“Teaching White Brother to Listen: The Ambiguous Incorporation of Samuel Kirkland in Kanadasaga, 1765-1766”

A colloq with Glenda Goodman (University of Pennsylvania). Please note that all colloquia papers are pre-circulated. Please register via the link below to receive a copy.

The twenty-two-year-old Samuel Kirkland left school early to embark on his first mission in a Seneca village, Kanadasaga, where he was not particularly welcome and where, over a disastrous eighteen months, he learned that no amount of enthusiasm, prayers, or psalm singing could persuade an uninterested people to convert to Protestantism. Instead, his Seneca hosts had to teach him how to behave correctly, particularly regarding the appropriate times to speak, to sing, to keep quiet, and when and how to listen. Unpacking the episodes of singing and listening that pepper Kirkland’s account of his first mission, this chapter argues that vocality and aurality were pivotal and teachable skills for the relationships they made possible in a period of rapidly changing Haudenosaunee-British relations following the Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s War, and the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

Glenda Goodman is a historical musicologist specializing in seventeenth and eighteenth-century musics of America. Her first book is Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (OUP 2020) won the Lewis Lockwood Prize from the American Musicological Society, and she has published numerous articles in musicology and history journals. She is currently working on a book about Protestant hymnody in the Native Northeast. She is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the interim Director of Graduate Study this year, and she is this year’s Topic Director for the Wolf Humanities Center for the topic “Practice.” Before entering academia, she was a classically-trained violist.

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