In this article, the author talks about schooling and the development of literacy within Algonquian communities in eighteenth-century southern New England. With the founding of Moor's Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1754, congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock launched an educational regimen that aimed to Christianize and "civilize" Native students by severing the vital role of kin and community from the process of Native learning. Wheelock's school and the growth of Algonquian literacy following the Great Awakening form part of a larger and longer history of Native literacy in the northern colonies in which Natives responded creatively, and often painfully, to the constraints and conditions of colonization by adopting new skills and knowledge. Historians have referred to eighteenth-century colonial America as a "republic of letters" owing to the remarkable growth in public and private correspondence during this period. During the decades following the Great Awakening in New England, itinerant ministers increasingly relied upon letters to communicate news of revivals and salvation, while individual believers corresponded to spur one another on in their faith. The author discusses how members of Algonquian communities in southern New England drew upon their literacy skills to enact a plan of relocation in order to resolve their temporal and spiritual needs. (Contains 50 notes.)