Excerpt from Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature

Birgit Brander Rasmussen’s Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature is a fascinating discussion of various non-alphabetic writing by indigenous peoples. According to its blurb, it “recovers previously overlooked moments of textual reciprocity in the colonial sphere, from a 1645 French-Haudenosaunee Peace Council to Herman Melville’s youthful encounters with Polynesian hieroglyphics.” The text reproduced here takes on Melville’s iconic novel Moby Dick and explores Ishmael’s description of the tattoos on the body of the Polynesian harpooner Queequeg and on his coffin. Rasmussen posits these as a fictionalized embodiment of actual Polynesian writing