Dr Steffi Dippold

Steffi Dippold is associate professor for early and Native American literatures at Kansas State University. Her research focuses on alternative archives, forgotten or marginalized texts, book history, material and visual culture, and early modern global and local cultures of everyday life. She researches and writes on materials ranging from print ornaments, the cultural logic of actual and textual keys, and curative assumptions embedded in a Haudenosaunee purging stick to early Native American bookbinding and the first North American Indigenous grammar. Together with Lauren Coats, she recently co-edited “Beyond Recovery,” an Early American Literature special issue on archival absences that focuses attention on that which has been lost or suppressed rather than what is found.

 

Project Title: Deciphering the Indigenous Artifact Language of the Edinburgh Indian Primer (1669) with Mr Michael Galban

 

Front and centre of Michael Galban and Steffi Dippold’s collaborative project is The Indian Primer, a small abecedary in Wampanoag, one of the many Indigenous languages once spoken in colonial America. Printed in 1669, The Indian Primer is part of a larger group of missionary materials inked on the earliest press in North America, the so-called Cambridge Press at Harvard College. Housed today in special collections at the University of Edinburgh, the Primer is an imminently important material artifact: it is the only surviving copy of the Wampanoag reading manual and the only known example of seventeenth-century Indigenous book arts. Sporting pale white buckskin covers artfully emblazoned with foliated designs and large strawberry ornaments, the extraordinary binding makes the volume into a unique survivor and material archive of otherwise unrecorded Indigenous practices, participation, and expertise of early American bookmaking and culture.