” (138) donor base, which included the Presbyterian SSPCK. Wheelock's school drew native scholars widely from New England and New York and served sixty-five native students. Wheelock's school not only required rigorous study of core subjects but also served as a site of cultural immersion. To capitalize on Wheelock's success, in the 1760s the SSPCK began an experiment in which they sent Wheelock's pupils to establish schools among the Iroquois, which failed principally because of the cultural divide that separated the Iroquois from their English and Algonquian schoolteachers.
Finally, Szasz looks in-depth at two “indigenous” products of the SSPCK system: Highland schoolteacher Dugald Buchanan and Samson Occom, the Mohegan minister. Both represented the “inclusive transformation the society desired” (165), and yet each adapted to Lowland culture selectively and remained committed to indigenous traditions. Buchanan, born into a traditional Gaelic-speaking Highland clan, served the SSPCK faithfully as the schoolmaster and yet became a famed poet in his native Gaelic language. Occom, reared in Mohegan tribal culture, was a Christian convert who studied under Wheelock and ministered to Indian communities. Interesting as their two lives were individually, their stories converge in 1766 in Edinburgh, where each ventured to support SSPCK projects: Buchanan to work on a Gaelic translation of the New Testament and Occom to headline an ultimately successful fund-raising tour.
Szasz's ending thus brings to full circle her clever rendering of Atlantic history, which is valuable in the way it explores the common impulse behind SSPCK educational practices in two disparate areas, the internal dynamics that spurred missionary work both locally and abroad and its connection to Britain's empire-building project. The book is not without its problems, however. For one, the comparison between Highland and Native American cultures seems forced, as the common ground she finds might be considered universal among tribal cultures rather than inherent to these two in particular. Moreover, the SSPCK's role in Native American education appears limited at best, when compared to the efforts of local American (often Congregationalists) ministers and to the society's own work in the Highlands. These criticisms aside, Szasz has written an engaging, imaginative work that opens up new possibilities for Atlantic history.
