The “Savage Sounds” of Christian Translation

Across a broad chronological and geographical span, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, missionaries of disparate national and religious identities instigated a sweeping effort to learn, record, and reproduce native tongues. I argue that through the practice of translating Christian texts into indigenous languages, these early Protestant and Catholic missionaries struggled to address some of the more contentious doctrinal debates of the seventeenth century. Missionary endeavors in early America became a testing ground or laboratory of sorts for discovering what each missionary believed to be the true relationship between the Word and the spirit. What they discovered surprised them: rather than affirming the universal scope of Christian belief, missionary linguistics revealed its limits. While Jesuit and Protestant missionaries searched for Christian universals, indigenous words and speakers resisted these scripts, forcing their interlocutors to confront the realities of multiple cosmologies and language as a human construct.