This is a guest blog by María Peña, a writer-editor in the Office of Communications. It also appears in the July-August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.
After arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631, English Puritan minister John Eliot made history not only with his steadfast mission to convert Native Americans to Christianity but also for his evangelical method: translating the Bible into the Wampanoag language of the region’s Algonquin tribes.
Eliot believed Indigenous communities would be more receptive to the message of Christianity if the holy scriptures were written in their language, also known as Natick. He learned the previously unwritten language and spent years translating the Geneva Bible into it, getting significant help from Native Americans such as James Printer and John Nesutan, according to the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Printed in Cambridge between 1660 and 1663, the Eliot Indian Bible today represents a landmark in printing history: It was the first Bible printed in North America in any language.
Eliot was a pivotal figure among the Puritans. He helped settle the intertribal communities of Christian converts, called “praying towns,” that dotted the New England landscape between 1646 and 1675. The establishment of these communities — 14 in total — was part of an attempt to impose Puritan rules, mores and lifestyles on recent Indigenous converts.
Eliot’s efforts to convert more Native Americans ultimately failed, in part because of bubbling animosity between white Colonists and the Wampanoags. And most copies of his Bible were destroyed during King Philip’s War (1675-1676), a conflict that took a toll on the region’s Indigenous population. A second edition of the Eliot Bible was published in 1685 — the edition held by the Library today.
In recent decades, the Wampanoag nation has used the Eliot Bible as a tool to help resurrect its ancestral language, which declined soon after the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived and went extinct in the 19th century.
Founded by MIT-trained linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird in 1993, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project uses the Eliot Bible and archival records to bring the language back to Wampanoag households, one student at a time.
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Comments
Very interesting. It looks as if Eliot used the Roman alphabet, but if the language went extinct in the 19th Century (presumably before any sound recordings), I wonder if he left behind a good pronunciation key. He also must have had to invent words for vocabulary that couldn’t have existed in the language, for e.g., for a word like “camel”?