“The Gesture Speech of Mankind”: Old and New Entanglements in the Histories of American Indian and European Sign Languages

This article brings into dialogue two distinct moments of encounter between Western and American indigenous traditions of kinetic-manual expression, challenging predominant paradigms in the study of human sign language and cross-linguistic communication in the process. When European explorers and settlers first came across American Indian verbal and signed languages in the late fifteenth century, the interactions that resulted were less defined by misunderstandings than has previously been suggested, in part because the participants all associated the nonverbal with eloquence rather than with speech incapacity. This initial reading was later obscured in the late 1890s, when ethnologists working for the Smithsonian embarked on a “rediscovery” of Indian sign language in the Western Plains, and initiated enduring misconceptions about indigenous nonverbal communication being geographically restricted, inspired by Westerners, comparable to the sign systems of the deaf, and subordinate to speech. Deconstructing the process through which rich indigenous communicative technologies were progressively erased from scholarly and public consciousness also reveals that Western notions and practices of sign language were significantly shaped by the encounter with American indigenous nonverbal systems. By bridging temporal and disciplinary boundaries, and by integrating Atlantic, hemispheric, and longue durée lines of inquiry, the article reframes traditional debates about the colonial “clash of cultures,” orality vs. literacy, and misunderstandings in early America.