Unscripted America – Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation

In 1664, French Jesuit Louis Nicolas arrived in Quebec. Upon first hearing Ojibwe, Nicolas observed that he had encountered the most barbaric language in the world–but after listening to and studying approximately fifteen Algonquian languages over a ten-year period, he wrote that he had “discovered all of the secrets of the most beautiful languages in the universe.” Please join us for a conversation about the way in which colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Full event details.