Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape

Native Americans, Christianity, and the reshaping of

the American Religious Landscape

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Native Americans, Christianity, and the reshaping of

the American Religious Landscape


edited by joel w. martin and mark a. nicholas foreword by michelene pesantubbee

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2010 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Scala and Scala Sans by Rebecca Evans. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. The following works have been reprinted in revised form with permission: Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 187–220, © 2005 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, reprinted by permission of the University of

Pennsylvania Press; and Douglas Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670–1770,” Religion and American Culture 15, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 147–86, © 2005 The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, published by the University of California Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Native Americans, Christianity, and the reshaping of the American religious landscape/ edited by Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas; foreword by Michelene Pesantubbee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8078-3406-0 (cloth: alk. paper) —isbn 978-0-8078-7145-4 (pbk: alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America —Missions —History. 2. Indians of North America —Religion. 3. Missionaries —United States —History. 4. Christianity and culture —United States —History. I. Martin, Joel W., 1956– II. Nicholas, Mark A. e98.m6n38 2010 970.004v97 — dc22 2010006641 cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1 paper 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents, Bill and Patty, people of faith who practice everyday grace and kindness. jm To my daughter Molly for reminding me that there is a world outside of books. And to my parents for all of their love and financial support. mn

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contents

Foreword Michelene Pesantubbee xi Introduction Joel W. Martin 1

part i: negotiating conversion Hard Feelings Samson Occom Contemplates His Christian Mentors Joanna Brooks 23 Eager Partners in Reform Indians and Frederick Baylies in Southern New England, 1780–1840 Daniel Mandell 38

Crisscrossing Projects of Sovereignty and Conversion Cherokee Christians and New England Missionaries during the 1820s Joel W. Martin 67

part ii: practicing religion Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670–1770 Douglas L. Winiarski 93 Blood, Fire, and “Baptism” Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit “Martyr” Emma Anderson 125 The Catholic Rosary, Gendered Practice, and Female Power in French-Indian Spiritual Encounters Tracy Neal Leavelle 159

part iii: circulating texts The Souls of Highlanders, the Salvation of Indians Scottish Mission and Eighteenth-Century British Empire Laura M. Stevens 179 Print Culture and the Power of Native Literacy in California and New England Missions Steven W. Hackel and Hilary E. Wyss 201

part iv: creating communities Hendrick Aupaumut Christian-Mahican Prophet Rachel Wheeler 225 To Become a Chosen People The Missionary Work and Missionary Spirit of the Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians, 1775–1835 David J. Silverman 250 Conclusion Turns and Common Grounds Mark A. Nicholas 276 Coda Naming the Legacy of Native Christian Missionary Encounters Michael D. McNally 289 Contributors 305 Index 309

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foreword Michelene Pesantubbee

Too often the story of Christian missions among Native Americans has tended toward one-dimensional renderings or particular methodological studies of events. Whether we are talking about the Jesuits in seventeenth-century New France, the Franciscans in Alta California in the eighteenth century, or nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in the Southeast, the classic story of Native American Christian encounter in North America was told from the EuroAmerican perspective of religio-ethnocentric state building. The unquestioned image of the self-sacrificing missionary enduring the hardships of the frontier predominated into the twentieth century with little regard to the adversities Native peoples faced from advancing colonization of the Americas. While such renderings make for compelling, motivating stories, it is not enough for scholars to interpret mission history, as George Tinker wrote in Missionary Conquest, based solely on the good intentions of the individual missionary or the mission imperative. The ideal did not function in isolation. Numerous factors — economic, political, personal, and vocational, as well as religious — were in a constant state of interplay as missionaries and missions struggled to maintain some semblance of stability in a highly unstable context. Nor did Indian missions move unidirectionally or unilaterally from missionary to missionized. Native Americans actively participated in mission encounters in multiple and varied ways. In the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of American Indian activism and Native American studies programs, the traditional missionary saga gave way to more Native American–sympathetic stories. Some of those stories went to the other

extreme of depicting Native people solely as victims of an inevitable fate without recognizing their agency expressed in subversive and imaginative ways. In these versions the missionaries became the antiheroes. Along with the rise of the new Indian history, deconstruction, feminist scholarship, and postcolonialism came more critical histories of the complex experiences of Native Americans and missionaries. Although the development of methods and approaches that challenge the normative story of mission work among Native peoples has greatly enhanced our understanding of Native American mission experiences and is to be lauded, the full story of Native American missions is not yet told, nor can it ever be. However, that elusive goal should not deter us from continually striving to construct richer understandings of that history. The scholars in this collection are advancing that goal by bringing together their varied methodologies and approaches to produce more nuanced Native American mission histories that recognize the inseparable and mutually impactive actions of one upon the other. The intent and process of producing this collection of essays bring to mind the allegorical story of the Native American experience of living in two cultures that I first heard in graduate school. As the story goes, for Native Americans, living in two cultures is like having to stand with each foot in a different canoe, one representing white ways, the other Native American ways. Sometimes the two canoes drift so far apart that the Native American person is faced with the decision of keeping a foot in each canoe, thus risking falling into the water, or jumping into one of the canoes and losing the other. In the context of Native American mission histories, Native Americans are often depicted as having to choose between Native and traditional or white and Christian cultures or as being alienated from both. Arguably, the experience of negotiating two canoes or indigenous or Christian ways is a much more complex endeavor than the canoe story indicates. The canoes do not just lazily drift toward and away from each other compelling either/or decisions. At times, driven by the currents, they violently collide, rocking and twisting against each other and the currents. Other times, the currents push the canoes so tightly together that they appear to be one canoe traveling downriver. Such is the case with Native American mission experiences as individuals, clans, and communities strove to adapt to changing conditions. Of course, Native Americans were not the only ones engaged in balancing acts. Missionaries also found themselves precariously straddling two worlds. The authors in this collection recognize that the complex experiences and responses of Native peoples and missionaries took place in a constantly changing landscape. Issues of gender, preservation, conversion, revitalization, polyxii

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religious experiences, intertribalism, and pan-Indianism all must be considered in such histories. In order to chart the ever changing currents of Native American mission history, these authors, trained in different disciplines, joined together in conversation and enriched each other’s work. By taking a multidisciplinary approach they provide more complex, nuanced analyses of the experiences of missionaries and Native Americans, not as separate entities but as sometimes willing, and at other times unwilling, partners in a turbulent world.

foreword

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Native Americans, Christianity, and the reshaping of

the American Religious Landscape

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Select Locations Associated with Missionaries Frederick Baylies and Josiah Cotton (Map by William F. Keegan)

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Hendrick Aupaumut David Brown David Brown’s Speaking Tour Stockbridge-Brotherton Stockbridge-Brotherton Relocations

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Lake Ontario

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Select Locations Associated with Hendrick Aupaumut’s Life, David Brown’s Speaking Tour, and the Stockbridge-Brotherton People (Map by William F. Keegan)

Hartford

New Haven

Princeton

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introduc tion Joel W. Martin

“A silent indignation arises within me, at the impious and savage procedure of Europeans,” a young Cherokee man named David Brown declared to New England citizens assembled one electric night in 1823 in Salem, Massachusetts. They had gathered to hear the Cherokee convert promote Christian missions to Native peoples, and they would do so, but only after he had provided a detailed history lesson about Europeans’ destructive actions in the New World. Before talking about missionaries and his kinsmen and kinswomen in the present, he wanted his audience to encounter some bitter truths about the past from a Native American perspective. To drive home the damage done by Europeans in the New World, he invoked the life of North Americans before 1492, providing a prelapsarian portrait tinted in positive colors. “They were once independent and happy . . . free from direful and destructive wars . . . in a more tranquil and prosperous state previous to their acquaintance than at any subsequent period.”1 Brown refuted the stereotype of precontact Native Americans as bellicose and violent folk, pointing to their “immensity of numbers” and citing the historical record. “Had the natives been in perpetual warfare with each other, had they been in constant commotion, and thirsting for human blood, as some fancifully assert, the first discoverers of America, especially the illustrious Columbus, and the benevolent Penn, would have known it, and reported to the world accordingly.” Speculating about Native Americans’ origins, Brown asserted that they had arrived soon after the Noahic flood. Here they thrived, increased, and “generally dispersed over the country.” While they were not “free from vice, immorality, and occasionally de-

structive wars,” their conflicts were nothing compared with those that followed Columbus. “His voyage would cause rivers of blood to flow in this western world!” Wars, catastrophes, vengeance, slavery, struggle, slaughter, degradation, and subjugation followed. Nothing could compensate for this “doleful” record. Considering this sorry history, David Brown told his white Christian audience that night in Salem, Massachusetts, in a statement that refuted New Englanders’ assumption that Native people were in desperate spiritual need before Europeans’ arrival: “As things have been in America, for three hundred years, better would it have been, had the natives never seen the shadow of a white man.” Only then did David Brown turn to consider the influence of Christian missionaries and Christianity among contemporary Cherokees, the putative topic of his talk. This influence he valued because of its links to Cherokeeinitiated nation-building efforts under way in Cherokee country, but at no point did he say that this influence made everything or even anything that Native Americans had endured worthwhile.


Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape focuses on Native Americans and missionaries, their encounters and exchanges, in person and in print, in and out of Indian country, their misunderstandings and agreements, their divergent and convergent projects. It is an incredibly complex subject and one deserving of fresh consideration, which this book seeks to provide and to encourage. Taking a cue from the speech of the long-departed Cherokee convert David Brown, we need to begin, however, by acknowledging first and foremost that this is a subject associated with great harm and hard realities experienced by Native Americans and that it is rife with complexity and contradictions. Conjoined to the invasion of their lands and subsequent assaults on their communities, the history of Native American conversion is inextricably interwoven with a brutal history of colonialism and conquest and its aftermath. Some would go further to argue that missionization itself was a tool of conquest, a powerful means to assault the very souls and identities of Native peoples. For example, in the important book Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide, George Tinker (Osage) excoriates the corrosive power of Christianity, the alien religion’s power to sunder tribal bonds and undermine traditional authority and effect what he terms “cultural genocide.”2 Christian conversion was the interior analogue and affective accomplice of more visible forms of domination and displacement of indigeneity, and in some ways, the 2

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more destructive form of assault against Native peoples, which continues even today.3 Whether one agrees fully with these specific arguments or not, discussion of missionization and Native American conversion inevitably evokes a vexed history of grossly uneven exchange and extraordinarily painful outcomes for Native peoples. How could it be otherwise given the prevailing course of American history? Just look at a map of the continental United States, all of which was carved out of Native American lands and expropriated from Native nations with extraordinary degrees of violence involved.4 That massive expropriation is the longue durée context shaping Native American history and experience since Columbus, even if this gross history was punctuated here and there with moments of concord and some conjunctures of reciprocity. Although some historic “middle grounds” did emerge where a basic balance of power tempered trade, diplomacy, and exchange, they were relatively rare, fragile, and impermanent, and also violent. Middle grounds died soon after Americans created their own nation-state and determined to pursue Native American lands, not Native American trade.5 The prevailing pattern of American history has been so anti-Indian that some Native Americans doubt whether any missionaries “could not have known precisely their culpability in the destruction of Native cultures.”6 Given this history, it should not surprise anyone that this book includes many specific examples of how non-Native Christians disrupted the lives of Native communities, betrayed the trust of Native Christians, or otherwise evidenced the “impious and savage procedure” that David Brown rebuked. Nevertheless, in this book, we will also encounter some non-Natives, including missionaries, who proved useful to Native peoples and Native causes. Even more frequently, we will encounter Native American converts, including David Brown himself, tapping Christianity to oppose forces of destruction, to defend Native American communities, and to strengthen Native American sovereignty, in spite of the odds. In this book and the new narratives it develops, missionaries themselves are rehumanized, treated not as one-dimensional heroes or villains but as complex, ambivalent agents, often complicit with destructive anti-Indian forces, sometimes standing against those forces in solidarity with Native communities. Most important, Indian agency, the capacity to play an active role in shaping history, including how communities process Christianity and Christians, receives a very strong confirmation in this book’s close studies of various communities and individuals negotiating missionization. These essays make important contributions to this project and use the tools of various disciplines — intense archival research, close reading of texts, sensitivity to emotions and symbols, attention to material culture, knowledge of the core forms of religious life — to introduction

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illumine the motivations and practices of missionaries and missionary societies and, most of all, to deepen our understanding of the Native Americans who interacted with them in order to strengthen their communities. Native American converts figure large in this book. They were at the vital nexus of all manner of cross-cultural, cross-polity, cross-gender exchange, translation, and negotiation, a human bearing point on which various projects pivoted and depended, some generated by outsiders, some by their own people. Not surprisingly, those occupying this position were highly stressed and often found themselves at cross-purposes with others. David Brown, as we will see more fully in this book, sometimes found himself at odds with the missionary in charge of the speaking tour, his traveling companion Jeremiah Evarts, the corresponding secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (abcfm). On one occasion in Trenton, New Jersey, with an audience waiting, Brown simply did not want to give his speech. Evidently that was not an option acceptable to Evarts, who bullied the young man into delivering an abbreviated version of his talk. Recalling this exchange later, Evarts characterized Brown as “obstinate.”7 Brown was not “obstinate.” Brown worked tirelessly on the tour, taking time away from his studies and his family, enduring rough travel conditions and even a stagecoach wreck that injured him to deliver speech after speech. He helped Evarts raise significant sums of money for the abcfm cause. He did all this, however, not because Evarts wanted him to. He did it because it enabled him to confront non-Natives with the truths about invasion and to enlist their help in the defense of the Cherokees’ rights to their own land. And when a superior or more urgent opportunity to defend sovereignty presented itself, Brown did not hesitate. As Cherokee leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., to defend land rights both in the East and in Arkansas, they implored Brown to abandon the speaking tour and join them to help with translations and decision making. In late February 1824, he separated from Evarts in Petersburg and returned to Washington to put his linguistic skills to work directly for tribal sovereignty.8 Brown’s story is just one of the countless stories of Native American converts that have yet to be told and do not conform to standard generalizations about converts. Generalizations of converts as inauthentic “sellouts” or as powerless victims do not describe how actual Native people like David Brown handled missionization. For this reason, it is important to displace constraining ways of thinking about Native converts and to help open up more complex ways of thinking and interpreting. These objectives motivate this book’s contributors as well as its design. Indeed, in organizing this book, the editors have sought to put multiple disciplinary approaches into dialogue, to enable scholars from various 4

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fields to meet and debate, and to make some sparks fly so that new light might emerge and new fire for this study might be kindled.

A Multidisciplinary Approach The disciplinary diversity embodied in this volume is intentional and significant. Its presence in one volume is intended to make an important statement. With this specific collection of essays from multiple disciplines, we want to demonstrate in a palpable way that the intellectual reappraisal of Native American converts and missions is not isolated to one field only and that much is to be gained by intentionally connecting disciplines. This is critical. By connecting and crossing disciplines, Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape expands our vision to a widerangle vantage and argues that something important and heretofore not well articulated or appreciated is occurring in contemporary scholarship focused on Native Americans and missionization. Specifically, in various fields, including American history, literary studies, religious studies, and Native American studies, a serious reconsideration of Native converts is under way. Consider the long and growing list of important publications by scholars such as William G. McLoughlin, Clara Sue Kidwell, Kenneth M. Morrison, William Taylor, Nancy Shoemaker, Jace Weaver, Christopher Vecsey, James Treat, and Allan Greer, not to mention many works authored by the scholars included in this volume. The emerging scholarship is robust enough to enable us to construct a lengthening list of excellent works.9 Unfortunately, the scope and significance of this trend have eluded widespread notice, even among scholars of this subject. To understand why, we need to recognize that scholars, like birds, typically flock together with their own disciplinary kind. To extend the avian metaphor a bit, professional scholars primarily learn how to sing songs of their own kind and do not listen as closely to the songs of other kinds of birds. Most scholars congregate in academic departments with colleagues who practice the same discipline. Professional scholars typically aspire to write for others in their own fields and to place their best work in discipline-specific peer-review journals. This is not in itself a bad thing, not at all, as it means scholars practicing a given craft of interpretation hold each other to very high guild-defined standards, but this very specialization can mean that the scope and significance of larger intellectual shifts occurring across multiple fields can remain unperceived. It seems that shifts occurring in other fields are only dimly glimpsed in the peripheral vision of well-trained but field-focused scholars. Due to intense specialization, a multidisciplinary turn toward Native Christians and introduction

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their creative appropriation of missionization could easily escape notice. Indeed, that is what we think has happened. Few scholars have perceived this broad shift and how it cuts across disciplinary lines. This development prompts this volume, a systematic attempt to convey to broader audiences this dramatic, field-crossing shift, to sharpen the discussion across disciplines, and to interpret its import for our times.

Our Creative Process All of this is by design. To create this volume, we intentionally sought to induce cross-disciplinary dialogue every step of the way. Specifically, beginning in 2006, we stepped beyond the usual disciplinary gatherings and channels to fashion an intellectual “mini-congress” or, to put it more humbly, a “microcongress.”10 When Mark Nicholas and I initiated the project, we first identified some of the leading scholars in four major fields of study related to historical Native American converts: Native American studies, American history, religious studies, and literary studies. We invited them to a “symposium on new narratives on the encounter of Native Americans and missions” to be held at the aptly named, if historically challenged, Mission Inn in Riverside, California, where the Franciscan missions of Baja and Alta California are invoked architecturally and remembered in a romantic, inaccurate way. Each participant presented briefly on his or her proposed topic for the volume. Presentations by historians were grouped together, as were those by literary scholars and those by religious studies scholars. Our purpose, however, was not to reinforce disciplinary divisions but to help bring these into visibility and to inquire how they affect scholarship. To produce that awareness, we enlisted the help of three prominent scholars whom we involved as “interlocutors.” They were historian Jon Sensbach, literary scholar Joanna Brooks, and religious studies scholar Michelene Pesantubbee (a happy connection that would also lead Dr. Pesantubbee to honor us by writing the foreword to this volume). Pesantubbee and Brooks are also highly regarded contributors to the interdisciplinary field of Native American studies. Our interlocutors were asked to respond to the two clusters of scholars from disciplines other than their own; thus, Michelene and Joanna responded to the historians; Jon and Michelene to the literary scholars; and Joanna and Jon to the religious studies scholars. Each interlocutor was asked to address the following questions: 1. Does disciplinary training/location/professionalization influence how we understand/execute/communicate the project? 6

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2. How can cross-disciplinary approaches be developed and encouraged and what benefits will they bring to the study? 3. Is the new mission history new? How new is it? And how is it new? This intentional cross-disciplinary dialogue model proved to be a very productive exercise and helped us identify patterns of convergence and divergence in scholarship. Creative sparks flew. Further discussion led to the production of a statement of our shared understanding, which we did not intend as a righteous statement as much as a set of shared “lodestar” assertions designed to stimulate our ensuing writing. “Ours is a project that examines why appropriations of Christianity by Native peoples and of Native peoples by Christian organizations are now receiving critical attention from so many fields. Our symposium brought this home by pulling together leading scholars . . . and by intentionally constructing a cross-disciplinary dialogue through the use of our key interlocutors. Thus, our process of production recognizes and depends upon an interdisciplinary conjuncture just as our volume will attempt to accelerate it intentionally through our own exchanges and creative works.” Over the next year individuals worked on their respective papers but also corresponded regularly. We then reconvened during the spring of 2007 for a workshop hosted by Tracy Leavelle at Creighton University Symposium. On this occasion, we recruited Michael McNally, one the foremost interpreters of contemporary Native American Christianity, to serve as our interlocutor, seeking his response to our project. The overall shape of the volume emerged from these and subsequent collective discussions. Framed on one side by the foreword by Pesantubbee and this introduction and on the other by Nicholas’s conclusion and McNally’s afterword, the essays themselves were ultimately grouped in four clusters organized under the broad themes of negotiation, practice, literacy, and community. These themes lend themselves to multidisciplinary examination and are enriched by it as well. They also point to broad scholarly trends that have influenced almost all of our authors in some way or another and stimulate a new study of converts and their responses to missionization.

Intellectual Influences and Foundations of This Volume First, the new Indian history associated with scholars such as Richard White, James Merrell, Robbie Etheridge, Ned Blackhawk, Gregory Dowd, Clara Sue Kidwell, Daniel Richter, Colin Calloway, and many others has inspired historiintroduction

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ans, including many represented in this book, to craft new narratives that place Native Americans at the center of American history. These narratives envisage Native Americans as dynamic, historical actors changing others and changing themselves in the context of contact and colonialism. This new history has taught us that the post-Columbian encounter produced “new worlds for all” of the peoples who inhabited or came to reside in North America. Among other things, they changed how they dressed. As Colin Calloway summarizes: “As European colonists living in or near Indian country pulled on Indian moccasins, leggings, and hunting shirts, Indian people living near colonial settlements acquired shirts and jackets, trousers and shoes.” Sustained patterns of exchange produced cross-cultural understandings.11 In sum, the new Indian history shows us how Native Americans appropriated novel peoples, technologies, and ideas. Against this backdrop, it makes sense that scholars would reconsider how some Native Americans exercised their best energies to make Christianity and missionaries useful to their people, and Joanna Brooks, Daniel Mandell, and Joel Martin have done so in the first part of this book. Because this motivation led some Native Americans to act as religious brokers, we have titled this part “Negotiating Conversion.” The title of the second part, “Practicing Religion,” evokes an important shift in historical scholarship regarding the interpretation of religion, a shift away from a focus on fine points of theology, belief, and creed and toward close analysis of lived practice, material culture, symbol usage, and ritualization and ceremonial play. This shift manifested itself powerfully in influential studies of popular religion in Europe and the New World by scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis, David Hall, and many others. They demonstrated the importance of recovering what ordinary people actually did with and through religion, how they lived it locally, how they melded traditions in nonorthodox ways, acting like bricoleurs of the sacred.12 This shift also manifested itself in the so-called ethnographic turn in U.S. religious history advanced by religious studies scholars such as Robert Orsi, Karen McCarthy Brown, Leigh Schmidt, John Corrigan, Thomas Tweed, and others, who explored how religion was embodied, ritualized, and felt through powerful emotions. And this shift helped drive important developments in Latin American historiography developed by scholars such as Nancy Farriss, Inga Clendinnen, Sabine MacCormack, Kenneth Mills, and William Taylor, leading to the recovery of fresh insights about indigenous people’s religious lives and political movements. This broad shift toward the study of practice opened a vast range of subject matter and original questions for scholars to examine. It is important for our purposes here because it enables scholars of contact and colonialism to dem8

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onstrate how Native American individuals and communities could appropriate Christianity without necessarily agreeing with what missionaries and other professional Christians said about Christianity. As Taylor shows, Local religion in central and western Mexico during the eighteenth century was not unified, fixed, and uncontested from top to bottom, or simply set against the religion of Catholic priests. Any explanation of religious change there needs to account for the local conflicts over religious practices and the multiple meanings of religious symbols; for the understandings that were shared between rulers and ruled and the misunderstandings that could divide them; for the development of parallel and complementary practices, as well as mixed or fused ones; [and] for ways in which religion could still be altered by groups and individuals in conflict.13 This kind of subtle reconstruction of religious exchange, focused on symbols and practices in a highly contested and dynamic colonial context, influences several scholars in this book. For example, Douglas Winiarski reappraises Native Americans’ interactions with New England’s popular religion; Tracy Leavelle focuses on the multiple meanings of the rosary; and Emma Anderson provides three interpretations of a ritualized death. Third, in terms of major scholarly developments pertinent to this study, the postcolonial critique of writings and practices of literacy that were produced in colonial settings has complicated, enriched, and enlivened how scholars understand texts from the early American past and from the entire transatlantic encounter. This postcolonial critique is now leading scholars to reappraise the writings of Native American converts.14 For example, in their respective books, Joanna Brooks and Maureen Konkle each revisit the writings of Christian Native intellectuals and discern important political dimensions other critics have overlooked. Brooks, in American Lazarus, focuses on the works of Mohegan Presbyterian Samson Occom, particularly his contributions to hymnody. Occom, Brooks argues, explored the experimental, prophetic, and originary potency of religious discourse to negate aspects of colonialism. Brooks states: “Our challenge in the field of early American minority literatures is to recognize that differences in content, shape, and texture, which have been read as markers of inadequacy, are in fact elements of signification. . . . We must be willing to read in every textual feature the potential for intelligence and strategy.”15 Also examining the writings of African American intellectuals John Marrant, Prince Hall, and others, Brooks helps us appreciate how they all used religious discourse to introduction

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counter rising racism and redress the prophetic and moral failure of complicit white religious and political leaders. Comparing how scholars have appraised the literary projects of early Native American and African American Christians, Brooks illumines how nonNative critics tend to discount Native Christianity in ways that they would not discount African American Christianity. Indeed, it is telling that scholars of all backgrounds have little problem imagining African American Christianity functioning as a cultural resource to strengthen community and empower political agency. In contrast, most non-Native scholars have tended to assume that the expression and practice of Native Christianity represents loss, suggests cultural capitulation, and expresses inauthentic identity, as if one could not truly be both Native and Christian. Brooks argues for more complicated and open readings free of such ideological filters.16 So does another student of early American “minority” literature, Maureen Konkle. Like Brooks, Konkle has little patience for critics who practice an “inordinate focus on Native difference and cultural identity” and therefore write off or ignore the works of Christian Native intellectuals.17 She indicts this type of critical practice and finds within it a troubling continuity with the politics of dispossession. She notes — with deep irony — that Andrew Jackson justified removal as a humane way to protect Indians who he asserted were doomed if forced to continue to reside near white civilization. She suggests that this kind of essentialist thinking continues to shape contemporary scholarship. “The reliance on cultural difference as an explanation merely reprises the nineteenthcentury platitude that when ‘civilizations’ clash and inferior meets superior, Indians must disappear.”18 Instead, she proposes that we take Native Christians very seriously as intellectuals seeking to “undo the effects of EuroAmerican knowledge about racial difference by writing history.”19 This approach has great merit because it will encourage scholars to recover important stories of political struggle, resistance, and affirmation heretofore occluded by a pernicious fixation on difference and “authenticity.” The fixation on difference is a topic astutely analyzed by Nicholas Thomas, who questions how colonialism has been theorized and depicted within “postcolonial” thought. His ideas, like those of Brooks and Konkle, help us think more openly about the complex space of the religious exchange and appropriation and intellectual creativity in a colonized setting. Accordingly, we should consider some of the salient points of his argument. Thomas, in Colonialism’s Culture, emphasizes the need and utility, when analyzing specific colonial encounters, for “localized theories and historically specific accounts” because these can “provide much insight into the varied ar10

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ticulations of colonizing and counter-colonial representations and practices.”20 He calls for “a pluralized field of colonial narratives, which are seen less as signs than as practices, or as signifying practices rather than as elements of a code.”21 He stresses that “colonialism is not a unitary project but a fractured one, riddled with contradictions and exhausted as much by its own internal debates as by the resistance of the colonized.” And he notes specifically that in many contexts “the work of colonial discourse . . . is to deny similarity.”22 This denial of similarity prevents us from recognizing how colonial politics actually works at the local level, “the space of practical resistance, acceptance and appropriation. . . . However colonial projects and artifacts — the gun, the Bible, currency, literacy and so on — are offered or imposed, it is likely that they will be subjected to some appropriation and redefinition. And this is no less true of the stuff of colonial discourse itself: ‘representations of the other’ are transposed, deployed in debates within indigenous society concerning its affirmation, reform and refashioning; they are projected back at Europeans with a variety of serious and parodic intentions, and enter into discourses of tribal, customary and national identities.” Because exchange within a colonialist setting is extremely complex, with no single side calling the tune in a way that precludes any shift in significance or political import, the “expressions of colonial discourses in metropolitan contexts need to be separated from their transpositions in colonized regions.”23 Influenced by Thomas’s distinction between metropolitan contexts and colonized regions, we provide two essays in the third part of this book, “Circulating Texts,” that focus on the production of texts and practices of literacy within the missionary project, but from locations far apart within that vast transatlantic network. Focused on the metropolitan European side, Laura Stevens examines how the publications of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands and Foreign Parts of the World (sspck) helped define “Britishness” and “assisted in the development of a transoceanic British identity.” Focused on the indigenous American side, Steven Hackel and Hilary Wyss examine how literacy was acquired and used by Native Americans in Alta California and New England. Their essay recovers some important transpositions of Christianity and literacy that enabled Native Americans to reaffirm personal and communal identities. But it also demonstrates the intrinsic difficulty of recovering the subaltern’s side of the story: “Although we can read into and through [their written texts] for marks of resistance, acquiescence, accommodation, and self-definition, there is a sense in which they remain fragmentary, incomplete, and frustratingly silent for us.” This very difficulty reflects the unevenness of exchange that shaped colonialism and continues to warp our understanding of its legacies. As we seek to tell new stories about Native introduction

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converts, we are obligated to be doubly creative and triply sensitive to recover historical Native American intellectual perspectives. Although it appears as the last part of the book, “Creating Communities” explores the most important of all of the themes. It draws on the most important intellectual currents related to this project. It cuts across all of the rest. Our determination to emphasize community building as a central passion and intellectual project of Native converts goes against the grain of some earlier scholarly treatments that tended to treat converts as individuals completely deracinated or estranged from their ancestral culture and communities. Here we are influenced by contemporary Native American intellectuals who refuse to equate Native American “authenticity” and “identity” with a condition or status untouched by contact, conversion, change, and literacy. Indeed, the very focus on authenticity and identity is problematic not just because it weakens scholarship but first and foremost because it hurts Native people. Non-Native critics, according to Cherokee intellectual Jace Weaver, are far too “preoccupied with questions of authenticity and identity” in relation to Native American peoples and their projects.24 It is as if non-Native critics have assumed the authority of some kind of self-appointed authenticity police, empowered to say who is and who is not really Native American, what is and what is not really Native American. In relation to Native American literary creativity and community formation, this means that “for many non-Native scholars, literature by Indians ceases to be Indian literature when it employs the language of the colonizer and adopts such Western literary forms as the novel, short story, or autobiography.”25 In relation to Native American religious negotiation, it means discounting Native Christians who relied heavily upon “salvationist discourse” or appear to have understood their identity “filtered through Christian perspective.”26 Both of these critical conclusions Weaver rejects. Instead of fixating on authenticity, which almost always implicitly overvalues stasis and condemns change, Weaver examines Native American creative, literary, religious, and political activities in relation to what he terms “communitism,” a proactive commitment to Native community. Thus, the content of Native American practice or form of expression is not fixed or timeless. It is the communal end, not the cultural means, that matters most. As Weaver explicates: “In this shared quest, Native writers may not always agree on either the means or meaning of communitism. Community is a primary value, but today we exist in many different kinds of community — reservation, rural, urban, tribal, pan-Indian, traditional, Christian. . . . Our different locations, physical, mental, and spiritual, will inevitably lead to different conceptions of what survival, liberation, and communitism require.” So open is Weaver’s approach that he acknowledges 12

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that others may prefer to describe the quest with other concepts, such as Gerald Vizenor’s “survivance,” Robert Allen Warrior’s “intellectual sovereignty,” and Georges Sioui’s “authohistory.”27 But uniting all these concepts is a vital affirmation that Native American intellectuals, past and present, have worked mightily, creatively, and resiliently to enable their communities to survive colonialism and to seek to do far more than merely survive, even when they were not supposed to survive at all, to paraphrase the Muskogee poet Joy Harjo. In “Creating Communities” we provide two essays, from different angles of approach by Rachel Wheeler and David J. Silverman, focused on the same community, the Stockbridge Indians. Dispossessed and displaced time and time again, inclusive of peoples from many different Native American nations, and heavily missionized, they managed to re-create time and time again a strong sense of purpose and community in spite of all the challenges they faced. As a result, their nation survives today, and their people’s intellectual leaders continue to contend with colonialism and its legacies. Because these four broad intellectual movements are some of the strongest shaping this book, we have subdivided the book and allocated our authors’ contributions into four parts. But we should clarify that this distribution reflects the editors’ decisions and that a given essay might just as easily fit in another part. This is because most of the essays in the book reflect the influence of more than one of the intellectual movements, if not all. These movements cut across the essays just as they cut across multiple disciplines. Similarly, when focused on Native Christianity, they all encourage a shift in how we typically understand Native American converts. This crosscutting shift is long overdue and deserves special attention here.

Changing Images of Native American Converts In the twentieth century, scholars and the lay public had little to say about Native converts, preferring to cast their attention toward Native Americans who seemed outside, or in opposition to, white society. Tenskwatawa the nativistic prophet, not Tekakwitha the saint; Black Elk the shaman, not Nicholas Black Elk the Catholic catechist: these were the preferred subjects written about by modern professional scholars. When it came to Native religion, scholars were drawn to prophets such as Handsome Lake and Neolin, not to the preachings of Samson Occom, the prominent Mohegan tribal leader and Presbyterian minister who was a celebrity in his own time. Not until the twenty-first century would Occom’s writings regain life in publication, thanks to one of our contributors (Joanna Brooks). introduction

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What was true in the academy was true beyond as well, with popular audiences uninterested in reading much about Native Christians, past or present, but avidly consuming the esoteric and psychedelic teachings of Don Juan, as mediated by writer Carlos Castaneda. It seems that Americans, during the twentieth century, preferred to think of Native Americans as if they inhabited a different world and a distant time uncontaminated by contact with whites and Christianity. By invoking these romantic natural figures, white consumers found a countervailing antidote to the ennui and routine of modern life. To those stuck in a factory or office, fantasies of wild Indians brought a welcome, if imaginary, release.28 Within such a system of thought, within this ideology that encouraged whites to “play Indian,” Native converts could not possess great value or gain much recognition. Native converts were not “out there” or different enough to attract attention. Quite the opposite. They were assumed to be too much like the majority of Americans to be deemed real or representative Native Americans. Even among serious scholars seeking to recover Native American voices, historical Native Christians were viewed implicitly as less than authentic, as negative examples, anomalous, sad cases trapped between “two worlds.” Not worthy of study on their own terms, they were understood to be the crushed victims of colonialism, from whom one could learn nothing very important about authentic Native cultures themselves. By and large, to most twentieth-century scholars, Native Christians remained relegated to eddies off the mainstream of scholarly production. As a consequence, important histories of exchange were ignored, compelling stories of individual and communal transformation went unnarrated, archival collections of incalculable value were untapped, and important primary texts written by Native Americans themselves remained unpublished. Fortunately, as the emerging scholarship across disciplines suggests, we are entering a fundamentally new period in the study of Native Americans and contact. To put it negatively (in terms of what it’s not), we have entered a postromantic, post–“playing Indian” period. Our contributors’ works demonstrate this powerfully and help bring the contours of the new, more expansive scholarly moment into better focus. Absent from their presentations are many of the concerns that have heretofore peppered scholarly discussion of Native converts. None of our authors hints that the converts were somehow inauthentic. None assumes that we need to ask whether their conversions were “bona fide,” to examine them closely to see if they conformed adequately enough to the criteria set by the missionaries. And none assumes automatically that these converts were “sellouts” to their people, 14

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as if they had betrayed the world of their kin and entered another different, incommensurate world.29 It may overstate things to say that Native Christians were treated by many scholars as if they were self-canceling oxymorons, but it did often seem as if scholars could not easily reconcile that a person could be Native and Christian. Did these Native Americans really convert? Or, if they really did become Christian, were they still truly Native? These were the dominant questions implicitly and sometimes explicitly asked by scholars about Native Christians.

A New Analytic Space Questions about whether Native Christians were really Christian or still truly Native no longer dominate scholarship. Thanks to the work of the scholars represented in this book and many others, simplistic assumptions have given way. Banished are the binary, bilateral, bipolar approaches that reify two separate and stable worlds and project “contests of culture” that allow for only two pure responses for Native people, capitulating assimiliation or inviolate resistance, and one impure response, malformed and inauthentic syncretism. Instead, we are challenged and invited to think of colonizers and colonized as inhabiting one world shaped by a highly conflicted, very volatile, and dynamic “shared culture” interpretable within “one analytical field.” In short, a new capacious and open “analytic space” has been crafted that takes Native Christians and everyone else seriously.30 Interestingly enough, this new analytic space finally provides to Native Christians the kind of recognition for complexity extended to other converts to Christianity in other times and places. For example, some medievalists studying Europe have argued that conversion was not an event but a process, that it came in many forms, and that it did not necessarily entail an “inner transformation” or “even any changes in [a people’s] way of life.”31 Similarly, scholars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages have affirmed that “complete conversion . . . is a chimera” and “converts . . . retain their room for maneuver.”32 Accordingly many scholars studying Europeans have abandoned the old binary definition of conversion that assumed it amounted to a complete switch from one state to another, like the flipping of a light switch. Such simplicity has given way to understandings that interpret conversion as located, strategic, complex social processes involving nuance and negotiation and requiring granular reconstruction by historians, the telling of multiple narratives, not incorporation of all converts into a “grand narrative . . . of the rise [and spread] of Christianity.”33 Operating within this new analytic space and contributing to it, our authors introduction

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brilliantly describe individuals and communities who were Native and Christian, Native and ex-Christian, and Native and post-Christian. In short, they help us appreciate lives played out in one very complex ultra-crisscrossed messy world where all agents were actively redefining themselves and reforging religious identities in dynamically changing settings all the time. In such a maelstrom of influences and tensions, almost everyone was at some time or another at crosspurposes with themselves, with others, and with ancestral traditions. It’s a very interesting world, otherwise known as America, and we thank these authors for helping us see it anew. However, even as we acknowledge the importance of scholars’ work in changing how we see the world, we need to consider also how nonscholarly contexts and developments have helped enable this moment of reinterpretation of Native Christianity.

The Resurgence of Native American Sovereignty Specifically, we think the multidisciplinary convergence on the topic of Native converts — especially the vitality of Native American intellectuals’ attention to this subject — needs to be understood in relation to a profound change occurring not just within but also beyond scholarship; we contend that the change in contemporary scholarship on historical Native converts relates to changes occurring in the status of Native Americans today. As we necessarily lack distance from our own time, this argument must be somewhat speculative, but it makes sense. No one lives or thinks in an apolitical vacuum. Everyone in America, to some degree, is shaped by changes occurring in Indian country, and in recent decades, these changes have been profound, so significant that they must be causing some epistemic ruptures, and affect how we understand the past. The most important of these is a modern resurgence of Native American sovereignty. As Charles Wilkinson, one of the foremost scholars of this development, summarizes: “But now we have the data: five centuries of survival under the most excruciating pressure of killing diseases, wars, land expropriation, and official government policy — forced assimilation, then outright termination. Yet the tribes are now the strongest they have been in a century and a half. Never has this land seen such staying power.” The “blood struggle” for sovereignty is not over — not by any means — and the level of pain in Indian country remains unconscionable, but it is now possible to believe with Wilkinson, indeed it is irrational and counterfactual not to believe as he does, that Native nations are here forever and will exercise steady, if not increased, influence in the future.34 Witnessing Native American contemporaries contesting court cases, writing novels and history books, making films, building a national museum on the 16

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Mall in Washington, raising important questions in classrooms and through profound scholarly and artistic works, and becoming major economic players in some regions and states necessarily alters or will alter in some subtle ways how most scholars understand the Native American past, including past Native American encounters with Christianity. The new context, where nondisappearing Native Americans manifest themselves daily in the academy and beyond, compels scholars of historical encounter to rethink how they have approached historical Native American figures, movements, and transformations connected to Christianity. The new context, which our project thematizes and seeks to advance, encourages scholars to be far less inclined to dismiss or marginalize those historical Native Americans who negotiated and shaped the contact experience, including those who converted to Christianity. Now that the end of the Native American story has changed, now that we realize that there is no end to that story, scholars can and must write new narratives about the consequences of encounter and exchange. Narratives assuming unilinear destruction and inevitable oblivion have been replaced by those emphasizing complexity of outcome, communal resilience, and agency, making room for fresh takes on Native American converts. In sum, the new scholarship on Native American converts is indirect but apt evidence of the renewal of Native American sovereignty in our times, with the latter acting as the enabler of the former.

A New Political Space To encourage others to contribute to this revisioning, we assume that it’s not just that a new “analytic space” has evolved, as important as that is. It’s also the case that Native Americans have helped forge a new “political space” for themselves and for everyone else. To put it positively, ours is a period shaped by the renewed sovereignty of Native Americans, a period in which the status and ownership of Native dead, sacred sites, access to resources, cultural patrimony, legal and human rights, and historical ideas are contested by Native Americans for Native Americans. Scholarship has certainly helped support this renewal of sovereignty — for example, ethnohistorical work helped bolster indigenous land claims in the legal system — but this political renewal has also challenged and enabled scholarship in important and even fundamental ways. Perhaps most important for our purposes here, the renewal of Native American sovereignty gave the lie to the colonial fantasy of disappearing Native Americans. It shattered the pervasive assumption that Native Americans could not handle modernity, missionization, and Christianity. They could; they did. Their introduction

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resilience and resurgence energize our reappraisal of the past, a reassessment of all of the ways Native Americans handled and initiated change, including how they handled and appropriated missions, missionaries, and Christianity and all that this entailed. A new, more complicated history of this exchange is emerging, one that does not overlook loss, pain, betrayal, or bitter truths — which continue to weigh extremely heavily upon Native Americans — but also does not sanction terminal narratives of defeat and doom. Our authors have sought to provide glimpses of this new complicated history individually in their past work. Now they do so with their essays in the book and also collectively with this volume. This volume contributes to that new history by delivering a set of excellent essays, by demonstrating the multidisciplinary breadth involved in this new scholarship, and by providing a compelling and provocative intellectual argument that accounts for the relative absence of this scholarship in the past and its robust emergence in the present. The Cherokee convert David Brown has retaken the podium. Subaltern no longer, he speaks anew, delivering some hard truths and strong affirmations of Native American sovereignty in a post-Columbian world.

Notes 1. “Address of Dewi Brown, a Cherokee Indian,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 12 (1871): 30–38. This version includes some material that does not appear elsewhere, but it also confirms that newspaper extracts were very accurate. The Columbian Star (Washington, D.C.), in its summary of the Salem speech in an article entitled “The Indians,” glossed over a long introductory section of Brown’s speech, including the portion quoted here, simply stating that he described “the happy condition of the natives when first visited by Europeans” (Columbian Star, December 27, 1823). 2. George Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 3. Such arguments echo those applied to other colonial contexts and subaltern peoples, including Europeans themselves, whose ancestors resisted missionization (Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992], 44). Jace Weaver and other Native American intellectuals emphasize that a missionary assault against Native American cultures continues today. See Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 28–30. 4. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 5. Joel W. Martin, “From ‘Middle Ground’ to ‘Underground’: Southeastern Indians and the Early Republic,” in American Religion: A Reader, ed. David Hackett (New York: Routledge Press, 1995), 127–45. 6. Weaver, That the People Might Live, 30. As historian Daniel Richter points out, although contact and exchange were ubiquitous in the eastern woodlands, “in most times and places

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of early American history, Indians and Europeans failed to create a lasting middle ground” (Daniel K. Richter, “Whose Indian History?,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 50, no. 2 [April 1993]: 379–93, quotation at 390). 7. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, January 16, 1824, Letters from Officers of the Board, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers, ABC: 11, vol. 1, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 8. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, February 25, 1824, in ibid. 9. William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Kenneth M. Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies and the Algonkian-Jesuit Religious Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); William Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priest and Parishioners in EighteenthCentury Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); Nancy Shoemaker, “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, ed. Nancy Shoemaker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 49–71; Jace Weaver, ed., Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998); Christopher Vecsey, Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983); Christopher Vecsey, ed., Belief and Worship in Native North America (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981); James Treat, Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1996); Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10. In discussions with the participants, I noted how a group of architects in the 1990s organized the Congress for the New Urbanism and introduced its guiding tenets at its fourth convening in Charleston in 1996 by drafting and signing the Charter of the New Urbanism, a set of town design principles that have had enormous influence and generated considerable critical comment. See Elizabeth Moule, “The Charter of the New Urbanism,” in The Seaside Debates: A Critique of the New Urbanism, ed. Todd W. Bressi (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002), 21–26. Our group debated the idea of creating cohesion by calling itself the “Riverside school” but resisted taking any steps to formalize a society or assume such a grandiose posture. 11. Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 66 (quotation), 131. 12. For a fuller bibliography, see Doug Winiarski’s essay in this book, n. 13. 13. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 59. I want to thank Douglas Winiarski for calling my attention to this quotation and also for the following citations: David Hall, introduction to Lived Religion: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), i–vii, and Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in the same volume, 3–21; Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570, Cambridge Latin American Studies, vol. 61 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994);

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Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999). 14. While it is impossible to summarize briefly the many angles of critique associated with “postcolonial” studies and it is inaccurate to suggest that they agree or share a common approach, it is certainly the case that this vast and rich range of intellectual activity has enlivened the study of contact, empire, and exchange. See Padmini Mongia, ed., Contemporary PostColonial Theory: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1996), and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen, eds., The Post-Colonial Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995; 2nd ed., 2006). 15. Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12; see also 78. 16. Ibid., 84. 17. Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7. 18. Ibid., 290; see also 73. 19. Ibid., 6. 20. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), ix. 21. Ibid., 8. 22. Ibid., 51. 23. Ibid., 63–64. 24. Weaver, That the People Might Live, 22. 25. Ibid., 24. 26. Ibid., 54, quoting Arnold Krupat, Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 144, 145–49. 27. Weaver, That the People Might Live, 45; see also xiii, 25, 43. 28. Phil Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 29. Allan Greer provides a useful critique of standard bipolar, two-world approaches in “Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity in Seventeenth-Century New France,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 175–98. 30. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton use the phrase “analytical space” in their introduction to Conversion, x, but the term was advanced earlier in Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies, 4, building upon prior critical works by Ashis Nandy and William Taylor that argued for thinking of colonizers and colonized as inhabiting a “shared culture” (Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989]) interpretable within “one analytical field” (Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 1996). 31. James Muldoon, “Introduction: The Conversion of Europe,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 8. 32. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003), ix, x. 33. Neil McLynn, “Seeing and Believing: Aspects of Conversion from Antoninus Pius to Louis the Pious,” in Mills and Grafton, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 226, 225. 34. Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2005), 383.

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part i Negotiating Conversion

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hard feelings samson occom contempl ates his christian mentors Joanna Brooks

How did it feel to be Samson Occom (1723–92), Mohegan, ordained Presbyterian minister, itinerant spiritual leader to Native New England communities, and one of the founders of the pantribal Native Christian Brotherton? How did it feel to grow up a diligent young Mohegan man, on the banks of the Thames River in Connecticut, at a time when English colonialism had already made devastating incursions into every dimension of Mohegan life? When the colony-appointed Christian schoolmaster Jonathan Barber came after Mohegan children, chasing them from their play, catching ten-year-old Samson by the shoulders to “make [him] Say over [his] letters,” did Samson laugh at the menace? Did he quietly absorb the rude handling? Did he grow resentful? What hungers, hurts, or curiosities impelled him down the road at eighteen years old to hear the preaching of the infamous New Light revivalist James Davenport? How did Occom experience Davenport’s words of exhortation, surrounded in the summer night by swooning crowds of white, black, and Native seekers? What feelings did he shoulder one year later when he was invited to take a seat alongside his father on the Mohegan tribal council? A sense of duty, a sense of responsibility, a sense of loss, a sense of longing — these feelings shaped Occom’s choices as a convert, a student of the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, a recruiter and fund-raiser for Wheelock’s Moor’s Indian Charity School, a husband, a father, an ordained Presbyterian minister, a leader of tribal faith communities, and a founder of the pantribal Brotherton movement, which resettled hundreds of southern New England Native Christians in upstate New York in the 1780s.

The history of Native North American Christianity is made up of many stories of deep feelings: love, commitment, and hope as well as disappointment, anger, and hunger. For more than a century, scholars avoided these feeling stories by framing mission history as missionary hagiography. An ethnohistorical turn in the 1970s and 1980s resituated North American mission history within the power contests of European imperialism; a social-historical turn in the 1990s attempted to map out how the forces of empire impacted the day-to-day lives of North American Indian communities. The newest wave of American mission scholarship maintains this focus on indigenous lived experience with a new emphasis on the recovery of Native-authored and Native-inscribed manuscript texts, Native consciousness, and Native spirituality. This scholarship tends to imbue Native historical subjects with a greater capacity for criticism, dissent, and theological innovation. No longer do we chronicle Native Christian histories as uniform narratives of assimilation into a monolithic Christian colonial culture; we now view them as a discontinuous series of conversions, declensions, revivals, apostasies, schisms, joinings, and separations. No longer do we uncritically assume that Native Christians universally, entirely, or inevitably accepted colonialist or racist Christian teachings as presented by their Euro-American preceptors. Viewing Native Christianity in this way neither excuses the damage Euro-colonial religions and their agents have done in Native communities nor romanticizes Native Christian communities as singular outposts of resistance against colonial Christendom. Rather, it presents the history of Christianity in indigenous communities as a tumultuous, variegated, highly differentiated field of activity fraught both with zones of soul-harming subjugation, coercion, and indoctrination and with opportunities for vision, innovation, imagination, and articulation. In short, the microhistorical scale and close-textual methodologies characteristic of this new wave of mission history bring us face to face with indigenous feelings about colonialism. What kind of feelings did American Indians have after the first two centuries of Euro-American colonization? How did they come to terms with these feelings? My emphasis on feelings here reflects a renewed interest within literary and cultural studies in how feelings (also discussed in terms of “affect,” “interiority,” or “inwardness”), their expression, and their management relate to the making and unmaking of power. Theorist Ann Cvetkovich has explored the political potential of feelings that arise in connection with trauma. She argues that “shock and injury are made socially meaningful, paradigmatic even, within cultural experience,” that “traumatic events refract outward to produce all kinds of affective responses and not just clinical symptoms,” and that “trauma [is] a collective experience that generates collective response.”1 Building upon the 24

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work of Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Stoler, and other scholars of sexuality, I would argue that, like sexuality, religion and spirituality also constitute intimate domains of feeling where “traumatic events” are collectively processed and made meaningful, especially in colonial contexts.2 It is to be celebrated that historians participating in this wave of mission history are willing to treat religion and spirituality on their own terms, rather than view them transparently as “weak languages” to be translated into the supposedly “stronger languages” of politics and economics.3 There is in this willingness an implicit assent to the materiality of religion and spiritual life: its capacity for working out difficult political questions on its own terms, through the articulation and processing of powerful feelings, through acts of exegesis, performance, and narration. The histories of colonial missions and related Native religious movements constitute what is probably the largest and most legible written archive of early American indigenous feelings.4 If we pay close attention to these church and mission archives, we can develop a more humanizing appreciation of religion as a site where Native people have articulated, grappled with, and theorized the intense feelings they have experienced in connection with colonization and its multiple impacts on their communities. It is this domain of feelings — Native experiences of grief, bewilderment, and rage as well as joy, confidence, and hope — that has generated social and cultural formations that in turn shape the lives of succeeding generations of indigenous peoples. Attention to feelings reveals in greater relief how empire is experienced internally and intergenerationally; avoiding matters of feeling impoverishes mission histories. In this essay, I will pursue the question “How did it feel to be Samson Occom?” taking as my point of departure a difficult episode in Occom’s life, when he appeared drunk in public in the winter of 1769. Reading this incident as a manifestation of Occom’s frustration and despair over his extremely straitened economic and political circumstances, I will attempt to reconstruct how Occom’s hard feelings and personal shortcomings were processed by Occom’s non-Native mentors in the ministry, then by Occom himself, and finally by the Native Christians he served. I hope to show how theologies can determine the way traumas are collectively processed and particularly how Native Christian communities in New England developed religious beliefs and practices that facilitated the processing of trauma. In so doing, I hope to help generate under the auspices of this new mission history project a more feeling-oriented approach to the history of Native North American Christianity, one that does not shy away from engaging with the hard feelings colonialism has engendered in Native communities. hard feelings

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One day in January or February 1769, somewhere in Connecticut, Samson Occom sat down for a drink. That day would shadow Occom’s life for months to come, but its particulars are now lost to us. Perhaps, we may imagine, he sat down at a large kitchen table in his family home in Mohegan. Perhaps he sat down at a tavern in New London, the nearby Connecticut port town known for its intense religious revivals, the place where young Mohegan men severed their home ties and put themselves to sea as working sailors, and where local judges and bankers schemed over the lands, laws, and debts of the Mohegan tribe. Occom spent much of the winter of 1768–69 attending to the debts his family had accrued during his two-year preaching tour of Great Britain as a fund-raiser for Moor’s Indian Charity School. Eleazar Wheelock promised but failed to look after the Occom family in Samson’s absence. Mary Fowler Occom, plagued by a series of debilitating illnesses, had enough to do to see to the survival of herself and seven children, let alone maintain their planting fields. With the farm in disrepair, the Occom family faced the onset of winter 1768–69 with scanty food stores. A crippling shoulder injury, its pain sharpened by the winter cold, hampered Samson Occom’s efforts to get food in by hunting and fishing. And to add to the concerns of that hard wintering season, Mary Fowler Occom was pregnant with the family’s eighth child: a girl, to be named Theodosia. All these pressures weighed heavily on Samson Occom that February afternoon. Occom must have recognized the irony of his situation: in England, he raised more than £13,000 for Moor’s Indian Charity School, while in Mohegan his own family struggled to survive. Did his dedicated efforts amount to any good for his family and his tribe? From the time he began his course of studies with Eleazar Wheelock in 1743 through the time he left for England in 1765, Occom believed that the classical education Wheelock offered would build a strong new generation of leaders for Native New England. Facility with the English language and the Anglo-American cultural forms that increasingly governed their fortunes were, he believed, crucial to the future of tribal communities. Occom recognized that both Wheelock and his Moor’s Indian Charity School curriculum had their shortcomings, but he had faith in the prospects of an exceptional young cohort of Moor’s students — among them David Fowler (Montaukett), Jacob Fowler (Montaukett), Joseph Johnson (Mohegan), Samuel Ashpo (Mohegan), Hezekiah Calvin (Lenape), and Joseph Brant (Mohawk). These young men might have capably replaced a generation of puppet sachems installed by colonial agents in tribal governments across the Northeast. But Occom’s hopes foundered when he returned from England in 1768 to find the Moor’s Indian 26

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Charity School mission in trouble. There was evidence to suggest that Wheelock was growing tired of his Native students, and the abuses of the boarding school environment had impelled some tribal leaders to call their students home. What good were those £13,000 doing Native people in this winter of injury, illness, debt, cold, hunger, and disagreement? Was Samson Occom hungry when he sat down to drink that cold February day? Had he eaten anything at all when he opened the bottle or sat down at the tavern table? Were his family food supplies running perilously low? Was he too proud or ashamed to admit to his drinking companions that he could not afford to buy himself any dinner? Besides hunger, what other hard feelings did he shoulder? Was he sad? Was he angry? The neglect of his family; the embarrassment of Moor’s failed relationship with tribes; the sniping of rival white missionaries and schoolteachers at Mohegan; the continuing disarray of Mohegan tribal affairs; the continual encroachment on and legal poaching of traditional tribal territory; the petty treachery, predictable corruption, and utter powerlessness of colony-backed tribal leaders like Ben Uncas III, who had ceded precious tribal lands; the grinding poverty of his people; their bewilderment; the illnesses of his wife, Mary; the hunger and cold of his own children, Mary, Aaron, Tabitha, Olive, Christiana, Talitha, Benoni, and now baby Theodosia — there was so much to be angry about. Occom drank enough that day to become intoxicated, and he was discovered in public in this condition. If he was drinking at home, perhaps he had an argument with a family member and wandered out into the dark and snow and was discovered by travelers on the post road to Norwich. Perhaps he fell asleep at the table in the warmth of the tavern or found himself in a disagreement with an unfriendly patron. However he was discovered in his condition, news of the incident spread quickly throughout Mohegan territory and in neighboring towns. Word soon reached Eleazar Wheelock, who wrote to castigate his former pupil on March 9. Occom immediately replied: I don’t remember that I have been overtaken with strong drink this winter, but many White people make no bones of it to call me a drunkard, and I expected it, as I have many enemies round about here, yea they call me a lyar and rogue and what not, and they curse and they curse & damn me to the lower Hell. . . . Them pretended Christians are seven times worse than the Savage Indians; and yet I think I take more heed to myself than ever. I do take some strong drink sometimes, but I don’t tip a quarter so much as I used to do, yea I don’t keep any in my house only in extraordinary cases. . . . P.S. I never was so discouraged as I am now.5 hard feelings

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Discouragement soon softened Occom’s initial defensiveness into regret. In early April, he drafted a letter of confession to the Long Island Presbytery, the body of ministers that oversaw his ordination: “I find it my Indispensible Duty to make my open faults known unto you — I have been Shamefully over taken with Strong Drink, by Which I have greatly wounded the Cause of God, and Blemishd the Pure Religion of Jesus Christ, and Blacken my own Character & function, and Hurt my sown Soul.”6 Meeting on April 12 on Long Island, across the sound from Wheelock territory, the officers of the presbytery, including Occom’s dear friend Samuel Buell, found Occom to be of a “very gloomy and desponding Frame of mind.”7 He was not alone in his gloom and despondency. Other Moor’s Indian Charity School alumni, including Joseph Johnson and Hezekiah Calvin, were also seen drunk in public that winter. And in May, when the Mohegan puppet sachem Ben Uncas III died, Occom joined with other pallbearers in a gesture of protest and disgust by dropping Uncas’s casket on the ground and refusing to carry it to the tribe’s royal burial grounds. How did Eleazar Wheelock respond to his former pupils in this season of despair and disillusionment? In a 1769 letter to a colleague, he described Occom, Johnson, and others as “Drunkards & Apostates.”8 Their backsliding intensified Wheelock’s dissatisfaction with the progress of the Moor’s Indian Charity School project. He hastened his plans to terminate the original Moor’s mission to train Native missionaries, refocus on the recruitment and education of white missionaries, and move his campus away from southern New England. In August 1770, he relocated to Hanover, New Hampshire. When he explained his decision in a 1771 report to his donors and supporters, he referenced the public failings of his Native pupils such as Occom and Johnson: “The most melancholy part of the account which I have here to relate, and which has occasioned me the greatest weight of sorrow, has been the bad conduct and behaviour of such as have been educated here, after they have left the school . . . and it is that from which, I think, I had the fullest evidence that a greater proportion of English youths must be fitted for missionaries.”9 According to Wheelock, most of the forty or so Native students he had trained failed to live up to his vision. This he seemed to blame on a constitutional Indian susceptibility to vice. “Nothing has prevented their being imployed usefully, and reputably in various capacities till this day,” he wrote, “but their want of fortitude to resist the power of those fashionable vices which were rampant among all their tribes. The current is too strong . . . and by this means the progress of this design has been retarded, and the raised hopes of many, which were founded on those encouraging projects have been disappointed.” Wheelock reviewed the fates of his students, thinly cloaking their identities. “Some who on account of their parts, and learning, 28

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bid the fairest for usefulness are sunk down into as low, savage, and brutish a manner of living as they were in before any endeavours were used with them to raise them up,” he wrote of Occom’s future son-in-law Joseph Johnson, who according to some reports had “turn’d pagan for about a week — painted, sung — danc’d — drank & whor’d it, wh some of the savage Indians he cou’d find.”10 And of his first and best student, Samson Occom, Wheelock wrote, “There are some of whom I did, and do still entertain a hope that they were really the subject of God’s grace, who have not wholly kept their garments unspotted amongst the pots.”11 Publicly, Wheelock blamed tribal culture and Indian “want of fortitude” for the demise of the Moor’s Indian School project. He did not openly acknowledge the feelings of grief, resentment, frustration, and gloominess that animated his Native students’ actions, or the life-threatening and spirit-harming forces of colonialism they encountered every day, on the streets, on their lands, in their tribal governments, in the courts. Instead of addressing these hard feelings, these destructive forces, and the human chaos they created in Native communities, Wheelock turned away and abandoned the twenty-five-year Moor’s Indian Charity School mission. How did Occom, his cohort of Moor’s alumni, and Native Christian communities deal with their own public failings and the hard feelings and human chaos unleashed by colonialism? We can begin to answer this question by reconstructing their theological worldviews. For religious believers, theologies often provide structures and vocabularies of feelings that in turn shape experience itself. How Occom came to feel about his own public drunkenness, his own missteps, was in large part shaped by his training as an orthodox reformed Calvinist.12 Occom utilized orthodox reformed Calvinist platforms in his teaching and ministerial works. He internalized these theological frameworks, and they in turn shaped his feelings about his own sins and shortcomings. The Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, used widely among Congregationalists and Presbyterians in North America and by Occom at his school for Native pupils on Montauk, Long Island, thus addresses sin: “Q. 82. Is any man able perfectly to keep the commandments of God? . . . A. No mere man, since the fall, is able in this life perfectly to keep the commandments of God, but doth daily break them in thought, word, and deed.” Going further, the Westminster Confession, a more technical, professional articulation of these Calvinist concepts, assures that those who have truly been converted “can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace,” a point of doctrine known as the perseverance of the saints. This perseverance is not premised on the willful efforts of the believer but is rather an effect of the constancy of the Spirit and the certainty of grace. Even the elect, the confession allowed, might “fall into grievous sins” hard feelings

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and thus “might have their graces and comforts impaired,” but ultimately they will “be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.” How grievous a sin, how often repeated, how far away must one wander before the wandering cast the veracity of one’s conversion into question? Calvinists called this the problem of assurance. Was it possible that believers who found themselves ever tempted to stray, ever straying, might have reason to lose their assurance, to doubt the certainty of their own conversion, or give reason to others to question it? What behavior constitutes the limit test for assurance? Even in his darkest and most discouraged times, even in February 1769, Samson Occom would have taken comfort in the reassuring language of the confession: True believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways shaken, diminished, and intermitted; as by negligence in preserving of it; by falling into some special sin, which woundeth the conscience and grieveth the Spirit; by some sudden or vehement temptation; by God’s withdrawing the light of his countenance; suffering even such as fear him to walk in darkness, and to have no light; yet are they neither utterly destitute of that seed of God, and life of faith, that love of Christ and the brethren, that sincerity of heart and conscience of duty, out of which by the operation of the Spirit this assurance may in due time be revived, and by the which in the meantime they are supported from utter despair. Personal failings, even repeated personal failings, deep self-doubt, anger, frustration, public rejection, despondency: in an orthodox reformed theological framework, none of these necessarily indicated the abandonment of God; nor did they mark the believer as an apostate — just a regular person, struggling to live, as Edmund Morgan famously described it, “faith in its proper imperfection.”13 Did Occom take the words of the confession to heart and find himself still “supported from utter despair” by the workings of the Spirit? Did he take refuge in his understanding of the inescapable infirmity of human will? How did he replenish his sense of certainty and trust? Where did his assurance of the love of God find its footings? During the seventeenth century, New England Puritans came to describe their experience of assurance as an “anchoring,” a metaphor that drew its force from the successful establishment of their colonial settlements. Their ability to feel anchored, to feel assured, was fed by what they saw all around them: growing settlements, spreading fields, sharp palisades. Their accomplishment of their colonial ambitions fed their good feelings, their trust in what they felt certain to be divine sanction. What sources of certainty, 30

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trust, and good feelings were available to Native Christians? No matter how earnest their Christianity, Native believers like Occom found themselves buffeted on all sides, their land bases eroding, their resources pillaged, sacred places disturbed, their traditional governments infiltrated, their sons and daughters leaving home in search of wages, the impacts of colonialism registering across the scale from the tribal to the individual. Even the most visible saints among them, like Occom, were scrutinized and suspected; even their public advocates, like Wheelock, declared them people of degenerating chances. In such contexts, feelings like trust and certainty were hard to come by. Separatist Native Christian communities in southern New England developed their own rituals and understandings of assurance around the feelings of uncertainty, grief, tenderness, hope, and hunger they shared. Whereas metaphors of anchored fixity scripted the Puritan experience of assurance as certainty, these Native Christians developed worship traditions centered around cycles of departure, return, and forgiveness, cycles that spoke to and spiritualized their collective experiences of uncertainty, instability, and struggle. They redeveloped orthodox Calvinist theologies to foster a greater sense of assurance for besieged Native communities of their connection to God. These Native Christian theologies embraced cycles of backsliding and repentance as fundamental to the religious life; they redefined assurance as entailing cycles of declension and return rather than as a pretense to certainty. Moreover, separatist Native Christian communities in southern New England created distinctive rituals of public confession and collective reconciliation that united them even in their disappointments and discouragements. Occom experienced his own failings within this theologically innovative southern Native New Light context. Passages from the journals of Samson Occom as well as accounts by contemporary non-Indian observers document practices of collective mourning, lay confession, and reconciliation distinctive to Native Christian communities in this time and place. The Irish Presbyterian minister Charles Beatty, an associate of David Brainerd, recorded one such ritual in his account of his visit in the 1760s to the Narragansett congregation of Samuel Niles. Niles (b. 1706) was an elder and role model to Samson Occom and his generation; he later joined the Brotherton movement and moved to upstate New York. During the Great Awakening, Niles was disciplined for exhorting in a Congregationalist church in Rhode Island; consequently, he left the church with one hundred other Native people to found the separatist Freewill Indian Baptist congregation at Narragansett. Niles arranged for his ordination by three Moravian Indians. Niles’s congregation developed its own distinctive rituals of confession and reconciliation for backsliders, Beatty noted: “If, at any time, any of their brethren hard feelings

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return to their former sinful practices, the rest will mourn over them as though their hearts would break; that, if their backsliding brethren repent of their sin, and manifest a desire to walk again with the church, their rejoicing is equal to their former mourning: but that, if no fruit of repentance appears, after they have mourned over them for several meetings, they bid the offender farewell, as though they were going to part to meet no more, and with such a mourning as resembles a funeral.”14 This striking description reveals that in southern New England Native New Light churches individual failings, treated under the heading of sin, were owned by the community. Native people confessed their sins not only to the church leader but to the entire congregation, effecting a more immediate reconciliation with the community. Just as Niles sought his ordination under the hands of three other Native Christians, in Niles’s congregation, Native people asked forgiveness, sought reconciliation, and renewed their assurance with each other. Collective public acts of mourning over lost members also provided an opportunity for Narragansett church members to articulate and process feelings of sadness and disappointment they experienced in connection with the uprooting of their communities, as well as to celebrate together renewals of togetherness. This sense of sin as a collective experience of hardship overlapping and intermingled with the deprivations of colonialism comes through clearly in Samson Occom’s landmark Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, delivered in March 1773. Paul, a Wampanoag convicted of murdering a white man in a fight at a New Haven tavern, invited Occom to preach at his execution. “Considering that we are of the same nation,” Paul wrote to Occom in 1772, “I have a particular desire that you should preach to me upon that occasion.”15 Paul had appealed his conviction, accusing his juries of racial bias; Occom himself, having just come through a period of personal and political transformation that strengthened his sense of commitment to Native causes, understood the charged racial context of the execution and used it as an occasion to speak directly to Native people about their collective survival. By reason of the sin of drunkenness, Occom observed, Native people experienced poverty, deprivation, hunger, violence, and increased risk of death by exposure and accident. Drinking was especially fatal in the context of a colonial society that sought to separate Native people from their lands: “If he has money or anything valuable, he may loose it all, or may be robb’d, or he may make a foolish bargain, and be cheated out of all he has. . . . Though you have been cheated over and over again, and you have lost your substance by drunkenness, yet you will venture to go on in this most destructive sin.”16 According to Occom, abandoning and overcoming sins such as drunkenness was crucial to the collective survival of Native people. 32

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Rites of collective confession and reconciliation that began with the Narragansett community of Samuel Niles spread throughout the six southern New England Native Christian communities affiliated with the Brotherton movement. In these towns, Native Christians met together, often in private homes, to meditate, console, grapple, sing, seek, cry, and pray. The journal of Samson Occom documents that acts of confession and reconciliation were not private transactions between the minister and the penitent but rather performative and expressive events involving entire Native religious gatherings. On January 23, 1785, after another dark season during which he abandoned journal and letter writing and apparently withdrew from his leadership role in the Brotherton movement, Occom himself asked forgiveness of his Mohegan community: “Made a Public Confession of my miss Conduct,” he wrote in his journal, “and was receivd universally by the People.” The “People” forgave Occom on the spot, and he “immediately” resumed his role as preacher. “There was great and affectionate attention among the People and in the Evening we had a meeting in my House, and we felt Some love,” Occom concluded the day’s diary entry.17 He later related to his friend Samuel Buell the relief this experience gave him. “It is a wonder, and amazing to me, that after my Dispondencies, Discouragements, and almost Desparation, should find, at Times, Some Peace Comfort and Resignation to god’s Disposal,” Occom wrote. “I have made and given Satisfactory Confession of my past miss Conduct, and am Universally receivd by the Indians.”18 The experience of being forgiven by other Native people was for Occom very healing. Occom’s journal mentions several other instances of similar rites of collective confession and forgiveness among Native Christians associated with the Brotherton movement. On Sunday, May 29, 1785, Occom recorded a meeting at the home of his friend and sometime preaching companion Henry Quaquaquid (Mohegan): “We had a Penitant meeti[n]g, I Sayd a few Words from the Brasen Serpent, and we felt the Power of god I think.”19 Small home-based worship services were a staple of Brotherton-movement communities, both in New England and after the peregrination to upstate New York. They fostered a sense of autonomy and intimacy, providing Native people a space where they could work out their salvation, their survival, and their feelings among themselves. Occom describes the home worship meeting at Henry Quaquaquid’s as a “Penitant meeti[n]g,” a meeting set apart for expressions of sorrow and remorse as well as reconciliation. At this meeting, Occom preached from Numbers 21:7–9: “Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto hard feelings

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Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” Occom’s choice of scripture offers an additional sense of the meeting. It suggests that Native Christians affiliated with the Brotherton movement identified with the gathering and exodus of Israel, that they felt themselves to be beset with dangers arising from their hostile environment, and that they sought relief and healing in religious observance. Native Christian rites of confession and forgiveness were integral to the welfare of the entire Brotherton movement. Native Christians met again at Henry Quaquaquid’s home in Mohegan on Sunday, February 12, 1786. “There was some moving amon[g]st the poor Indians,” Occom wrote, “and two of em made Confession of their back Slidings and Ask’d forgiveness & they forgave one another.”20 Participants in the Brotherton migration to upstate New York maintained these customs. At the settlement of New Stockbridge, at an evening meeting on Sunday, October 1, 1786, at the home of Peter Pohquunnuppeet (Mahican-Stockbridge), “Sir Peter Pohquunnuppeet made a Confession of his Wanderings from God, and Askd the Peoples forgiveness, and he was very Solemn, and the People received him in their Charity.”21 At Brotherton, on September 13, 1787, a day appointed for collective fasting and reflection, the community met at the home of town elder David Fowler. Occom preached from Luke 15, the parable of the prodigal son. “There were Some that made Confession of their Wanderings from God,” he recorded in his journal. “Many were bowd before the Majesty of Heaven and I believe [the] Day will not be forgot Soon.”22 In contexts hostile to their survival, contexts that caused Native people to feel bad about themselves and sometimes to act harmfully toward themselves and others too, Native Christians developed a way to offer each other a distinctive sense of assurance and forgiveness.


Native Christians in eighteenth-century southern New England, drawing authority from the improvisational, expressive, emotive cultures of New Light evangelicalism as well as from the urgency of their own situation, developed separatist Indian churches and invented performative rituals of confession and forgiveness that instantiated narrative formulas of death and resurrection, mourning and return, declension and reclamation. They did so in an extremely unforgiving colonial context, against popular and institutional narratives that seized on the failings of Native individuals as proof of the supposed inevitability of the decline of indigenous peoples. Taking what they learned from missionaries 34

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and mission schools, Native Christians fashioned new theological understandings of the meaning and remediation of sin amid hostile circumstances. Rites of confession and forgiveness institutionalized in separatist Christian Indian churches express innovative theological answers to the urgent problem of how to maintain feelings of trust, hope, love, intimacy, and acceptance in a community under siege. Collective rituals of confession, penitence, and forgiveness allowed Native Christian groups to hear one another, claim one another, and be with one another even in their missteps, to dissolve isolating feelings of shame, to own their sorrow and grief, and to express together a yearning for stronger, clearer futures. At a historical moment when traditional tribal governmental forms were collapsing in New England, Native Christian house meetings, penitent meetings, singing meetings, and worship meetings became places where Indian people could connect and process the extreme pressures they shouldered as well as the difficult feelings that accompanied them. The idea that feelings matter is becoming an increasingly articulate part of Native American studies scholarship. In his classic book Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide, George Tinker (Osage) has attested to both the authenticity of Native Christian conversion and the reality of the suffering that has often resulted from evangelization and indoctrination.23 Robert Warrior (Osage) and Laura Donaldson have written very moving essays about the role anxiety, isolation, and grief played in the life of the nineteenthcentury Methodist Pequot minister William Apess. In a more contemporary frame, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson (Dakota Sioux) has documented the powerful feelings experienced by participants in the commemorative November 2002 march retracing the steps of Dakota Sioux forced from their homelands in 1862.24 The commemoration allowed Dakota Sioux people to claim and express feelings like “grief,” “love,” “compassion,” and “resiliency,” all necessary steps, Wilson suggests, in processes of decolonization.25 How does this wave of American mission history position itself in relationship to these developments in Native American studies? As we study the history of Christian missions in Native communities, it is important to acknowledge that these missions have often made Native people feel bad about themselves, their communities, and their traditions. They have also provided venues and vocabularies that Native communities have used to reorganize themselves and process their sorrow, discouragement, and anger, even as these feelings have come down through the generations. The recognition that feelings matter, that it is good that feelings should be collectively owned and acknowledged rather than privatized, isolated, or abandoned, was fundamental to the nascent theologies and collective practices of Samson Occom and other Native Christians in southern New hard feelings

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England. One hopes that this wave of mission history has enough heart to face these profound dimensions of Native historical experience and contemporary scholarship with a feeling sense of responsiveness and responsibility.

Notes 1. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 2. See Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 3. On religion treated as a “weak language,” see Jenny Franchot, “Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies,” American Literature 67, no. 4 (1995): 833–42, and Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 141–64. 4. Demographic records and criminal records are also exceptional archives of early Native feelings; see, for example, Ann-Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 5. Joanna Brooks, ed., The Collected Writings of Samson Occom: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 89. 6. Ibid., 87. 7. Ibid., 88n45. 8. Eleazar Wheelock Papers, 769274.2, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. 9. Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon, in Connecticut (Hartford: n.p., 1771), 19. 10. Wheelock Papers, 768679. 11. Wheelock, Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity-School, 20. 12. Occom was converted, educated, and ordained in a context of theological uniformity by four Yale graduates, all of whom were orthodox reformed Calvinists: James Davenport, Wheelock, Benjamin Pomeroy, and Samuel Buell. See Richard Warch, School of the Prophets: Yale College, 1701–1740 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 234. Occom’s own 1768 life narrative carefully describes his conversion in a technical language of “conviction,” “trust,” and “enabling” that comports accurately with orthodox soteriologies. See Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 53. 13. Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 91. 14. Charles Beatty, Journal of a Two Months’ Tour (London: W. Davenhill, 1768). See also William Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” American Ethnologist 10, no. 2 (May 1983): 263. 15. Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 162. 16. Ibid., 193. 17. Ibid., 287.

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18. Ibid., 127. 19. Ibid., 294. 20. Ibid., 329. 21. Ibid., 343. 22. Ibid., 377. 23. George Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 24. See Robert Warrior, “Eulogy on William Apess: Speculations on His New York Death,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 16, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 1–13; Laura Donaldson, “Son of the Forest, Child of God: William Apess and the Scene of Postcolonial Nativity,” in Postcolonial America, ed. C. Richard King (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 201–22; and “Walking for Justice: The Dakota Commemorative March of 2002,” a special issue of American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Spring 2004). 25. Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird, eds., For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2005), 193.

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eager partners in reform indians and frederick baylies in southern new engl and, 1780 –1840 Daniel Mandell

In late September 1819, after an initial summer organizing schools, teaching, and preaching in five Native communities in southern New England, Frederick Baylies of Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, enthused to his employers, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (spg), that “a new Era appears to be commenced among the Indians.” His glowing report emphasized how the newly formed schools were “flourishing” and “will be the means of great good. Here the tender mind, is early disciplined to order, here they are early taught the excellency of the Christian Religion, & the importance of a regular life.”1 This was welcome news to the society, which had experienced little success since it had been organized in 1787 as a successor to the group that, until the Revolution, had assisted missionaries to southern New England Indians, including the celebrated John Eliot and the Mayhews. The society drew on this legendary history for inspiration and also as a means to gain political and financial support. Its request to the Massachusetts legislature for a charter and funds emphasized that its primary mission was to continue “the one design of our venerable fathers in emigrating to this land . . . to extend the knowledge of our glorious Redeemer among the savage natives.” But the organization’s charter also empowered it to work “among other people . . . destitute of the means of religious instruction,” which meant whites without orthodox ministers as well as Natives, and pointed to the huge changes in American Christianity since the seventeenth century.2 The Indians targeted by the spg saw themselves as vastly different from their “savage” ancestors, although they faced a daunting array of social problems.

Those in Massachusetts had operated schools and churches of their own since the mid-seventeenth century, and the Narragansetts (along with Connecticut tribes) embraced Christianity and established schools and churches in the 1740s. But in the wake of the Revolution, Indian ministers and elders struggled with racism, the loss of autonomy and resources, and social instability as men and women sought work elsewhere. Alcoholism and domestic violence wounded every community, and poverty and the high rate of child indenture frustrated efforts to maintain schools. While tribal elders saw the need for many of the reforms urged by the spg, their goal was to revive their communities and resist the loss of power and land. Fortunately, Baylies understood and worked for Natives’ needs, helping them to rebuild community institutions and to improve their social and economic conditions. Baylies was effective and remembered by Indians with wry affection because he emphasized teaching and administration and, while he occasionally preached to Native congregations, was quite comfortable with services led by Indian Baptist ministers, making him part of the Second Great Awakening rather than the Puritan mission. After his death in 1836, Native leaders worked in a self-confident and assertive way with the increasingly activist state legislatures and governors to maintain tribal institutions.


Before coming to the Americas, the English boasted that they would treat the Natives far more humanely than did the cruel Catholic Spaniards and that therefore the Indians would welcome them and embrace reformed Christianity. Yet although the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company featured a Native surrounded by the words “Come over and help us” (a figure that is still at the center of the Massachusetts state flag), the insular Puritans initially made few efforts to convert Indians. In 1647, the Reverend John Eliot of Roxbury began preaching at the village of Nonantum (Newton) and quickly gathered a growing flock of Massachusetts and Nipmucs shocked by the sudden changes to their world since the arrival of the English. The Puritans believed that Natives needed to reject Satan’s ways and their pagan leaders and take on more aspects of civilized life (most important, European gender roles) before they were ready to become true Christians. Toward that goal, Eliot founded the “praying town” of Natick in 1651 to isolate and reshape the converts. By the 1670s, five “praying towns” formed an arch thirty miles from Boston, edging into Nipmuc, Wabanaki, and Wampanoag territory.3 Not all English demanded that Native converts reject their traditions and sachems. In 1641, Thomas Mayhew purchased Martha’s Vineyard and nearby islands, and Thomas Jr., along with a small group of colonists, settled on the eager partners in reform

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Vineyard. One year later, Hiacoomes, a Wampanoag of “mean descent,” came to Thomas and expressed an interest in Christianity. Mayhew tutored the Native, Hiacoomes soon had his conversion experience, and by 1646 their influence had spread throughout the island and won many converts while recognizing their sachems’ authority. In 1657, after Thomas Jr. disappeared on a voyage to England, his father (already manor lord and judge) took on his son’s missionary role. The Wampanoag converts soon ran their own churches and schools for girls as well as boys, using religious tracts translated into an Algonquian alphabet developed by John Eliot.4 Similarly, when Richard Bourne, a town leader in Sandwich on the western edge of Cape Cod in New Plymouth, began to preach to nearby Natives, he acquiesced to converts maintaining many of their traditions and local leadership. The first community that responded to his message, on Sandwich’s southeastern border, became known as Mashpee. By 1674, Wampanoag preachers spread the gospel to seven groups of Christian Indians and one “gathered church” on Cape Cod. As with Eliot’s praying towns, these Indian communities obtained new protection for their lands along with Christianity. In 1665, Mashpee obtained a deed from a local sachem for a Christian Indian community and fifteen years later won recognition from Plymouth.5 These missionary efforts played an important role in transatlantic relations. John Eliot wrote to friends in England long descriptions of his struggles and successes and sent along reports from the Mayhews and Bourne. When published in London, these pamphlets helped raise political support and funds in England and cemented Eliot’s fame in history.6 In 1649, Parliament chartered the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in New England, which raised nearly £15,000 in the first decade. Money raised in England was spent by commissioners in Boston, usually as stipends to ministers and teachers and for books and similar supplies — nearly all in Massachusetts, particularly after the Vineyard and Plymouth became part of that colony in 1692.7 No similar efforts were made in Connecticut or Rhode Island, largely because the Natives and their sachems retained enough autonomy to reject missionaries as intrusive and destructive. This missionary enterprise was nearly destroyed by King Philip’s War, which decimated the Indian population and among the colonists facilitated a hostile view of the survivors. Only a few of Eliot’s praying towns survived, and the Native villages in Plymouth and along Cape Cod shrank and many vanished as the English population swelled and Indians moved to larger communities with protected reserves. Even the more autonomous Christian Indian villages on the Vineyard and the nearby island of Nantucket were battered by changes 40

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in the colonial economy, by the terrible effects of epidemics, alcoholism, and indebtedness, and by the loss of men in wars or to migratory labor. The survivors adapted by teetering along the line between isolation from and immersion in colonial society and culture while maintaining critical boundaries against white settlers. By the mid-eighteenth century, only a handful of communities remained in Massachusetts, heavily acculturated to English ways, led by Native ministers who preached in the Native language and received small stipends from the spg.8 One of the most significant was Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard, which would be the largest tribe to work with Baylies in the 1820s. Though Gay Head was the last village on the island to embrace Christianity, in the 1660s, its ministers soon led a regional religious network and often traveled to other island and mainland groups to preach. Gay Head was also the source of the only Christian Indian religious schism in New England: in 1693, a preacher gathered there a separate Baptist society, which soon had thirty members; Baptist congregations were also established at Chappaquiddick and Nantucket. These churches grew steadily until 1740, when the assistant Gay Head Baptist pastor Zachariah Hossueit switched to the Congregationalists, became their minister, and immediately helped prevent the loss of tribal land to a powerful white neighbor. The Great Awakening of the 1740s, which exposed and exacerbated conflicts among Anglo-Americans, seemed to have no effect on Indians in Massachusetts, probably because they were more insular and had their own ministers and distinctive religious subculture by that time.9 The Narragansetts would be the second largest tribe to work with Baylies, and the history of their church highlights by contrast the importance of the Great Awakening among Indians in Connecticut and Rhode Island. At that time, desperate poverty, racism, and alcoholism led large numbers to embrace the euphoric, egalitarian New Light worship, regarded by many white ministers and magistrates as subversive and disorderly. The Narragansetts were also involved in a bitter conflict with their sachem, Thomas Ninigret, for selling large areas of tribal territory, and tribal members ordained as their minister the uneducated but charismatic Samuel Niles, who had championed opposition to Ninigret. In the Narragansetts’ memory, their church was associated with the Free Will Baptist movement, a radical sect that gained notoriety in the 1770s as it became popular in the poorer hill towns of New England. Free Wills emphasized congregational autonomy, absolute equality, a scorn for scholastic preaching, ecstatic worship, and salvation available for all (rejecting Calvinism). The Narragansett church became the cornerstone of a network of Indian congregations in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut and Long Island.10 eager partners in reform

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By the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Indian communities in the region had strong schools and churches, generally led by Native teachers and ministers.11 Many Indians were literate, particularly with the written Algonquian language; during the second quarter of the century as many as 30 to 50 percent of adults and 75 percent of children could read.12 At the same time, aboriginal traditions of witchcraft, local spirits, and hostility to selfishness and individual gain remained strong.13 Indian women had social and political power denied Anglo-American women, and informal marriages remained common. Distinctive Indian work habits emphasized sharing, migratory labor, and the support of kinship networks.14 But Indians also faced poverty, high death rates, social instability, and hostility from neighboring whites. Many men fought and died in the colonial wars, and a growing number left for months or even years on whaling voyages. Widespread indentured servitude kept many children from their communities and from receiving an education.15 Increasing contempt toward Indians in the region disheartened and injured their communities.16 These conditions led the Mohegan minister Samson Occom to start a movement to establish a new pantribal community in Oneida territory, called Brotherton, which drew many Indian ministers and teachers out of Rhode Island and Connecticut.17


The four decades following the Revolutionary War may have been the lowest point for Indians in southern New England. Their lifeways changed little: communities still managed their fields and other resources in common even as individuals could claim plots and pass them to their children. But they were confronted by the loss of men to war and the maritime trades, poverty, a fraying social fabric, abusive white neighbors who stole timber and fish, and a high vulnerability to alcoholism. Tribal leaders struggled to maintain their communities and the institutions that provided a vital foundation. Anglo-Americans had their solutions: proper subordination and self-discipline. Indians had a different notion: in 1829, William Apess pointed to the hypocrisy of New England’s whites, and called on them to change as a first necessary step. But both Indians and whites believed reform was necessary, and Frederick Baylies would play a critical role in that effort. Gay Head and Narragansett did better than most tribes. Their resource-rich reserves and vibrant churches became magnets for individuals and families from elsewhere. Gay Head’s population increased from 165 in 1765 to 203 in 1786 and perhaps 276 in 1790, stabilizing at about 270 during the first half of the nineteenth century.18 Most of the Indians in Rhode Island moved to the 42

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Narragansett reserve after the war, although so many left for Brotherton that the tribe’s overall population declined 47 percent, from 528 to only 280, before stabilizing at the end of the century.19 Churches in both tribes continued to play critical roles within their communities and subregions. Niles kept his distance from the Brotherton movement, and as a result the Narragansett church grew in importance after the war, anchoring a network of religious meetings that drew together Montauks, Pequots, visitors from Brotherton, and others at least once every two months. In August 1811, visiting minister Curtis Coe noted that many leading Narragansett men and women had gone to the bimonthly meeting at the Mashantucket Pequots, where they were joined by “people of different nations,” including Long Island and Brotherton. Such visits continued for decades.20 Gay Head’s Congregationalist church was led by Zachariah Howwoswee, who, like his father, served the island Indians as a pillar of Calvinism and the Wampanoag language. In 1798, Thomas Jeffers (ca. 1742–1818), an Indian Baptist preacher, arrived from Mashpee, where he had drawn the ire of the orthodox Reverend Gideon Hawley for “preaching up the doctrines of liberty and equality.”21 He quickly won over most Gay Headers, in part because he used English and encouraged congregational participation and in part because Howwoswee had alienated many when he sought profit and power in the community. In 1808, the visiting Reverend Elisha Clapp found in the Congregational church “only a few aged Indians, who do not understand English,” and noted that Howwoswee had become an alcoholic.22 By 1810, all the Indian communities in southern New England had embraced the radical wing of the Baptist movement, which brought dignity and democracy to subaltern groups, put far less emphasis on theological details, and scorned scholastic learning as harmful to humble piety and salvation.23 This movement was particularly appealing to the growing number of Indians raised in white households and the rising population of outsiders (mostly African Americans) who had married into Indian communities. Exogamous marriage was unusual on larger Indian communities before the Revolution but became increasingly prominent afterward as more Indian men went whaling on ever lengthening voyages and (especially with the end of slavery in the North) a noticeable number of black men married women in the tribe. They and their children rarely spoke the Native language and were drawn to the Baptist church in their new community.24 The beliefs and rituals among these congregations paralleled the esoteric mysticism that had surfaced among a transatlantic evangelical community. At a Narragansett prayer meeting in 1811, an elder told Coe that when she was eager partners in reform

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young “she was taken to heaven, while her body lay, like a lump of clay, on the earth — that her spirit returned to one end of, & it again rose to life.” Sally George (1779–1824), a Mashantucket Pequot woman regarded by Indians and whites in the area as a holy woman, a spirited preacher, and a skilled doctor, presided over outdoor services on the reserve that lasted for three days. Such enthusiastic worship in the open, with women leaders and connections between spiritual and physical healing, connected coastal Natives to a visionary culture that had spread between Europe and America.25 But Christian Indian beliefs, rituals, and leadership also had aboriginal roots that remained intact. On Cape Cod and the Vineyard, at Mohegan and elsewhere, Indians continued to leave branches or pebbles at large stones or other places where generations had placed memory offerings. Stories recorded later show continued beliefs among Indians in witches, ghosts, “little people,” magical treasure, and other spiritual phenomena. While some of the same motifs appear in New England folklore, there were differences: Indians saw treasure as the devil’s temptation, for example, whereas whites saw it as God’s blessings.26 Churches in New England also managed education in their towns and tribes. Unfortunately, Indian schools lost their source of income and supplies when the Revolution cut off the London-based spg. The Narragansetts and Connecticut tribes were particularly disadvantaged because many teachers and lay leaders left for Brotherton. In July 1809, when Curtis Coe first visited the Narragansetts, council members told him that their schoolhouse had blown down and that only a few in the tribe able to afford it sent their children to schools in the area. When Coe opened his first class a year later, he noted that most of his approximately twenty students were illiterate adults.27 Gay Head’s longer tradition of schooling was less impacted by the war. Women continued teaching the youngest children, and literacy rates remained high. In 1792, the tribe found sufficient funds to hire a white schoolmaster to educate fifteen older boys in writing and arithmetic — reproducing the two-tiered system common in New England towns — but within a year their money ran out, and the boys’ school folded. By 1801, the wife of Thomas Jeffers was teaching younger children during the summer, but the community wanted more. In 1807, perhaps using new income from clay sold to industries, it reestablished a winter boys’ school taught by the lighthouse keeper.28


During the early years of the Republic, New England elites drew on the region’s peculiar post-Revolutionary mixture of Puritan and republican culture to create many organizations dedicated to the religious and secular education of a moral 44

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citizenry needed for a righteous and Godly nation. These magistrates and ministers were connected by shared education, values, and in many cases kinship; many had read John Eliot’s writings.29 In November 1787, twenty of the leading members of this “Standing Order” meeting in Boston established the Society for Propagating the Gospel with two goals: to teach and improve both Indians and white settlers in areas without orthodox minister or teachers. But although the society received a sizable bequest in 1789 to fund missionaries to Indians, it ignored the Indian churches and schools and instead occasionally sent small stipends to a few Anglo-American ministers who were supposed to be working with Indians. Not surprisingly, its 1804 annual report apologized that the spg “cannot say, that much good hath resulted from that part of its labors.”30 The society instead initially focused on the “deplorable effects” that the lack of orthodox ministers had among “our countrymen and friends” in the three most distant counties in Maine — which had become infamous for agrarian challenges to absentee Boston landlords. Ironically, those squatters sometimes disguised themselves in paint and feathers and were known as “white Indians.” The first orthodox itinerant minister dispatched by the spg, Daniel Little, told Peter Thacher of the spg that previous preachers in the area had been “illiterate” men who “spread a spirit of bigotry and enthusiasm,” creating a climate of hostility to proper religion, but that with the spg’s assistance his ministry would encourage “many persons of property . . . [to] remove their interest, and carry their virtue into the Eastern Territory.” The society’s support for ministers to Maine far outweighed the assistance given Indian missionaries.31 The society’s first real effort among Indians was Coe’s outreach, which, while initially directed at the many “unchurched” living along Narragansett Bay, soon included a special effort toward the Narragansetts. In June 1811, Coe finally attended a church meeting and afterward asked permission to preach. He was astonished at the church members’ reaction: first, that every person present (including the women) was called to “give their voice on the subject,” and second, that they wished to bar him from preaching even when no Baptist minister was present. Coe was also appalled at their insistence that “their mode [of worship] was for all to speak,” scornfully observing that “their tumultuous, noisy meetings, & what we call regular, decent worship are inconsistent.” But Narragansett hospitality and Coe’s ability to bend triumphed: he preached occasionally and tolerated the discussions and prayers that followed.32 One year later, the spg paid for a schoolhouse and the following summer sponsored Silas Shores “to diffuse useful knowledge among the Indian children and youth, and to promote Christian virtue and piety among the Indians at large.” Shores taught catechism, spelling, and arithmetic and distributed primers, Bibles, and religious tracts to eager partners in reform

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Narragansett families. But the school collapsed in 1816 when Shores left and the Indians rejected his successor, Stetson Raymond.33 Despite the elitist prejudices of spg ministers and magistrates, New England’s cultural climate was shifting in ways that made it easier for Native groups to work with Anglo-American reformers. Education became more important and was no longer primarily religious doctrine. Tolerance increased as Congregationalist churches and organizations split between Unitarian and Calvinist (orthodox) and Baptists became more respectable. The Puritan notion of a unitary commonwealth crumbled as magistrates and clergymen accepted a universe of voluntary associations, many of which ignored denominational differences and sought improvement by distributing Bibles and otherwise spreading “useful knowledge.” Piety and order were associated with knowledge and refinement.34 The threat of removal (which was becoming the national policy) may have also played a role: Mohegan tradition holds that the tribe’s elders decided to work with a young missionary woman in 1830 to start a school and build a church in large part to prevent removal.35 In this new environment of more ecumenical moral uplift and education, Frederick Baylies was able to play a significant role with various tribes in southern New England. In September 1808, the Reverend Joseph Thaxter of Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, urged the society to sponsor a schoolteacher for the neighboring Chappaquiddicks and recommended Baylies, who had preached there and taught in Edgartown. “He is not a man of publick Education, but of Education sufficient for the undertaking,” Thaxter told the spg’s secretary. “He is a man of serious Piety & exemplary Life firmly attached to the Peace & order of Society.” He also turned out to be extremely effective in working with Indian communities.36 Baylies was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, in 1774; after he married Sally Lee in June 1795, the couple went to Woodstock, Connecticut, where a first child was born in March 1797 (and where a noticeable number of Nipmuc families lived), and then to Edgartown, on the eastern side of the Vineyard, where a second entered the Baylies family in January 1799. We have no information on Baylies before he began working with the Indians, so he probably had no formal education beyond that given most young children in New England, but he had gained enough to teach the orthodox (Congregationalist) children in Edgartown and (on his own initiative) to preach and teach among the Chappaquiddicks, who lived on a peninsula (now an island) that lay along the eastern edge of the Vineyard.37 On February 12, 1810, the Chappaquiddicks asked the spg to provide a sti-

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pend for Baylies, who for the past eighteenth months had “almost constantly been with us on Lord’s Day, preached to us and conducted public worship as well as given private instruction.” Of eighty-five tribal members, thirty-nine were of school age, but they could not afford a schoolmaster. Thaxter also again asked the spg to sponsor Baylies; the Edgartown minister reassured the society that the layman was “a discrete, prudent man” and that “as to his orthodoxy he is not wanting in that the Society need not fear that he is a Heretic because I recommend him.” Yet the society refused to grant more than token support (sending a few books and pamphlets) for nearly a decade. In all likelihood, members preferred to use their resources (which indirectly included remnants of the colonial-era Boyles and Williams funds administered by Harvard College) in other ways and thought little of Baylies’s background.38 Society officials finally did show a strong interest when Baylies expanded his efforts to the western and northern edges of the Vineyard and even took a boat across Buzzards Bay to the mainland. He reported on May 5, 1819, that he had distributed religious tracts to all the Vineyard Indian communities, including Christiantown on the northern side of the island and Gay Head to the far west, and that the Gay Headers in particular had asked for financial support for their school. Eleven days later he described a promising visit across Buzzards Bay to Troy-Watuppa, a reservation on the outskirts of the booming city of Fall River, where he met with about forty-eight Indians at their “decent house of two rooms” built with spg funds as a school and a church. Nine days later, he detailed his plan to care for various Indian schools during the summer, including the Narragansetts, and asked for a salary of $360. The members of the spg board were impressed by his energy and persistence as well as Thaxter’s patronage and told him they would support his efforts with an annual salary of $260; that would be raised to $350 in November 1833.39 On June 21, Baylies returned to Gay Head, where he told a tribal meeting that the society would help. The Indians immediately selected a seven-member committee “to agree with a woman to take charge of the School &c,” which showed the effectiveness of their administrative structure and that they knew who had the necessary skills to serve their interests. A week later, the Gay Head school opened.40 The initial literacy rate among the children who attended at first was quite low: Baylies found in his next visit on July 3 that only two of the thirty students (aged five to sixteen) could read “& they but poorly.” Two weeks later when Baylies visited again, the situation at the school had not improved: while a different (unidentified) woman had taken over teaching the school, she was absent because (Baylies later wrote) she was “bashful.” He found this unaccept-

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able, dismissed her, and told the tribe’s school committee that he was heading to open a school with the Narragansetts and that they would need to find another teacher and meet the costs of keeping the school open that summer.41 When Baylies boarded a vessel on July 22 to cross to the mainland, he must have been very concerned, if not brooding, about the future of his mission after his initial experience at Gay Head. On the way to Narragansett, he stopped at the Troy reservation, located on the outskirts of the growing city of Fall River along Watuppa Pond, where two months before he had met with about fifty members of the tribe. He started classes, determined to light the fire of education himself, probably because Troy (established in the early eighteenth century) had no experience with schools but also perhaps as a response to his problems at Gay Head. Baylies had already corresponded with Oliver Brown, who was about to take the Presbyterian pulpit at Kingston, near Narragansett; a few days after Baylies arrived, Brown came to preach and brought a volunteer from the Ladies Benevolent Society at Fall River to take over the classes. Baylies then went to Narragansett and was greeted with a favorable reception that is quite surprising considering the tribe’s treatment of Coe and other outsiders. Two months later, he wrote that he had preached in their meetinghouse to about forty parishioners who “are in the habit of speaking in meeting, in their exhortation they generally approved of what I said.” On August 2, he opened classes at the tribe’s schoolhouse and taught for three weeks to about forty-six students before gaining the services of Martha Clark, daughter of a prominent judge in the area, who agreed to teach Sunday school at the tribe’s church.42 Once Clark took over the Narragansett school, Baylies boarded a ship to return to the Vineyard. He went first to Chappaquiddick, where he had started a decade earlier, and hired Betsy Carter, one of the leading women in the tribe who had signed the 1809 petition to the spg asking for a teacher. She opened the school at the tribe’s meetinghouse on August 30 for an eight-week session. He then traveled to Christiantown, where he arranged for the Anglo-American woman Jedidiah Luce to teach for six weeks at its meetinghouse beginning on September 6. At some point, Baylies went back to Gay Head and found to his delight that the tribal committee had, in his absence, hired another member of the tribe, Mrs. Abiah Johnson, to teach and that the school was “in good order, the Parents gratified & the children improved.” On September 25, he met with the committee: it agreed to pay for the previous ten weeks, and he in turn advanced the committee $6 to begin a new session taught by Johnson. She ended that session on January 1, 1820, and two days later he reopened the school. About ten days later, the tribe decided to hire Joseph Skiff (whom Baylies called “a faithful young man”) as teacher for six weeks. When Skiff finally dismissed 48

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the classes, Baylies could tell the spg with great satisfaction that Gay Headers had held twenty-seven weeks of school since June 28, hired their own teachers, and had paid for more than half of the expenses for the year.43 At the end of September, after he had returned to Gay Head and found its school flourishing, he wrote to his spg sponsors in triumph. He exulted at the “new Era” that had begun, with five Indian schools “applauded by all.” Six months later, he reported on how each of the schools had done during the year. The Narragansett school had met four and a half months: he had taught six weeks and Martha Clark twelve, with around thirty-six students who “made good improvement.” At Christiantown, Jedidiah Luce had taught twelve to fifteen students for six weeks. Gay Head classes continued to meet — Baylies himself had just finished teaching there for three weeks to about forty-three students — and “the children had made great improvement, and the Parents [were] highly gratified.” Betsy Carter of Chappaquiddick (“a regular woman”) taught there for eight weeks, and then Baylies taught for three: he had twenty-seven students who had “made a handsome improvement.” He sent the spg samples of writing from 70 of his 132 students (to prove “the ingenuity, and attention of the natives”) and told his sponsors that the schools “were very pleasing to the Indians.” Baylies was also very pleasing to the Indians, as they demonstrated by eagerly working with him to staff and administer their schools and sending their children to classes. Since the late seventeenth century, no other Anglo-American teacher or missionary had worked with so many different Indian communities spread over such a wide area. No doubt Baylies was successful because he worked with community leaders instead of trying to dictate or impose his authority. The Narragansetts’ support was particularly striking.44 The schools did not meet during the spring. When Baylies made his rounds from late May to early August to reopen classes, he found some changes. On May 29, Gay Head again held a meeting and chose a school committee that hired Esther Howwoswee (from the most prominent family in the tribe) to teach in the summer; in late September, Baylies visited the tribe, reopened the school for a fall session, and after a week hired an older woman, Mrs. Abigail Skiff, to teach for two more weeks. On June 12, he began classes at Chappaquiddick but taught for just a week before abruptly ending the school — probably because he received word that the legislature had approved (on June 14) the tribe’s petition for $300 to build a new meetinghouse because its members were so poor that “they have no Place that is suitable for them to attend the publick Worship or for their Children to assemble for Instruction.” Baylies was apparently not involved, although Joseph Thaxter wrote a letter supporting their efforts. The new building measured 18v 22v and was finished by September 18 when Betsy Carter eager partners in reform

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began a twelve-week session. In early July, Baylies headed for Narragansett, opened its school on July 10, and taught for two weeks before Martha Clark and her sister Harriet agreed to take over and teach for twelve weeks. He then traveled back to the Vineyard to see Jedidiah Luce begin the new school session at Christiantown on August 4. For a second year, Baylies had successfully opened three Indian schools on the Vineyard and at Narragansett, taught at most of them, and made sure that all had the teachers, resources, and community support to continue for many weeks.45 That summer of 1820 nearly everything was on schedule according to Baylies’s initial plan. Unfortunately, the Fall River Ladies Benevolent Society failed to send a teacher to Troy-Watuppa. He told the spg that “no blame should be attached to the Indians” and implicitly criticized the Benevolent Society for neglecting the school simply because the Indians were not “their primary object” of interest. Why he did not try to teach there and find others to help is not clear, but perhaps he felt that he lacked the time and ability to add that community to his rounds, or perhaps he had become aware that all but a few members of the tribe lived elsewhere and were served by other institutions. In 1824, he tried to interest a Fall River group of “Gentlemen and Ladies” in renewing the TroyWatuppa school, but they saw the effort as fruitless, telling Baylies that “they had attempted it themselves to no purpose.” In August 1825, he opened a school for the tribe in nearby Dartmouth and taught for two weeks, but that was his last effort in that area.46 A new opportunity, however, had opened on nearby Nantucket. During the winter of 1763, the island’s Native Christian community had been decimated by an epidemic, probably yellow fever.47 Others came to Nantucket to take the places held by Indians in the whaling trade, and by the end of the century the Native community had seemingly been replaced by a “colored” neighborhood called New Guinea. Yet many blacks in New England retained connections to their Native families. In May 1822, Nantucket’s black leaders asked the spg for help supporting a teacher and told the society that “nearly every family in our village are partly descended from the [Indian] inhabitants of this & neighboring places.” The spg agreed to send Baylies, and on April 14, 1823, he told his sponsors that he had visited Nantucket, had gained the support of white elites for a school, would make it part of his annual circuit, and noted that many in New Guinea were “part Indian.”48 Baylies saw himself primarily as an administrator and a teacher. Every year he traveled to each of the five communities: teaching one to four weeks; providing books and supplies; hiring or ensuring that the tribe hired a capable teacher for seven to twelve weeks; paying salaries to teachers; and reporting to 50

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the spg on the numbers and abilities of students. In addition, he persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to build schoolhouses at Gay Head in 1827 and Christiantown in 1830. Baylies preferred women teachers, who worked for less, and to keep the same teacher year after year. At Chappaquiddick, Betsy Carter taught twelve weeks each year through at least 1829. Similarly, at Nantucket, Baylies initially hired young women to teach for twelve weeks, although in 1827 he began employing Jacob Price. Gay Head was exceptional. By 1824, the tribe established a girls’ school (a pattern common in most towns) financed by the spg and taught by either Esther Howwoswee or Jane Wamsley, both tribal members, and a boys’ school financed by the tribe and taught by Gay Head mariner Aaron Cooper, an expert on navigation and math. Such stability was not always possible. At Christiantown, where classes met for seven to nine weeks, Jedidiah Luce taught until 1825 but was replaced by a series of female teachers, each of whom served only for a term. The Narragansett school usually met for twelve weeks after Baylies left and was taught by a series of different women.49 The shockingly low level of literacy in Baylies’s 1819 account of Gay Head was belied by his subsequent reports that showed strong abilities to read and write in these communities supposedly long without schools. Every year or two Baylies tallied the students who attended his classes; noted how many could write their name or more; and recorded how many could either read the alphabet, a spelling book, or (at the highest level) from the Bible. For Baylies (like many contemporaries), the Bible served as a moral and intellectual touchstone, and he was interested in how well his students could read the words rather than whether they believed in a particular doctrine. From 41 to 51 percent of his students could read from the Bible, and an additional 35 to 38 percent could read from a spelling book. About half could write more than their name, and by 1829 this increased to 59 percent. An 1835 spg committee auditing Baylies’s work found that about 60 percent of 155 children in the schools could read and write.50 Four years later, an Anglo-American minister working with the Vineyard Indians found that “about every native can read and write” and that those still illiterate were mostly blacks from other countries who had married into the communities. These figures highlight a continued tradition of education within the tribes even though by 1819 their schools had fallen on hard times with community poverty and instability.51 Like so many others involved in the Second Great Awakening, Baylies focused on education as the primary vehicle of reform and improvement. In September 1819 he exulted that the schools “will be a means of great good,” and in March 1820 he told the spg that “these schools are very pleasing to the Indians and it is my fervent Prayer that they may tend to promote their happiness in eager partners in reform

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time and eternity.” Other Anglo-American reformers were impressed by the results of his efforts. In 1825, Oliver Brown praised his public examination of Narragansett students and the tribe generally. The performance and general appearance of the Scholars were very satisfactory. The good effects of our appropriations, and of the exertions of Mr. Baylies, never before appeared to me so manifest and so promising. Place before your eyes a collection of fifty Scholars, from the child of three years old to young men and women grown, all under complete but easy government, emulous to do well, and successful in their endeavours, with their parents and the leading men of the Tribe present, almost without exception, clean, and decent, and comfortable in their dress, and you have a correct view of the scene.52 The following year, Brown reported that several friends who had attended the Narragansett examination were “highly gratified . . . of the performance and order of the school.”53 As Narragansett success demonstrated, Baylies, like his contemporaries, felt that education necessarily included lessons in religion and proper morality. As part of that moral obligation, Baylies attended services at the Indian churches, helped establish or maintain Sabbath schools, and encouraged Indians to spurn liquor and to embrace a range of reforms. In March 1824, he wrote that generally among the tribes Sabbath meetings “are pretty well attended” and that “there are many pious people among the Indians.” Almost four years later he noted that at the meetings “sometimes we have a goodly number, at other times not so many, but at all times they appear, clean and decent, and behave with the greatest propriety.” There were also, he told the spg, Sabbath schools at Narragansett (taught by Oliver Brown), Gay Head, and Chappaquiddick (taught by tribal member Peter Belain).54 Baylies was also, as other reformers, focused on temperance, particularly since Indians were notorious for their weakness for alcohol and its worst effects. For decades, New England tribal leaders had been sensitive to the threat that rum and hard cider posed to their communities, and those at Narragansett, Christiantown, Gay Head, and Nantucket responded quickly, forming Indian-run temperance societies.55 All five Indian groups embraced Baylies and his program and (at his encouragement) became deeply involved in the operation of their schools. In 1822, Gay Head decided to extend school to twenty-seven weeks, agreeing to pay its teachers for an additional sixteen weeks as well as some of Baylies’s additional boarding expenses. Within a few years, every community but Narragansett had one of its own teaching most sessions, and by 1829 a Narragansett taught summer 52

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school. When a tribe obtained funding to build a school, as the Chappaquiddicks had in 1820, the Indians supplied the labor. A few Natives were hostile to Baylies; some childless Vineyard Indians opposed the appropriation of scarce community monies for schools, and some parents kept their children from attending. But most were enthusiastic, almost certainly because Baylies worked with them instead of attempting to control the communities. For decades, they had been suspicious (due to hard experience) of outsiders; in 1807, an English visitor noted that Gay Head Indians ran and hid when he approached, fearing that he represented a land speculator or whaling captain looking for crewmen. But the tribes were clearly ready to work with Baylies, who worked for years without pay with the Chappaquiddicks, offered spg support for schools and reforms that the Indians felt they needed, and gave them a major role in the program.56 Indians on the Vineyard seem to have regarded Baylies with respect and a wry affection. Eight decades later, a Gay Head woman noted that “we hear little of his methods and nothing of the books he used. He taught only a short summer term, but the school was well attended. He was considered a good teacher for his time and was strict in his ways. . . . Though this pedagogue occupied three chairs and spent much of his time in sleeping, still he managed to draw the money.” A former Christiantown student, Joseph Mingo, in talking to a reporter in 1909, recalled a more active Baylies. Beginning the school at the age of four or five, Mingo was reprimanded for his “slow progress” at learning the alphabet and then, after repeating the mistake, received “a sharp cuff” that knocked him over. Mingo told the reporter that, as a child, he was good at crawling under desks, and with the schoolmaster after him, “[Mingo] led him on a merry chase about the school, crawling under a desk when there was any danger of capture.”57 Less clear is why Narragansetts embraced Baylies and his school without the rancor or dissension that confronted Curtis Coe a decade earlier. One factor might have been the menace of removal. About the same time Baylies made his rounds in 1819, Jedidiah Morse, on behalf of the U.S. secretary of war, asked each of the remaining New England tribes whether they had an interest in moving west. The Narragansetts rejected the idea, telling Morse via the Reverend Brown that “we wish not to be removed into a wild country.”58 The Mohegans remember today that this threat led the tribe’s elders in the 1830s to work with a nearby white woman to establish a school and a church on their reserve.59 But there must have been more. No one in the tribe objected and a large number attended when Baylies preached at the Narragansetts’ meetinghouse several times during his first visit in the summer of 1819. They also permitted him to accept eager partners in reform

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about ten white children into their school, which they had utterly rejected when suggested by Coe.60 Seemingly, changing conditions within the tribe (perhaps more awareness of the problems of illiteracy and threat of alcohol abuse?) and within the area as the Second Great Awakening spread made the Narragansetts more amenable to change, much as they had embraced Christianity in the 1740s. Perhaps they felt more amiable after Coe and teacher Silas Shores proved trustworthy. Another very important factor was Baylies himself. Baylies came to know Native individuals and their communities very well, and they in turn knew and trusted him, as indicated by the details in his reports to the spg. In 1821 he told the society’s secretary, “I make it a point frequently to call at their houses, and in particular, to visit them when sick, in these visits I am always treated with attention.”61 This was not a boast and probably reflected a long habit with the Chappaquiddicks since he arrived on the Vineyard two decades earlier. Two years later, Baylies made a census of all the Indian communities on the island — Farm Neck, Deep Bottom, Gay Head, Chappaquiddick, and Christiantown — showing the sex, age, and percentages of Indian, “Negro,” and “white” ancestry of each individual. While such “blood ratio” accounts frequently reek of racism, this one seems quite accurate in light of a similar census of Gay Head taken by Moses Howwoswee in 1792 and therefore points to very close connections between Baylies and the Vineyard Indians.62 An important reason the Indians trusted and accepted Baylies was that he worked to involve the Indians in the administration and teaching of schools. His strategy and efforts could be seen as a reflection of the democratic and voluntaristic aspects of the Second Great Awakening, but few, if any, other reformers considered Indians (or people of color) qualified for such responsible positions. Baylies displayed in other ways a respect and open-mindedness that was unique. He frequently and consistently praised Native students and their communities as serious, hardworking, orderly, and intelligent. He utterly rejected the racial dogma of the time, telling the spg in 1830 that “the situation of the natives is evidently improving, and may they continue to improve, until they arrive to the stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus.”63 Religion formed another critical link between the Indians and Baylies, for he accepted without scorn their ways of worship. He worked among Vineyard groups as a teacher and a preacher for years without pay, which for some was the critical distinction between a true minister and an agent of Mammon. For example, Coe wrote that Narragansett church members had objected to his giving a sermon in their meetinghouse in June 1811 because “they wanted to hear no preacher that was paid — That my preaching prevented their speaking when they felt the spirit — That I was of a different denomination — That it was dan54

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gerous to give way, lest they should lose their government.”64 Clearly neither the Narragansetts nor the other tribes feared that they might lose their government — ecclesiastical or political — to Baylies. He was not particularly concerned about theology or dogma: he made a point of attending Sunday services at each tribe’s meetinghouse and routinely praised their regular attendance and moral condition. They in turn accepted him. Baylies was unusual in his ecumenical support for the Indian churches. His colleague at Mashpee, Phineas Fish, a quasi-Unitarian minister also supported by the spg and by Harvard College, considered the Indians as children, refused to help them when they had conflicts with their white guardians, and barred a Baptist Wampanoag preacher, Joseph Amos, and his flock (which included all but a few Mashpees) from the tribe’s meetinghouse. In 1833, the Mashpees revolted against their guardians and Fish and finally considered their efforts complete in 1840 when they evicted the minister from their meetinghouse and the parsonage. A decade later, just before his death, he told the spg that the Indians showed “a considerable degree of false ambition of equality with Whites, without proper fitness for it.”65 While the ability of ministers and magistrates to create organizations like the spg or the American Bible Society was an important element in the Second Great Awakening, circa 1790–1830, this was also a period when a particular denomination’s style or content (such as the Unitarians’ supra-rationalism or the Methodists’ antinomian egalitarianism) generally reflected the preferences of a particular socioeconomic class or ethnic group, which made it harder to “cross over” from one to another. But Baylies’s approach disappointed and bothered some spg officials. In May 1835, a review committee expressed disappointment that Baylies hired Indians for most of the school year instead of teaching himself, and while granting that he was “sincere” and “useful as a schoolmaster,” the committee regretted that he did not have “more zeal” as a preacher. The society then dispatched Francis Parkman to inspect the Indian schools, churches, and communities. Local magistrates and Natives praised Baylies’s virtues, efforts, and success. But Parkman found far fewer Indian students and congregants than reported by Baylies — many were fearful or hostile to visitors — and so challenged the missionary’s reports and effectiveness. Parkman also focused on Baylies’s failure to press his religious mission and, like the committee’s report in May, urged the spg to employ an orthodox missionary who would have “a more direct spiritual and religious influence on the people.” Yet he also realized that in all five communities the people were devoted Baptists or Methodists “deeply attached” to their “exciting strain of preaching,” and he doubted whether any society missionary could be more effective. One of the Mayhews told him that “Blind Joe” Amos eager partners in reform

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“would be more acceptable than the best taught or ablest missionary our Society would send.”66 Despite such critical reports, in November the spg renewed its stipend. In April, Baylies sent his spring 1836 report to the society. Since he “considered an education an object of the first importance,” he had obtained a $50 grant from the state legislature for the Vineyard Indian schools. Baylies also highlighted his ecumenical approach to working with the tribes and their positive response. He worshiped one Sunday at the Nantucket Baptist meetinghouse that Parkman had ignored, noting with pride that “we had a small but a respectable congregation.” Another Sunday he attended the Narragansett church and reminded the spg that its elder and lay minister Moses Stanton was “a good character.” And back on the Vineyard, Baylies told his orthodox supporters, he often worshiped alongside Baptist minister Henry Marchant, and the two discussed working together. No wonder, as he concluded, “I am treated with kindness by the various tribes.” Unfortunately, several months later, Baylies died of apoplexy during a trip to New York. With his death, the spg’s efforts in New England ended, and the legislatures began to fund Indian schools along with other state educational efforts.67


We know little of Baylies’s life and work outside of his letters and the occasional testimony of friends like Oliver Brown and Joseph Thaxter. He was not college educated, which perhaps made him less authoritarian and more flexible in his relations with the Natives. The spg committee and investigator criticized him for not spending enough time directly supervising the schools because he did not try to correct the religious “errors” or lax ways of the Indian churches and even enjoyed worshiping with the Baptists. But this inattention and appreciation were precisely what the Indians needed so they could rebuild and learn to manage their schools, and also perhaps to learn to trust a white man with power. Baylies did keep ultimate control over the schools, including dispersing salaries and supplies, but provided a very high degree of latitude to Indian teachers and school committees. He also had no interest in trying to reshape, let alone control, the Indian churches. A similar situation developed at the same time at Mohegan, where tribal elders eagerly grasped a church, a school, and a set of reforms offered by a cadre of devout young Anglo-American women who, like Baylies, were willing to give much of the leadership to Native elders and teachers.68 This democratic approach was part of a larger development in the Second Great Awakening, as ministers and others organized ordinary men and women 56

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to become active citizens in a multitude of social, religious, and political societies. Sociologists note that this movement saw the replacement of vertical social arrangements, featuring an unambiguous hierarchy in tightly knit towns and villages, with horizontal associations that united individuals of similar class, occupation, or interest. More conservative New England magistrates and ministers feared their loss of authority and the threat of social disorder of this development, but more saw the great potential in transforming Americans from passive, obedient subjects into informed, active participants in the Republic — and in their own Christian salvation. This shift and the reformers who were part of it offered new powers and opportunities to Indians.69 While the spg’s activity in the region faded in the wake of Baylies’s death, Indian groups became increasingly involved with state governments, in large part because reformers played an increasingly significant role in state politics and policies, particularly as the Whig Party coalesced. Special legislative commissions and commissioners visited and reported on the Narragansetts, Mohegans, and all the Massachusetts Indian communities many times in the second quarter of the century.70 Antebellum New England state governments studied a range of perceived social and moral problems and then designed policies, programs, and agencies to implement solutions. State instead of spg backing did not cause any noticeable changes in tribal churches or schools because officials considered public support for education, religion, and welfare to be key aspects of a morally sound society.71 The reforms that legislatures encouraged and financed among Indians were initially schools and guardians but increasingly involved economic developments including the division of reservation lands in severalty, the protection of key resources such as fish and wood, and the development of new enterprises such as tourism. Indian communities were already experienced in dealing with state agents and legislatures and built new relationships with these governments upon the foundation of their spg connections.72 After Baylies died, the reforms that he had fostered continued to shape the Indian communities, as women and men became increasingly involved in tribal churches, schools, temperance societies, and other organizations that sought to improve the community. Schools met for longer sessions, gained state funds, and were taught by members of the tribe; alcoholism decreased; men became more likely to stay within the community, and many tended farms; and families and communities became more stable and comfortable. At midcentury, a Massachusetts commission described many reforms. The Chappaquiddicks were “chaste . . . temperate . . . and comfortable, not inferior, in dress, manners, and intelligence, to their white neighbors” — which the Indians supposedly attribeager partners in reform

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uted to their land division two decades before. Most Gay Headers worked farms, and sailors returned to settle down after following the sea for a few years.73 In 1858, a Rhode Island commissioner reported similar progress among the Narragansetts: a quarter century ago, “many suffered, during the inclement season of the year, for all the necessaries of life; now, they are provided with comfortable dwellings, are well clad, and have proper supplies of food.”74 At the same time, many tribal institutions remained as they had been before Baylies’s arrival. Gay Head and Narragansett still governed themselves through annual meetings and tribal councils and had Baptist churches serve as social and political as well as religious centers. Gay Headers continued to treat their reserve as common territory, and economic equality and communal harmony remained a virtue. Men of the tribe continued to go whaling, after 1880 taking the transcontinental railroad to San Francisco to sign on for voyages to the Arctic. Similarly, while the Narragansett council continued to lease land, sell timber permits, and set off areas to members of the tribe, most of the tribe’s four thousand acres remained open to the entire community to maintain a subsistence economy. A large number of the tribe’s members lived in nearby towns to earn their living, returning for the annual elections or regional church gathering. By midcentury, that gathering had become a fair that attracted people throughout the region to attend prayer meetings, eat Narragansett food, buy Narragansett crafts, and gawk at the Indians doing all of those things.75 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Indian communities in southern New England became a special target of Anglo-American reformers. Native leaders and many of their people embraced the agenda of this movement because they agreed that their communities needed improvements. Alcohol, poverty, and prejudice were dire threats. At the same time, they were wary of whites, including reformers, for in the past Anglo-Americans had tried to take control of community institutions and resources and had treated them as children or with racist contempt. The Baptist movement provided new opportunities for Indians to reclaim or rebuild their churches and offered Native leaders authority and recognition. Not surprisingly, they were concerned that the more orthodox reformers would take or try to reshape their churches. In this atmosphere, Baylies played a key role in becoming their eager partner in reform. He provided critical financial and political support from the spg while allowing the Indian communities and their institutions to maintain their authority and autonomy. Just as important, he celebrated and participated in their religious meetings. Frederick Baylies was one of the last in a long line of New England Indian missionaries that began with Thomas Mayhew Jr. and John Eliot. For the Natives with whom he worked, he was one of the more useful ones. 58

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Notes 1. Baylies, Edgartown, to Abiel Holmes, Secretary of SPG, September 28, 1819, SPG Papers, box 1, folder 8, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (hereafter cited as SPGPE). 2. SPG petition to the Legislature requesting support from Governor John Hancock . . . 20 June 1788 (Boston: Adams and Nourse, 1788); “Petition of the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and others,” American Magazine 4 (1789): 430–31; Massachusetts, Act to Incorporate Certain Persons, By the name of the Society, for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others, in North America (Boston: Adams and Nourse, 1787). A history of the SPG published by the society in 1887 began by noting that it was “continuing operations long before pursued” by the London-based organization (Society for Propagating the Gospel, The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America, 1787–1887 [Boston: printed for the Society, 1887], 5). 3. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 178; Daniel Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter cited as MHSC), ser. 1, 1 (1792): 166, 184–93. The scholarly literature on Eliot, the Mayhews, and related concerns is quite impressive. Important works include Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Dane Morrison, A Praying People: Massachusett Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600–1690 (New York: P. Lang, 1995); Harold Von Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646–1730,” New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 400–404; Yasuhide Kawashima, Puritan Justice and the Indian: White Man’s Law in Massachusetts, 1630–1763 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986); James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 218–70; Kathleen Bragdon, “ ‘Another Tongue Brought In’: An Ethnohistorical Study of Native Writings in Massachusett” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1981); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 15–31, 231–53; Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 31 (1974): 27–54; and Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (1965), 3rd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 247–52, 263–66. 4. David Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17–77; James P. Ronda, “Generations of Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 38 (1983): 367–94; Bragdon, “‘Another Tongue Brought In.’” 5. Gookin, “Historical Collections,” 196–200; Joseph Hinckley, “Letter to William Stoughton and Joseph Dudley [April 2, 1685],” MHSC, 4th ser., 5 (1861): 133; Grindal Rawson and Samuel Danforth, “Account of an Indian Visitation, AD 1698,” 133–34. 6. As Kristina Bross points out, Eliot and the Massachusetts Bay magistrates sought recognition for their missionary effort because in the wake of the English Civil War the colony needed a new purpose to retain its place as “the Citie upon a Hill” (Kristina Bross, Dry Bones

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and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004]). 7. William Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776: Missionary Society to the American Indians (London: Longmans, 1961). 8. Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Daniel Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indian Communities in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Bragdon, “‘Another Tongue Brought In.’” 9. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 56–63, 162–66; Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 55–56, 126–27. 10. William Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” American Ethnologist 40, no. 1 (1983): 253–71; William Simmons and Cheryl Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765–1776 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982). In September 1827, a correspondent told the SPG in Boston that the tribe’s church “goes by the Name of Free well [will] Baptist Ben So a Part a Bout Eighty years A go Elder Samuel Niles the first Indian was ever ordained over Church in this Parts” (anonymous to SPG, in SPG Papers, box 3, folder September 1, 1827–September 17, 1827, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. [hereafter cited as MHS]). On the history of the Free Will Baptists, see Stephen Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 64–67, 86–88. 11. David J. Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life: A View from the Islands and Cape Cod,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 264–98; Douglas Winiarski, “A Question of Plain Dealing: Josiah Cotton, Native Christians, and the Quest for Security in Eighteenth-Century Plymouth County,” New England Quarterly 77 (2004): 368–413; Laura Murray, ed., To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Mandell, Behind the Frontier; Laurie Weinstein, “Land Politics and Power: The Mohegan Indians in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Man in the Northeast 42 (1991): 9–16. 12. Rawson and Danforth, “Account of an Indian Visitation,” 129–34; E. Jennifer Monaghan, “ ‘She Loved to Read in Good Books’: Literacy and the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1643– 1725,” History of Education Quarterly 30 (1990): 502–3n38; David Silverman, “The Impact of Indentured Servitude on the Society and Culture of Southern New England Indians, 1680– 1810,” New England Quarterly 74 (2001): 656–57. At least 30 percent of Natick Indians were literate in 1720, and many petitions from Natick individuals around midcentury boasted of their children’s education (Bragdon, “‘Another Tongue Brought In,’” 55; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 92, 94, 96). In 1753, for example, Jacob Chalcom of Natick told the Massachusetts legislature that he had a son and two daughters and “hath learned them to Read & Write” (Massachusetts, Colonial Records, Massachusetts Archives, Boston [hereafter cited as MA], 32:417–18). Eight years later, Joseph Ephraim of the same town noted that he “has procured as good an Education for his Children, as his English neighbours” (MA 33:159; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 157). 13. William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620– 1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 168–71, 268–69. 14. See, for example, Gay Head petition (11 men and 21 women), 1785, Massachusetts documents related to Passed Legislation, Archives, Boston (hereafter cited as MPL), ch. 4, Resolu-

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tions of 1785; Christiantown petition (7 men and 4 women), January 29, 1805, MPL, ch. 84, Acts of 1804; Chappaquiddick petition (17 men, 23 women, and 4 indeterminable), May 24, 1810, Massachusetts documents related to unpassed Senate legislation, Archives, Boston (hereafter cited as MUSL), no. 4093; Yarmouth Indian petition (15 men and 17 women), January 14, 1829, MUSL, no. 6568; Ebenezer Skiff, Gay Head, to Frederick Baylies, February 3, 1823, Misc. Bound Docs., MHS; John Deforest, History of the Indians of Connecticut, from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford: William Jason Hamersley, 1851), 420; Rhode Island, Report of the Commissioner of the Narragansett Tribe of Indians, Made to the General Assembly at Its January Session, 1858 (Providence, 1858), 6; Dwight R. Adams, George Carmichael Jr., and George B. Carpenter, Report of the Committee of Investigation; A Historical Sketch and Evidence Taken, Made to the House of Representatives in its January Session, A.D. 1880 (Providence, 1880), 29, 45–46. 15. Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Servitude in Early Rhode Island,” in Calloway and Salisbury, Reinterpreting New England Indians, 137–73; Silverman, “Impact of Indentured Servitude,” 657–60. 16. In 1767, two “gentlemen” in a Connecticut tavern told prospective missionary and teacher David Crosby that “they could never respect an Indian, Christian or no Christian so as to put him on a level with white people on account especially to eat at the same Table, no — not with Mr. Ocham [Occom] himself be he ever so much a Christian or ever so Learned” (David Crosby, East Hartford, to Eleazar Wheelock, November 4, 1767, no. 767604.1, Wheelock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.). 17. William DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1899), 247–90, 305; Kevin McBride, “The Historical Archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots, 1637–1900: A Preliminary Analysis,” in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Rise and Fall of an American Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 96–116; Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren. 18. Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), 1:7–8; Josiah H. Benton, Early Census-Making in Massachusetts, 1643–1765 (Boston: Goodspeed, 1905); Gay Head petition to Massachusetts legislature, May 18, 1816, in MUSL, no. 8029, 1816. 19. The Narragansett reserve held 35.4 percent of all Indians in Rhode Island in 1774 and 53.3 percent in 1782 (“The Number of Indians in Rhode Island . . . Taken between the 4th of May and the 14th of June, 1774,” in MHSC, 1st ser., 10 [1809]: 119; 1782 census in Records of the State of Rhode Island [Providence, 1783], 653). On the influence of Brotherton, see Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians, 247–90, 305; Third Annual Report of Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians (Providence, 1883), 12. 20. Curtis Coe, journal, with unnumbered and generally undated pages, June 4–September 11, 1811, box 1, folder 21, SPGPE; Providence [R.I.] Journal, August 14, 1843, reprinted as “The Narragansett Indians of R.I.,” Niles’ National Register, August 26, 1843, 45. 21. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 180–82; Hawley to SPG, September 2, 1795, S. P. Savage Papers, 2:218, MHS; Daniel Mandell, “ ‘We, as a Tribe, Will Rule Ourselves’: Mashpee’s Struggle for Autonomy, 1745–1840,” in Calloway and Salisbury, Reinterpreting New England Indians, 299–340. 22. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 182; Elisha Clapp to Jedidiah Morse, July 22, 1808, Misc. Bound Docs, MHS. 23. Elisha Clapp wrote in 1808 that the Christiantown meetinghouse had been “used by

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sectaries & itinerants” — a common term for Free Will Baptists, Methodists, and other radical Christian preachers (Clapp to Morse, July 22, 1808, Misc. Bound Docs, MHS). In 1809, Chappaquiddick was the center of a Baptist revival despite its lack of a church building (Abisha Samson, Tisbury, to Joseph Grafton, Newton, February 3, 1810, in Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Magazine 2 [1810]: 300–301). On the increasing authoritarianism of mainstream Baptist churches in southern New England, see Susan Juster, Disorderly Women, Sexual Politics and Evangelism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 108–44. 24. Daniel R. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780– 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), chap. 2; Silverman, “Church in New England Indian Community Life,” 278–83; Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760–1880,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 466–501; Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 164–201. 25. Coe journal, June 4–September 11, 1811, SPGPE; William Apess, “Son of the Forest,” in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 40; William Apess, “Experiences of Five Christian Indians,” in O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 150. On the visionary culture in eighteenthcentury America and Europe, see Douglas Winiarski, “Souls Filled With Ravishing Transport: Heavenly Visions and the Radical Awakening in New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 56 (2004): 41–42, and Mark S. Schantz, Piety in Providence: Class Dimensions of Religious Experience in Antebellum Rhode Island (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 47. 26. Edward Kendall, Travels through the Northern Parts of the United States in the Years 1807 and 1808, 3 vols. (New York: I. Riley, 1809), 2:49–50, 183; Melissa J. Fawcett, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 23–27, 31–36; Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 162–71; Frank G. Speck, “Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut: A Mohegan-Pequot Diary,” Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report 43, 1925–26 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1928), 224, 245, 254, 273–76; Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy: Treasure Seeking in the American North-East,” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 8. 27. Coe journal, June 24–October 17, 1809, July 7–December 7, 1810, SPGPE. 28. Zechariah Mayhew to Thacher, May 22, 1792, June 15, 1793, July 28, 1801, box 3, folder 11, SPGPE; Joel Perlmann, Silvana R. Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver, “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (1997): 127–31; Kendall, Travels through the Northern Parts, 2:197; Gay Head to Massachusetts legislature, July 13, 1811, box 19, Massachusetts Governor’s Council Files, Massachusetts Archives (hereafter cited as MGCF). 29. Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in EighteenthCentury Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 4; Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11, 19–51; Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), esp. 84, 88. 30. John Lathrop, A Discourse before the Society for Propagating the Gospel (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1804), 17. 31. Daniel Little to Richard Cary, August 1786, in Richard Cary, To the Members of the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians. . . . Charlestown, Mass., May 27, 1789 (Boston:

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S. Hall, 1789); Little to Thacher, November 24, 1790, in A Brief Account of the Present State of the Society for Propagating the Gospel . . . [a] Supplement to the Independent Chronicle, Thursday, February 3, 1791 (Boston: Thomas Adams, 1791), 2–3; Frederick Lewis Weis, The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America (Dublin, N.H.: printed for the Society, 1953), 28; SPG, Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians (Cambridge, Mass., 1887), 40–41; James Winthrop, A Sermon Delivered before the Society for Propagating the Gospel . . . November 7, 1811 (Boston: John Eliot Jr., 1812), 35–36; A Brief of the Account of the Present State, . . . of the Society (Boston, 1795), 1–2; Brief Account of the Present State . . . 1791, 1. On the “white Indians” of Maine, see Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 32. Coe journal, June 22–July 14, 1811, July 21, 1811, June 4–September 11, 1811, SPGPE. 33. Joshua Bates, A Sermon Delivered before the Society for Propagating the Gospel (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1813), 29–41; “Domestic Missions, Narragansett Indians,” Religious Intelligencer (New Haven, Conn.), March 15, 1817, 662–63. 34. Johann Neem, “The Elusive Common Good: Religion and Civil Society in Massachusetts, 1780–1833,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (2004): 381–417; Sassi, Republic of Righteousness. 35. Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 12. In 1820, when Jedidiah Morse sought information on southern New England tribes, he also asked whether they would sell their reserves and move west. All refused, but his query must have sensitized them to the threat (Jedidiah Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War of the United States on Indian Affairs [New Haven: Converse, 1822]). 36. Thaxter to James Lothrop, September 30, 1808, Misc. Bound Docs, MHS. 37. Bob Juch, “Bob Juch’s Kin [Frederick Baylies/Sally Lee],” freepages.genealogy.rootsweb. com/~bobjuch/fam/fam01231.htmœ, updated June 5, 2002, accessed July 1, 2004. His first son, Frederick Baylies II, became one of the most famous architects on the Vineyard and designed the Mariner’s Church in Edgartown, which today hosts the town’s historical society. There are no records on Baylies other than these dates (gleaned from local vital records) and the letters relating to his work among the Indians beginning in 1808. A box of documents from Baylies donated to the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society in 1993 by a descendant contained no records or letters before he began working with the Indians. 38. Chappaquiddicks to SPG, February 12, 1810, doc. 32; Thaxter to SPG, January 15, 1810, June 13, 1810, November 29, 1810, all doc. 34; Baylies to Harvard College, June 11, 1810, unnumbered, all in Letters, Harvard Grants for Work among the Indians, Harvard University Archives, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as Harvard Grants). 39. Baylies to Abiel Holmes, May 5 and 16, 1819 (same letter), box 1, folder 8, SPGPE (unless noted otherwise, all Baylies’s letters in SPGPE are in this box and folder); Baylies to Holmes, May 25, 1819, SPGPE; SPG committee report, May 22, 1835, folder May 15, 1835–September 29, 1835, box 6, SPG Records, MHS. SPG records show Baylies being paid just once, in 1818 (Society for Propagating the Gospel, Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians [1887], 40–41). He could have been paid out of the colonial-era Boyles and Williams funds administered by Harvard College, which the SPG or its key members managed and were used to pay the salary of Mashpee minister Phineas Fish, but the extant records for that fund end in 1812 (Harvard Grants, UAI 20.720), and the SPG committee report of 1835 noted that two years earlier Baylies had been granted an annual salary of $350 “from this Society.” 40. Baylies to Abiel Holmes, May 5 and 16, 1819 (same letter), SPGPE; Baylies to Holmes, May 25, 1819, SPGPE.

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41. Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, March 20, 1820, SPGPE. 42. Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, SPGPE. Peabody took the Presbyterian pulpit at Kingston in 1820. J. R. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, Rhode Island (New York: W. W. Preston and Co., 1889), 553. 43. Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, March 20, 1820, SPGPE. 44. Ibid. 45. Baylies to Holmes, October 10, 1820, SPGPE; chap. 7, approved June 15, 1820, Resolves of 1820, MPL, including Chappaquiddick, “Petition of a Committee of the Natives on the island of Chapbaquiddick, May 15, 1820”; Baylies to Holmes, October 10, 1820, SPGPE. 46. Baylies to Holmes, October 10, 1820, SPGPE; Baylies to Alden Bradford, Boston, April 14, 1823; Baylies to Holmes, March 15, 1824; Baylies to Holmes, April 13, 1824; Baylies to Holmes, April 15, 1825; Baylies to Holmes, January 25, 1826, all in SPGPE. 47. This tragedy fed the general myth of the disappearing Indian: Crèvecoeur described it in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer and opined that the Natives “appear to be a race doomed to recede and disappear before the superior genius of the Europeans.” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 121. The story was also described by Andrew Oliver in a letter to Israel Manduit, undated, reprinted in American Magazine 5 (1789): 28, and Massachusetts Magazine 7 (1789): 636–37. 48. Essex Boston, Betty Boston, and Jeffrey Summons to SPG, Boston, May 17, 1822, box 1, SPGPE (thanks to Nathaniel Philbrick for sending me a transcript of this document); Baylies, Edgartown, to Alden Bradford, Boston, April 14, 1823, SPGPE. 49. Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, SPGPE; Massachusetts, chap. 89, Resolves of 1826 (Gay Head schoolhouse), MPL; chap. 43, Resolves of 1828 (Christiantown schoolhouse), MPL; Baylies to Holmes, April 13, 1824, April 15, 1825, January 25, 1826, SPGPE; Baylies to Alden Bradford, May 21, 1832, May 20, 1833, SPGPE; Baylies, journal (dated January 10, 1827), SPG Papers, box 3, folder 1827–January 24, 1827, MHS; Baylies to Abiel Holmes, January 1, 1828, SPG Papers, box 4, folder January 1828–January 22, 1828, MHS; Baylies to Abiel Holmes, January 1, 1829, SPG Papers, box 5, folder January 1829–March 31, 1829, MHS; Baylies to SPG, January 1, 1830, SPG Papers, box 5, folder January 1, 1830–April 11, 1830, MHS; Baylies to Alden Bradford, March 20, 1834, SPG Papers, box 5, folder January 1834–October 10, 1834, MHS; Baylies to Bradford, April 8, 1835, SPG Papers, box 6, folder January 26, 1835–April 8, 1835, MHS. After 1825, Baylies’s reports became very brief and often identified the other teacher as simply “a woman” or “a man.” 50. Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, SPGPE; Peter Thacher reporting for SPG Committee, May 22, 1835, SPG Papers, box 6, MHS. The number of students in each of Baylies’s schools fluctuated widely during the 1820s, although he provided figures only for the one to four weeks that he personally taught at each community. 51. David Wright to Walker and Parkman, Boston, April 9, 1839, SPG Papers, box 7, folder January 19, 1839–May 25, 1839, MHS. 52. Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, SPGPE; Baylies to SPG, March 20, 1820, SPGPE; Oliver Brown to SPG in letter from Baylies to Holmes, September 13, 1825, SPG Papers, box 3, folder August 16, 1825–December 1826, MHS. 53. Brown to Holmes, September 1, 1827, SPG Papers, box 3, folder August 16, 1825–December 1826, MHS. 54. Baylies to Holmes, March 15, 1824, SPGPE; Baylies to Holmes, January 1, 1828, SPG Papers, box 4, folder January 1828–January 22, 1828, MHS.

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55. Baylies to Alden Bradford, April 8, 1835, SPG Papers, box 6, folder January 26, 1835–April 8, 1835, MHS; Mandell, Tribe, Race, History, chap. 4. 56. Baylies to SPG, March 20, 1820, SPGPE; Rhode Island, report of legislative committee on Narragansetts, January 1830, doc. 80, Narragansett file, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence (hereafter cited as NRIA); chap. 7, Acts of 1820, MPL; accounts of Chappaquiddick church, box 30, MGCF; Morse, Report to the Secretary of War, 71–72; Kendall, Travels through the Northern Parts of the United States, 2:196. While about forty Narragansett students attended Baylies’s school during the late 1820s, when the Narragansett tribal council asked for a share of the Rhode Island school fund in 1828, it noted that it had more than one hundred children under the age of sixteen (Tobias Ross and Narragansett tribal council to Assembly, October 1828, doc. 73, NRIA). 57. Mary A. Cleggett Vanderhoop, “The Gay Head Indians: Their History and Traditions,” series in the New Bedford Evening Standard beginning June 25, 1904; “Old, Forgotten Indian Meeting House on Martha’s Vineyard About Which Center Some of the Most Interesting Traditions of the Island,” New Bedford Sunday Standard, 1909, clipping in Segel, Pierce, Monterosso Collection, Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society. 58. Morse, Report to the Secretary of War, 74. The circumstances indicate that they replied before Baylies appeared on the scene, which meant that they had been put on notice that removal was a potential threat. 59. Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 12. 60. On Sunday, August 21, 1809, the Narragansett tribal council told Curtis Coe that the Narragansett church had thirty to forty members (Coe journal, June 24–October 17, 1809, SPGPE). Baylies noted that he had “generally about 30, or 40 hearers” when he spoke at the Narragansett church in 1819 (Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, SPGPE). 61. Baylies to Holmes, April 20, 1821, SPGPE. 62. Frederick Baylies, “Names & Ages of the Indians on Martha’s Vineyard, Taken About the 1st of Jan. 1823,” uncataloged manuscript, New England Historic Genealogical Society; Moses Howwoswee, 1792 census, Misc. Docs., MHS; Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 229–31. 63. Baylies to SPG, January 1, 1830, box 4, folder January 1, 1830–April 11, 1830, SPG Papers, MHS. See also Baylies to Holmes, September 28, 1819, SPGPE; Baylies, Edgartown, to Abiel Holmes, Cambridge, March 15, 1824, SPGPE; Baylies to Alden Bradford, April 8, 1835, SPG Papers, box 6, folder January 26, 1835–April 8, 1835, MHS; Baylies to Holmes, September 13, 1825, box 3, folder 16, SPG Papers, MHS. 64. Coe journal, June 4–September 11, 1811, SPGPE. 65. Mandell, “‘We, as a Tribe, Will Rule Ourselves’”; Fish, Cotuit, to LK Lathrop, October 13, 1853, box 2, folder 8, SPGPE. Fish was describing the Herring Pond tribe, with which he still worked, but he said similar things about the Mashpees during his tenure there. 66. Peter Thacher, SPG Committee report, May 22, 1835, SPG Papers, box 6, folder May 15, 1835–September 29, 1835, MHS; Francis Parkman, “Report of a Visit of Inquiry at Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, & to the Narragansett Indians [October 27, 1835],” SPG Papers, box 6, folder October 2, 1835–October 31, 1835, MHS. 67. Baylies to Bradford and SPG, April 2, 1836; SPG committee report, November 3, 1836, both in SPG Papers, box 6, folder April 2, 1836–May 23, 1836; folder October 26, 1836–November 28, 1836, MHS. 68. In 1827, Sarah Huntington of nearby Norwich, inspired by stories of missionaries to China and the Sandwich Islands, became “strongly interested” in the Mohegans. By 1830,

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working with Samson Occom’s sister and her daughters, who were also the guardians of the tribe’s traditions, Huntington and a friend established a Sabbath school for children in the Tantiquigeon home. They soon raised enough money from local congregations to build a church at Mohegan on Fort Hill and in 1831 persuaded the U.S. War Department to build a home and fund a salary for a teacher. Two Mohegan elders in their turn set aside land for the church and teacher’s house. The tribe also formed a temperance society. Looking back from 1859, men and women told visitors that their tribe had made substantial economic and moral improvements during the previous two decades and that the young men who had grown up with the school and church were more likely than their fathers to want to stay and farm than to go whaling (Edward Hooker, Memoirs of Mrs. Sarah L. Huntington Smith, 3rd ed. [New York: American Tract Society, 1846], 110–11, 120–21; Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 12, 53; Speck, “Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut,” 255; Trudie Lamb Richmond and Amy E. Den Ouden, “Recovering Gendered Political Histories: Local Struggles and Native Women’s Resistance in Colonial Southern New England,” in Calloway and Salisbury, Reinterpreting New England Indians, 187–88; “Disposition of the Mohegan Tribe Lands,” Norwich Daily Courier, June 7, 1859, 2, cols. 3–5). 69. Neem, “Elusive Common Good.” 70. Connecticut Assembly committee report on the Golden Hill Paugussetts, 1823, folder 3, Mohegans, 1830, folder 8, and Mashantucket Pequots, 1855, folder 26, all in Connecticut, Record Group 002, General Assembly, Indian Papers, box 1, Connecticut State Archives, Hartford, Conn.; D. L. Childs, H. Stebbins, and D. Fellows Jr., “Report [on the condition of the native Indians and descendants of native Indians, in this Commonwealth],” Massachusetts House Reports, no. 68 (Boston, 1827); F. W. Bird, Whiting Griswold, and Cyrus Weekes, “Report on Condition and Circumstances of Indians Remaining within this Commonwealth,” Massachusetts House Reports, no. 46 (Boston, 1849); John Milton Earle, “Report to the Governor and Council Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth under the Act of April 6, 1859,” Massachusetts Senate Reports, no. 96 (Boston, 1861); Report of the Commissioners on Distribution of Lands of the Mohegan Indians (Hartford, Conn., 1861); Dan King, “Report of Committee on [Narragansett] Indian Tribe,” January 1831, doc. 81, NRIA, Rhode Island State Archives; Joseph Griffin, Narragansett Commissioner Report to the General Assembly (Providence, 1858). See generally Mandell, Tribe, Race, History, chaps. 4–6. 71. In 1838, seven years after Massachusetts officially ended legal and financial support for religious institutions — the last state in the union to do so — the legislature paid for a structure for Herring Pond to serve as both a church and a school; in 1850, the state did the same for Gay Head and five years later financed repairs and improvements for the Mashpee church and schools (Herring Pond to Massachusetts legislature, March 1838, chap. 64, April 17, 1838, MPL; Massachusetts, commission’s report on building the Herring Pond school house, March 20, 1839, box 49, June 1838–March 1839, MGCF; Thaxter, report to governor, December 31, 1850, box 63, June 1850–February 1857, MGCF; Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, chap. 35, April 26, 1855). 72. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History, chaps. 4–6. 73. Bird, Griswold, and Weekes, “Report,” 7, 19, 25; see also Earle, “Report.” 74. Report of the Commissioner on the Narragansett Tribe of Indians, Made to the General Assembly at Its January Session, 1858, in Acts and Resolves, app. (Providence, 1858), 6. 75. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History, esp. chaps. 4–6; Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 247.

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crisscrossing projec ts of sovereignt y and conversion cherokee christians and new engl and missionaries during the 1820s Joel W. Martin

During the fall of 1823, New England church officials of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (abcfm) enlisted Cherokee convert David Brown, then a twenty-two-year-old student at Andover Theological Seminary studying Hebrew, Greek, and French, to embark on a grand speaking tour in the eastern United States to promote the cause of missions to Native Americans. This tour, although almost completely overlooked by scholars today, generated a great deal of contemporary press coverage and anticipated the tour of the more famous convert and Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot. Most important, it can be reconstructed in precise detail not just to illumine the missionary cause but also to recover a different but vital project oriented toward indigenous ends beyond evangelism. Indeed, by examining David Brown’s participation and contributions, including the hour-long speech he gave to great acclaim in eastern cities, we can argue that he deliberately sought to enlist missionaries and a larger non-Native public in the urgent political cause of defending the rights of the Cherokee people. His project, then, was primarily a Cherokee-centric one, and it existed in negotiated tension with the different project of the missionaries, as their responses and as his actions and writing during and after the tour reveal. Another way to put this, metaphorically, is to say that these projects were interlaced, tightly, but at off-setting angles. I liken this integrated duality to the two images printed or presented on a medium using the lenticular process. This process displays two images on the same surface, but because each can be seen only from a distinct angle, only one can be seen fully at a time. For example, in some automobiles, the controlled alignment of pixels on a digital dashboard

screen allows the driver and the passenger to see different things on the same monitor at the same time. So it is, analogously, with these two projects and their narration. Though historians’ gaze has been locked onto this encounter largely from one angle only — an angle that was fixed by the missionaries and then largely internalized by subsequent historians — another image, another project, always existed, interlaced, with the familiar one focused on missionaries’ efforts to effect conversion. We need to recover that interlaced project, and we can do so, using the same archive, by shifting the angle of our approach to bring the Cherokee project into visibility. When we do so, we will realize that, at a critical moment in Cherokee history, Cherokee intellectuals like David Brown sought to convert influential whites to the cause of defending Cherokee sovereignty — and, further, that to a significant degree they succeeded.1


The speaking tour arose serendipitously. David Brown and Jeremiah Evarts, the corresponding secretary for the abcfm, had originally planned to travel south together in October 1823 to visit Brown’s home, abcfm missions, and the Cherokee council in the Cherokee Nation.2 But after Brown successfully gave solo public talks “on the condition of the Indians” during the summer and fall of 1823 in Salem, Boston, Cambridge, and Newton,3 Evarts thought to couple the trip south with a public relations and fund-raising campaign to support abcfm missions more generally. abcfm missionaries wanted and needed the support of the New England middle class for their mission project, which received federal subsidies, depended heavily upon grassroots benevolent societies organized by women and men in New England, faced competition from other denominations, and encountered opposition from opportunistic whites who desired to remove or “exterminate” Native Americans and take their lands. Accordingly, missionaries linked their project to mainstream Protestant piety and to the “civilizing” mission associated with the modern nation-state and its reformers. In publications, missionaries celebrated their efforts to promote not just Christ and the practice of prayer but also their understanding of literacy, agriculture, proper dress, chaste sexual ethics, and conventional gender relations. The speaking tour would convey this message in an especially powerful way. Through staged public appearances of the well-dressed, eloquent Cherokee convert David Brown, the missionaries could provide “ocular demonstration” to whites of the validity of the missionary project, its capacity to transform “savages” into civilized persons.4 Before launching the tour, Evarts first arranged a kind of audition with a group of auditors and donor prospects. Evarts and Brown met in Newton and 68

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then traveled by stage to Worcester. There, on the evening of December 11, 1823, they spoke before a gathering of prominent citizens, many of them attorneys in town for court week. Evarts spoke first and for fifteen minutes, providing a few general comments about David Brown and his family, including the late and widely known Catharine Brown, one of the abcfm’s most famous converts and David Brown’s sister.5 David Brown followed and spoke much longer. The ensuing special collection — $65 — spoke for itself, confirming that this type of performance could yield goodwill and solid returns for the cause of missions. At a planning meeting the next day, seven clergy and Evarts concluded, “David would make the best agent we could have.”6 Having found its star, the tour began. In the ensuing weeks, usually introduced by Evarts, David Brown would speak in Hartford, New Haven, New York, Newark, New Brunswick, Princeton, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg. He gave multiple talks in New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond.7 Along the way, Evarts conducted important abcfm business, connected with wealthy donors, discussed possible mergers with other missionary bodies, and scouted for rising ministers who might be worthy of a pulpit in Boston. In parallel fashion, David Brown, when not at the podium, pursued his own agenda of generating goodwill and social capital for the Cherokee people. Visiting or dining with prominent citizens such as the president of Yale College, he built a network of important and well-connected white allies, people with whom he would correspond subsequently to gain support for Cherokee political objectives. As their fund-raising tour progressed, Brown’s delivery of his speech only improved. By New York he could deliver it without consulting his manuscript. As would be expected for someone speaking from memory, “occasionally he omits, or alters, a sentence,” Evarts noted.8 In Princeton, Brown dropped an ethnographically detailed description of Cherokee divination practices that he had observed years earlier as a participant in a planned skirmish with the Osage people in Arkansas. In Richmond, Virginia, he remembered to include this description of the “religious rites of his nation,” but he also improvised by inserting a special reference to Powhatan, the most famous Native American leader from Virginia. His message was universally appreciated: “All present seemed to acknowledge that he had found the avenue to their hearts.”9 Everywhere, it appears he enthralled and touched audiences. By the end of the tour the Boston Recorder could summarize with some satisfaction: “The crowded audiences, the liberal contributions, the substantial approbation, which have followed the performances of David Brown, so recently an unlettered savage, will cause crisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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Christians to feel that their labor is not in vain.”10 Just as Brown’s performances impressed his audiences, the response of audiences reassured church officials, completing a virtuous cycle. Both audiences and officials found ample vindication for the cause of missions, thanks to the tour. Unaddressed, however, was whether David Brown himself felt that his labor on this tour was in vain or valuable and exactly why he delayed his academic studies in order to travel “perpetually . . . from one place to another.”11 We need to ask these questions if we are to avoid collapsing this history into the one narrated by church officials, in which only their conclusions count and their project and its dramas matter. To engage these questions, we must first stop assuming that the missionaries’ cause and Brown’s were perfectly congruent. They were not. There was ample room for collaboration, to be sure, otherwise David Brown would never have climbed into the stagecoach in Newton with Jeremiah Evarts to begin the tour that would put him onstage in so many eastern towns. But, as among almost all things involving Cherokee converts, the co-created production that resulted reflected complex negotiations and dynamic dialogue among Cherokees and missionaries. Cherokees and missionaries, I will argue, were negotiating two distinctive projects that overlapped but also diverged in key ways. One project was initiated by whites, oriented toward the refashioning of Native peoples’ souls, manners, and ways of life and the perpetuation of the missionary apparatus; the other was initiated by Cherokees and designed to gather useful resources and expertise, to build Cherokee-friendly social and political networks in the East, and to effect the conversion or fundamental reorientation of whites toward Native nations so that they would aid in the defense of Cherokee sovereignty. In seeking to describe this interlocked co-produced structure, we are trying to fathom an important colonial encounter, an encounter that was defined to a significant extent by the intersection of multiple projects, some sponsored by colonizers and others by the colonized but all of them touching and affecting both groups. “Projects,” as Nicholas Thomas defines them, are “socially transformative endeavour[s] that are localized, politicized, and partial, yet also engendered by longer historical developments and ways of narrating them.” Colonial (and anticolonial) projects integrate material and ideal aspects. “A project is neither a strictly discursive entity nor an exclusively practical one: because it is a willed creation of historically situated actors it also has roots and ramifications which were not or are not apparent to those involved.” Because of this complexity, the attempt to reconstruct one project, let alone two that were intertwined, is daunting. Perhaps for this reason, most historians writing on these missions and converts have tended to stress the missionaries’ project more than 70

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the Cherokees’, to assume that that project was determinative and that converts were absorbed and defined by it, so much so that these individuals ceased to be authentic or reliable representatives of their people. This essay attempts to correct this imbalance by interpreting the exchange between Cherokees and missionaries as a localized nexus where multiple projects intersected, became complicit, diverged, and clashed in unstable, historically inflected, gendered, and politicized ways, transforming all the subjects involved in original ways with sometimes surprising outcomes.12 With this general framework of colonial exchange and conjoined projects in mind, let us reconsider Brown’s participation in the tour from a different angle and, specifically, seek to understand it as a strategic choice made by a very gifted Cherokee intellectual, patriot, and linguist at a time of utmost threat to his people’s autonomy. I will argue that his literary, performative, and networking labor on the tour was a fruitful investment for his nation, his way to advance the intentional project of gaining white support for Cherokee sovereignty. His talks, then, were a series of co-directed “performances,” highly charged signifying events intentionally designed to touch hearts but also to confront ideologies and prejudices and to produce solidarity for the Cherokee cause. With words, but not just with words, he purposefully sought to disarm ideas and counter policies that harmed Native Americans. Among other things, he would retell American history from a Native American perspective, along the way defending his ancestors without apology. He would hold Europeans and Americans accountable for the chaos they introduced and remind them that they inhabited lands that belonged to Native nations. And while affirming the value of missions and Christianity, he would defend Native American sovereignty in the present and solicit white support for his people’s cause and rights. As much as he supported the missionary cause, this is why he went on the tour and also why he would eventually interrupt it when tensions between the two projects forced a choice.13 His talk began where it had to begin, by engaging and defusing dominant assumptions that whites held about Native Americans’ appearance. Whites, he knew, had trouble recognizing real Native Americans because they were so enraptured with fantastic ones. By 1823, the year of publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers, misrecognition was par for the course in America, with white people in the East seemingly unable to recognize a Native American man or woman who was not dressed like a stereotype. Even though Native Americans such as the Cherokees had long since adopted European clothing, whites coming to hear a Native American speaker expected to see a person dressed in a “savage” manner. David Brown had witnessed this phenomenon crisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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earlier in relation to his celebrated sister Catharine Brown, whom on multiple occasions white people had trouble “reading” as a Native American because of her “civilized” appearance. As one white man wrote in 1822, “If you should see [Catharine Brown] in any circle of young ladies in New-England, you would not notice her particularly except for her dignity of manners and modesty of deportment.”14 The correspondent made an even bolder claim: “Not even a Cherokee, who should enter the mission family as a stranger, would have the least suspicion, but that Catharine was one of the mission sisters from the north.” An even more absurd but telling incident of this type of lack of recognition had occurred in April 1822 in Huntsville, Alabama. “One morning Dr. [Archibald Campbell] and his lady and Catharine walked into one of the stores to purchase some articles. . . . After Catharine and the lady had gone out, the gentleman asked the Dr. — ‘What young lady is that with your wife?’ The Dr. replied: ‘It is a Cherokee.’ . . . The gentleman was much agitated. . . . ‘I don’t believe a word you say.’ ” That the gentleman was an opponent “of the efforts made to civilize the Indians” may have contributed to his refusal to trust a white man committed to that cause, but the pattern of misrecognition was common and growing in influence. As literary scholar Maureen Konkle points out, “By the 1840s, it apparently became de rigueur for Native orators to appear before white audiences in costume, dressed for the part of the Indian.”15 While things were not yet so extreme in 1823–24 that every Native American had to intentionally “play Indian” in order to be recognized as a Native American by whites, David Brown knew he had to confront this confusion on his tour and in his talk.16 Because he dressed like any other young scholar in an American city and thus looked “white” (to whites), David Brown had to come out as a Native American through his words, his testimony. He did so up front, in a repetitive manner, declaiming: “Before I proceed, however, indulge me the pleasure of informing you, that I am one of the sons of the forest. Yea! The image of an Indian is upon me, and aboriginal blood runs in my veins.” Adding to this genealogical heritage, he invoked cultural bona fides that whites equated with “Indianness” in the masculine key. His language, relying upon nature metaphors, was tuned to white expectations regarding authentic “Indian” eloquence: “I have worn the armour of a Cherokee warrior, have traversed the western wilds in pursuit of an Osage scalp, and far towards the setting sun have gone to avenge the blood of my fathers.”17 With these and other biographical particulars, David Brown verified his “Indianness,” even if he did not dress the part. The rest of his talk, which probably took about an hour to deliver, was divided into four major sections arranged chronologically and structured to induce a sense of moral obligation among white listeners: 72

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1. A description of benign precontact America when “no person of European extract was seen in all this vast continent” and “the natives were in a more tranquil and prosperous state” and “in full possession of this country.” 2. A narrative of the catastrophes of the past three hundred years that had devastated Native America, including a description of confusion and despair during the Revolutionary years when Native peoples found themselves “surrounded by foreigners in every quarter.” 3. A portrait of the present prospects of remnant Native nations with particular attention to their traditional religious life, which contains valuable “principles of virtue” but, when viewed “through the gospel of Jesus Christ,” appears immersed in “delusion and gloom” and in need of missionary labors. 4. An affirmation of the equal humanity of Native peoples and their full capacity for civilization and contemporary achievement, with illustrative examples evoking the economic, civic, ethical, and religious successes of the Cherokee Nation, successes credited in part to the supportive benevolence of New England Christians and the U.S. government. Working off this example, the talk concluded with a call to action to support missionaries among Native Americans.18 With the first two sections, which were focused primarily on the past and the long view, Brown provided a Native American version of American history. Brown’s narrative required listeners to consider the consequences of European violence. This portion of the speech, analyzed rhetorically, used the trope of chiasmus to dramatize the severity of change experienced by Native peoples, how their world was turned upside down, and, reciprocally, how Europeans benefited from this very change. The initial terms of full possession of the land by Native nations in an era when no Europeans had reached America flipped violently to a time when Europeans and their descendants possessed almost everything and once mighty Native nations existed no longer in New England. The transition from one order to its inverse was extremely tumultuous and left Native America reeling, even as Europeans profited and occupied lands formerly belonging to sovereign Native nations. Evoking the bitter pathos of postcatastrophic New England, Brown said, Nothing now reminds one of them but a mere name, excepting here and there one of their sons, who had the fortune, or I may rather say the misfortune, to escape the ravages of war. He alone is left to witness the subjugation of the country. When prompted by his religion to visit crisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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the depositories and graves of his ancestors, as he walks lonely through the streets of New England, often is the finger pointed at him, saying, “There goes one of the savages of America.” Friendless and forlorn does he go. No one to drop a sympathetic tear with him while he sighs for his country, and weeps over the sepulchers of his fathers. Brown evoked dispossession and disappearance, anomie and alienation, but he did not stop there. This is significant. As literary scholar Renée L. Bergland notes, at this time many of New England’s most prominent and popular writers were absorbed with spectral aboriginal figures haunting the landscape. Speaking of the last of the Mohicans or otherwise suggesting the end of Native nations, they enacted “a literary removal that reinforced and at times help construct the political Indian Removal.” In contrast, Brown would not leave his audience thinking of Native Americans as “figures of melancholy and loss, homelessness and death.” Instead, Brown turned to consider possible futures for Native nations still extant. In the final two sections of his talk, he assumed that Native American sovereignty and vitality would strengthen as Native people secured the benefits of civilization.19 After approaching a terminal limit, the extreme of extinction, Brown’s talk pivoted away from death and loss to remind listeners that many Native Americans and several Native nations were not in fact gone, that they had survived, and that they were pursuing a vigorous future in America. “Notwithstanding, however, that the aboriginal race is almost extinct in the United States, blessed by God!, there are yet many tribes and nations of them in America. The Indian blood is not all, as yet, wasted away. Though many have already descended, with their ancestors, to the land of shadows, there is yet a remnant.” The Cherokee Nation, he said, provided a good example of a Native nation that had withstood the chaos of colonial invasion, rebounded, and was asserting itself as a sovereign nation and as a closely connected, autonomously governed neighbor of the United States. Cherokees and the Cherokee Nation, Brown argued, were worthy of the respect and support of philanthropically inclined and enlightened people, none of whom, he asserted, would tolerate the racist claim that Native Americans could not handle civilization. His discussion of the Cherokee Nation began with personal stories and autobiographical facts selected to parallel his individual transformation with that of his resurgent nation: “From the plains of Tsusaeyaseaso, beneath the tall trees that bloom in its plain, and not far from the banks of the Tsikcamega, in the Cherokee nation, I sprang, and was there reared up in the habits of my country; of course my parents are heathen.” Significantly, Brown emphasized the anti74

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colonial, Cherokee-centric perspective his parents instilled in him. “Yanugvyaski my honored father, early taught me the religion of my ancestors. Many times did he relate to me, while sitting in some solitary retreat, the wars with Europeans, and the wrongs and losses sustained by them. My fond mother [Tsa luh] too, when I was quite young, often sung for me a mournful song, commemorative of the death of some of my valiant forefathers, who fell in the arms of death while defending the rights of our country.” She also instilled in her son a strong sense of nationalist purpose: “Importunate was she to inform me of the injuries done to her countrymen, and often invoked the Great Spirit to destine her son to aid the return of peace and gladness in all the dwellings of Tsalagi.” His calling, in other words, was to help restore the strength of the Cherokee Nation, and it was with that goal in mind that he addressed white audiences.20 Thus began the third section of his talk, which reported on the “religious views of the Indians.” Providing a short description of beliefs about deities, practices of prophecy during wartime, and an affirmation of the moral character of his compatriots — they show “extreme love to friends, hospitality to strangers, respect for the aged” — Brown suggested ways in which Native religious views seemed wanting when appraised by orthodox Christian doctrine. Using standard evangelical language, he suggested that Native notions of the afterlife were too vague. Even as he made that judgment, however, he equated the moral state of Native Americans with that of any people who were not yet evangelized. For mere historical reasons, they simply did not know better. “When we view them through the gospel of Jesus Christ, we lament their deplorable condition. Like all the heathen nations of the earth they are in darkness.” They did not deserve condemnation and should not be subjected to “an expedition of violence”; they only needed missionaries and teachers bound “on an errand the most benign.” Brown then detailed the secular and spiritual progress occurring among Native Americans, especially among southeastern peoples. The Indians are making rapid advances toward the standard of morality, virtue, and religion. . . . The bow and quiver are converted into utensils of industry. . . . The Cherokee code of laws, legislatures, courts of justice, though as yet in their incipient state, are similar to those of the United States. . . . In the Cherokee and Choctaw nations there are about fifteen schools in which there are four or five hundred Indian children. . . . It must be gratifying to the Christian public that some of the most influential chiefs in the Cherokee nation are now members of the church, . . . fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God. crisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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The message ratified the missionary cause but also affirmed Native American equality. Native Americans were destined to be equals in America, both as individual pilgrims in the church militant, which crossed all boundaries, and corporately as nations constituting distinct sovereign political entities neighboring the United States. Bringing his argument home, Brown offered listeners a chance to repair history, right wrongs, and support benevolence instead of violence. Specifically, he suggested that those occupying Native lands and enjoying the wealth that it helped produce had a special obligation to support the teachers and missionaries in Native communities. He asked: “And who, let me ask, who will send to them missionaries, and support them? Shall not you who now stand on the soil once possessed by the natives?” In effect, Brown challenged his listeners to realize that, even if they were not individually guilty of dispossession, they were collectively the beneficiaries of processes of colonialism that relied upon dispossession and thus produced uneven results for Europeans and their descendants, on the one hand, and Native Americans and their descendants, on the other. The least they could do, as enlightened Christians fired with philanthropic zeal, would be to show support for their fellow New Englanders seeking to help the remnant Native nations, nations striving to secure their land and rights by adopting civilization. “As you behold with delight your empire rising with rapidity, while you send your missionaries over the Atlantic and Pacific, oh! remember, remember, your red brethren, the original proprietors of America.” Thus the Cherokee convert, having reminded his white audiences in the earlier sections of his talk that American history was anything but benign, with his conclusion sought to convert that knowledge into tangible material and political support for the Cherokee Nation striving to retain its ancestral homeland. His message was well received. Indeed, every audience on the tour responded with ardent enthusiasm and generous gifts.21 The reaction in Philadelphia was nearly overwhelming. At Arch Street Church on January 11, 1824, “there was a prodigious crowd and many hundreds could not gain admission. . . . The address was well attended to, except that the crowd about the doors was so great, as to cause some interruption.” On a subsequent night in another church in Philadelphia, the sanctuary was “impiously crowded, as were all the neighboring streets. People enough went away to fill several churches.”22 In Samson Street Club, a place Evarts judged to “accommodate more persons than any other place of worship within [his] knowledge, there were thought to be at least 2500 hearers.” But the apogee of Brown’s popularity may have occurred after his talk at the Third Baptist Church in Southwark (Philadelphia). “The house was small, the crowd excessive, and the noise at the door such that David stopped, 76

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and it was some time before he could be prevailed upon to proceed. After the exercises, he was followed by a multitude, principally females, to his lodgings, very much as Nelson was often followed by the London populace.”23 Or, as we might put it today, David Brown had become a rock star. Part evangelist, part advocate for Native American rights, he inspired and galvanized listeners with his message. Significantly, it was in Philadelphia that Brown’s advocacy for Native American sovereignty was reinforced by another Cherokee scholar, a “fluent young man” filled with “Indian pride,” John Ridge.24 Ridge was on his way north to return to the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. He had accompanied his father to Washington, where his father and other Cherokee leaders were defending Cherokee interests. One evening in Philadelphia, “at the close of David’s address, Ridge spoke extemporaneously for half an hour, giving an account of the improvements under way among the Cherokees and arguing that the Native Americans have a perfect title to their lands. These thoughts he supported on three grounds, prior discovery, occupancy, and the repeated acknowledgements of the United States.”25 On another night, “Ridge began his address in a very bold manner by recapitulating some of the most [flagrant?] outrages upon the Indians, although he said he did not wish to revive old animosities and at the close of his encomium added, ‘All this we freely forgive in consideration of the goodwill manifested toward the Indians by the government and people of the United States.’ ”26 In many ways, this echoed the message Brown gave throughout the tour to remind listeners of past wrongs and inspire them to support Native rights in the present and future. For his part, Evarts was “afraid [Ridge] would proceed too far but he made, in the whole, a very favorable impression.” Ironically, Ridge would soon go “too far” in a much more dramatic way that would severely test the alliance between missionaries and Cherokees. On January 27, 1824, less than two weeks after sharing a podium with David Brown in Philadelphia, John Ridge married Sarah Bird Northrup, the daughter of a trustee of the Foreign Mission School. The ensuing reaction among white townspeople, the local press, and church officials was ugly and would alarm Cherokee converts like David Brown. Consider the editorial written by Isaiah Bunce, the editor of the Litchfield-based American Eagle. For this “unnatural connection” he blamed not Sarah Northrup’s parents or family but Foreign Mission School trustees Lyman Beecher, Timothy Stone, Charles Prentice, Joseph Harvey, and Herman Daggett. This subject of intermarriages with the Indians and blacks of the missionary school at Cornwall now begun — and of this particular crisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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marriage is . . . not a subject for irony. The affliction, mortification and disgrace, of the relatives of the young woman, who is only about sixteen years old, are too great for that. . . . To have her thus marry an Indian and taken into the wilderness among savages, must indeed be a heart rending pan[g] which none can realize except those called to feel it. We forbear to mention their names, or the name of her who has thus made herself a squaw, and connected her ancestors to a race of Indians. . . . And the relatives of the girl, or the people of Cornwall, or the public at large, who feel indignant at the transaction, some of whom have said that the girl ought to be publicly whipped, the Indian hung, and the mother drown’d, will do well to trace the thing to its true cause, and see whether the men above named, or their system, are not the authors of the transaction as a new kind of missionary machinery.27 White New Englanders like Bunce viewed the marriage as “miscegenation,” an unseemly crossing of boundaries vital to good order and therefore a threat to dominant norms that enforced class status, patriarchal authority, and race hierarchies.28 In their effort to defend themselves, the assailed school and church leaders spoke out against miscegenation, urged white New Englanders to confine themselves to forming only spiritual connections with the foreign students among them, and suggested that this type of liaison would not happen again.29 But the drama would continue to simmer until it boiled over spectacularly when another Cornwall student, Cherokee convert Elias Boudinot, and another white woman, Harriet Gold, became engaged in the spring of 1825. Their romantic entanglement was condemned as “criminal” by church officials; the publication of their banns prompted a grotesque riot in Cornwall, including the burning of the couple in effigy. Indeed, Gold’s brother Stephen led a mock funeral of his sister and threatened violence against Boudinot. Members of Gold’s church treated her as socially dead. The moral panic and the tumult that preceded and followed her marriage in March 1826 led to the closing of the Foreign Mission School entirely.30 As this series of events would reveal, many New Englanders were not ready to truly embrace equality and full civil rights for Native people. This conflict disgusted and distressed David Brown and other Cherokee converts (and several missionaries), who had expected better from the Christian public. In a letter written September 29, 1825, Brown told Evarts that his confidence in the people of New England was “shaken” because of their refusal to practice reciprocity. “If white men may marry among us without offence, how can it be thought wicked for us to marry among them; especially if some of our 78

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white sisters are pleased with such connexions. ” He asked if New Englanders were racists: “Do our beloved friends in Connecticut say that such marriages will cast an indelible stain on their characters and be a reproach to their state?” And he wondered whether they were truly committed to practicing Christian love, which recognized that all human beings were “apostate children of Adam” in need of redemption.31 This entire episode would bring home to Brown and others the noncongruence between the missionaries’ project and the projects of the Cherokees themselves and illumine how the inequity in power relations would undermine claims of Christian solidarity. Scholars of this encounter have rightly placed significant weight on the GoldBoudinot drama, identifying it as a turning point in the relationship between Cherokees and missionaries.32 However, focusing on this drama carries the ubiquitous danger of shifting agency too unilaterally toward New Englanders — specifically, toward powerful white men like Stephen Gold, Isaiah Bunce, or Lyman Beecher. To shift in that direction would make it seem as if whites were in control of the situation. The reality was far more complex because there were always multiple projects involved in and shaping this encounter. Indeed, Cherokee converts, advancing their own project, had previously marked its boundaries and signaled its autonomy. Being aware of this complexity ensures that we do not assign agency to influential whites only; it allows us to recognize that this colonial encounter — and the interaction of the various projects within it — was shaped by all parties always. Indeed, David Brown himself, while on the speaking tour and well before the controversial Cornwall marriages occurred, had signaled the difference between the two projects in many ways: by what he said and what he did not say in his speech, even by refusing to perform on some occasions; by accepting invitations on his own to dine with influential whites; by seeking to build a network of friends and supporters whom he would later seek to enlist for political purposes; and in other minor ways. He also drew the line in a major way soon after he and Evarts encountered Cherokee officials negotiating with federal officials in Washington, D.C. On February 12, 1824, Cherokee leaders John Ross, Major Ridge, Elijah Hicks, and Major Lowry intercepted David Brown and Jeremiah Evarts just before the two were to catch a stage to leave Washington and work their way south to Richmond and additional performances. The Cherokee officials wanted Brown’s help with negotiations between the Cherokee Nation and the federal government of the United States. They asked Evarts to allow Brown to stay in Washington in anticipation of the arrival of western Cherokee leaders. The western Cherokees were coming to the capital city to challenge a boundary line that had been recently proposed to determine their territory. “The Arkansas Cherokees,” Evarts noted, crisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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“were to have 6,000,000 acres of land between Arkansas and White Rivers. The upper boundary was fixed . . . so they were to receive, as they supposed, land in equal distance down each river, till the quantity was made up. The U.S. surveyors last summer run [sic] the line . . . so as to give them little on the Arkansas where the land is good and much on White river, where the face of the country is mountainous.” As Evarts clarified, “This line leaves out all the Cherokee settlements or nearly all and among them the establishment at Dwight.” The stakes were especially high, for the Arkansas settlements were growing and also provided a critical safety valve for the entire Cherokee Nation. “Unless the matter can be altered, the Indians say they will not attempt any settlement but will betake themselves to the wilderness beyond the advancing whites. It is supposed that they may obtain some alleviation of the case; but the whites are apt to get the best end of the bargain, at every treaty with the Indians.” For this reason, John Ross and the other Cherokee leaders wanted David Brown’s participation. He was familiar with the land in question, possessed the linguistic skills to help during negotiations, and had aided an earlier western Cherokee delegation visiting Washington in March 1823, led by his sibling Walter Webber. The Cherokee leaders thought Brown’s “acquaintance with Mr. Calhoun and several members of Congress may turn to some account.” They insisted, Evarts later wrote, “that I should consent to David’s remaining.”33 Evarts needed to listen carefully and frame his response diplomatically. Because of Cherokee priorities and initiatives, the missionary cause was approaching overt conflict with the cause of Cherokee sovereignty. Evarts, seizing on the fact that the Arkansas delegation had not yet arrived, sought to defer a decision and to extend the speaking tour a while longer, but he knew that he could not refuse the request directly. “I saw at once that David had a strong inclination to stay and that, if he should not, it would be thought that he cared nothing about the interests of his people or that he was prevented from staying by my influence. I therefore said, that he would have time to reflect upon the subject while accompanying me to Richmond, and if he then thought it his duty to return to Washington, he might do it. This appeared satisfactory to all, and we set off.”34 In the end, however, this only bought a little more time, a few more speeches, one in Alexandria, one in Fredericksburg, two talks in Richmond, and the last in Petersburg at Virginia College, where women donated $10 to David Brown to “be laid out for such books as he may order.” Here David Brown terminated the speaking tour. Separating from Evarts, he returned to Washington to aid his compatriots defending their rights, their land, their sovereignty. His departure from Evarts and return to his compatriots made overt, literal, and clear what had been the case all along. The tour had always been the 80

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co-creation of Brown and Evarts, the Cherokee convert and the abcfm official. Every step of the way, they had negotiated the complex priorities of two projects, one Cherokee-centric, the other missionary driven. Through their negotiations, they had forged a strategic partnership that waxed and waned, converged and diverged in a dynamic way never free of tension. After the Cherokee delegation secured a written promise from the secretary of war to treat the Arkansas Cherokees liberally, Brown returned in April 1824 to the Dwight mission in Arkansas. For the next several years, he played visible and important roles in Cherokee religious, political, literary, and cultural life, traveling back and forth between Arkansas and the “Old Nation.” Historian Jill Lepore suggests that it is even warranted to make some speculation that Brown may have aided Sequoyah in the development of the Cherokee syllabary, one of the most important intellectual achievements in Cherokee and American history.35 To be sure, Brown was uniquely talented as a linguist. In addition, like one of pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell’s “connectors,” he was intimately linked with almost every major thinker working to develop Cherokee writing, having been a student of Daniel Butrick, the Brainerd-based missionary seeking to publish the gospel in Cherokee, and a collaborator on Cherokee language studies with John Pickering, one of the leading linguists in the United States.36 By fall of 1824 Brown was serving as secretary to the Cherokee National Committee and had married Rachel Lowry, the daughter of Major George Lowry and niece of Sequoyah. But even though Brown would have been uniquely qualified to make contributions to Sequoyah’s efforts, it is almost certain that he was not involved directly, as his own comments, written in April 1825, confirm. In a letter published later in the Family Visitor in Richmond and subsequently republished elsewhere, Brown indicates that he had learned Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary and intended to employ it to transcribe the New Testament, after translating the Greek into Cherokee, using the orthography developed by John Pickering. But he makes no claim to have played a role in Sequoyah’s achievement. Quite to the contrary, he praises Sequoyah’s originality and indicates his own lack of influence on the work: “That mode of writing lately invented by Mr. Guess, the self tutored Cherokee philosopher, has been universally adopted in the Nation; but like all systems of learning, it needs improvement. I would not rob this distinguished Cherokee of the honour justly due him for his philosophical researches, but if he or any other person, does not engage to improve the system, I must tender my humble services to the subject.”37 Brown, like every other Cherokee, was beholden to Sequoyah. That said, it is worth noting that Brown, consistent with his ubiquitous involvement in Cherokee linguistics, was the person who brought knowledge of Sequoyah’s achievement to the attencrisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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tion of the non-Native world, sending an official report to the secretary of war in September 1825. He later escorted Sequoyah to Washington in 1828 and took pains to make sure that Jeremiah Evarts had a chance to converse with him and gain greater appreciation of his genius and the Cherokees’ successful mastery of literacy.38 Celebrating Sequoyah’s achievement fit within the general strategy that Cherokee intellectuals like Brown had employed for years to secure the support of white friends in the East and undermine arguments of their white political enemies. The Cherokee converts’ message was consistent: Because Cherokees and civilization were fully compatible, Cherokee sovereignty should be fully supported. This was an urgent strategic message designed to directly counter Jacksonian arguments justifying removal on the putative humanitarian grounds that Native Americans always declined in proximity to whites and white ways, arguments that were gaining greater white support.39 Brown had refuted that thesis directly in his talk on the speaking tour by his very example, by noting the extensive progress of Cherokees across multiple indicators of civilized behavior, and by explicitly refuting the “erroneous theory that [Indians] are incapable of civilization.” Such an argument was unworthy of consideration, he declared. “No one who has any acquaintance with the natives can doubt of their natural capacities for moral cultivation; that they are as susceptible of mental as well as religious improvement, as much as any people on the Globe, I frankly assert without any fear of contradiction.”40 After the tour he reinforced that message through his correspondence with the influential white men and women he had met during his travels. Brown knew that his correspondents would share his letters with eastern newspapers, helping him and his message reach a much larger audience. Indeed, a female friend in Wilmington, Delaware, having received a letter from him thanking her for her hospitality while he was visiting there during the speaking tour, gave his letter to the Washington Circular, which printed it and thus conveyed to readers the avid interest of Cherokees in formal education: “The generality of the Cherokee people are anxious to have their children educated and brought up as the white children.” Other papers, including the Boston Recorder and Telegraph, picked up the article and republished it, providing still greater exposure to the Cherokees’ pro-sovereignty, anti-removal message.41 Similarly, portions of his description of his tour of the Old Nation conveyed to his Fishkill friends in a private letter of November 1, 1824, were published in the Religious Intelligencer and then reprinted in the Boston Recorder and Telegraph on April 16, 1825: “The posture of National as well as Missionary affairs in the country is very favorable. Equitable and wholesome laws are enacted by the council to 82

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protect and to regulate the conduct of the people. There is a National Academy in contemplation. . . . There will be a National Library at New-Town, the Metropolis of the nation. In different parts of the nation numerous Cherokees have embraced the Christian religion.” When we consider that Brown’s letters and reports were but a portion of those generated and published by Cherokee converts and that these were reinforced still further by many advocacy pieces, reports, and memoirs celebrating converts penned by missionaries, we can understand how the Cherokees acquired a distinctive reputation in the East, not only as one of the so-called civilized tribes but as the civilized Native American nation par excellence.42 This reputation was not accidentally achieved but intentionally produced as part of their larger campaign to defend their nation’s interests. Brown hammered this message home hard in a lengthy report originally sent to his friends in Richmond, where it first appeared in print in the Family Visitor but was then republished countless times in much more substantial venues, including Niles’ Register, the Missionary Herald, and the Boston Recorder and Telegraph. His presentation moved from the macro to the micro, from a grand overview of the landscape to the interior of the Cherokee home, and across an encyclopedic range of life domains including agriculture, cuisine, clothing, population and social practices, civic life and national character, religion, education, finance, and governance shaped by republican principles. From the flocks of sheep on the Cherokees’ plains, to the houses of entertainment on their public roads, to the butter on their tables and cotton blankets on their beds, to the proposed printing press, national library, and museum to be located in their seat of government, every detail of Brown’s report confirmed civilized behavior. The Cherokees were thriving and their population was increasing, Brown asserted. “How vain, then, to talk of Cherokee deterioration,” he said, refuting the Jacksonian claim that Native Americans and civilization were incompatible. Their “removal to the wild and inhospitable regions of the west” would produce “evil consequences.” By detailing Cherokee industriousness, Brown contradicted the idea that Native Americans did not make full and proper use of their land and undercut the idea that the Cherokee Nation could afford to cede more land. “They have no more to spare.” If the United States was just at all, “the Cherokee title to this land will remain as long as the sun and moon endure.” The alternative, removal, would reveal the shameless truth that “physical strength should guide the measures of the United States government.”43 Ultimately, this very question would be asked, literally, in the Twenty-first Congress, which opened on December 7, 1829, and received the next day President Andrew Jackson’s first message, which insisted upon Indian removal. Brown was not present to witness or seek to influence the congressional decrisscrossing projects of sovereignty and conversion

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bates that ensued, having died a few months earlier, on September 15, 1829, after battling tuberculosis.44 But Jeremiah Evarts, a man who had known Brown intimately, traveled with him, and had heard his speech defending Cherokee rights more than anyone alive, was there. Evarts, who thought it his “duty to avow himself a decided friend of the Indians,” worked tirelessly to persuade elected officials to defeat the Removal Act. He met with and argued with cabinet officials, congressmen, governors, Chief Justice Marshall, and others and counseled Native leaders as to strategy. He sought to rally decisive public support by writing twenty-four very influential, strongly argued, evocatively expressed essays defending Native American sovereignty that were published in prominent newspapers, republished as pamphlets, discussed widely, and read by many congressmen.45 He encouraged grassroots networks, often led by women who had supported the missionary cause, to oppose removal.46 And he watched and recorded the daily debates and votes in Congress, deeming the outcome to be a decisive measure of the legitimacy of the U.S. government. Would it stand with truth and honor, or would it further empower infatuation, racism, and greed? Would it honor its own treaties? Or would it punish Native peoples for having appropriated civilization in defense of their nation’s sovereignty? Referencing the Cherokee Nation, which he knew very well, and reviewing every treaty the United States had solemnized with that nation, Evarts wrote: “These are the men whose country is to be wrested from them, and who are to be brought under the laws of Georgia without their own consent.” Disgusted with Georgia’s attempt to usurp Cherokee sovereignty, Evarts uncoiled multiple strands of argumentation in a long, unfolding sentence building to a crescendo of outrage at the proposed outcome for Cherokee people: These civilized and educated men; — these orderly members of a society, raised, in part, by the fostering care of our national government, from rude materials, but now exhibiting a good degree of symmetry and beauty; — these laborious farmers and practical republicans; — these dependent allies, who committed their all to our good faith, on the “guaranty” of Gen. Washington, the “assurance” of Mr. Jefferson, and the re-assurance of Gen. Jackson and Mr. Calhoun, sanctioned, as these several acts were, by the Senate of the United States; — these “citizens of the Cherokee nation” as we called them in the treaty of Holston; — these fellow Christians, regular members of Moravian, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches, fellow-citizens with the saints and household of God, are to be suddenly brought under the laws of Georgia, according to which they can be neither witnesses nor parties in a court of justice. 84

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Turning sarcastic, he asked: “Under the laws, did I say? It is a monstrous perversion to call such a state of things, living under law. They are to be made outlaws on the land of their fathers; and, in this condition, to be allowed the privilege of choosing between exile and chains.” His advocacy was passionate and effective, along with that of the Cherokees’ themselves, so much so that the pro-removal forces had trouble gaining passage in the House. Nevertheless, on May 24, 1830, Evarts had to record a terrible outcome: “I have the unspeakable pain and mortification of saying that the Indian bill passed . . . ayes 102, nays 97.”47 Evarts would die a few months later, from tuberculosis, like so many of his Cherokee friends. Among his papers was a memorandum outlining his daily prayers. The last prayer theme that was annotated read: “That the rights of the Indians may be vindicated, and the honor of the country preserved.”48 Is it too much to suggest that just as he had sought to influence Native Americans, they had influenced him in a life-changing way? Was not the one who had sought to promote the cause of civilizing and evangelizing Native peoples in the end not converted or turned himself to the cause of defending Native American sovereignty? After all, the New Englanders’ project was never the only one that mattered. In this colonial encounter, the Cherokees, including intellectuals like David Brown, had ably advanced their own projects all along. They would continue to do so long after the speaking tour, after Brown’s demise, through removal and beyond.

Notes 1. Founded by Massachusetts Congregationalists in 1810, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions supported missions across the globe, including the foreign Missions of North America. The board deemed the Cherokees to constitute the Native nation most easily made into a people “English in language, civilized in habits, and Christian in religion.” See William Ellsworth Strong, The Story of the American Board (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 36. Ralph H. Gabriel, Elias Boudinot (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941); Theda Perdue, ed., Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 42–96, esp. 46–47, which argues with aspects of Perdue’s approach to Boudinot. Thomas Hallock provides a brief but stimulating analysis of Boudinot’s literary attempts to defuse rationales for removal in From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749–1826 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 217–25. Regarding David Brown’s biography, see Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips, eds., The Brainerd Journal: A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1823 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 489n60, also 394, which mentions the speaking tour. I want to acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Carrie McLachlan, who, among other things, helped find contemporary newspaper stories related to the tour and some important letters written by David Brown.

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2. David Brown to John Pickering, September 4, 1823, quoted in Mary Orne Pickering, Life of John Pickering (Boston, 1887), 332. Brown wrote: “In the middle of October I think of going home, in company with Mr. Evarts.” 3. Several newspapers published extracts from the address, with one of the most comprehensive appearing in the Columbian Star (Washington, D.C., December 27, 1823). It is important to note, however, that Elizabeth Manning Peabody of Salem also copied the entire original manuscript and that decades later, in 1870, her relative Nathaniel C. Peabody donated her copy, along with some letters, to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which printed the “Address of Dewi Brown, a Cherokee Indian,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 12 (1871): 30–38. This version provides the complete talk and thus includes some very important material that does not appear elsewhere and is quoted and cited in my analysis. In addition to providing a complete version of the speech, it confirms that newspaper extracts were very accurate in how they quoted portions of the talk. Comparison of all versions confirms that Brown gave the same address, with minor variations, throughout the tour, a fact further confirmed by many comments in Evarts’s diary. 4. Selections of a description of David Brown’s talk in Richmond originally appearing in the Family Visitor were reprinted in the New York Religious Chronicle, March 6, 1824, 7. The correspondent asserted: “Even the enemies of missions could not resist the force of ocular demonstration. They were now met with a palpable argument, which, with all their wisdom and obduracy they could neither gainsay nor resist — except by ascribing what they saw and heard to an illusion upon their senses!” 5. For more on Catharine Brown, see Joel W. Martin, “Visions of Revitalization in the Eastern Woodlands: Can a Middle-Aged Theory Stretch to Embrace the First Cherokee Converts?,” in Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, ed. Michael E. Harkin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 61–87, and Joel W. Martin, “Almost White: The Ambivalent Promise of Christian Missions among the Cherokees,” in Religion, Myth, and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity, ed. Craig Prentiss (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 43–60. 6. Jeremiah Evarts to Rufus Anderson, December 12, 1823, Letters from Officers of the Board, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers, ABC: 11, vol. 1, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass (hereafter cited as ABCFM Papers; unless noted otherwise, all citations are to ABC: 11, vol. 1). 7. Evarts sometimes followed Brown to the podium. Whether following or leading, Evarts was “in the habit of making observations . . . in which I have often enlarged on general topics; such as the importance of missions to the general work of education, the imperious claims of the heathen world, the encouragements to exertions from what has already taken place, the magnitude of the work, the privilege of being engaged in it, etc” (Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, January 16, 1824, ABCFM Papers). 8. Ibid. 9. As reprinted in the New York Religious Chronicle, March 6, 1824, 7. “ ‘When he mentioned the name of Powhatan,’ says the writer, ‘and inquired for those numerous and powerful tribes who “once drank the waters of Virginia,” and lamented that they had “disappeared like the falling leaves before a driving storm,” and when he described the religious rites of his nation in their expedition against the Osages, all present seemed to acknowledge that he had found the avenues to their hearts.’ ” 10. Boston Recorder and Telegraph, February 28, 1824.

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11. David Brown to John Pickering, n.d., quoted in Pickering, Life of John Pickering, 333. 12. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 106. 13. My interpretation is beholden to the critical hermeneutics developed by Cherokee intellectual Jace Weaver, who argues that non-Native scholars are far too “preoccupied with questions of authenticity and identity” in relation to Native American peoples and their projects (Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 22). My approach is also very compatible with that of Konkle, who emphasizes the need to focus on the political import of Cherokee converts’ intellectual work and thinks that modern scholarship has been too fixated on cultural authenticity narrowly conceived: “The Cherokees who endorsed ‘civilization’ and progress are only puzzling when the Cherokee Nation can only be conceived of as a purely cultural entity rather than a political entity with a future autonomous existence the terms of which can be fought over by its citizens and inhabitants” (Writing Indian Nations, 46). 14. “Education of Indian Youth,” Boston Recorder and Telegraph, August 3, 1822, 122 (the original letter was dated Wincester, June 29, 1822). 15. Konkle, Writing Indian Nations, 40. 16. I examine the importance of Native dress and appearance in relation to the civilizing mission in “Almost White,” 43–60. A key book for theorizing the theme and history of “playing Indian” is Phil Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), which also informs the subtle readings of period texts developed in Hallock, From the Fallen Tree. Both of these works influence my interpretation of Brown’s tactical engagement with common stereotypes and leading tropes employed by whites in relation to Native peoples. 17. Columbian Star, December 27, 1823. 18. Unless otherwise noted, my outline and analysis follow and draw on the full version of the talk preserved in “Address of Dewi Brown, a Cherokee Indian.” 19. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2000), 3. See also Hallock, From the Fallen Tree, which connects the replacement of actual Native peoples with figurative ones as part of a process to legitimate “an ascending empire” (208) and, in the case of Cooper, to sanction a white “landed aristocracy in a democratic republic” (211). 20. The Cherokee names of David Brown’s parents are also provided in Rufus Anderson, ed., Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation, 2nd ed. (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1825), 10. His father’s name meant “drowned by a bear.” 21. The “very numerous and deeply attentive” citizens of Hartford “expressed their gratification with Brown’s performance” (Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, December 17, 1823, ABCFM Papers). In New Haven, the faculty and students of Yale College and the principal inhabitants of New Haven crowded the galleries and aisles halfway to the pulpit to hear Brown, who entered accompanied by the president of the college and afterward was “treated with much attention and respect by the people of all classes (Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, December 27, 1823, ABCFM Papers). 22. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, January 20, 1824, ABCFM Papers. 23. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, January 22/23, 1824, ABCFM Papers. 24. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, January 20, 1824, ABCFM Papers. 25. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, January 22/23, 1824, ABCFM Papers. 26. Ibid.

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27. Ibid. (“proceed too far”); Gabriel, Elias Boudinot, 60–62 (italics in original). Also discussed in Theresa Strouth Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriet Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 8–9. 28. Gaul, To Marry an Indian, 7. 29. The Executive Committee of the school wrote that the marriage was “the result of peculiar circumstances, which can never be expected again to recur” (“The Marriage of an Indian to a White Female,” New York Religious Chronicle, April 10, 1824). 30. Gaul, To Marry an Indian, 12–23; John Andrew, “Educating the Heathen: The Foreign Mission School Controversy and American Ideals,” American Studies 12, no. 3 (1978): 331–42. 31. David Brown to Jeremiah Evarts, September 29, 1825, ABCFM Papers, ABC: 18.3.1, vol. 5, quoted in Gaul, To Marry an Indian, 17. 32. In his interpretation of these events, William G. McLoughlin (Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995]) argues that Cherokees were divided into two camps based on their stand toward white culture, the “assimilationists” and the “traditionalists.” He correlates these stands with “two kinds of nationalism” and suggests they were responding to a “crisis of white American nationalism” (190), itself divided between a waning but inclusive nationalism inspired by the Enlightenment and a waxing, romantic race-based nationalism that excluded nonwhites. The Cornwall episode, he argues, was a “blow to those [Cherokees] favoring acculturation, while it confirmed the views of those opposing it” (189). After it, antimission sentiment increased among the Cherokees. My interpretation, in contrast, seeks to recover and document a fundamental tension that existed from the very start between Cherokee converts pursuing an autonomous project of sovereignty and that of New England missionaries, assuming their own benevolence, seeking to spread the gospel and “civilization” to the heathen. Attending to that tension, we perceive that even Cherokees “friendly” to the missionaries required New Englanders to negotiate about almost every aspect of their relationship, including, for example, the weighting of evangelism to education within missions, the location of schools, and their staffing, from the very start of the encounter. 33. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, February 25, 1824, ABCFM Papers. 34. Ibid. 35. Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Vintage, 2002), 214n22. 36. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown, 2000). In 1819, Brown and Butrick’s book Tsvlvki Sqclvcl: A Cherokee Spelling Book was published in Knoxville. 37. David Brown, “The New Testament in Cherokee,” Boston Recorder and Telegraph, July 8, 1825 (originally appearing in the Family Visitor, dated Creek Path, Cherokee Nation, April 1825). 38. E. C. Tracy, Memoir of the Life of Jeremiah Evarts (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1845), 304–5. 39. By 1825, President James Monroe, who had opposed removal, would favor it in the name of the civilizing mission (Hallock, From the Fallen Tree, 208). 40. “Address of Dewi Brown, a Cherokee Indian.” 41. Quotation is from Boston Recorder and Telegraph, October 9, 1824 (original letter dated May 29, 1824). 42. John Ridge, “Indian Address,” Boston Recorder and Telegraph, December 28, 1822; Memoir of John Arch (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Union, 1829); Anderson, Memoir of

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Catharine Brown. News about Cherokee converts helped fill the pages of religious periodicals such as the Missionary Herald, the Panoplist, the Boston Recorder and Telegraph, the Religious Intelligencer, the Boston Watchman, the Columbian Star, the Family Visitor, and the Guardian. 43. Boston Recorder and Telegraph, October 21, 1825 (italics in original). Also Niles’ Register, October 15, 1825; Missionary Herald 21, no. 11 (November 1825): 354–55; Walter Lowie et al., eds., American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–34), 2:651. 44. Charlotte Adams Hood, Jackson’s White Plumes: An Historical and Genealogical Account of Selected Cherokee Families Who Supported Andrew Jackson during the Creek War of 1813–1814 (Bay Minette, Ala.: Lavender Publishing, 1995), 177. 45. Tracy, Memoir of the Life of Jeremiah Evarts, 327; see also 328, 337, 365, 368. The essays, published under the name of William Penn, are discussed in Konkle, Writing Indian Nations, 63–71. See also John A. Andrew, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 46. Catharine Beecher sparked the petition campaign after meeting Evarts, a friend of her family, in Boston in 1829 and being encouraged by him to enlist women in the cause. See Alisse Theodore, “ ‘A Right to Speak on the Subject’: The U.S. Women’s Antiremoval Petition Campaign, 1829–1831,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5, no. 4 (2002): 601–23. 47. Tracy, Memoir of the Life of Jeremiah Evarts, 345–46, 376 (italics in original). 48. Ibid., 429.

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part ii Practicing Religion

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native american popul ar religion in new engl and ’s old colony, 1670 –1770 Douglas L. Winiarski

On March 30, 1740, the tranquil Sabbath morning in Plymouth, Massachusetts, was shattered by the appearance of a local villager professing a fantastic story. The previous day, he explained to the assembled churchgoers, eight Spanish wizards had appeared at his farm on the outskirts of town and propelled both the man and his house “over the Tops of Trees” to a landing spot nearly four miles away. Plymouth’s leading citizen, a prosperous farmer, civil magistrate, and Indian missionary named Josiah Cotton, dismissed the story in his private memoirs, calling it “ridiculous & incredible.” In his opinion, the unidentified storyteller had concocted his tale of flying houses and invading Spanish hordes to “Conceal Some Mischief he had done.” Cotton unfortunately neglected to mention the nature of the alleged deception. We know only that the man’s story “put this Town into the Utmost Confusion,” although the matter eventually “Ended without Bloud.”1 Hoax or not, the unusual tale of witchcraft and warfare preyed upon the deepest fears of Cotton’s Plymouth neighbors. Tensions were running high in town during the spring of 1740 as Spanish privateers roamed the New England coast committing “Depredations & Barbarities” on the “Estates & Persons” of local mariners.2 During the early eighteenth century, moreover, Plymouth stood at the center of a vibrant regional supernatural economy in which local residents regularly consulted cunning folk, healers, astrologers, and diviners; others readily admitted that evil spirits lurked in the town’s alleys, wharves, and burial places; and one overly credulous Plymouth villager even claimed to have witnessed the appearance of Satan in an enchanted kitchen pot. Cot-

ton himself had suffered financial reversals and public humiliation just a few years earlier when tenants renting a house owned by the estate of the judge’s deceased son-in-law brazenly proclaimed that the property was haunted by the specter its former owner.3 It is not hard to imagine stories of preternatural flight and foreign invasion inciting uproar in a town like Plymouth. What makes this incident especially interesting, however, is the ethnicity of the architect of what Cotton called this “Monstrous Ly”: he was a local Wampanoag Indian. The unusual events that erupted in Plymouth that Sabbath morning during the spring of 1740 raise intriguing questions about the utility of interpretive models of Native American religion in colonial America that privilege either acts of resistance or acculturation. Although the unnamed Indian man lived on the outskirts of town, his presence among the Plymouth congregation suggests that he, like many English outliers, remained connected to the community. He was equally cognizant of international political events and local folklore. Some English residents in Plymouth, moreover, may have accepted the man’s fantastic tale simply because they believed that Indians often possessed unusual insight into the workings of the supernatural. That his story incited the Plymouth townspeople suggests that Indians continued to command a measure of respect in eighteenth-century New England. In short, Cotton’s brief account of this unusual episode reveals a shadowy world in which the English and Native American residents of New England’s “Old Colony” — an area stretching from Plymouth and Bristol counties in Massachusetts to the tip of Cape Cod — continued to engage in complex forms of religious exchange during the provincial era. After providing an overview of Josiah Cotton’s career as a lay missionary, this essay moves outward to explore the religious beliefs and practices of the Indians to whom he preached. Four major themes anchor a broader discussion of the various strategies deployed by Native Christians in the Old Colony as they engaged a dominant English religious culture: religion and the family, religious literacy and devotional practices, spiritual healing and mortuary customs, and supernatural lore. Despite facing a host of social and economic adversities, Native Americans throughout the region did not vanish from the historical landscape in the devastating wake of King Philip’s War (1675–76). Rather, they participated in the creation of a distinctive religious culture marked by eclecticism, diversity, and hybridity. Nearly every Indian appearing in the court, land, probate, town, or vital records of the Old Colony hailed from families that were affiliated with one of several Native churches in the region. Most were second- and even thirdgeneration Christians for whom questions of conversion had been resolved decades earlier. They worshiped in meetinghouses of their own construction 94

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and were more likely to hear a sermon delivered in their own language by an Indian preacher than the harangues of English missionaries like Josiah Cotton. In fact, an emerging consensus among scholars suggests that an “Indianized” form of Christianity may have promoted cultural stability as Native families struggled to find a safe haven “behind the frontier.”4 Indians throughout the Old Colony professed and practiced an eclectic popular piety that closely mirrored that of their English neighbors. While some Native Christians developed rigorous private devotional routines that rivaled those of even the most devout colonists, others diverged dramatically from the beliefs and practices prescribed by Congregational ministers and missionaries like Cotton. Lay men and women of both groups were preoccupied with faith healing and the workings of the supernatural; and, in a few cases, language barriers and racial stereotypes actually promoted religious exchange through which English provincials purchased the occult skills of Indian ritual specialists. Often paralleling, sometimes intersecting, alternately shaping and being shaped by popular Euro-American Protestantism, the hybrid Native Christian spirituality that emerged in the Old Colony during the eighteenth century defies easy categorization. Then again, so, too, do the sprawling religious traditions of their English neighbors, masters, landlords, and oppressors, among whom they lived and worked for nearly a century prior to the American Revolution.


The image of a local Wampanoag man attending Sabbath exercises in the Plymouth church and sharing news with non-Native parishioners may strike some as incongruous, especially since scholars traditionally have situated Indian and European religions on opposite sides of an unbridgeable cultural chasm. Classic anthropological studies tended to subsume the vast panoply of Native American spiritual traditions under a static canon of structuralist categories: myth, ritual, sacred space, shamanism, and totems.5 The powerful polemics of Vine Deloria Jr., in turn, pitted these timeless “primal” traditions against modern and Western Christian values in a politically compelling but historically controversial war of worldviews.6 Textbooks in the field of American religious history have embraced the cultural otherness of Indians as well. Most begin with an obligatory chapter that ranges widely across Native American religions, only to abandon the narrative following the arrival of Europeans.7 As a result, we have come to view authentic Indian spirituality as a timeless, unchanging, exotic counterpart to the historically grounded denominations of American Protestantism. Building upon this well-established scholarly paradigm, early studies of Puritan-Indian relations in colonial New England emphasized the alien nature native american popular religion

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of indigenous beliefs and practices and the inability or unwillingness of invading Europeans to properly assess or categorize Native religious traditions. Most ethnohistorians assumed that the two groups inhabited radically different conceptual universes: the former, an oral culture of myth, ritual, and cyclical time; the latter, a culture of the book, complex theology, and providential history. Movement between these opposing religious systems was defined in terms of “conversion,” a decisive rejection of traditional ways that required Indians to adopt a battery of novel cultural practices ranging from restrictive sexual mores and patriarchal gender roles to market-oriented subsistence routines and European styles of dress and comportment. Nearly all these studies posited a fundamental division between Indian and Puritan value systems, emphasized dramatic confrontations between Native ritual specialists and Puritan missionaries, and, until recently, focused exclusively on the earliest years of contact or the decades prior to King Philip’s War.8 The new Indian history of the 1970s and 1980s provided a powerful corrective to generations of filiopietistic antiquarian studies that praised Puritan missionaries as the peaceful standard-bearers of modernity. Revisionist invectives decrying John Eliot and his colleagues as shock troops in a covert spiritual war and advocates of cultural genocide, however, seem misplaced in the “Indians’ new world” of pre-Revolutionary British America.9 Oddly enough, studies that characterized seventeenth-century Native conversion as a form of cultural suicide inadvertently replicated the very myth of the vanishing Indian that the field of ethnohistory had sought to remedy. In contrast, recent studies of prominent Indian spiritual leaders ranging from Neolin to Black Elk have situated indigenous beliefs and practices in creative dialog with Christianity, while scholars of early American religion continue to create space for Native voices that speak in a Catholic, Methodist, Moravian, or Presbyterian idiom.10 A new generation of historically inflected survey texts reveals that Indian religious traditions have always been evolving over time, adapting to changing environments, and providing meaning amid social turmoil. Where Deloria once envisioned a cosmic divide, this growing body of scholarship explores the complex worldviews of Indians who were both Native and Christian.11 While a number of recent studies have successfully examined the social, economic, and demographic conditions of Native American communities in provincial New England, we know less about the religious traditions of the Wampanoag families who lived in the Old Colony during the eighteenth century.12 Reconstructing the beliefs and practices of Indians who toiled in obscurity as day laborers, deep-sea whalers, or indentured servants poses formidable challenges for scholars, since most surviving documents were penned by mis96

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sionaries. Josiah Cotton’s personal papers — perhaps the most extensive body of surviving records by any eighteenth-century Indian preacher — are no exception. This problem, however, is neither unbridgeable nor unique to the study of Native American history. Until recently, the religious traditions of the Puritan laity have suffered from a similar lack of scholarly attention. Recovering the religious voices of ordinary men and women who rarely left footprints in the historical record — English or Native American — thus requires a shift in methodology, one that moves from the systematic theologies of university-trained ministers and missionaries into the hearts and minds of their parishioners. The approach adopted here capitalizes on the interpretive innovations of historians who examine the “local,” “vernacular,” “folk,” or “popular” dimensions of religious life in early modern Europe and America. The impetus behind this movement began with a group of scholars who sought to recover the mentalité of European peasants who, like Native Americans in early New England, were once thought to be both socially marginal and historically inarticulate. Proponents stressed the translation of theological concepts from pulpit to pew and the creative appropriation of these ideas by lay men and women. Over time, studies of popular religion have expanded to emphasize devotional and ritual practices, as well as belief systems, and evolved to incorporate the “lived” experiences of ordinary people.13 The emergence of popular religion as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry has dramatically reshaped our understanding of religious exchange in the New World, particularly in the Catholic regions of Latin America and New France. Borrowing freely from the works of Europeanists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, literary critics, and religious studies specialists over the past two decades has decisively recast the “spiritual conquest” model of cultural contact. Collectively, these sophisticated postcolonial studies expose the limits of missionary extirpation campaigns, unmask the subtle acts of rebellion through which interpreters translated Catholic doctrine into a distinctly Native idiom, excavate the multicultural origins of indigenous saints and Christian communal rituals, and recover the plurality of ways in which Native peoples throughout the Americas adopted the religious beliefs and practices of European colonizers and redeployed those same traditions in the service of thoroughly local projects.14 Scholars of British North America have been reluctant to embrace the methodological strategies of their Latin and Franco-American colleagues. Few ethnohistorians have looked beyond the exceptionalist peculiarities of Perry Miller’s ascetic New England, where, according to conventional wisdom, Puritan theological sophistication, doctrinal rigidity, and biblical scrupulosity precluded the blurring of religious traditions that so often marked encounters between native american popular religion

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indigenous peoples and Catholic missionaries elsewhere in the hemisphere. At the same time, recent scholarship on the New England laity rivals studies of religious exchange in colonial Mexico, South America, and New France and thus provides a unique opportunity to incorporate the experiences of Native Christians into a broader understanding of Protestant popular religion. One of the genre’s ablest practitioners, David Hall, has reconstructed the multilayered religious world of early New England. His concept of a “shared” religious culture is flexible enough to span the chasm between high theology and “horseshed” Christians, doctrinal literacy and folk magic, conversion narratives and protective healing rituals — and, by extension, the gulf separating Josiah Cotton from his Wampanoag congregation.15


Although he refused to divulge the name of the Wampanoag rumormonger who disrupted the Plymouth worship exercises with his tales of flying houses and Spanish wizards, Cotton would have known the man intimately. For nearly forty years he served as a lay missionary to the Indian families of the Old Colony. Born in 1680, Josiah was the son of John Cotton Jr., a prominent Indian missionary in his own right and Plymouth’s town minister. After graduating from Harvard College in 1698 and teaching school for several years in Marblehead, Cotton returned to Plymouth and promptly began an intensive program of study in the Massachusett language. Several years later he obtained permission from the London-based New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel to serve as a lay preacher, and for these labors he was paid a modest annual stipend. In addition to his civic duties as county court justice, registrar of probate and deeds, and representative to the General Court, Cotton preached biweekly sermons at the homes of Wampanoag families throughout Plymouth County. He compiled an “Indian Nomenclature” that remains a standard reference source for anthropologists and linguists, and he later translated Cotton Mather’s short treatise on the Lord’s Supper into Massachusett. The lay missionary’s pastoral responsibilities also included leading prayers and reading scripture, presiding over collective rituals of fasting and thanksgiving, visiting Native families, counseling the sick, and attending Indian funerals.16 From the outset, his ministry was unique. Unlike prominent missionaries such as John Eliot or Experience Mayhew, who labored in the large praying town enclaves at Natick or Gay Head, Cotton initially preached to scattered groups of Indians living on the outskirts of small Plymouth County hamlets such as Bridgewater, Duxbury, Kingston, and Pembroke. In addition, his congregation hailed from several small neighborhoods within the bounds of Plymouth proper. 98

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A number of these families lived along the Eel River two miles from the center of town. Others dwelled along the road leading to Cape Cod, in the Herring Pond Reservation near the Sandwich border, or at Manomet Ponds — an isolated parish in Plymouth that was separated from the center of town by a long range of hills. This last group boasted its own church staffed by Native preachers. Although Cotton occasionally ministered to all these disparate Indian families, the majority of his biweekly meetings were conducted at the homes of Indians Francis Ned, Nathan Hood, and Daniel Robin, all of whom lived and worked at Plain Dealing, Cotton’s farm located a few miles north of town. On average, fewer than ten Indians attended these Sabbath exercises. Most were local fishermen, day laborers, and indentured servants. They understood English “pretty well,” according to Cotton, and they occasionally attended meetings at churches in Plymouth or Kingston.17 Cotton’s four-decade preaching career coincided with a dramatic period of growth for the New England Company. While John Eliot’s famous praying towns in central Massachusetts languished in the wake of King Philip’s War, missionaries in the Old Colony redoubled their efforts and reported dramatic success among the remnant Wampanoags. On the eve of the conflict in 1674, Cape Cod lay preacher Richard Bourne counted a total of 462 praying Indians residing in more than a dozen communities. A decade later, the number of Native Christians on the Cape had doubled, while converts in the region that would become Plymouth and Bristol counties soared from 75 to more than 500. This unprecedented growth, moreover, occurred in a time when the total Indian population in the Old Colony declined by as much as 70 percent. One glowing report from Martha’s Vineyard even claimed that of the 180 families residing on the island, “no more than Two Persons . . . now remain in their Paganism.”18 Numbers alone do not tell the full story. By 1700, Native Christians throughout southeastern New England had developed sophisticated religious communities that occasionally outshone those of their English neighbors. During the 1660s, John Cotton Jr. recorded numerous conversations with Indians who inquired after the meaning of obscure scriptural verses, biblical prophecies, and doctrinal issues. He later claimed that his Native auditors took notes during his sermons and narrated their conversion experiences with emotive oratorical skill. Recently discovered examples of these church admission testimonies from the Indian church at Mashpee indicate that the earliest Native Christians in the Old Colony possessed a detailed knowledge of reformed theological doctrines and practices. A generation later, traveling New England Company inspectors Grindal Rawson and Samuel Danforth met with well-dressed Indian congregations led by Native ministers, teachers, and elders on their tour of mission native american popular religion

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churches from Martha’s Vineyard to the hinterlands of Bristol County. Diligently gathering for worship in English-style framed meetinghouses, the assemblies sang psalms, listened to sermons in their own language — often twice each Sabbath — and observed the sacrament with regularity. The two inspectors boasted that literacy was widespread, and they reported that ruling elders imposed church censures for moral infractions ranging from intemperance to spousal abuse.19 Elsewhere, the progress of the gospel was uneven. Well into the eighteenth century, the homelands of the southeastern Connecticut tribes remained, in the ethnocentric words of one traveler, the “most salvage” country in New England. Here, large groups of Indians continued to congregate at regional sites for seasonal ceremonial dances, and reports of men and women resorting to traditional powwows circulated frequently. In 1733, a young Yale missionary described in detail the ritual activities of a Niantic shaman, who attempted to heal an ailing Mohegan boy by removing from his stomach and back several knotted leather thongs that were encrusted with wampum beads and bits of hair. This was the religious world into which Samson Occom was born, and it was a far cry from what English lay men and women typically called the gospel “land of light.” The renowned Mohegan missionary would later lament in his autobiography that he had been “Born a Heathen and Brought up In Heathenism.” His parents had led a “wandering life,” and they “Strictly maintained and followed their Heathenish Ways, Customs & Religion.”20 The Wampanoag families that resided at Plain Dealing and in towns throughout the Old Colony occupied a middle space between these two trajectories. Most families were affiliated with a local Indian church, but this apparent Christian identity masked dramatic variations. During a 1726 “General Visitation” that he conducted among the Wampanoag families that lived in scattered pockets throughout Plymouth County, Cotton discovered deeply pious Native Christians who studied their Bibles assiduously, meditated in secret, prayed with their families, and joined Indian churches in full membership. Others shied away from Sabbath meetings and continued to practice forms of ancestral religion. Thus, the majority of Indian families in southeastern Massachusetts remained, in the apt words of one local clergyman, “half Christian” — eclectic spiritual cobblers who were actively engaged in assembling a coherent worldview from diverse cultural resources.21 But in this respect the Native Christians in the Old Colony differed little from their equally eclectic English neighbors, who drew upon a spectrum of religious traditions ranging from the theological conventions of reformed Protestantism to premodern folk wisdom. Inheritors

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of multiple, overlapping, and at times mutually incompatible religious traditions, provincials of both groups inhabited a fluid spiritual world with few fixed boundaries. Indians in the Old Colony walked the same roads as their English neighbors. Native and Anglo-Americans labored together at sea, on the docks, in shops and households, and in the fields. They met as adversaries in court, brawled in the streets, sang together in church, and, perhaps clandestinely, drank together in taverns. In such a world, how did Native Christians understand Josiah Cotton’s missionary labors, and in what ways did their beliefs and practices intersect with those of the other lay men and women? The following four sections sketch a broad range of possible responses.

Parallelism: Religion and the Family One crucial fact distinguished Cotton’s “Indian Business,” as he called it, from the mission labors of his father. Unlike John Cotton Jr., the Plymouth judge never served as an ordained minister at one of the local Indian congregations in the Old Colony. Although Cotton occasionally preached and dispensed pastoral advice to Indian families in the southern part of Plymouth, the Native Christians who assembled for worship at Manomet Ponds never called him to their pulpit. Instead, for nearly a century, the New England Company supported a succession of Native preachers and schoolteachers in the praying Indian church that the elder Cotton had gathered during the 1670s. As was the case with the indigenous congregations on Martha’s Vineyard described by James Ronda, the Manomet Ponds church provided crucial leadership roles for a new generation of devout Wampanoag Christians who were laboring to reestablish their authority in the turbulent decades following King Philip’s War.22 In this regard, the Wampanoags and English found themselves traveling on parallel tracks, for popular religion in both communities was a family affair. Employing metaphors that likened Congregational churches to “Nurseries” of piety where “church children” drank in the “milk” of the gospel from their earliest years, Old Colony ministers frequently suggested that salvation sprang from the “loins of godly parents,” and the demographics of religious affiliation throughout New England reinforced this theological refrain. A minority of prominent families provided a disproportionate number of full church members in each generation; strangers, newcomers, and transients, in contrast, rarely formed lasting ties to local religious institutions. Entrenched core parish families monopolized religious authority in the community and supplied the

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majority of the town’s ecclesiastical leaders. Even the spatial arrangement of eighteenth-century meetinghouses symbolized the waxing authority of clan and kin in parish affairs. By the middle of the eighteenth century, family pew boxes had replaced the gender-segregated benches of an earlier era. The newly consecrated sacred space reinforced social hierarchy and highlighted the centrality of the “little commonwealth” in the religious life of the community.23 The Wampanoag families under the Cottons’ pastoral inspection displayed many of the characteristics of what historians have termed “Puritan tribalism.” Between 1670 and 1678, more than 80 percent of John Cotton Jr.’s original praying Indian congregation at Manomet Ponds converted to Christianity in family groups. The Plymouth minister’s first convert, a local headman named Occanootus, pledged to serve the Christian God in November 1670. His wife, sister, and five adult children all followed suit. Two generations later, members of the Nootas clan continued to dominate the rosters of Native Christians in the area. Four of the five most prominent families in the elder Cotton’s original congregation can be traced through subsequent lists of Native Christians at Manomet Ponds over several generations, and descendants of many eighteenth-century core parish families continue to worship in the Baptist churches of Cape Cod.24 Consider the case of Nathan Hood, the principal host of Cotton’s biweekly worship meetings for more than two decades. Born into in a family with deep Christian roots, Hood may have descended from one of the founding pillars of the Indian church at Mashpee. By 1710, he had emerged as a leader in the Manomet Ponds Indian church. When members of the Native congregation sent a petition to the New England Company requesting that Jacob Hedge serve as their minister and schoolmaster in 1709, Hood’s name headed the list, followed by that of his brother, Robin. Both men appeared on the roster of Manomet Ponds parishioners that Cotton compiled a year later. Indeed, the twenty-seven Hood family members on the judge’s list constituted the largest single clan of Native Christians in the region. Collectively, they accounted for nearly a quarter of the entire church. Core families in nearby English congregations exerted a similar demographic influence.25 Although he lived at Manomet Ponds for several years, “Old Nathan” was forced to sell his small farm following a series of financial reversals during the second decade of the eighteenth century. He relocated to Plain Dealing and indentured his children in Cotton’s service, thus purchasing a modicum of economic security with his family’s servitude. Over the next two decades, Hood regularly hosted Cotton’s biweekly religious meetings at his wigwam. Following his death in 1740, this responsibility passed to Daniel Robin, who had married Hood’s daughter. When he removed to Herring Pond around 1747, the torch 102

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passed briefly to James Ned, son of Francis Ned, one of Cotton’s original Indian tenants.26 Numerous Indian preachers, schoolmistresses, and civil magistrates hailed from the ranks of established Native Christian clans like the Hoods. Will Hedge and his wife were among Plymouth’s earliest converts, for example, and their three children — Jacob, Rebecca, and Joanna — quickly followed their parents into the praying Indian fold. When the younger Cotton began his missionary career in 1707, Jacob Hedge was serving as a ruling elder in the Native church at Herring Pond, on the border of Sandwich and Plymouth; at the invitation of Nathan Hood and the other Manomet Ponds petitioners, he began preaching there as well. Meanwhile, Hedge’s sister, Rebecca, served as schoolmistress to the Ponds congregation for more than a decade. Similarly, the descendants of Wanna — the elder Cotton’s second praying Indian convert in 1670 — diligently provided leadership in two regional Native communities. When Joseph Wannoo died in 1741 at the age of eighty, Cotton praised his work as a schoolmaster, justice of the peace, and preacher at Manomet Ponds. Wannoo’s brother, John, also served as a local Indian magistrate, while John’s wife, Esther, occasionally taught school. Other members of the Wannoo clan — Joseph’s son Benjamin and his brother Isaac — were elected to the posts of constable and justice of the peace in the Indian plantation at Titicut in nearby Middleborough. And in 1767, agents for the New England Company reported that Isaac Jeffry — who was listed as a dependant on Cotton’s 1710 roster of praying Indians at Manomet Ponds — was still preaching to the tiny remnant of Native families that lived on the outskirts of Plymouth.27 In short, over the course of the eighteenth century, the social structure of indigenous congregations increasingly paralleled that of existing Puritan “tribes.”

Eclecticism: Religious Literacy and Devotional Practices While most Indian families displayed a preference for autonomous, although structurally parallel, indigenous churches, the range of religious beliefs professed by Native Christians in the Old Colony was nearly indistinguishable from that of their English neighbors. David Hall’s work on popular religion in early New England suggests a broad range of individual faith perspectives among seventeenth-century Puritans, ranging from the devout writings of pious goodwives to the casual or strategic spirituality of “horse-shed” Christians. His work calls attention to the “intermittences” of religious life, the ebb and flow of spiritual concerns over the individual life course, and the “untidiness” and “messiness” of religion in everyday life.28 The Wampanoag families that were living at native american popular religion

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Plain Dealing, Manomet Ponds, and elsewhere in the Old Colony occupied an equally eclectic spectrum of beliefs and practices. Like his ordained ministerial colleagues, Cotton loaded his bilingual sermons with proof texts that supported his arguments. Understanding his theological message required an extensive knowledge of both the Bible and reformed Protestant doctrine. To this end, he and his missionary colleagues labored incessantly to improve the level of religious literacy among their Indian congregations. During the 1720s, the New England Company began to liquidate its remaining stores of “Stationary Ware.” Over an eight-year span, Cotton received nearly one hundred Massachusett-language books from the Boston commissioners. The charitable contributions included fifty-eight primers, twelve psalm books, catechisms, devotional literature, and published sermons, as well as quires of paper, inkhorns, and spectacles. The judge forwarded most of these materials to the Indian school at Manomet Ponds, where a succession of Native teachers instructed children in the rudiments of reading and writing. The literacy campaign bore mixed results. In 1710, 52 percent of the adult men and 44 percent of the women attending religious meetings at Manomet Ponds were readers, and nearly every family on Cotton’s roster included at least one member who could read. Surviving probate inventories, too, provide evidence of book and Bible ownership among Native Christians throughout the Old Colony.29 Writing skills, however, may have lagged further behind. Both Sam Penes and his son Simon, for example, were listed as readers on Cotton’s early roster of Manomet Ponds parishioners, but only the father signed his name to a 1729 petition endorsing the candidacy of Indian preacher Joseph Moses. Simon endorsed the document with a mark.30 Vernacular literacy for Native Americans living in Plymouth County actually may have declined during the first quarter of the eighteenth century from what John Cotton Jr. had reported a half century earlier. Of the forty praying Indians living at Manomet Ponds in 1674, one-quarter could read in English, and others were “very desirous to learn to read the word.” Traveling throughout the region forty years later, Josiah reported disappointingly low levels of reading literacy. Despite the New England Company’s campaign to saturate the Indian communities of the Old Colony with Massachusett texts, only one in five Native Christians could read, and even fewer could write. The decline may have been more widespread, as recent studies of Martha’s Vineyard have suggested.31 The limits of Indian religious literacy in the Old Colony during the middle decades of the eighteenth century raise difficult questions regarding the extent to which Native Christians mastered reformed theological doctrines and devo-

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tional practices. During his 1726 general visitation, Cotton spent nearly a month discoursing with more than one hundred Native Americans living in scattered settlements across Plymouth County. The hurried notes that he scribbled during his travels suggested that he had two objectives in mind. First, Cotton was concerned with documenting the Indians’ understanding of basic theological issues. A secondary goal of the visitation was to exhort Native Christians to greater diligence in participating in private and public “ordinances,” including private meditation and scriptural study, family prayer, and attendance of public worship. To his dismay, Cotton discovered that few adults had joined local Indian churches and only one in ten had been baptized. Several were “Thankfull for my Advice,” he acknowledged, and some of the individuals he interviewed were eager to share their “Knowledge & Apprehension of Spiritual things.” One told the lay missionary that “the Way to get to Heaven was by Faith & Repentance.” Others “declared their Senc of Sin, & the End of Christs dying, & their Thoughts of Praying to God.”32 Here again, it is important to recall the eclecticism of English popular piety. During the eighteenth century, ministers in the Old Colony regularly complained of ignorant children who knew nothing of their catechisms, parents who failed to present infants for baptism, and brash Sabbath profaners who mocked their sermons, took the Lord’s name in vain, or spoke lightly of the devil. In towns like Plymouth and Sandwich, restrictive church membership practices ensured that as many as half of all families remained unchurched. More than 40 percent of all baptismal candidates were over the age of two, and thus a significant number of children in these parishes died unbaptized. In addition, Plymouth and the hinterland communities of southeastern New England harbored Baptists, Quakers, and a wide variety of sectarian groups ranging from the Rogerenes of New London to the immortalist heretics of Bristol County and Rhode Island. In short, the Old Colony was one of New England’s “darkest” corners — a region in which spiritual dissenters of all racial and ethnic groups discovered fertile ground for their distinctive beliefs and practices.33 Despite the presence of religious heterodoxy and apathy among Plymouth’s Indian and English communities, there appear to have been some notable counterexamples. Members of Francis Ned’s family, for example, left tantalizing clues to their Native Christian worldview in the margins of a family Bible. Born during the 1630s, “Old Ned” lived at Plain Dealing, and he hosted Cotton’s biweekly meetings for several years. In 1710, Cotton presented his Indian tenant with a handsome copy of John Eliot’s translation of the Bible — a rare and valuable commodity by the early eighteenth century — in recognition of his Sabbath

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hospitality. On its pages, Francis and his son Josiah recorded various information in Massachusett script. The Neds used their Bible to practice writing their names and characters, and their marginal annotations chronicled family news and neighborhood happenings. On February 7, 1715, for example, one of the Neds observed that they had received “five great snows” that winter, “but we . . . Indians still survive well on this morning.” One year later, Josiah noted in the margins of 1 Kings that he was “going to go to the ocean.” Another Native writer, Benjamin Kusseniyeutt, explained in the pages of Jeremiah how he had caught “a Negro man and a white woman” in a scandalous encounter.34 In addition, the Ned family Bible contains important information about its members’ collective theological knowledge and devotional practices. Francis, for example, penned an exhortation on the pages of the book of Acts. “My brothers,” he noted, “remember love for God and all people, always.” His son repeatedly wrote the words “remember” and “meditate” in the margins. Keyed to brackets within the text, these annotations identified scriptural passages on which he based his occasional private meditations. The verses that received his devotional attention, moreover, reveal a remarkable range of theological inquiry. Some were classics, such as the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4. Elsewhere, the younger Ned bracketed several passages from Proverbs, a book that Cotton referenced frequently in his Indian sermons. But his Indian tenant also appears to have delved into the arcane mysteries of typology, prophecy, and apocalypticism. “Josiah Ned meditates about [the] savior,” he recorded on the pages of Isaiah, as he advised himself to “remember the sign” of Christ’s birth embedded in the prophecies of the Old Testament. On another page he inscribed the words “Ezekiel 44:17”: an obscure reference to the clothing of the Zadok priests who reclaimed Solomon’s Temple in the exiled Hebrew writer’s restorationist vision. And in the book of Revelation, he penned the following cryptic message: “Know ye all people, there is going to be a new storm.”35 It is unclear whether Ned was searching through his Bible for texts that would help to explain the vicious winter squalls that punctuated the period, or whether his meditations on Revelation were part of an emerging apocalyptical worldview through which he imagined a social order turned upside down. Regardless, the marginal notations inscribed in the Ned family Bible suggest that at least a few of Plymouth’s Native Christians ranked among those whom Hall has called “religious virtuosi,” deeply pious men and women who were capable of both sustained devotional routines and sophisticated theological reflection. Once defined as a technology of colonial domination, Native vernacular gestured in multiple directions and often served to maintain boundaries between Wampanoag Christians and their English neighbors.36 106

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Hybridity: Healing and Mortuary Customs Josiah Ned’s creative and potentially subversive Bible-reading habits demonstrate the capacity of ordinary people in provincial New England to redirect established traditions to suit individual needs. Shifting focus from the production of religious values to their consumption spotlights the processes through which lay people, in David Hall’s words, became “agents in the making of their culture” and opens up “a middle where appropriation takes place.” His characterization of Puritanism as a “middle way” marked by negotiations bears striking resemblance to ethnohistorian Richard White’s celebrated description of cultural contact on the early American frontier as a process of “creative misunderstandings.” In their struggle to create common systems of meaning, Indians and Europeans living in the Old Northwest frequently distorted or misrepresented the values of the other, but new cultural practices also emerged from such misunderstandings, the “shared meanings” of what White has famously termed “the middle ground.” Both White and Hall emphasize the improvisational, ambivalent, ironic, contested, and hybrid nature of culture.37 For Indians living behind the frontier in the Old Colony, few issues better reflected this creative dynamism — or generated more anxiety among ordained Congregational ministers and their missionary colleagues — than Native Christian healing practices and mortuary customs. In addition to preaching bilingual sermons to the Native tenants living at Plain Dealing, Cotton traveled extensively throughout the Old Colony on weekdays, visiting Indian communities and talking with individuals and families. The purpose behind these pastoral visits typically involved praying with ailing Indians. He counseled grieving widows, consumptives, and even a “distracted” Indian man suffering from mental illness. Like many of his ordained pastoral colleagues, Cotton stressed the role of human sin in provoking God to send temporal judgments among his people. During the devastating winter of 1711, as yet another epidemic raged among the Indian settlements of Plymouth County, the lay missionary explained how “Sin is the reason of all the afflictions you feel. A Great many Indians have died this year & more are Sick. God sends Sickness & Death because you commit Sin.” On such occasions, Cotton’s pious counsels focused on the proper responses to divine affliction: confession of sin, reformation of behavior, and heightened devotional activity. Public or private fasting, especially, provided relief to penitent sinners hoping to “Obtain Some great mercy for his body or Soul or family.” If “a man wants health in his family,” Cotton asserted in another sermon, “he must “solemnly & Seriously pray to God.”38 native american popular religion

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Provincial clergymen regularly preached sermons on affliction, but they often parted company with both their English and Indian congregants when educating their parishioners on the proper way to cope with illness and misfortune. Ministers typically urged their flocks to “improve” or sanctify experiences of divine affliction by contemplating their own mortality and the divine judgment that would inevitably follow. Lay men and women, in contrast, invested more energy in ritual performances designed to protect their loved ones from misfortune. Families requested special public prayers for pregnant women and sick relatives, hoping that the God would “appear” to heal and protect the infirm. Collective rituals of fasting countered outbreaks of epidemic disease. In some southeastern New England parishes, as many as one-fifth of all church membership candidates justified their candidacy not on the grounds of a dramatic conversion experience but because they were fulfilling a healing vow uttered during a recent illness or moment of physical danger.39 Old Colony Indians, too, placed great emphasis on the religious dimensions of healing. Prior to contact, the Wampanoags believed that the world was controlled, in part, by the underworld serpent Abbomocho, who was responsible for poor harvests as well as fertility, diseases as well as their cures. Religious specialists — shamans known as powwows — communicated with this fearsome yet accessible other-than-human being through ritual performances that were designed to heal the sick and mitigate natural disasters. Most Algonquian shamans worked independently, dispensing practical herbal remedies as well as engaging in dramatic sucking, spitting, and blowing rituals that addressed the psychological dimensions of healing. The Wampanoags also performed collective rituals that were analogous to Puritan days of fasting and thanksgiving. New England Company secretary Samuel Sewall described one such communal event in a letter to a London correspondent. Following “many Adversities” that included the “Loss of near Relations,” he explained, a female sachem appointed a special day during which Indians from across the region assembled to feast, dance, and listen to speeches describing her “former Calamity.” Together, the rituals formed a collective appeal to supernatural powers for the great woman’s “future Prosperity.”40 Indian shamans and Puritan ministers may have differed dramatically in their approaches to healing, and yet affinities in the underlying worldviews of both English colonials and Native Americans persisted. Both groups believed that they could control the unruly invisible world through appropriate ritual techniques, and this shared culture of healing prepared the way for the hybridization of popular religion in the Old Colony during the eighteenth century. Cotton and his father recorded several examples of this layering of Algonquian 108

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and English faith healing practices in their personal papers. During the seventeenth century, illness and misfortune often facilitated Indian conversions in the Old Colony. In 1674, for example, the sister of Occanootus offered herself as a praying Indian after her son was dramatically rescued from drowning. “She thought she was bound to serve God,” noted the Plymouth minister in his diary. The following year the Christian Indians at Manomet Ponds observed a day of “rejoicing & Thanksgiving to God for the recovery of John Wanna’s child from great sicknesse, when all hopes of its life were past.” After several hours of joyful psalm singing, Wanna and his wife stood up and with tears streaming down their faces acknowledged their “vileness,” gave thanks for God’s “sparing mercy,” and pledged to “forsake the wayes of God” no more. This pattern persisted well into the provincial period. Interviewing Francis Ned, Nathan Hood, and the other Native tenant families at Plain Dealing in 1726, Cotton encountered a “Sick Person” who confessed his “long absence from Sacrament, his love to drink, [and] sometimes neglect of Family Prayer.” Still, the unnamed church member pledged “his hopes of doing better if he recovered.” Many English layfolk voiced nearly identical utilitarian healing vows in the written statements that they submitted to their ministers at the time they were propounded for full church membership.41 Even though he occasionally preached on the efficacy of healing devotions, Cotton was wary of self-serving ritual observances. “Some men when they are sick,” he warned in one of his Massachusett sermons, “will promise to forsake sin, but when they are well, they will be worse than they were before.” Only by walking in God’s ways and obeying scriptural commands would true Christians be able to avoid disaster in this world and eternal misfortune in the next.42 The theological distinction between heartfelt repentance and naked bargaining with God, however, was often lost on pious layfolk, both Indian and English. Indeed, Cotton’s suffering tenant may have superimposed the reformed theology of affliction onto a preexisting grid of ancestral rituals, incorporating the judge’s fasting and prayer devotions into a larger repertoire of faith healing practices that may have included the curing techniques of regional shamans and the communal rituals over which they occasionally presided. In addition, Cotton’s Indian sermons inadvertently reinforced traditional Wampanoag notions of the afterlife. In an address that he delivered repeatedly throughout the Old Colony during his career, the lay missionary criticized those “persons [who] are afraid to think of their wicked ways because they are afraid of being too troubled for them.” Those who were sorry for their sins, he argued, “shall be happy for ever in Heaven,” while those who were not “shall be miserable in Hell for ever.” In heaven, Cotton continued, the “causes of Sorrow” native american popular religion

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would be “utterly taken away”: sins absolved, God’s wrath placated. Faithful men and women would be delivered from all their enemies, healed of their afflictions, and reunited with the “Company of glorious Angels & blessed Saints.”43 Perhaps a result of the awkward language barrier that separated him from his Native audiences, Cotton’s description of a heavenly paradise of material sufficiency, robust health, and social reunion coincided with several key aspects of an ancestral Algonquian cosmology. During the seventeenth century, Indians throughout southeastern New England believed that the souls of the dead traveled southwest to the house of the creator deity, Cautantowwit, where they dwelled amid sumptuous gardens in the company of relatives and ancestors. The earliest converts at Mashpee do not appear to have drawn sharp divisions between their inherited cosmology and the new tenets of reformed soteriology, and eighteenth-century archaeological evidence suggest that their descendants continued to participate in a hybrid, multivalent Native Christianity that creatively blended concepts of the afterlife.44 Prior to contact with Europeans, the Indians of southeastern New England buried their dead in the fetal position, with the head facing southwest toward Cautantowwit’s house. To assist the deceased in their journey to the land of the ancestors, graves typically included utilitarian objects such as beads and projectile points. By the early eighteenth century, the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Montauks continued to inter bodies along a southwestern axis, but nearly half were buried in the extended posture preferred by Europeans. Grave goods now included elaborate items of English manufacture. Kettles, knives, bells, muskets, cloth, and even medicine bundles formed from torn pages of the Bible were neatly incorporated into the traditional mortuary complex. One wonders if the Native Christians at Plain Dealing observed these burial rituals following the death of Old Nathan Hood in 1740. Although he presided over the funeral, would Cotton have even realized that the orientation of the coffin, the posture of the deceased, and the objects and clothing that accompanied the body conveyed an ancient spiritual meaning to his Indian congregants?45

Influence: Supernatural Lore In an important revisionist study of Puritan-Indian relations in early New England, ethnohistorian James Ronda asserted that “Indian converts transformed Christianity to suit Native cultural needs.” Although he restricted his analysis of an “Indianized” religious culture to the Native churches on Martha’s Vineyard, Ronda’s provocative thesis resonates with David Hall’s assertion that the English laity were partial “makers of their faith.” Tensions, contradictions, and 110

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ambivalences within Puritanism provided Native Christians and English laypeople with opportunities to selectively appropriate a wide range of religious beliefs and practices. Or, to recast the issue in different terms, New Englanders compartmentalized their religious beliefs and practices, as Richard Godbeer has demonstrated in his study of popular magical practices. Indeed, supernatural lore and occult practices circulated freely among English colonists, Indians, and enslaved African Americans.46 As the eighteenth century progressed, the direction of influence moved from the racialized margins of the culture to its center. Despite decades of earnest effort, John Eliot, John Cotton Jr., and other New England Company missionaries proved unable to extirpate the Algonquians’ ancestral religion. The further one traveled into the hinterlands of the Old Colony, the stronger such traditions became. In a 1690 letter to an inquiring London correspondent, Bristol, Rhode Island, clergyman Samuel Lee detailed a host of flourishing Wampanoag ritual practices, ranging from the sequestration of menstruating women to the techniques of “physick” practiced by “priests & conjurers.” He noted that Indian powwows continued to create “evil charmes” that could stop a victim’s water or cure the sick. Information on the persistence of precontact supernatural traditions during the eighteenth century remains shrouded in mystery, in part, because the Wampanoag wanted it that way. Lee admitted that the Indians were “very secret in such things,” and, over time, Native Americans throughout the region grew ever more vigilant in their efforts to shield their religious practices from the prying eyes of outsiders.47 Ritual secrecy ignited the curiosity of Plymouth’s English residents. Traveling from Sandwich to Plymouth in 1762, Newport clergyman Ezra Stiles inquired after the meaning behind a peculiar topographical feature known to local residents as the “Sacrifice Rocks.” For centuries — “immemorially,” according to Stiles — Old Colony Natives seeking success on the hunt had tossed stones and small pieces of wood on the two massive glacial erratics, forming a large pile of brush. Although they scrupulously continued to observe the ritual into the nineteenth century, Indians in the region were reluctant to explain the meaning of the intriguing good-luck custom. They were “ashamed the English should see them,” Stiles noted in his journal, “& accordingly when walking with an English[man] they have made a path round at a quarter Mile’s Distance to avoid it.” Most feigned ignorance when quizzed by inquiring travelers, admitting only that their “Fathers & their Grandfathers & Great Grandfathers did so, and charged all their Children to do so.” When Edward Kendall visited the region in 1802, he confirmed that the motives behind the ritual were “obscurely explained” by the Indians and, for that reason, Plymouth residents assumed native american popular religion

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that they had “no reason to give,” but the tenacity with which the ritual was performed for more than two centuries after contact suggests otherwise. Thus English colonists mistakenly referred to the site as the “Sacrificing Rocks,” although Stiles readily admitted that “the Indians don’t imagine it a Sacrifice.”48 While an 1830 town map erased all evidence of Native settlement in town, even this document noted the location of Plymouth’s “other historic rock.” Proudly described in nineteenth-century town histories and commemorated with a modern roadside historical marker, the “ancient” Sacrifice Rocks now serve to connect Plymouth with its contentious Native past. To an earlier generation of New Englanders, however, the rocks represented an outmoded, superstitious worldview once shared by Puritans and Indians alike. Commenting on the Indians’ enduring regard for the site, one nineteenth-century writer suggested that Native Americans were no “more superstitious than their white neighbors.” The anonymous author found it difficult to distinguish the Wampanoags’ practice of heaping good-luck offerings on a pile of brush along the Sandwich Road from the common habit among Anglo-Americans of carrying a rabbit’s foot in their pocket. Behind such seemingly harmless customs lay a well-entrenched tradition of supernaturalism that was intelligible to members of both communities.49 Throughout the eighteenth century, English residents in the Old Colony retained a profound respect for the invisible world. Diarists continued to fill their private journals with tales of celestial wonders and natural prodigies, and books on the subject by notorious hack writers continued to find an eager audience. Families cast horoscopes on behalf of their newborn infants, marking the precise date, time, and astrological sign under which each child was born in their family Bibles. Mariners resorted to judicial astrology in order to divine an auspicious time for departure. Bristol, Rhode Island, magistrate John Saffin even invented an “Artificiall Divination by Number” scheme using stones and kernels of corn, and an enterprising Hanover ironmonger attempted to divine the remaining length of winter based on the “Pleasant” weather occurring on Candlemas Day — February 2!50 Indian and English demons, ghosts, and spirits, too, infested southeastern New England. In 1673, Rhode Island magistrates listened to eyewitness testimony involving an apparition that had appeared to accuse her murderers; the English folklore tradition of “murder will out” compelled another Plymouth County resident to set off for Nova Scotia following a similar supernatural encounter more than a century later. These accounts, in turn, mirrored a brief spiritual biography penned by Martha’s Vineyard missionary Experience Mayhew in which a pious Native Christian woman returned from the dead to 112

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chastise her father for neglecting to commit her religious experiences to writing. Throughout the colonial period, Native Americans developed their own hybrid folklore traditions that would persist into the twentieth century. Among the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Pequots, and Mohegans, supernatural lore bearing the imprint of Christian beliefs in ghosts and devils surfaced alongside traditional Algonquian stories of trickster deities, spirit beings, and culture heroes, such as the giant Maushop.51 Witchcraft remained a common concern for Indians and English colonists as well. Informal accusations surfaced in Hingham (1709), Milton (1718), eastern Connecticut (1713, 1737, 1745), Martha’s Vineyard (1723), Plymouth (1732), Barrington, Rhode Island (1744), and Harwich (1762). Most of these cases involved allegations of maleficia, or occult harm caused to the victim’s family, animals, house, or possessions through black magic. Numerous eighteenth-century colonials described eerie encounters with spectral familiars and shape-shifting night hags who subdued their victims with bit and bridle and rode them around the countryside.52 These stories were conventional, although perhaps antiquated, by English standards, and they blended seamlessly with Native American folklore. Samuel Lee reported that Algonquian shamans consorted with “oraacles” — Manitou, totems, and guardian spirits that assumed the forms of rattlesnakes, crows, hawks, and bald eagles. Likewise, in 1702 Indians on Naushon Island recalled an ancient story regarding a powwow living along the shores of Buzzards Bay, twenty miles away, who allegedly cast a spectral rattlesnake across the channel and attacked one of the women in the village. “I don’t see for my part,” mused the Mohegan Indian preacher Samson Occom in 1761, why Algonquian witchcraft was “not as true, as the English or other nation’s witchcraft.”53 Reports of maleficia in Native American communities were rare in seventeenthcentury New England, and yet the structural similarities between Indian shamans and English witches contributed to the creative blurring of supernatural lore. For more than a century after contact, English commentators from Roger Williams to Ezra Stiles repeatedly conflated and stigmatized the occult traditions of both groups. Over time, such pronouncements helped to create a cultural climate in which exchange was possible. While most of the available evidence suggests that Native Americans adopted European folk traditions, the direction of influence was never unidirectional.54 Perhaps the most striking counterexample involved the gradual transformation of Native shamans into peddlers of occult services that were eagerly purchased by a racially diverse clientele. Powwows did not vanish from the eighteenth-century religious landscape, as some historians have suggested. Rather, they began to resemble traditional English cunning folk. native american popular religion

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Most early modern European villages included occult adepts who healed the sick, divined fortunes, discovered lost items, cast horoscopes, and counteracted the malevolent magic of neighborhood witches. Their ritual practices bore a superficial resemblance to those of Algonquian shamans. Although they were viewed with suspicion by ministers and civil magistrates, “white” witches, “conjurors,” and “wise” men and women performed crucial services on behalf of neighbors seeking knowledge of or control over the invisible world. While a constellation of forces, including a backlash against the Salem witch hunt, the decriminalization of witchcraft throughout the British Empire in 1736, and the emergence of Enlightenment thought, may have tarnished the reputation of cunning folk among provincial intellectuals, a vibrant tradition of popular magic persisted throughout the eighteenth century. And no region of New England harbored more astrologers, palmists, folk healers, or diviners than the Old Colony and its neighbor, Rhode Island.55 In southeastern New England, the cunning arts were nourished by the persistence of religious heterodoxy, but the region’s diverse population contributed equally to its reputation as a hothouse of occult activity. In fact, popular magical practices became increasingly racialized as the eighteenth century progressed. By 1770, English fortune-tellers such as the Newport, Rhode Island, cunning man Joseph Stafford were actively exploiting the local fascination with Native American supernatural lore, selling horoscopes to local residents seeking to discover buried “Indian” treasure on Cape Cod. Over the course of the century, English men and women frequently chose to consult with Indians and African cunning folk — exotic racial outsiders who were viewed as having special connections with the spirit world.56 Ezra Stiles explained the close correspondence between Indian and English popular magical practices in a 1773 sermon. The Newport clergyman used the occasion to rail against several of his parishioners who had recently consulted with local fortune-tellers and conjurers such as old Granny Morgan, who “accustoms herself on occasion to a hocus pocus, & making Cakes of flour and her own Urine and sticking them full of pins and divining by them.” In a curious twist, Stiles included Indian powwows under the same heading, and he proceeded to relate the details of a Narragansett rain dance that had been led by local shamans nearly fifty years before. Stiles’s sermon doctrine laid bare the relationship between the two occult traditions. Indian powwowing and English cunning magic, in his opinion, were “conjoined together.” Both were “Relict[s]” of the same “antient System of seeking to an evil invisible power.” Although Stiles mistakenly believed that this monolithic “Vessel of Sorcery” had been “shipwreckt” during his own lifetime and erroneously assumed that “no Powaw 114

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now exists in N. England,” his willingness to lump English and Indian occult practices together into a singular “System” nonetheless underscored the fluidity of eighteenth-century supernatural lore.57 The trend toward conflating English cunning magic with both African and Indian shamanism began during the seventeenth century. In 1694, Martha’s Vineyard missionary Matthew Mayhew related a curious anecdote about an English sea captain who appealed to a local shaman for assistance in locating some stolen possessions. The powwow agreed to help, but he cautioned his client that his medicine would succeed only “if you can believe that my god will help you.” This stipulation may ultimately have scuttled the bargain, but similar stories surfaced occasionally during the provincial period. In 1709, Bristol County magistrates haled several enslaved African Americans before the county court for “pretending to discover lost or stolen goods and to find out the persons that have them.” Following the protracted debate over his son-in-law’s alleged haunted house, an exasperated Cotton angrily decried his superstitious Plymouth neighbors in his private memoirs, claiming that “it is too Common a Practice In these parts to repair to a Certain Diviner among Us to recover lost Goods, & to any Pretender English or Indian to know Our Fortunes.”58


Acknowledging the cross-pollination of Native American and European occult traditions blurs beyond recognition the thin line segregating English religion from Indian superstition, and it forces us to reconsider the significance of the Wampanoag man’s story of Spanish wizards and flying houses with which this essay began. While Cotton was appalled by the man’s “ridiculous & incredible” tale, his neighbors took the supernatural story seriously, since it resonated with a popular religious worldview that was shared by both groups. English and Indian “half Christians” throughout the Old Colony occupied a spectrum of positions on such issues as religion and the family, religious literacy, devotional practices, faith healing, mortuary customs, and supernatural lore. To this list we might add the Great Awakening revivals and the separatist movement that followed — two events in which Native Americans participated vigorously.59 By 1770 few Indians lived solely in an oral world of myth and ritual. While some continued to observe an ancestral religion that had fused with English occult traditions, others like Francis Ned and the Indian tenants at Plain Dealing gravitated toward a reformed Christianity that was as rigorous and as theologically sophisticated as Cotton’s own. Indians participated in provincial New England’s sprawling religious culture on a variety of levels and for a variety of reasons. Fully acquainted with Christianity yet anchored in an ancient cosmology, Old native american popular religion

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Colony Indians inhabited the untidy cultural space between these rapidly converging conceptual worlds.

Notes This essay is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared in Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 15, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 147–86. For a complementary discussion of the social dimensions of Josiah Cotton’s ministry, see Douglas L. Winiarski, “A Question of Plain Dealing: Josiah Cotton, Native Christians, and the Quest for Security in Eighteenth-Century Plymouth County,” New England Quarterly 77 (September 2004): 368–412. 1. Josiah Cotton, “Account of the Cotton Family, 1727–1755,” MS Am 1165, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 302. 2. Ibid., 291. 3. Douglas L. Winiarski, “ ‘Pale Blewish Lights’ and a Dead Man’s Groan: Tales of the Supernatural from Eighteenth-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 55 (October 1998): 497–530. 4. I borrow these terms from James P. Ronda’s revisionist essay “Generations of the Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (July 1981): 371, and Daniel R. Mandell’s landmark monograph Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). Prominent studies that emphasize New England Indians’ selective appropriation of Christianity include Elise M. Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey: That Is the Question: Strategies for Cultural Autonomy of Massachusetts Praying Town Indians,” Ethnohistory 27 (Spring 1980): 135–52; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “The Material Culture of the Christian Indians of New England, 1650–1775,” in Documentary Archaeology in the New World, ed. Mary C. Beudry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 126–31; E. Jennifer Monaghan, “ ‘She Loved to Read in Good Books’: Literacy and the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1643–1725,” History of Education Quarterly 30 (Winter 1990): 493–521; Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646–1730,” New England Quarterly 63 (September 1990): 396–428; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Native Christianity in 18th Century Massachusetts: Ritual as Cultural Reaffirmation,” in New Dimensions in Ethnohistory: Papers of the Second Laurier Conference on Ethnohistory and Ethnology, ed. Barry Gough and Laird Christie (Hull, Que.: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1991), 119–26; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Vernacular Literacy and Massachusett World View, 1650–1750,” in Algonkians of New England: Past and Present, vol. 16 of Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 1993), 26–34; Charles L. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians: A Theological and Cultural Perspective,” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Francis J. Bremer (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 233–54; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Gender as a Social Category in Native Southern New England,” Ethnohistory 43 (Autumn 1996): 573–92; Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America, Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Neal Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North America,” Ethnohistory 50 (Spring 2003): 247–59; David J. Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life: A View from the Is-

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lands and Cape Cod,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, vol. 71 of Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 264–98; and David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in SeventeenthCentury Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 62 (April 2005): 141–74. 5. See, for example, Ruth M. Underhill, Red Man’s Religion: Beliefs and Practices of the Indians North of Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Åke Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians, Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions, vol. 7, trans. Monica Setterwall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian (New York: Crossroad, 1982); and Joseph Epes Brown with Emily Cousins, Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, rev. ed. (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994), and Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner, 1995). 7. Joel W. Martin, “Indians, Contact, and Colonialism in the Deep South: Themes for a Postcolonial History of American Religion,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 151. 8. See Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675, 3rd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31 (January 1974): 27–54; William S. Simmons, “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” New England Quarterly 52 (June 1979): 197–218; William S. Simmons, “Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans’ Perception of Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (January 1981): 56–72; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 9. I borrow this phrase from James H. Merrell’s pioneering study The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), viii. 10. For the examples cited, see R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 109th ser., vol. 4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Barry O’Connell, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Clyde Holler, Black Elk’s Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Laura J. Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776, Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Clyde Holler, ed., The Black Elk Reader (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a MidAtlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Joanna

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Brooks, ed., The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Alfred A. Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Richard W. Pointer, Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). 11. Joel W. Martin, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); William A. Young, Quest for Harmony: Native American Spiritual Traditions (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002); James Treat, Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1996). 12. Prominent monographs in this dynamic new subfield of Native American history include Mandell, Behind the Frontier; Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790, Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); and David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity and Community among the Wampanoag Indians, 1600–1871, Studies in North American Indian History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 13. Formative methodological essays in the field of popular religion include Natalie Zemon Davis, “Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkhaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 307–36; Stuart Clark, “French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture,” Past and Present 100 (1983): 62–99; Natalie Zemon Davis, “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures,” in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven E. Ozment (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 321–41; Jon Butler, “The Future of American Religious History: Prospectus, Agenda, Transatlantic Problématique,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 42 (April 1985): 167–83; Jon Butler, “Historiographical Heresy: Catholicism as a Model for American Religious History,” in Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 286–309; Leonard Norman Primiano, “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” Western Folklore 54 (1995): 37–56; David D. Hall, introduction to Lived Religion: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), vii–xiii; Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Hall, Lived Religion, 3–21; and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, introduction to Practicing Protestants: History of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965, ed. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 1–15. 14. For an overview of these developments and a representative bibliography of exemplary studies, see Nicholas Griffiths, introduction to Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America, ed. Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 1–42. 15. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 11, 15, 245. See also the following works by Hall: “Toward a History of Popular Religion in Early New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 41 (January 1984): 49–55; “Religion and Society: Problems and Considerations,” in Colonial

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British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 317–44; “On Common Ground: The Coherence of American Puritan Studies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 44 (April 1987): 193–229; “Narrating Puritanism,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51–83; and “ ‘Between the Times’: Popular Religion in Eighteenth-Century British North America,” in The World Turned Upside-Down: The State of Eighteenth-Century American Studies at the Beginning of the TwentyFirst Century, ed. Michael V. Kennedy and William G. Shade (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2000), 142–63. 16. Cotton, “Account of the Cotton Family,” 169; Josiah Cotton, “Vocabulary of the Massachusetts (or Natick) Indian Language,” ed. John Pickering, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., 2 (1830): 147–257; Cotton Mather, Mehquantamwahuwaenin wutche nemunukeeg Lordooe mishadtuppooonk: Usseonk wogkouunummunat kah anunumwontamunat peantamoe peyamoonk ut Lordooe mishadtuppooonkanit (A Monitor for Communicants: An Essay to Excite and Assist Religious Approaches to the Table of the Lord), trans. Josiah Cotton (Boston: Benjamin Green, 1716). 17. Josiah Cotton to Adam Winthrop, November 7, 1732, in Cotton, “Account of the Cotton Family,” 237. 18. Richard Bourne to Daniel Gookin, August 1, 1674, in Daniel Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 1 (1792): 196–200; Thomas Hinckley to William Stoughton and Joseph Dudley, April 2, 1685, “The Hinckley Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 5 (1861): 133; James David Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676, Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 169; Cotton Mather, A Letter, about the Present State of Christianity, among the Christianized Indians of New-England (Boston: Timothy Green, 1705), 5. 19. Len Travers, ed., “The Missionary Journal of John Cotton Jr., 1666–1678,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 109 (1997): 59–90; John Cotton Jr. to Increase Mather, March 23, 1693, typescript, miscellaneous manuscripts: “Cotton,” New-York Historical Society, New York; J. Patrick Cesarini, ed., “John Eliot’s ‘A breif History of the Mashepog Indians,’ 1666,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65 (January 2008): 101–34; Grindal Rawson and Samuel Danforth, “Account of an Indian Visitation, A.D. 1698,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., 10 (1809): 129–34; Mather, Letter, about the Present State of Christianity, 4–10. 20. Sarah Kemble Knight, “The Journal of Madam Knight,” in Colonial American Travel Narratives, ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 65–65; Axtell, Invasion Within, 243–47; “The Indian Powwow, or Deception Rewarded,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 2 (1848): 44; Frances Manwaring Caulkins, Memoir of the Rev. William Adams, of Dedham, Mass., and of the Rev. Eliphalet Adams, of New London, Conn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Metcalf and Co., 1849), 35–36; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 1755–1794 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 142–45, 401; Jonathan Barber to Benjamin Colman, October 2, 1733, Benjamin Colman Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. (hereafter cited as MHS); Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 52. 21. George L. Kitteredge, ed., “Letters of Samuel Lee and Samuel Sewall Relating to New England Indians,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 14 (1911–13): 148.

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22. Ronda, “Generations of the Faith,” 372–85. 23. Key studies of the Puritan “tribalism” include Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Gerald F. Moran, “Religious Renewal, Puritan Tribalism, and the Family in Seventeenth-Century Milford, Connecticut,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 36 (April 1979): 236–54; Gerald F. Moran and Maris S. Vinovskis, “The Puritan Family and Religion: A Critical Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (January 1982): 29–63; Mary McManus Ramsbottom, “Religious Society and the Family in Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1630–1740” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1987); Robert J. Dinkin, “Seating the Meetinghouse in Early Massachusetts,” in Material Life in America, 1600–1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 407–18; Anne Speerschneider Brown, “ ‘Bound Up in a Bundle of Life’: The Social Meaning of Religious Practice in Northeastern Massachusetts, 1700–1765” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1995); Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Early New England,” in Hall, Lived Religion, 41–68. 24. Travers, “Missionary Journal of John Cotton Jr.,” 89–101; Thomas Tupper, “An Account of Mr. Tuppers Congregation of Indians,” 1693, Pilgrim Society, Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Mass., published as part of the online exhibition “In Their Own Write: Native American Documents from the Collections of the Pilgrim Hall Museum,” http://www.pilgrimhall.org/ natamdocs.htmœ (October 16, 2008); Josiah Cotton, “An Account of Monument ponds Indians taken by Josiah Cotton,” 1710, trans. Rosseter Cotton, Curwen Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. (hereafter cited as Curwen Family Papers); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 303–5; Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoag of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Jamaica Plain, Mass.: Nimrod Press, 1987), 22–23. 25. New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, Commissioners’ Minutes, October 11, 1708, MS 7953, Guildhall Museum, London (microfilm, Yale University); Cotton, “Account of Monument ponds Indians.” For genealogical information on Nathan Hood and his possible connection to Mashpee, see Winiarski, “Question of Plain Dealing,” 397n38, and Cesarini, “John Eliot’s ‘A breif History of the Mashepog Indians,’ ” 132–34. 26. Josiah Cotton, “Service among the Indians,” October 28, 1716–September 15, 1717, Ms. L, MHS; Josiah Cotton, “Cotton Diaries, 1733–1774,” Cotton Families Collection, Pilgrim Society, Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Mass., 2–3, 6–8, 21, 28–32, 35, 37. 27. Travers, “Missionary Journal of John Cotton Jr.,” 89–90; New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, Commissioners’ Minutes, 1699–1784, MS 7953; New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, Commissioners’ Accounts, 1657–1731, MS 7946, Guildhall Library (microfilm, Yale University); Cotton, “Account of the Cotton Family,” 316; Cotton, “Account of Monument ponds Indians”; “Report of a Committee on the State of the Indians in Mashpee and Parts Adjacent,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser., 3 (1809): 13–14. 28. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, 15, 130; Hall, “Narrating Puritanism,” 62–64, 67–68; Hall, introduction to Lived Religion, x. 29. Plymouth County Probate Records, 1685–1903, microfilm, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 3:121, 4:147, 6:28. These cases represented three of the five surviving estate inventories from Plymouth County. Elsewhere in New England, only two of ten eighteenth-

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century Nantucket inventories and none of the estates probated in Hartford County, Connecticut, between 1692 and 1747 included references to book ownership. See Elizabeth A. Little, Probate Records of Nantucket Indians, Nantucket Algonquian Studies, vol. 2 (Nantucket, Mass.: Nantucket Historical Society, 1980), 12, and Katherine Hermes, “ ‘By Their Desire Recorded’: Native American Wills and Estate Papers in Colonial Connecticut,” Connecticut History 38 (Fall 1999): 150–73. 30. Cotton, “Account of Monument ponds Indians”; Josiah Cotton, “Indian Call of Joseph Moses,” September 28, 1729, Curwen Family Papers. 31. John Cotton Jr. to Daniel Gookin, September 14, 1674, in Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England,” 200; Josiah Cotton, “Some Inquiries . . . Made among the Indians in the General Visitation,” September 4, 1726, Curwen Family Papers; Cotton, “Account of the Cotton Family,” 134. Kathleen J. Bragdon and Ives Goddard have suggested that Native literacy was widespread during the late colonial period, but evidence from Josiah Cotton’s mission papers confirms the figures compiled by Jennifer Monaghan and David Silverman for Indians living on Martha’s Vineyard. Cf. Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Probate Records as a Source for Algonquian Ethnohistory,” in Papers of the Tenth Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1979), 140; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “ ‘Another Tongue Brought In’: An Ethnohistorical Study of Native Writings in Massachusett” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1981), 49–64; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Linguistic Acculturation in Massachusett: 1663–1771,” in Papers of the Twelfth Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1981), 122; Bragdon, “Vernacular Literacy and Massachusett World View,” 29–30; Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, eds., Native Writings in Massachusett, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), 1:14; Monaghan, “‘She Loved to Read in Good Books,’” 493–521; David J. Silverman, “The Impact of Indentured Servitude on the Society and Culture of Southern New England Indians, 1680–1810,” New England Quarterly 74 (December 2001): 656–63. 32. Cotton, “Some Inquiries . . . Made among the Indians.” 33. William G. McLoughlin, “Free Love, Immortalism, and Perfectionism in Cumberland, Rhode Island, 1748–1768,” Rhode Island History 33 (August/November 1974): 67–86; Francis G. Walett, “Shadrack Ireland and the ‘Immortals’ of Colonial New England,” in Sibley’s Heir: A Volume in Memory of Clifford Kenyon Shipton, vol. 39 of Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, ed. Frederick S. Allis Jr. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1982), 541–50; Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 133–56; John L. Brooke, “ ‘The True Spiritual Seed’: Sectarian Religion and the Persistence of the Occult in Eighteenth-Century New England,” in Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600–1900, vol. 17 of Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1995), 107–26; Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy and Eighteenth-Century New England, Early America: History, Context, Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 139–46; Douglas Leo Winiarski, “All Manner of Error and Delusion: Josiah Cotton and the Religious Transformation of Southeastern New England, 1700–1770” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2000), 117–19, 423–26. 34. Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett, 2:447, 449, 451. The Ned family Bible bears a Latin inscription indicating that the book originally was given to Josiah Willard in 1706 by John Wainwright (ibid., 2:457). Secretary of Massachusetts and future commissioner of the New England Company, Willard was a friend and correspondent of Cotton’s, and he likely forwarded Wainwright’s gift to the Plymouth lay missionary.

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35. Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett, 2:447, 449–51, 453, 457. 36. Hall, “Narrating Puritanism,” 62; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “The Shamanic ‘Text’ in Southern New England,” in The Written and the Wrought: Complementary Sources in Historical Anthropology, ed. Mary Ellin d’Agostino, Elizabeth Prine, Eleanor Casella, and Margot Winer, Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, no. 79 (Berkeley, Calif.: Kroeber Anthropological Society, 1995), 173; Kathleen J. Bragdon, “Native Languages as Spoken and Written: Views from Southern New England,” in The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays, ed. Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 180–83. 37. Hall, “Narrating Puritanism,” 71, 73–75; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x. 38. Cotton, “Service among the Indians”; Cotton, “Cotton Diaries,” 2–3, 6–8, 21, 28–32, 35, 37; Josiah Cotton, “Indian Sermon,” February 12, 1710, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, MS 1592, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill.; Cotton, “Indian Sermon,” March 14, 1723, Cotton Family Sermons, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 39. Stephen J. Stein, “ ‘For Their Spiritual Good’: The Northampton, Massachusetts Prayer Bids of the 1730s and 1740s,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 37 (1980): 261–85; Patricia Ann Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 13–24; Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Spiritual Meanings of Illness in Eighteenth-Century New England,” in Religions of the United States in Practice, 2 vols., ed. Colleen McDannell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1:268–78; Douglas L. Winiarski, “Experiencing Conversion in New England,” in Modern Christianity to 1900, vol. 6 of A People’s History of Christianity, ed. Amanda Porterfield (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress Press, 2007), 223–24. 40. William S. Simmons, “Southern New England Shamanism: An Ethnographic Reconstruction,” in Papers of the Seventh Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1976), 217–55; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650, Civilization of the American Indian, vol. 221 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 201–8; Kitteredge, “Letters of Samuel Lee and Samuel Sewall,” 154. 41. Travers, “Missionary Journal of John Cotton Jr.,” 95–96; Cotton, “Some Inquiries . . . Made among the Indians”; Douglas L. Winiarski, “Gendered ‘Relations’ in Haverhill, Massachusetts, 1719–1742,” in In Our Own Words: New England Diaries, 1600 to the Present, vol. 31 of Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 2009), 69–70. For a similar seventeenth-century example, see Wuttinnaumatuk’s church membership confession in Cesarini, “John Eliot’s ‘A breif History of the Mashepog Indians,’ ” 128–29. 42. Cotton, “Vocabulary of the Massachusett (or Natick) Indian Language,” 252. 43. Cotton, “Indian Sermon,” January 1710, Cotton Family Sermons. 44. William Scranton Simmons, Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1970); Constance A. Crosby, “From Myth to History, or Why King Philip’s Ghost Walks Abroad,” in The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, ed. Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 189; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 190–91; Cesarini, “John Eliot’s ‘A breif History of the Mashepog Indians,’ ” 118–22. 45. Cotton, “Cotton Diaries,” 28. On Algonquian mortuary practices in the protohistoric,

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early contact, and provincial periods of New England history, see Simmons, Cautantowwit’s House; Susan G. Gibson, Burr’s Hill: A 17th Century Wampanoag Burial Ground in Warren, Rhode Island, Studies in Anthropology and Material Culture, vol. 2 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 1980); Paul A. Robinson, Marc A. Kelley, and Patricia E. Rubertone, “Preliminary Biocultural Interpretations from a Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Indian Cemetery in Rhode Island,” in Cultures in Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural Institutions, A.D. 1000–1800, ed. William W. Fitzhugh (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1985), 107–30; Elise M. Brenner, “Archaeological Investigations at a Massachusetts Praying Town,” Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society 47 (1986): 74–76; Crosby, “From Myth to History,” 183–209; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 233–41; Hugh Amory, “The Trout and the Milk: An Ethnobibliographical Talk,” Harvard Library Bulletin 7 (1996): 50–65; and Patricia E. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 46. Ronda, “Generations of the Faith,” 371; Hall, “Toward a History of Popular Religion in Early New England,” 51; Richard Godbeer, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 8–9, 14–17. 47. Kitteredge, “Letters of Samuel Lee and Samuel Sewall,” 149, 151–52, 154. 48. William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620– 1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 251–53; Constance A. Crosby, “The Algonkian Spiritual Landscape,” in Benes, Algonkians of New England, 35–41. 49. William T. Davis, Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth (Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1883), 154; Plymouth Antiquarian Society, “Historic Sites: Three Historic Houses, Three Centuries of American History,” http://www.plymouthantiquariansociety.org/historic.htmœ (October 16, 2008); Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 253. 50. For these examples, see Douglas L. Winiarski, “The Education of Joseph Prince,” in Worlds of Children, 1620–1920, vol. 27 of Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 2004), 50–54. 51. Elaine Forman Crane, Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 176; William G. McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3 vols. (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1979), 3:1275; Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes. 52. “Witchcraft in Hingham,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 5 (1851): 263; Connecticut Archives, Crimes and Misdemeanors, ser. 1, vol. 2 (1707–24), 73, 398–401; Thomas Clap to Eleazar Wheelock, August 18, 1737, Eleazar Wheelock Papers, 737468, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.; Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 124–25; William S. Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, 4 vols. (Hartford: Church Press, 1873), 3:387; Benjamin Bangs, Diary, 1742–65, March 25, 1762, MHS. 53. Kitteredge, “Letters of Samuel Lee and Samuel Sewall,” 149, 151; Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 91–92; Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 49. 54. Alfred A. Cave, “Indian Shamans and English Witches in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 128 (Fall 1992): 243–44; Alfred A. Cave, “New England Puritan Misperceptions of Native American Shamanism,” International Social Science Review 67 (Winter 1992), 19; Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 91–117. 55. The literature on European cunning folk is extensive. See Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (New York: Harper and Row,

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1970), 115–34; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), 212–52; and James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 66–70. For New England examples, see John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 80–84; Godbeer, Devil’s Dominion, 24–54; and Peter Benes, “Fortune Tellers, Wise-Men, and Magical Healers in New England, 1644–1850,” in Benes, Wonders of the Invisible World, 127–48. 56. Brooke, “‘The True Spiritual Seed,’” 118; Benes, “Fortune Tellers, Wise-Men, and Magical Healers,” 135–37. 57. Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 1:385–86. 58. Matthew Mayhew, A Brief Narrative of the Success which the Gospel Hath Had among the Indians (Boston: Bartholomew Green, 1694), 12 (italics in original); William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 84; Cotton, “Account of the Cotton Family,” 247. 59. On Native American participation in the Great Awakening, see William S. Simmons, “The Great Awakening and Indian Conversion in Southern New England,” in Cowan, Papers of the Tenth Algonquian Conference, 25–36; William S. Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” American Ethnologist 10 (May 1983): 253–71; and John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 102–44.

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blood, fire, and “ baptism ” three perspec tives on the death of jean de brébeuf, seventeenth- century jesuit “ mart yr ” Emma Anderson

On March 16, 1649, the Jesuit mission of St. Louis, deep in Wendake, in the present-day Canadian province of Ontario, was overrun by Haudenosaunee warriors eager finally to gain total territorial and economic ascendancy over their beleaguered Wendat rivals.1 Many people died, both during the battle and in its aftermath, when the victorious Haudenosaunee selectively punished their opponents through grueling torture before ritually integrating the remaining survivors into their community. Despite the grim ubiquity of death on that raw, late winter day, it has been the demise of famed Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf that has, over the centuries, been lifted from anonymity and singled out for intense scrutiny, reflection, and representation.2 But even with (or perhaps because of) this disproportionate attention, Brébeuf’s death remains a poorly understood event. Until relatively recently, historians have been preoccupied almost exclusively with the event’s interpretation within a Christian, European framework. For centuries, his Catholic hagiographers have sought to win for Brébeuf a place on the holy register of martyred saints, while, since the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant historians have (sometimes reluctantly) assigned him a central yet romantically doomed role in the bringing of European religion and “civilization” to the North American “frontier.”3 Perceptions of Brébeuf’s death through treasured European metanarratives of “martyrdom” or “the white man’s burden” have resulted in the denial or co-option of non-Christian Native perceptions of his demise,4 despite the nuance, variety, and much-needed perspective that their viewpoints would bring to our understanding of this event. Interestingly, while some ab-

original perceptions directly challenge Christian triumphalist interpretations of Brébeuf’s death, reexamination of the perspectives of the Native participants in the events of March 16, 1649, also reveals a world of startlingly coincident meaning. Brébeuf’s flesh and bones were perceived by seventeenth-century Haudenosaunee and Jesuits alike as having been so transmuted by his suffering as to become repositories of accessible and transformative power that each sought to utilize in their respective religious realms. This essay, then, will attempt to reconstruct the perceptions and motivations of three groups of historical actors who participated in the death of Jean de Brébeuf, commencing with those of Brébeuf himself. In the 1640s, in response to intensifying violence and instability in New France, the Jesuits evolved an increasingly elaborate and urgent theology of suffering and expiatory death in this “unredeemed” land. Brébeuf’s extant writings and postmortem hagiographic accounts of his suffering and death alongside Gabriel Lalemant, a junior colleague captured with him, illuminate the self-perception of Jesuit actors in this drama, for whom the successful Christianization of seventeenth-century New France was increasingly conceptually linked to their own willingness to suffer martyrdom for this sacred cause.5 This essay next reconstructs the viewpoint of the invading Haudenosaunee, who likely viewed the destruction of Brébeuf and Lalemant as being significant only in its conformity to the regular practice of postwar torture routinely transacted between rival aboriginal nations. Though they would doubtless have perceived these deaths, like those of any other captive, as having acute spiritual resonance, such perceptions would have been informed not by Christian ideas of expiatory suffering but by panaboriginal concepts of retaliation, sacrifice, and the value of defiant, stoic suffering. The Haudenosaunee’s spectacular death-bytorture rituals, however, cannot fully be understood without exploring the other side of their ritual coin, their incorporation of the vast majority of war prisoners into their victorious body politic through elaborate adoption ceremonies. Consideration of Haudenosaunee perspectives, then, repositions the demise of Brébeuf within a much larger historical framework by refocusing attention upon the broader dynamics of intra-aboriginal conflict in which his death was a mere incident. Decentering European historical actors from their accustomed place in the historiographic spotlight moves traditionalist aboriginal figures and their ritual practices from inexplicable shadow to logical spotlight. Examining traditional practices of intra-aboriginal postwar torture, moreover, profoundly destabilizes traditional Christian presentations of Haudenosaunee motivations for this killing — their enraged “hatred of the Christian faith” (or “in odium fidei”) — a traditional requirement for Christian martyrdom.6 126

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Finally, this essay examines this event from a virtually unstudied perspective — that of the small group of ex-Christian ex-Wendat who joined their Haudenosaunee confederates in the torture of their former missionary mentors, but with radically different motives. Themselves captured, like Brébeuf, during previous battles but targeted for integration into the community rather than fatal torture, this handful of integrated captives employed against their former catechist innovative torments that highlighted the Catholic identity of their victim while simultaneously repudiating their own past association with this foreign faith. Analysis of their violent improvisation with traditional forms of torture and their ritual inversion of Catholic symbolism in the death of Brébeuf reopens the thorny question of “in odium fidei” from another angle. Inclusion of their ill-studied, destabilizing perspective also challenges the unspoken expectation that one viewpoint or the other will eventually be recognized as the more legitimate. But preoccupation with discovering the “real” meaning of the events in question errs in seeking an uncontested and singular “truth.” A richer picture emerges when we embrace the multivalency of this encounter, recognizing that each group of historical actors brought to the bloody events in which they were collectively involved their own set of pressing religious, cultural, and psychological needs and motivations. With that recognition, then, this essay seeks to illuminate the fateful entanglements between Jesuits bent on the conversion of Native North America, the Wendat communities their missionization fatefully divided, and the largely traditionalist Haudenosaunee, who, motivated by both precontact dynamics and new pressures created by colonialism, were quick to exploit these religious and cultural fissures.

Blood: The Jesuit Perspective He stood before them, tied to a stake and struggling to hold on to consciousness. The haze of blood and sweat that coated his eyes would have made vision difficult even had he not been exhausted from enduring hours of grueling torture. As his eyes struggled to focus, Jean de Brébeuf’s mouth filled with blood from the wound in his mouth where his tongue had been severed, flowing like a warm, salty drink down his throat and dribbling down his chin, making his beard a bloody mat. Deprived of the comfort of defiant song and preaching in his final moments, with which he had verbally telegraphed encouragement to his colleague and to the small band of Christian Wendat who suffered alongside him, the maimed missionary used his whole body in a last religious gesture. Sinking to the snow on legs that had already been stripped of their flesh, he knelt, extending his arms and mute gaze to the heaven he hoped would soon receive him. blood, fire, and “baptism”

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Jean de Brébeuf’s perception of these final events of his life would have been colored by his previous long years of difficult experience in the Canadian mission fields, particularly in the decade preceding his death, which witnessed both an increasingly organized and vocal Wendat opposition to Christian missionization and bolder and more numerous Haudenosaunee incursions from the south. Though separate phenomena, these developments were perceived by Brébeuf and his fellow Jesuit missionaries as equally indicative of demonically inspired opposition to their holy message and as a personal challenge to remain faithful to Christianity even under the increasing threat of physical violence. Faced with these difficulties of “carrying the cross” in New France, the Jesuits evolved a theological and spiritual response that evoked the role of the martyr on a metaphorical and, increasingly, a literal level. It had not always been thus. In 1625, when Brébeuf, then thirty-two years of age, first set foot on Canadian soil, his Jesuit order confidently regarded the conversion of the aboriginal peoples of New France as inevitable. This perception reflected both their pride in what they saw as the self-evident beauty and truth of their Christian message and their fundamental misperception that aboriginal groups, entirely lacking religiosity, would eagerly and exclusively adopt Catholicism. Appreciative of Native intelligence and earnest defenders of aboriginal spiritual capacity, Brébeuf and other early Jesuit missionaries to Canada confidently predicted that, once they had gained the linguistic wherewithal to present their message elegantly and coherently, entire aboriginal nations would quickly be brought to Christ. Missionary attention quickly came to focus on the Wendat people of the Georgian Bay, whom the French had dubbed the “Huron.” The Jesuits saw in their orderly, palisaded villages and in their reliance upon agriculture an approximation of the “civilized” routines of Christian Europe, favorably comparing their imagined amenability to Christianity with that of nomadic aboriginal groups such as the Innu, whose peripatetic lifestyle they dismissed as essentially opposed to the disciplined seasonal round of Christian life and practice. From modest and sporadic beginnings, Jesuit missions took hold to become, in the 1640s, a well-developed and growing network throughout Wendake that served as economic and military outposts as well as religious centers. The Christianity taught at these missions was a defiant Catholicism that had emerged, bloody but unbowed, from the Protestant Reformation and which had been radicalized by decades of violent confessional conflict in France. Abandoning their spiritually fractured homeland, missionaries cherished the notion that their embattled faith could be implanted, unadulterated, in the rugged heart of

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New France, and they dreamed of enkindling within aboriginal breasts a religious fervor that would shame the tepidity and division of the Old World. Given these grandiose dreams, the Jesuits’ initial experiences proved rather dispiriting. Some Wendat, having grasped that these missionary latecomers to the Canadian scene had fundamentally different preoccupations than their more worldly compatriots, were uninterested in broadening their exchange with Europeans from material goods to religious congress and tolerated the Jesuits’ presence merely as an imposed precondition for continuing trade with their French military allies. Others, though curious about the European faith, proved, from the Jesuits’ perspective, to be frighteningly inventive in combining their traditional practices with Christian concepts, prompting the missionaries to refrain from baptizing all but the moribund and the long instructed. Still others, disquieted by the cultural insensitivity of Catholic missionization methods, which generally utilized stark confrontation rather than the preferred Wendat methods of conciliation and dialogue and required that converts break ritual, familial, and communal ties, began actively to oppose the missionary program. Faced with this range of reactions, the Jesuits were forced to reevaluate their earlier predictions of a quick spiritual conquest of the supposedly amenable Wendat. As they settled in for a long, hard campaign of Christianization, missionary visions of New France began slowly but subtly to alter as the Jesuits began rhetorically to recast their experiences using metaphors less redolent of Eden than of Golgotha. The New World was increasingly presented as “one continuation of crosses and sufferings”: its very geography and meteorology providing the ideal climate for penitence and self-chastisement.7 The Jesuits began to perceive and present themselves less as triumphant evangelists than as living martyrs, despised by those they came to rescue. This rhetorical shift from triumphalism to martyrdom refocused attention from the traditional focus of missionary literature — Native peoples — to the suffering servanthood of the missionary and recast their relationship from priest and catechists to victim and persecutors. It also put the best possible rhetorical gloss on what might more uncharitably be described as the Jesuits’ failure to meet their own (admittedly highly unrealistic) goal of adjudicating the Wendat’s unequivocal collective repudiation of what was an entrenched and adaptive spiritual heritage. Through the alchemic logic of martyrdom, the Jesuits’ present defeat was recast into a future promise of ultimate triumph obtained, like that of Christ, through and over suffering and death. In the early 1640s, as the Jesuits’ uncompromisingly exclusivistic Christian

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message created increasingly deepening cleavages in Wendat society, waves of epidemic hardened traditionalist opposition to their presence, and Haudenosaunee incursions into Wendake increased in frequency and severity, Jesuits’ understanding of their mission in Canada as a largely symbolic self-immolation in the service of Christ became overlain with the constant expectation of actual physical annihilation. Jesuits perceived both increasingly radicalized Wendat traditionalists and the encroaching Haudenosaunee as nurturing dangerous grievances against the Christian faith that they might at any moment choose to act upon. We should perhaps not be surprised, given the foregoing discussion of the Jesuits’ self-perception and rhetorical self-presentation as living martyrs, that such anticipated violence was not wholly unwelcome but was rather perceived as an encouraging development. In 1639, Paul Le Jeune, openly expressing his painful puzzlement as to why the Society of Jesus, despite its herculean efforts, had been unable to accomplish its treasured goal of systematically converting entire Native societies, concluded: We have sometimes wondered whether we could hope for the conversion of this country without the shedding of blood; the principle received, it seems, in the Church of God, that the blood of Martyrs is the seed of Christians, made me at one time conclude that this was not to be expected — yea, that it was not even to be desired; considering the glory that redounds to God from the constancy of the martyrs, with whose blood all the rest of the earth has been so lately drenched, it would be a sort of curse if this quarter of the world should not participate in the happiness of having contributed to the splendour of this glory.8 Inspired by Tertullian’s famous epigram, Le Jeune’s conclusion in the dying months of the 1630s was that only a generous drenching of Canadian soil with martyrs’ blood could make this implacable northern wasteland into a true garden of aboriginal Catholics. If, with Paul Le Jeune, the Jesuits anticipated the violent deaths of their cohort as an expiatory holocaust necessary to provoke aboriginal spiritual capitulation, they did not have long to wait for such killings to occur. In 1642 the first of their number, a Jesuit donné named René Goupil, was killed in Iroquoia.9 Four years later the first Jesuit priest, Isaac Jogues, met a similarly violent end.10 This final chapter of what could be termed the “serial martyrdom” of Jogues, a drama that had fired the early modern Catholic imagination on both sides of the Atlantic, marked a definitive step in Canadian Jesuits’ positive embrace of sacrificial 130

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death. Jogues’s summary dispatch by a blow to the back of his head was made all the more poignant, from the Catholic perspective, because of his voluntary return all the way from France to receive the fatal coup de grâce. First captured by the Haudenosaunee in August 1642, Jogues survived more than a year of grueling captivity before escaping, with the complicity of the Protestant Dutch, across the Atlantic.11 In France, his severely disfigured fingers, broken or cut off during his postcapture torture, earned him the tears of a queen and the intervention of a pope, who, in breaking the ritual rule that priests must be physically whole to preside over mass, stated, “Indignum esset Christi martyrem, Christi non bibere sanguinem” (It would be unjust that a martyr for Christ should not drink the blood of Christ).12 Jogues’s voluntary return in 1646 to Canada, the land of the cross, and immediately afterward to Iroquoia and almost certain death arguably shifted the working definition of martyrdom in New France from passive resignation in the face of danger to a more active courtship of violent death.13 Jogues’s fate, while drawing the heartfelt admiration of his priestly peers, also inaugurated within Jesuit ranks a holy competition of sorts in which martyrdom, often referred to euphemistically as a “crown” or “garland,” became seen as the ultimate expression of fidelity to the missionary’s calling, a signal mark of God’s grace, and as a critical investment in the religious future of the colony.14 Personally suspected of sorcery by Wendat traditionalists and frequenting mission communities menaced by an increasingly confident Haudenosaunee alliance, Jean de Brébeuf, like his Jesuit compatriots, began to anticipate and to embrace his future martyrdom. His extant literary corpus and the recorded impressions of his black-robed companions reveal that Brébeuf’s interior spiritual life reflected his community’s preoccupation with persecution. His mystical experiences became increasingly pregnant with the anticipation of his untimely and violent martyrdom for the faith and shadowed with the suffering of Christ, who appeared to him “bearing his Cross, or indeed, being attached to it,” enflaming the missionary’s already fervent desire to share in his suffering, a desire he reportedly indulged through the ritual self-infliction of penitential pain.15 Nineteen years before his violent death, in 1630, Brébeuf wrote his first selfdedication to his mission, which he signed with his own blood, stating that he was “ready to sacrifice it all as willingly as I do this drop.”16 This solemn vow was the first of many he would make in the years to come. Apparently unsatisfied with his customary practice of silently reconsecrating himself daily during mass, Brébeuf, shortly before his death, once again wrote of embracing martyrdom, expressing his willingness to suffer even the hellish torments of aboriginal postwar torture for Christ’s sake: “I make a vow to you never to fail, on my side, blood, fire, and “baptism”

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in the grace of martyrdom, if by your infinite mercy you offer it to me some day, to me, your unworthy servant . . . my beloved Jesus, I offer to you from to-day . . . my blood, my body, and my life; so that I might die only for you.”17 Brébeuf’s mystical premonitions did not concern his fate alone but reflected his fears for the Canadian Jesuits’ survival as a group. Recounting his ominous vision of a massive cross in the sky that “came from the direction of the Iroquois Nations,” Brébeuf remarked that it was “large enough to crucify us all.”18 In 1644, Brébeuf saw himself and his Jesuit companions being sprinkled — visibly marked — with the blood of Christ.19 His visions and mystical exchanges so convinced Brébeuf’s community that he was destined for a martyr’s fate that, concerned that his body might be hidden or destroyed during the violent death he so strongly anticipated, his colleagues persuaded him to donate while he yet lived a vial of his blood so that they might revere it as a relic in such an eventuality.20 The events that befell Brébeuf during the afternoon of March 16, 1649, then, were events that he had long anticipated and for which he had carefully prepared himself spiritually and psychologically. Brébeuf’s determination finally to embrace the fate he had so long anticipated is evident in his refusal to flee the St. Louis mission when it was apparent a Haudenosaunee attack was imminent.21 During his capture and approximately four hours of torture on that brutal March day, the Jesuit deliberately behaved in such a way as to charge the events of his torment and death with a clearly Christian message that was also immediately comprehensible in traditional aboriginal terms. Until physically prevented from doing so by the removal of his lips, Brébeuf apparently hectored his tormenters to convert or repent and encouraged his fellow Christian captives to hold to their faith even in the face of death itself.22 After his silencing, he defiantly continued to transmit the same message nonverbally, hoping to inspire his Wendat flock to win for themselves the laurels of martyrdom, while at the same time planting seeds of admiration in Haudenosaunee hearts, which might, in time, ripen into receptivity to the Catholic message. By fulfilling the demanding traditional expectations of both Wendat and Haudenosaunee for a captive’s conduct under torture, Brébeuf likely wished to demonstrate the superiority of his own religion by exhibiting its ability to inspire exemplary courage. Information regarding Brébeuf’s (and his colleague Lalemant’s) comportment under torture and the extent and nature of the injuries they received was carefully compiled by the Jesuits in the days following their deaths. Initial details were obtained from the testimony of Wendat escapees, many of them Christians, who had witnessed the events in question. Their testimony was cor-

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roborated by the Jesuits’ recovery and examination of the bodies of their fallen comrades.23 Viewing and touching these physical remains was an emotional experience for Jesuit survivors. Seeing and probing their wounds filled their colleagues with a holy certainty of their beloved deceased’s courage and sanctity and prompted the inevitable comparisons of their fate with the torture and death of the early Christian martyrs. Writing just days after their death, Paul Ragueneau, the Jesuit superior of the Canadian mission and a passionate advocate for his fallen colleagues, while fully aware that he lacked the power officially to elevate them to the status of martyrs, expressed what has come to be the conventional Catholic wisdom regarding their demise: “I would gladly call them, if I were allowed, by that glorious name [of martyrs], not only because voluntarily, for the love of God and the salvation of their neighbour, they exposed themselves to death, and to a cruel death if ever there was one in the world . . . but much rather would I call them because . . . hatred of the Faith and contempt for the name of God were among the most powerful incentives which influenced the minds of the Barbarians who practiced upon them as much cruelty as the rage of tyrants obliged the Martyrs to endure.”24 Ragueneau’s central contention here is his definitive assertion of the essentially anti-Christian motivation of Brébeuf’s and Lalemant’s antagonists. Putting aside his rhetorical capitulation of his own judgment, Ragueneau’s statement powerfully affirms that these deaths adhere to the influential “in odium fidei” model of martyrdom, which requires that the martyr be put to death “in hatred of the faith.”25 The advantages of this rhetorical move are multiple. Emphasizing Brébeuf and Lalemant’s shared confessional identity as Catholics (an identity that they shared with many of the Wendat captured and tortured alongside them) deflects the reader’s attention from their status as the only Frenchmen in the group of captives. By postulating Haudenosaunee hatred of these men as faithful Christians, Ragueneau neatly sidesteps a competing interpretation of their fate: that they were marked for death because of the long-standing Haudenosaunee-French animus (arguably inaugurated with Samuel de Champlain’s 1609 assault upon the Mohawk) and because of French alliance with the Wendat, who bore the brunt of the Haudenosaunee assault.26 As well as establishing Brébeuf and Lalemant’s conformity with early Christian models of martyrdom, then, the “in odium fidei” rhetoric employed by Ragueneau obscured the complexity of the historical encounter between the Haudenosaunee and the French and the multiple and entrenched grudges that the former held against the latter. Rhetorically marking these deaths as martyrdoms and enrob-

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ing them in the associations of a distant and glorious Christian past also discouraged the reader’s comparison of these slayings with recent acts of similar violence against the French, acts that Ragueneau, for a variety of reasons, chose not to halo with an aura of religious significance.27 In making the argument that Brébeuf and Lalemant were killed out of hatred for their Christian faith, Ragueneau also conflated rather than clarified the distinctive motivations of the diverse aboriginal participants in this seventeenthcentury “passion play.” This is less a conscious distortion on Ragueneau’s part than it is an accurate reflection of his actual perception of the situation. Jesuits in the 1640s regarded themselves as waging a three-front spiritual battle against Satan, whom they encountered in the persons of Wendat traditionalists, who resisted Christianity; Wendat “apostates,” who abandoned the faith after baptism; and the largely traditionalist Haudenosaunee, who decisively rebuffed their missionary labors and who had already slain several Jesuits. Encountering resistance and sporadic violence from all three groups, missionaries often failed to distinguish between the nuanced motives of each party, preferring to categorize all forms of opposition to their mission as simple hatred of Christian truth.28 Ragueneau’s sorrowful obituary for his fallen friends, the first document forcefully to articulate the case for their martyrdom, created a “textual relic” that Brébeuf’s survivors treasured as much as they did his holy bones.29 Even in their rush to flee Sainte-Marie, their primary mission stronghold, in the face of renewed Haudenosaunee assaults,30 the Jesuits were careful to preserve Ragueneau’s prophetic words, just as they lovingly disinterred, boiled, and dried their colleagues’ bones, reverently wrapping them in silk to take into exile. Despite his admitted inability to make a formal determination of the dead men’s official spiritual status, Ragueneau’s de facto evocation of his colleagues as martyrsaints in his copious writings bequeathed an enduring interpretive legacy of their deaths that influenced generations of hagiographic historians and eventually received papal ratification when Brébeuf, Lalemant, and six of their Jesuit or Jesuit-affiliated colleagues were beatified in 1925 and canonized five years later.31

Fire: The Haudenosaunee Perspective The Haudenosaunee’s gaze traveled dispassionately across the scene of devastation, absently fingering a minor wound on his shoulder. Hardened by years of intermittent guerrilla warfare, the warrior regarded the large number of Wendat captives who would soon be integrated into his community and the central 134

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spectacle of the ritual torture of selected enemy prisoners unfolding before him. As his eyes roved over the scenes of painful defiance and his ears were assaulted by the death songs of the dying captives, the warrior was keenly aware that, had the battle gone the other way, it was he who would be receiving rather than observing these taunts and painful “caresses.” At the outskirts of the scene, his attention was caught by the presence of an unusual captive, whose beard, in the absence of his long, dark woolen tunic, which had been torn from his body, distinguished him as a European “black robe.” Though he had heard tales of these reputed sorcerers, the man had never seen one. Drawing closer, he watched the man’s face contort as he strove to master his suffering and meet with bravery his continued affliction. Though repulsed by the man’s bearded appearance, the warrior nevertheless grudgingly approved of his courage in accepting his just punishment for having allied himself with the Haudenosaunee’s adamant enemies and bravely dying in the manner of his adopted people. Moved by the large man’s continuing defiance of his captors even at the end of his life, the warrior watched as the final blows were administered and the prisoner’s heart was removed. Himself imbibing a morsel of the flesh, he treasured the hope that it would impart to him something of the man’s exemplary bravery. The clash between the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat on that fateful March day had epic historical implications for both groups. This battle marked the beginning of the end of the Wendat’s abilities to survive as a united people on their ancestral lands. In the years that followed, Wendat survivors would become increasingly widely dispersed. Many would be ritually integrated into the ranks of the Haudenosaunee, where their presence would spark important changes to the identity of their host culture.32 In a sense, there was a poetic circularity in this Wendat reintegration into the wider Iroquois body politic. Despite the animosity between the Wendat and other Haudenosaunee groups, their profound cultural and linguistic similarities hint that, in an earlier era, they had been part of the same original metanation.33 Like their Wendat antagonists, the Haudenosaunee, an alliance of five discrete peoples, saw themselves as the children of Atahensic, the primordial sky-woman whose sudden fall from the heavens into the watery abyss had initiated mutually beneficial contact between humans and animals and prompted the creation of the first dry land upon the back of a giant turtle.34 Whatever precontact factors had originally precipitated Wendat-Haudenosaunee estrangement and eventual antagonism, it is clear that these tensions were greatly exacerbated by the changes brought by rival European colonists to economic, military, political, religious, and demographic life on both sides blood, fire, and “baptism”

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of the St. Lawrence River.35 French and Dutch presence (to the north and to the south, respectively) of this major continental artery prompted European participation in preexisting aboriginal war and trade patterns, provoked dangerous levels of overhunting, and unleashed waves of devastating epidemics that further destabilized relations between these rival aboriginal polities during the 1630s and 1640s. The Haudenosaunee responded to the changing economic situation and threatened demographic decline posed by European incursions by escalating their traditional strategy of incorporative warfare, which plundered the human resources of enemy neighbors to consolidate their own strength. Though the Haudenosaunee were virtually unique in their imaginative adaptation of these ancient traditions to the troubling new challenges of the 1640s, the dynamics of what Daniel Richter has termed the “mourning war” were the shared legacy of a number of aboriginal groups, including the French-allied Wendat and Innu.36 Though, like European conflicts, aboriginal warfare encompassed economic, political, and territorial concerns, at the heart of this shared cultural complex were the twin imperatives of reprisal and replenishment. Reprisal involved the tit-for-tat exacting of revenge upon selected representatives of the groups that had, previously, killed beloved community members. Replenishment entailed the ritual “replacement” of men and women lost to the hazards of childbirth, illness, and war by the prisoners, whose newly captured bodies could host the return of these departed souls.37 Because of these dual motivations, aboriginal postwar practices culminated in two asymmetrical rituals: the tortuous destruction of the few and the ritual integration of the many. Immediately following their capture, the initial fate of all war captives was identical: a trek to the victor’s territory, often heavily loaded with captured goods, and the running of a celebratory gauntlet when the war party returned to its destination. The gauntlet was a preliminary form of torture in which all captives (men, women, and children) and the entire victorious village (men, women, and children) participated. Captives were forced to run between two parallel lines of villagers who kicked, beat, and otherwise abused them.38 Then the ultimate fate of each individual prisoner — adoption or destruction — would be decided. Women and children were almost automatically selected for ritual integration into the community. Male captives faced the additional specter of death by torture, though the very logic of Haudenosaunee incorporative warfare in the 1640s would likely have limited the number of male captives they were prepared to sacrifice.39 Both ritual destruction and ritual incorporation were highly significant religious events for early modern aboriginal peoples. Victors and vanquished were 136

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fully complicit with each other in the cultural and religious reenactment of their shared values through these rites. Haudenosaunee and Wendat each anticipated destruction or integration by their opponent in the event of defeat, respected the same basic behavioral protocols for torturers and the tortured, reverenced the same underlying concepts of sacrifice, ritual ingestion, and soul return, and openly admired those of their foes who were able to approximate their shared, exacting ideals of defiant courage under torture.40 Indeed, the ritual destruction of captives often featured the victors’ selective ingestion of the flesh of the particularly brave in order to partake in the deceased’s exemplary qualities.41 As well as providing a socially acceptable outlet for the dangerous feelings of rage and grief that accompany bereavement, death-by-torture rituals also had strong connotations of sacrifice. Torture seems to have culminated at times of the day loaded with meteorological significance, such as sunrise or sunset, suggesting that the lives of these captured enemies may have been regarded as a sacrifice to the “other than human persons” of the aboriginal pantheon, notably the sun.42 Integration of war captives was also highly ritualistic, as it involved the effective linkage of a living enemy with the associations, roles, and functions of the community’s cherished dead. Through the ritual administration of gifts, clothing, and new names, the Haudenosaunee believed that they could prepare the living flesh of captured prisoners to serve as new earthly containers for the returning souls of their deceased kin. Calling upon the dead to return from the shadows of the distant, westerly afterworld, ritual celebrants urged them to reassume, through these borrowed bodies, their prior familial roles and former occupations. Captives were called by the names of the returned souls and were invited to reabsorb the recounted memories, preferences, and habits of their former lives, taking the place of the deceased in a complex constellation of familial relationships.43 Such was the power of these incorporative rituals that many prisoners rewarded their captors’ incorporative efforts with lives of unimpeachable loyalty toward their new family, community, and nation.44 Appreciation of the ubiquity and complexity of postwar aboriginal torture and adoption rituals and recognition of the specific demographic, economic, and political challenges that charged these traditional forms with a new urgency in the 1640s embed our discussion of the death of Jean de Brébeuf in a far more precise historical, cultural, and religious context and underline the conceptual distortions of traditional Christian interpretations of his death as a martyrdom. Though the lengthy and grueling torture faced by the two Jesuit missionaries did indeed bear certain superficial similarities to the persecution of early Christians by the Roman state, as suggested by Paul Ragueneau, it is immediately blood, fire, and “baptism”

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apparent that their torture and death far more closely resembles the traditional fate of aboriginal captives in mid-seventeenth-century North America (including the group of Wendat taken prisoner alongside them). Recognition of the essential congruity of the treatment endured by these two Jesuit missionaries with that of countless aboriginal prisoners of war captured in the same historical era and geographical region has implications for our assessment of Haudenosaunee’s motivations in their torment and for our analysis of the traditional, exceptionalist presentation of these European deaths. The foregoing analysis of the critical psychological and spiritual functions that these rituals served among the aboriginal peoples of northeastern North America, coupled with the fact that these two Europeans suffered tortures comparable to those endured by Wendat with whom they were captured, strongly suggests that traditional aboriginal motivations and protocols took pride of place in the Haudenosaunee’s ritual torture of the pair. Though the Haudenosaunee were by no means hermetically sealed from Christian influences,45 their ritual treatment of the two captured missionaries so clearly reflects traditional postwar protocol for the treatment of captives as to render highly questionable the standard hagiographic contention that the Haudenosaunee targeted the duo out of “hatred of the faith” or a desire to punish them for their Christian beliefs.46 Recognition of the essential similarity of the treatment given Brébeuf, Lalemant, and those unnamed Wendat captured with them also raises the important issue of exceptionalism in the traditional Catholic presentation of the Europeans’ deaths. Many of these Wendat prisoners were baptized Catholics; yet, though they suffered tortures similar to those of the missionary duo, and under identical circumstances, these aboriginal Christians have yet to be honored as martyrs by the Catholic Church. Framing only the European deaths as “martyrdoms” thus makes an unjustified distinction between the sufferings of Brébeuf and Lalemant and the correspondent but unrecognized agonies of the more numerous group of Christian Wendat captives.47 Lack of evidence for the “in odium fidei” hypothesis, coupled with strong evidence for the ongoing resonance of traditional concepts and motivations in Haudenosaunee society, leads us to hypothesize that Brébeuf, Lalemant, and the unnamed Wendat who died with them were likely being punished for their political rather than their religious identity — that is, for their alliance with one another against the Haudenosaunee — rather than for their Christian commitments. While their captors doubtless saw the missionaries’ deaths in religious terms, these were their own indigenous spiritual connotations of sacrifice and reprisal, not the anti-Christian sentiments misleadingly or carelessly attributed to them by seventeenth-century Jesuits and their later hagiographic apologists. 138

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Simply put, Brébeuf’s Haudenosaunee torturers do not seem to have possessed the anti-Christian motivation required to transform the dross of torture into the gold of martyrdom: motives prescribed for them by the classic “in odium fidei” definition of martyrdom. But if Brébeuf’s Haudenosaunee tormenters did not kill him out of hatred for his Catholic faith, as seems apparent, might they have tortured him, like the Roman persecutors of old, to force him to abjure said faith? In other words, if Jean de Brébeuf or Gabriel Lalemant had, during the course of their torment, renounced Catholicism, would this have arrested their torture? I am convinced that we must answer this question in the negative, for a number of reasons. Firstly and most fundamentally, as abjuration would have failed to address the Haudenosaunee’s primary motivation for torturing the men, such an offer would thus have been seen as irrelevant or even, given the Haudensaunee’s limited exposure to Christianity, incomprehensible. The ritual torment of Brébeuf and Lalemant, as we have seen, followed a religious logic not predicated upon or influenced by the Christian worldview. It is unlikely, then, that missionary offers to renounce their Catholic faith, even if they had been understood, would have resulted in the annulment of their punishment. Secondly, this model of martyrdom as the heroic refusal to capitulate to religious coercion, formulated in response to the persecution of early Christians by the Roman state, presumes an illusory symmetry between the two historicalcultural contexts that closer examination fails to ratify. The Roman model of state torture in the service of religious uniformity accorded the individual Christian victim considerable agency, as religious capitulation was linked to the cessation of torture. By acquiescing to the forceful demand to apostatize that underlay religious persecution in the Roman world, an individual Christian could choose, at any time, to end his or her suffering. In this ancient model of Christian martyrdom, the agency of the martyr is paramount: it is his or her courageous, volitional choice of death before religious dishonor that is at the basis of his or her celebration as a martyr. The logic of aboriginal postwar practices, however, did not accord the tortured this form of control or agency, nor did death-by-torture rites seek to force transformation of the prisoner’s political or religious identity: this was the goal of ritual adoption. Though reprieve from torment and subsequent integration into the victorious community could come at any time during the lengthy torture ritual, the aboriginal exercise of clemency, though frequently utilized, was, like torture itself, designed to emphasize the absolute control of the victors. In this context, captives were being punished for their preexistent identity, not being coerced into changing that identity. Though, as we have explored, the blood, fire, and “baptism”

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majority of war prisoners were integrated into the victorious culture, decisions about who would be adopted and who would be sacrificed were the jealously guarded prerogatives of the conquerors. Indeed, a captive’s attempts to negotiate with his torturers would have represented a breach in the implicit expectations that existed for both victors and vanquished. The designated role for the latter was one, not of bargaining, but of courageous and consistent defiance in the face of imminent death. Denied the ability to control whether they lived or died, exemplary aboriginal prisoners of war refocused all their energy on the manner of their death, the one element still within their control.48 Scorning a clemency that was beyond their power to achieve, prisoners verbally and nonverbally transmitted their disdain for their tormenters, behaviors that, ironically, often resulted in the mercy they had so definitively rejected being granted to them. The fact that Brébeuf did not seek to negotiate with his captors, then, says as much about his understanding of seventeenth-century aboriginal culture as it does about his commitment to Christianity. His defiance of his tormenters, likely motivated to meet aboriginal expectations about physical courage under duress, also transformed the traditional Christian understanding of martyrdom to fit a New World context in which a Christian’s ability to end his or her physical suffering through spiritual capitulation was not an option. As aboriginal captives had done for centuries, Brébeuf embraced the limited agency available to him by strenuously controlling his own reactions and scripting his own demise. His ritual behavior under torture was thus multivalent, as his undeniable courage had both Christian and Haudenosaunee resonance. While his dying actions represented a rallying call to those Christians suffering with him to hold to the faith in the face of horrific adversity, his singing, hectoring, and refusal to cry out under the most extreme duress also accorded well with the traditional postwar expectations of both Haudenosaunee and Wendat traditionalists. His exacting conformation to aboriginal ideals of captive behavior did have the effect, as he no doubt intended, of impressing his torturers. The eating of Brébeuf’s heart by traditionalist Haudenosaunee, often presented by hagiographers as the apotheosis of their savagery, was in fact the highest compliment they could have paid to his courage.

Baptism: The Ex-Christian Ex-Wendat Perspective Though the man was unfamiliar in his bloody nudity, the Haudenosaunee adoptee, watching the wounded Jesuit rally his fellow Christian captives, recognized him at once as the teacher who had so engaged his youthful Wendat 140

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imagination with fascinating and disturbing images of hell and paradise. It seemed another lifetime since he had seen his former catechist. Captured in the low-level skirmishes characteristic of the smoldering Haudenosaunee-Wendat conflict, the man had been selected for integration into the community instead of being singled out, like Brébeuf, for ritual sacrifice. So ingrained had this new identity become that he had, today, fought against the members of his former nation. As a youth, however, he had sat by the fire arguing long into the night with the Jesuit about the creation of the earth and the life of the world to come. He had felt upon his forehead the mark of the cross, inscribed with the cool water of baptism. The bellowing missionary’s call to hold firm to the cross of Christ, however, presented a disturbing reminder of a distant past and a dead faith. Interrupting Brébeuf’s religious invective, the man abruptly accosted him, calling him, intimately, by his Wendat name: “Echon, you say that baptism and the sufferings of this life lead to Paradise, you will go there soon, for I am going to baptize you, to make you suffer well, so that you can go all the sooner to Paradise.”49 Grabbing a pot of boiling water from a nearby cooking fire, the exWendat, demonstrating his intimate knowledge of Catholic ritual observance, upended its contents not once but three times over Brébeuf’s bloodied head. The participation of yet a third group of ritual actors in the torture and death of Brébeuf and Lalemant, a small group of Wendat “apostates” who had been integrated into the Haudenosaunee community, discloses the critical importance of a seriously understudied portion of the postcontact aboriginal population — ex-Christians — and reopens the question of Brébeuf’s martyrdom from yet another angle.50 Though these ex-Wendat, like their traditionalist Haudenosaunee compatriots, tortured the two Jesuit captives, these former Christians strategically modified traditional forms of torment the better to express their essentially different motives for engaging in ritual violence. Whereas the traditionalist Haudenosaunee majority, as we have seen, likely apprehended Brébeuf and Lalemant in political terms as enemies allied with a rival aboriginal group, in military terms as retribution for Wendat-inflicted casualties, and in religious terms as a sacrifice to the other-than-human persons of the Haudenosaunee pantheon, these deconverted ex-Wendat appear to have understood their torture of the two missionaries as publicly dramatizing their repudiation of Christianity through a ritual inversion that explicitly and derisively referenced the sacrament of baptism. By these means they may have hoped to accentuate their new status as Haudenosaunee, even as their “apostasy” may have represented their belated recognition of long-standing Wendat traditionalist arguments against the European faith. blood, fire, and “baptism”

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So who were these young Wendat men who put their own distinctive twist on the torture of Jean de Brébeuf? What can we glean about them from early modern sources? Unfortunately, even the most detailed accounts of what transpired between the dying Brébeuf and his ex-Wendat tormenters do not identify any of his antagonists by name, denying us the opportunity to construct potentially revealing individual biographies. Relevant passages disclose only that Brébeuf’s ex-Wendat torturers had at one time embraced the Christian faith under Jesuit tutelage and that they had renounced it sometime prior to their unexpected reunion with their former mentor on March 16, 1649. The sources also stress that the men were personally acquainted with Brébeuf and are unanimous that the men pointedly and repeatedly referenced the Catholic sacrament of baptism in their torment of him. Frustratingly, however, the historical record is not clear as to whether these individuals’ rejection of the Christian faith took place within their natal Wendat culture or their adoptive Haudenosaunee milieu. Thus, we are unable definitively to determine whether their religious about-face reflected the influence of Wendat traditionalists and other “apostates” or whether it represented one aspect of their postcapture accommodation to Haudenosaunee society. Our attempt to understand the perspectives of this third, critical group of historical actors, then, must investigate both possibilities, in the process illuminating, from a unique angle of vision, the politics of postwar aboriginal adoption and Wendat experiences of Catholic missionization. The first possibility is that these captured Wendat turned from Catholicism as a response to the new realities of living as adopted Haudenosaunee among their former enemies. As we have seen, panaboriginal postwar rituals of incorporation aimed to utilize the flesh of living enemy captives to resuscitate deceased family members, necessitating the ritual suppression or excision of the prisoners’ former identity. The Catholicism of these ex-Wendat, then, may well have been one of the elements of their former lives stripped away as a part of their process of integration into a Haudenosaunee culture that was still almost entirely traditionalist in its religious orientation. The Haudenosaunee were well aware of the factionalizing effects of the traditionalist-Christian debate within Wendat culture and would have been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the traditionalist Wendat, whose spirituality closely mirrored their own. This alone would have given them ample motivation to discourage their captives’ retention of Christian attachments, at least while they, as native-born Iroquois, were still numerically dominant enough to enforce such demands.51 Despite the plausibility of the argument that the circumstances of their new postcapture lives demanded the repudiation of their Catholic identity, the frag142

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mentary evidence that we do have seems to suggest, on the contrary, that this small group of Wendat men came to oppose the faith they had once embraced while still living within their cradle culture, prior to their capture by the Haudenosaunee. The phrasing of their brief description in the Jesuit Relations as “Infidel Hurons, former captives of the Haudenosaunee, and, of old, enemies of the Faith, — who, having previously had sufficient instruction for their salvation, impiously abused it” seems to imply that their deconversion occurred in the Wendat context.52 A scenario that posits their precapture deconversion makes sense given what we know about the deepening factionalism of Wendat responses to Christianity in the 1640s. As previously noted, Jesuit missionaries during this turbulent decade increasingly presented themselves, not as triumphant evangelists, but as the persecuted servants of Christ, abused by those they came to save. But the Jesuits’ incremental shift to an increasingly defensive religious posture was equally evident on the Wendat side. Several aspects of missionary strategy fostered increasingly vocal Wendat opposition to the Jesuits’ message and methods during this period. First, Jesuit propensity for utilizing confrontation in their teaching of Christianity represented a serious affront to Wendat social ethics, which avoided direct contradiction of another person’s stated views. Converts to the new faith, however, imitating their missionary mentors, often refused to participate in the diplomatic dance of compromise and mutual consultation mandated by internal Wendat diplomacy. While converts’ insistence upon the unique truth of their own perspective was seen as egregiously arrogant and provocative by Wendat traditionalists, neophytes’ intolerant exclusivism warmed the hearts of Jesuits who witnessed it.53 Converts’ insistence upon an exclusivistic interpretation of Christian allegiance went well beyond the flouting of traditional rhetorical norms, striking deep at the ritual ties that had traditionally bound Wendat communities. Taught by their Jesuit mentors to perceive contrasts rather than convergences between Catholicism and traditional spirituality, Wendat Christians often distanced themselves from the traditional, reciprocal practices that had long been the sinews of community cohesiveness, in the process transforming subsistence, marriage, and burial patterns. Converts’ refusal to participate in shared feasts, their rejection of traditionalist suitors, their careful observation of Catholic fasts, and their withholding of Christian remains from the Feast of the Dead, an important ritual of disinterment and collective reburial, resulted, in some factionalized communities, in the breakdown of traditional mechanisms for social control and reproduction.54 Christian refusal to participate in key community rituals was seen by many traditionalists as imperiling Wendat spiritual unanimity in blood, fire, and “baptism”

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the teeth of an increasingly serious external threat. In many cases the Jesuits were blamed for having implanted this dangerous disregard for community unity in the hearts of their converts.55 But what most divided Wendat from Wendat in the 1640s were their varying religious responses to another of the decade’s most pernicious and destabilizing threats: epidemic. Interestingly, Christian and traditionalist Wendat were firmly united in identifying who was responsible for inflicting this pestilence on their people: virtually everyone blamed the Jesuits.56 Missionaries’ immunity to epidemic disease, coupled with their attribution of these scourges to Wendat sinfulness and resistance to Christianity, was partly responsible for this prevalent assumption of Jesuit culpability.57 But an even more critical factor was the Jesuits’ inadvertent self-presentation as shamans. In keeping with their emphasis upon spiritual confrontation, Jesuit missionaries often attempted publicly to challenge Wendat shamans through fiercely competitive contests to ameliorate individual and collective ills. Jesuits’ demonstration of their supposed ability, through prayer, to control the weather or influence human health encouraged the already prevalent Wendat tendency to perceive them through the lens of traditional shamanism. Because aboriginal conceptions of shamanic power stressed its amoral, ambivalent nature, the Wendat freely attributed banes as well as boons to the Jesuits. Wendat unanimity in identifying the black robes as the source of these repeated and devastating outbreaks foundered, however, when the community collectively considered the thorny issue of how best to respond to this evident threat. The controversy splintered Wendat communities into two extremist wings mediated by the largest and most ambivalent faction. Radical traditionalists who had long objected to the Jesuits’ presence were convinced that direct confrontation of these malevolent sorcerers, despite its obvious dangers, was the only responsible option. They thus engaged in an aggressive campaign of continuous low-level threats and sporadic violence against the Wendake Jesuits during the 1630s and 1640s, with the ultimate aim of killing or driving them out. In 1637 this faction formally accused a number of prominent missionaries, including Jean de Brébeuf, of sorcery, a crime bearing the death penalty. In their desperation to rid themselves of the Jesuit gadfly and to cleanse their society of Christian influences, these radical traditionalists, in the late 1640s, began to advocate the heretofore unthinkable: alliance with the Haudenosaunee against their implacably Christian kin. As Bruce Trigger notes: “It is a measure of how threatened those Huron who were committed to maintaining traditional ways had become that now, for the first time, a respectable body of opinion had emerged which viewed an alliance with longstanding enemies who shared 144

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similar beliefs to be preferable to one with European allies who were seeking to change the Huron way of life.”58 This radical traditionalist faction was behind the daring daytime slaying of French donné Jacques Douart in April 1648, right outside the fortified Jesuit headquarters of Sainte-Marie-among-the-Huron. By killing the twenty-two-year-old, these radical traditionalists sought to signal their rejection of political, economic, and military alliance with the French and their hopes for a new liaison with the Iroquois and their Dutch allies, who would become their new source for European trade goods. But, in the face of the strong objections from Wendat Catholics, who wished to continue their religious communion with the Jesuits, and less radical traditionalist factions that, despite their shared opposition to missionary presence, nevertheless wished to maintain their traditional alliance with the French, the radical traditionalists were forced to back down and offer the Jesuits rich compensation for the donné’s death.59 For the radical traditionalists, then, Jesuit culpability in the ills imperiling their society necessitated their slaying or ejection from Wendake, even if this precipitated a heretofore unthinkable shift in entrenched economic and military alliances. But identification of the Jesuits as the responsible party in ongoing Wendat suffering did not automatically result in violent opposition to their presence, or even in the rejection of their Christian message. Given the widespread aboriginal belief that only the agent who had ritually precipitated an illness or injury could ritually undo it, turning to the Jesuits for spiritual and ritual assistance in remediating the very illness that they had unleashed made sense to many Wendat in the 1630s and 1640s. Such an argument led to the creative reinterpretation of baptism as a physically curative rite restoring corporeal health in this life rather than as securing the soul’s salvation in the next: a conceptual shift often tacitly encouraged by the Jesuits themselves. Wendat converts’ novel and optimistic construction of Catholic baptism as a healing rite was all the more unusual in that this sacrament, in mid-seventeenthcentury Wendake, was almost universally associated with death. For their part, the Jesuits were very concerned that this transformative ritual might inadvertently be administered to those who would, through their apostasy, subsequently profane it.60 Such a profanation not only vitiated the salvation of the “apostate” but also called into serious question the spiritual discernment of the ritual celebrant who had so unwisely admitted him or her into the church.61 The Jesuits’ scrupulosity in administering baptism, then, while reflecting their real concern for the quality of Native conversions, also had a strongly self-protective function. Death-bed baptisms were thus preferred, with the sacred water of baptism being closely seconded by the holy oil of the viaticum. The sacrament so closely blood, fire, and “baptism”

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associated with the beginning of the Christian’s earthly sojourn in seventeenthcentury France often heralded, in Wendake, a neophyte’s reception into the heavenly church triumphant rather than the earthly church militant. The small group of baptized ex-Christians who lived to wreak their ritual revenge on Brébeuf, then, had bucked a sacramental system in which they were scripted to succumb shortly after its reception. Like the Jesuits, Wendat traditionalists generally associated Christian initiation with death, but for different reasons. Logically, given endemic epidemic and missionary fondness for death-bed baptism, they argued that the ceremony was a sinister piece of sorcery that, with its watery cross, actively marked an individual for death.62 Jesuits who covertly sketched a cross on an infant’s fevered brow risked the wrath of their families, who often perceived this as nothing less than a final coup de grâce.63 Curative interpretations of the ritual of baptism, then, though they seem to have been highly influential in motivating Wendat conversion, were decisively in the minority. Moreover, optimistic perceptions of this sacrament as a healing balm bore within them the dark seeds of possible disenchantment. It is easy to imagine the depth of Wendat anger and bitterness should the ritual fail to live up to its perceived promise of health and happiness in the here and now. Indeed, the ritual behavior of the ex-Wendat cohort under consideration may well represent one expression of that very disappointment. It is extremely suggestive that the passionate and long-standing Wendat debate over the nature of Jesuit sacramental power became so ritually visible in these ex-Wendat’s innovative torture of Jean de Brébeuf on March 16, 1649. While Haudenosaunee torture of the two missionaries was virtually indistinguishable from the grueling torments inflicted upon scores of aboriginal captives in both the pre- and postcontact periods, the same cannot be said for those utilized by this unique ex-Wendat cohort, which differed in both detail and intent.64 In mimicking the baptismal rite’s threefold administration of holy water and reminding Brébeuf, their former catechist, of the necessity of the sacrament for entry into Paradise, these “apostate” Wendat effectively reversed their former roles by themselves appropriating the status of sacramental celebrants. Their “baptism” of Brébeuf betrayed their intimate knowledge of key doctrines of the faith they had once shared with their victim even in their inversion and mockery of this Catholic sacrament.65 Moreover, these ex-Wendat may have been all too aware of the horror that their status as “apostates” would have aroused in Brébeuf, making their ritual performance an early modern form of “psyche ops” targeting the Jesuit will to remain in Wendake by undercutting its cherished religious presuppositions. Jesuit logic, as previously explored, held Brébeuf, as the ritual celebrant 146

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of their baptisms, partly responsible for their subsequent profanation of this rite by their deconversion. Buried in the ritual subtext of the torture that these former catechumens inflicted upon Brébeuf, then, was a complex, multivalent association of baptism, suffering, and death. The popular association between this ritual and the individual’s subsequent demise, as we have seen, was already well established in Wendat culture. But the affiliation between baptism and torture was of more recent provenance. Though they were eager to wipe out what they saw as the barbaric savagery of Wendat postwar torture rituals, the Jesuits were never successful in so doing and had to content themselves with imposing a thin Christian overlay upon what remained an entirely traditionalist ceremony.66 That overlay, of course, was the instruction and baptism of willing enemy captives prior to the commencement of their fatal torture. What were, from Brébeuf’s perspective, two inherently opposed rituals — baptism and torture — were thus creatively combined by his ex-Wendat tormentors into a seamless performance that transformed the contested Catholic sacrament itself into an improvised form of ritual torture. These elements of ritual subversion suggest that this ex-Wendat cohort intended to telegraph their dramatic public repudiation of their former ritual incorporation into the Christian fold by presiding at a sort of “antibaptism” or “unbaptism” effected through violent infliction rather than docile reception.67 Their ritual actions not only dramatically inverted their relationship with their former catechist and ritually negated their own earlier baptisms but also challenged Wendat converts’ strong association of the sacrament with healing and survival. In their sarcastic affirmation of the otherworldly benefits of baptism, and their use of the sacrament to torture the Jesuit who had administered it to them, these ex-Wendat ex-Catholics ritually voiced the disappointment of cruelly thwarted expectations. In defiance of the usual script, in which a healthy Jesuit administered the sacrament to a dying Wendat, these ex-Wendat — defiant survivors of baptism, war, and captivity — used it as the coup de grâce to finish off a dying missionary. The unmistakably Christian inflection of the torments that these ex-Wendat ex-Christians inflicted upon Jean de Brébeuf reopens, once again, the question of “in odium fidei.” As we have seen, Ragueneau’s framing of martyrdom, which was influenced by the state persecution of early Christians, mandated that a martyr’s suffering result from his or her antagonists’ hatred of Christianity or determination to force a recantation of this faith. While these conditions, as previously discussed, were manifestly unmet by the Haudenosaunee majority who participated in Brébeuf’s death, for whom his demise appears to have been strictly “business as usual,” the ritual actions of this small group of ex-Wendat blood, fire, and “baptism”

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participants were more complex. Though their ritual torture of Brébeuf indeed conformed to the broad rubric of traditional postwar practices, their creative modifications to this torture and their apparently different motivations for engaging in it give the encounter the flavor of a secret conversation between Brébeuf and his former catechumens, utilizing the shared yet disputed Christian symbol of baptism in the face of a largely uncomprehending Haudenosaunee majority. Brébeuf’s verbal and nonverbal signals to his Christian cohort to hold fast to the faith in the face of such determined aggression, which seemed a mere misinterpretation of the nature of postwar practices when we examined it from the Haudenosaunee perspective, appears more cogent in the face of these more pointed and intimate threats. The deaths of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalement were multivalent events that were understood by each of the three groups of participants who collectively enacted their ritual drama in starkly different yet subtly interconnected terms. These events allow us to observe both the mutual incomprehension and subtle mutual understandings that marked the ritual communication between the two Jesuit prisoners and two distinctive groups of aboriginal antagonists, Haudenosaunee traditionalists and a cohort of deconverted Wendat adoptees. Of particular interest is the perspective of the least-studied group of ritual actors, the Wendat “apostates,” who were uniquely equipped, through their own life experiences, to bring together traditionalist and Christian viewpoints. These ex-Catholics, in their treatment of their former mentor, forged new forms of postwar torture that simultaneously reflected and rejected their Christian past. In response to them, Brébeuf, in his calculated ritual actions, both exemplified and transformed traditional Christian expectations of martyrs. From the perspective of Brébeuf, who had long anticipated his martyrdom, the events of March 16, 1649, presented a long-awaited opportunity to display fidelity to his faith, but through ritual actions that also referenced the values of the Wendat milieu in which he had long lived. The genius of Brébeuf’s behavior under torture is that it both fulfilled and transformed two very different sets of religious and cultural expectations simultaneously. His courage exemplified the ancient expectations placed upon Christian martyrs for fidelity under duress even as it simultaneously spoke to powerful panaboriginal conventions for the postwar behavior of captives. The success of Brébeuf’s multivalent ritual actions in communicating across the cultural divide that separated him from his traditionalist tormentors is evidenced by his reception of the ultimate postmortem compliment to his bravery: his ritual ingestion. Though hagiographic commentators have often chosen to present this ritual action as representing the apotheosis of Haudenosaunee savagery, such outrage cannot hide the strong parallels 148

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with seventeenth-century Catholic practices of likewise preserving, touching, and even ingesting fragments of Brébeuf’s powerful bones.68 Like the Haudenosaunee, Catholics, in ritually subsuming his holy relics, commemorated and preserved, in their very flesh, something of his essence. The circumstances of Brébeuf’s death, then, arguably morphed traditional conceptions of martyrdom as much as they fulfilled them. Traditional definitions of Christian martyrdom, based on the persecution of the early Christian community by the Roman state, envision the martyr as a volitional agent who is empowered to arrest their physical destruction through spiritual capitulation. Deprived of this critical agency by aboriginal torture practices designed to showcase the control of the torturer rather than the volition of the tortured, Brébeuf regained a modicum of self-determination by scripting his own demise: modeling his comportment under torture upon both aboriginal and Christian standards for captives and for martyrs, and in the process boldly grafting a Christian meaning onto his elaborate obedience of aboriginal norms. For the traditionalist Haudenosaunee who were numerically the most dominant of the three groups of ritual actors that day, the torture and death of Brébeuf was a mere incident in their desperate campaign to survive in threatening new circumstances. Confronted by the specter of demographic decline, which seemed to menace their ongoing existence as a viable confederacy of independent and flourishing nations in the 1630s and 1640s, the Haudenosaunee responded by stepping up their traditional strategy of incorporative warfare.69 Their presence in Wendake on that late winter day signified their determination to endure through the forceful incorporation of neighboring enemy groups, even as their ritual destruction of Brébeuf displayed the continuing coherency and world-creating power of traditional beliefs and practices. The Wendat’s missionization by the Jesuits had created deep ideological fissures within their society that even the threat of imminent annihilation by an external foe could not repair. The exclusivism of the Catholic Reformation demanded an all-or-nothing commitment from its converts that undercut traditional aboriginal bonds in this life and the next and forever altered the traditionally conciliatory tenor of internal Wendat diplomacy. Like water seeping into the secret cleavages of a stone, Christianity penetrated this early modern aboriginal culture. When war came like a killing frost, the now fragile rock was broken into discrete shards by the ice within. Undermined from inside their culture by their uneven reaction to Catholicism, the Wendat lacked the community cohesion to coherently react to both novel and traditional threats to their traditional identity and lands.70 Placed against the drama of two aboriginal nations’ struggle to survive as blood, fire, and “baptism”

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coherent societies through debilitating epidemic, war, and the social, cultural, and religious changes that accompanied European contact, these celebrated, debated deaths recede from their accustomed place of historiographic centrality to become a mere vignette within a sweeping, compelling aboriginal narrative of survival and change. Nor does the significance of the missionaries’ final hours, within this wider aboriginal context, retain its conventional hagiographic characterization. While their deaths remain religiously meaningful, ethnohistorians’ illumination of the underlying cultural and psychological purposes of aboriginal postwar torture and adoption ceremonies forces us to acknowledge that the Iroquoian concepts of ritual sacrifice, ingestion, and physical incorporation are at least as important to our understanding of their fate as is the more familiar Christian concept of martyrdom. One view, however, does not trump or extinguish the other two. Each perspective is necessary for our comprehension of the events. All, finally, are “true.”

Notes 1. I use “Wendat” and “Wendake” (rather than “Huron” and “Huronia”) and “Haudenosaunee” (rather than “Iroquois”) because these seem to be the emergent self-designatory terms of contemporary aboriginal communities (Georges Sioui, Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle [Vancouver: British Columbia University Press, 1999], 3, 207). 2. Jean de Brébeuf was born in Normandy in 1593 and joined the Jesuits in 1617. He first came to Canada as a missionary in 1625 but was forced, along with the rest of the French colony, to retreat to Europe when the English temporarily took possession of the colony in 1629. From his return in 1633 to his death in 1649, Brébeuf spent the majority of his time amid the Wendat. All the biographies of Brébeuf to date are hagiographically tinged (Francis X. Talbot, Saint among the Hurons: The Life of Jean de Brébeuf [Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1956]; René Latourelle, S.J., Jean de Brébeuf, trans. William Lone, S.J. [Montreal: Guérin, 2001]; Joseph P. Donnelly, S.J., Jean de Brébeuf, 1593–1649 [Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1975]; Joseph Robinne, L’Apôtre au Coeur Mange: Une époque, un Homme, une mission [Paris: Editions Sant-Paul, 1949]). Though Brébeuf is only one of a cohort of eight Jesuit (or Jesuit-affiliated) missionaries recognized as saints and martyrs by the Catholic Church in 1930 (the others being Gabriel Lalemant, Noel Chabanal, Antoine Daniel, Rene Goupil, Isaac Jogues, Jean de la Lande, and Charles Garnier), he has always occupied a disproportionately large place in the Catholic imagination. Especially in Canada, where a unique combination of factors made his story part of an emergent national myth, his life and death have long been singled out for special attention, inspiring art, drama, and poetry. Brébeuf’s prominence is due to a number of factors, including the spectacular nature of his death, his substantial textual legacy, the survival of his relics (particularly critical, as remains from only three of the eight men are extant), and his long record of service in New France, which gives him a uniquely “North American” aura. 3. The classic example being Francis Parkman, whose gruff yet admiring descriptions of the Jesuits (“the truth is, that, with some of these missionaries, one may throw off trash and

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nonsense by the cartload, and find under it all a solid nucleus of saint and hero”) appealed to the biases of both Protestants and Catholics (Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century [Toronto: George Morang and Co., 1900], 217). 4. The rubric of Christian martyrdom (like its more interrogated cousin, “conversion”) is a conceptual tar baby that can all too easily ensnare the unwary in its seductive grip. It is a hegemonic concept because of its ability to impose a highly specific interpretation upon the historical facts in such a way that this interpretation seems uniquely natural and inevitable. In particular, ubiquitous usage of the term “martyr” (and the glaring lack of a more neutral synonym) creates a dangerous slippage between the reality of these violent deaths and the particular theological meaning imputed to them, such that the two are perceived as one and the same thing. Regrettably, it is beyond the scope of this already overstuffed essay to explore the perspective of the Wendat Christians captured with Brébeuf. This investigation of the multiple meanings of his death, however, would be impossible without Jesuit records based largely upon the eyewitness testimony of Wendat escapees, many of them Christian. 5. Born in Paris in 1610, Gabriel Lalemant was the nephew of two prominent Jesuit missionaries to New France, Charles Lalemant and Jérôme Lalemant. He came to Canada in 1646, though he had worked in Wendake for only seven months before his death. For a brief overview of his life, see E. J. Devine, The Canadian Martyrs, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Canadian Messenger, 1923), 21–40; Frédéric Rouvier, S.J., Les Bienheureux Martyrs de la Campagnie de Jésus au Canada (Montreal: Le Messager Canadien, 1925); and Angus Macdougall et al., Martyrs of New France (Midland, Ontario: Martyrs’ Shrine Publications, 1972), 41–45. 6. For a discussion of the prominence of “in odium fidei” as a criterion for canonical martyrdom in the seventeenth-century, see Timothy Pearson, “Becoming Holy in Early Canada: Performance and the Making of Holy Persons in Society and Culture” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2007), 69–70. 7. Paul Ragueneau, quoted in Talbot, Saint among the Hurons, 290. 8. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896–1901), 17:13. For the development of martyrdom themes in Jesuit writing, see Paul Perron, “Isaac Joques: From Martyrdom to Sainthood,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 153–68; Pearson, “Becoming Holy in Early Canada,” 64–65, 68; and Allan Greer, “Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity in Seventeenth-Century New France,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 153–68, 340–42. 9. Donnés were religiously motivated lay volunteers devoted to assisting the Canadian Jesuits. Goupil was born in 1608 near Angers. Though hearing problems prevented him from joining the Jesuit order, in 1640 he came to Canada as a donné. Captured with Isaac Jogues by the Haudenosaunee in August 1642, Goupil was held captive for almost two months before his death. His formation of the sign of the cross over the head of a Haudenosaunee child is traditionally perceived as the precipitating factor in his killing. For the details of Goupil’s life, see Henri Fouqueray, Martyrs du Canada, 2nd ed. (Paris: Pierre Téqui, 1930); Devine, Canadian Martyrs, 127–46; and Macdougall et al., Martyrs of New France, 1–8. 10. Jogues was born in 1607 in Orleans. He joined the Jesuits at the age of seventeen, was ordained in 1636 at the age of twenty-nine, and was shortly thereafter sent to Canada. Between

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1636 and 1642, when he was initially captured, Jogues worked with a variety of aboriginal nations. For more on his life, see Felix Martin, S.J., The Life of Father Isaac Joques, Missionary Priest of the Society of Jesus, trans. John Gilmary Shea (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1885); Devine, Canadian Martyrs, 107–25; Macdougall et al., Martyrs of New France, 9–17; and Perron, “Isaac Joques.” 11. On both of these occasions, the Haudenosaunee seem to have been genuinely ambivalent about Jogues, as is demonstrated by his somewhat anomalous treatment. In 1642, Jogues was neither put to death nor fully adopted into Haudenosaunee society. In 1646 his captors, in debating his fate, split along clan lines. Though the majority apparently wished to spare Jogues’s life, the minority Bear clan summarily executed him. These pronounced internal divisions must nuance any presentation of the Haudenosaunee motives for Jogues’s killing. 12. Martin, Life of Father Isaac Joques, 164. 13. Whether this more active courtship of death is compatible with “martyrdom,” classically understood, is debatable. Paul Middleton (Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Conflict in Early Christianity [London: T. and T. Clark, 2006]) explores the surprising prevalence in early Christianity of what he terms “radical martyrdom:” a Christian’s active seeking out of confrontation with anti-Christian authorities. He notes that while such practices were increasingly discouraged by the ancient church (and have been all but ignored by scholars since), they did form an important minority definition of what it meant to be a martyr during this early period. 14. For example, Noel Chabanal, who had been replaced by Gabriel Lalemant at the side of Jean de Brébeuf several weeks before the pair was martyred, wrote these wistful words to his brother, a fellow Jesuit: “Your Reverence has been very near to possessing a brother a Martyr; but alas! in the mind of God, to merit the honor of Martyrdom, a virtue of another stamp than mine is needed. . . . I . . . was sent upon a Mission more remote and more laborious, but not so fruitful in Palms and Crowns as that of which my cowardice has, in the sight of God, rendered me unworthy. . . . The ravages of the Iroquois throughout this country will perhaps, someday, supply what is wanting” (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 35:161). Note how the Iroquois are here, for Chabanal, purely the deus ex machina of his anticipated martyrdom. Nor was this longing for martyrdom restricted to men, as nuns also expressed similar sentiments (see Dom Guy-Marie Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation Correspondence [Quebec: Solesmes, 1971], 387–88). Indeed, one could read Brébeuf devotee Mère Catherine de Saint Augustine’s spiritual career as a sort of feminization of what had been, in colonial North America, traditionally masculine martyrdom motifs. 15. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:161, 183. 16. Devine, Canadian Martyrs, 38. 17. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:165, 167–69. According to Marie de l’Incarnation, his prolific Ursuline contemporary, Brébeuf was told in a vision of his martyrdom three days prior to when it occurred and at that time was also given other foreknowledge of exactly what he would have to endure (Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation Correspondence, 379–80). 18. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:163–65. 19. Latourelle, Jean de Brébeuf, 233; Donnelly, Jean de Brébeuf, 228; Talbot, Saint among the Hurons, 290. 20. Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation Correspondence, 379–80; Donnelly, Jean de Brébeuf, 271. 21. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 43:127–29. I would submit that, since Jogues’s upping of the ante with his volitional return to Iroquoia following his successful escape to France, the once respectable Jesuit option of choosing to escape and live to fight another day, so to speak, was

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all but removed for those missionaries who sought to emulate his grasping of the martyr’s palm. 22. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:27. 23. Ibid., 33. 24. Ibid., 34:139–41. Marie de l’Incarnation, in her private correspondence, concurs with Ragueneau’s evaluation: “C’est vraiment pour Dieu, et en haine de la Foi, ques ces Hommes Apostoliques ont souffert de si horribles tourmens” (Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation Correspondence, 380). On the increasing centralization of canonization during this period, see Pearson, “Becoming Holy in Early Canada,” 34–40. 25. More recently, theologians have begun to appreciate the problematic degree of power that the “in odium fidei” definition of martyrdom gives to the would-be martyr’s antagonists. The danger that legitimate martyrs might be denied their “crown” because of the difficulty of definitively proving the motivations of their persecutors (coupled, of course, with the influence of post–Vatican II theology) has led some recent analysts to recast martyrdom as the martyr’s embrace of death as an act of love for his or her fellow humanity rather than stressing the antiChristian motivations of his or her persecutors (Latourelle, Jean de Brébeuf, 287–91). 26. A range of commentators from the seventeenth century to the present, from the Jesuits’ Recollet competitors (Christian Le Clercq, First Establishment of the Faith in New France, trans. John Gilmary Shea, 2 vols. [New York: John G. Shea, 1881], 1:217, 245), to Enlightenment philosophes such as the Baron de Lahontan (Real Ouellet, Lahontan: Oeuvres Complètes, Édition Critique, 2 vols. [Montreal: Les Presses de l’Universitè de Montreal, 1990], 1008–9; see also Georges Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992], 65), to contemporary academics (Guy Laflèche, Les Saints Martyrs Canadiens, vol. 1, Histoire du Mythe [Montreal: Singulier, 1989]; Allan Greer, “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 [April 2000]: 334; Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s Heroic Age Reconsidered [Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985], 267; Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. [Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1976], 763–64) have suggested that these deaths should be evaluated in their military, economic, and political context rather than through the lens of a theological concept such as martyrdom. 27. For example, only eleven months before the deaths of Brébeuf and Lalemant, Jacques Douart, a young donné, had been killed within sight of the Jesuit headquarters by radical Wendat traditionalists who hoped, by this action, to provoke a total rupture of the entrenched Wendat-French alliance and the dispersion of Jesuit missionaries from Wendake. The identity of Douart’s killers, as well as fact that the Jesuits had been offered and accepted compensation from the Wendat to smooth over the incident, precluded Ragueneau from casting Douart’s murder as a martyrdom (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 33:229–49). 28. See Perron, “Isaac Joques,” 156. 29. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:37. See also Julia Boss, “Writing a Relic: The Uses of Hagiography in New France,” in Greer and Bilinkoff, Colonial Saints, 211–33, which proposes that texts about martyrdom have functioned as “textual relics.” 30. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:35. 31. In addition to his long description of the martyrdoms of Brébeuf and Lalemant composed for the Relation of 1649 (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:139–57), Ragueneau also took it upon

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himself to compile a longer document to aid in canonization efforts. Referred to as the Manuscript of 1652, it was published (with many faults) in the Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Quebec (1924–25), 3–93. Ragueneau also furthered Brébeuf’s cult with his sensational 1671 spiritual biography of Mère Catherine de Saint Augustine, a Hospitalière nun whose postmortem visions of Brébeuf in glory, holding a martyr’s palm, left little doubt as to his august spiritual status. 32. Several months after Brébeuf’s death and the Jesuits’ abandonment of their mission stronghold of Sainte-Marie, many Wendat fled northward to what is now Christian Island, enduring a brutal winter in which many starved. Some exiles sought shelter with neighboring groups such as the Petuns and Neutrals, while others integrated into Haudenosaunee ranks. In the spring of 1650, many Christian Island exiles accompanied the Jesuits on a desperate voyage to Quebec, where many of them settled, initially at Sillery and later at Lorette. Wendat refugees to what later became the United States faced successive displacement westward in the nineteenth century. Currently, Wendat groups exist in Quebec, Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma. A decade ago, representatives of these Wendat communities met on their ancestral lands near Midland, Ontario, to reconstitute their nation symbolically and to engage in a modern-day Feast of the Dead (see Francis Gros-Louis, 1999, www.agondachia.com — Huron/ Wendat cemeteryœ; see also Mima Kapches, “Ossassané Ossuary: The Circle Closes” [unpublished paper, 2004]). On August 29, 1999, the remains of more than five hundred Wendat ancestors that had been held since their 1947 excavation by the Royal Ontario Museum were ceremonially reinterred in the same ossuary pit thought to have been personally observed by Jean de Brébeuf in 1636 (Kenneth Kidd, “The Excavation and Historical Identification of a Huron Ossuary,” American Antiquity 18, no. 14 [1953]: 359, 372–76; Kapches, “Ossassané Ossuary,” 1–3, 6–7). For Brébeuf’s original description of the dead, see Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 10:139–65. 33. Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 11. 34. Ibid., 16–17, Trigger, Children of Aataentsic. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee confederacy encompassed the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations. 35. Daniel Richter (The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992], 64, 65) stresses demographic tensions as prompting the Haudenosaunee decision in the 1640s to escalate traditional warfare to gain new human resources. While agreeing with the importance of disease as a determining factor, Wendat scholar Georges Sioui suggests a more global strategic goal on the part of the Haudenosaunee, arguing that, seeing their confederacy as the last, best defense of Native North America, they decided forcibly to incorporate French-allied aboriginal nations into their own ranks, the better collectively to repel the invaders (For an Amerindian Autohistory, 44). Though Trigger does not postulate this degree of intentionality on the part of the Haudenosaunee, he does note that the idea of an Iroquois victory was preferable in the minds of some Wendat to the triumph of Christian factions (Children of Aataentsic, 750). 36. The Haudenosaunee’s status as the enemies of New France in the mid-1600s has led to a pronounced historiographic tendency to characterize them as “the ravenous rabble” (Talbot, Saint among the Hurons, 297). To buttress their contention that the Haudenosaunee should be lumped with the “Tartars, Goths, Vandals, and Huns” as the bogeymen of history, historians used as “Exhibit A” their practice of postwar ritual torture, blithely ignoring both the nuanced cultural and religious functions of these practices in aboriginal cultures and the fact that identi-

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cal rituals prevailed among French-allied indigenous groups such as the Wendat and the Innu. Try as they might, the Jesuits were unable to eliminate these practices and had to content themselves merely with baptizing war captives. For consideration of the historiographic distortion of the Haudenosaunee, see Cornelius Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 120–52; Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory, 39–40; and Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 51–57. 37. Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 172–73. 38. This ritual practice of running the gauntlet would be repeated at each new village the returning war party visited. Generally speaking (the deaths of Brébeuf and Lalemant on Wendat rather that Iroquoian soil representing an intriguing exception), captives were taken far into the victors’ home territory before being adopted or tortured to death. Depending on their captors’ final destination, then, prisoners might pass through several villages, thus running the gauntlet on multiple occasions. 39. The strong value attached to females (as those practically and ritually concerned with the fertility of the soil) in both Haudenosaunee and Wendat societies would have made their ritual dispatch all the more unlikely. This high valuation of women is also seen by the fact that the expected compensation due the families of murdered females seems to have been higher than for their male counterparts (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 33:243–45; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 35). 40. Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 171–74; Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory, 54–56. 41. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:147; Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 173–74; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 36–37, 69–71. 42. Though not present in the ritual torture of Brébeuf, these solar referents are strongly evident in the death of his fellow missionary Gabriel Lalemant, who seems to have been kept alive deliberately through the night so that he could be sacrificed early the next morning (Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 123, 143). 43. In some cases, the gender of the captive did not match that of the returning ancestor. In such cases, the gender identity of the ancestor seems to have trumped the physical sex of his or her embodying adoptee, leading to interesting cases of early modern “gender bending.” Adoptees were also judged through the lens of the ancestor’s former skills or qualities. Leadership skills were expected and cultivated in captives hosting the spirit of the charismatic departed, while those who had been marginalized figures of fun in their previous lives passed on this dubious legacy to the adoptee who had the misfortune to enflesh them. This search for the qualities of the beloved dead in their present embodiment is not a thing of the past. The contemporary Dene Tha people of northern Alberta perceive infants as the returning souls of ancestors and conscientiously search their behavior and appearance for clues as to their primordial identity (see Jean-Guy Goulet, Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Dene Tha [Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998]). 44. It is important, nevertheless, that the integrative power of these rituals not be overstated. See Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 71–72, for a discussion of captive resistance to adoption and indoctrination. 45. Catholic missionary activity among the Haudenosaunee was retarded by the fact that the French were often allied against them militarily. The Haudenosaunee nevertheless had alternative sources of information regarding Catholicism, including the highly polemical descriptions offered by their Protestant neighbors and by captured Wendat traditionalists. 46. On the contrary, the available evidence suggests that (as with Jogues) the Haudeno-

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saunee who captured Brébeuf and Lalemant were initially ambivalent regarding their fate. Evidence obtained from a central participant in the sack of St. Louis, a Cayuga who later converted to Catholicism and took the baptismal name Lazare, reveals that he was able to ransom both missionaries successfully by presenting wampum necklaces to individuals bent on their slaying (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 43:311–13). This incident, which significantly tempers typically blanket characterizations of Haudenosaunee motivations for the deaths, does not appear in any published biographies of Brébeuf (probably because Thwaites failed to include it in his index). It is also unclear why the deal fell through, though the single modern commentator who mentions the incident attributes this reversal to the missionaries’ resumed evangelization efforts (Paul Prud’homme, Our Martyrs/Nos Martyrs: Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Joques and Their Companions/et leurs Compagnons, 1642–1649 [Montreal: n.p., 1929], 29–30). If this was indeed the case, such behavior could be seen as an active instigation of martyrdom on their part. 47. This European exceptionalism is all the more problematic given that several Native Catholics have cases as strong as or stronger than those of the eight canonized Frenchmen. In 1650 Joseph Onaharé, a young Algonquin Christian, withstood three days of torture by Haudenosaunee who (allegedly) wished to force his renunciation of Christianity (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 35:222–33; François Du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, trans. Percy Robinson [Toronto: Champlain Society, 1951], 571–74). If true, this would make him a martyr both because of his executioners’ purported anti-Christian motivations and because he apparently chose death as a Christian over life as an apostate. Though Onaharé was initially included in seventeenth-century etchings of the glorious martyrs of New France, he has never been recognized officially as a martyr. For analysis of Onaharé’s case, see Greer, “Colonial Saints,” 335–36, 343. One could also make an excellent case that Wendat Catholic Joseph Chihwatenwa was a martyr under traditional definitions. It appears that Chihwatenwa, a vocal advocate of Christianity, was killed by traditionalists within his own community who subsequently blamed their crime on Iroquois marauders (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 19:151–53, 20:79–85; Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 249; Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 717). Lack of eyewitness testimony as to the precise circumstances of his death has thwarted the progress of Chihwatenwa’s official recognition as a martyr by the Catholic Church. Yet similar uncertainty surrounded the unwitnessed late 1649 slaying of Noel Chabanal, a European who was canonized with the other seven North American martyrs. For details on his death, see Devine, Canadian Martyrs, 85–104. 48. Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 173–74. 49. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:28–29 (my translation into modern English). 50. Despite the conceptual contributions that more extensive consideration of “deconversion” would make to the ever popular study of aboriginal religious change in early modern North America (and the important reality check it offers to constructions of religious conversion as a final or irreversible decision), aboriginal “apostates” have yet to awaken much scholarly interest. Given the ubiquity of aboriginal deconversion in the primary sources, this lack of attention represents a surprising and troubling lacuna. 51. Ironically, it would be the overwhelming success of the Haudenosaunee campaigns of incorporative warfare in the 1640s and 1650s that would eventually open their traditionalist society to strong Catholic influences. As early as 1653, Catholic adoptees were able to leverage their increasing demographic clout to retain their Christian identity postcapture and even to agitate for the ritual ministrations of the Jesuits. 52. Ragueneau’s description of them in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:145 (my emphasis),

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though the French original, with its parallel “anciens,” is more equivocal: “C’estoient des Hurons Infideles, anciens captifs des Iroquois, anciens ennemis de la Foy.” See also ibid., 141, 27. The phrasing of Marie de l’Incarnation is similarly ambiguous, though she stresses how well the group knew Brébeuf and the men’s hatred for him: “à qui les Renégats portoient une haine mortelle” (Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation Correspondence, 365). 53. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 256–57. In the most notorious incident, which occurred at the village of Ossassané in 1648, the Christian faction, having become the majority, effectively enforced a moratorium on the practice of traditional ceremonies and sought to force the non-Christian minority to convert or leave (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:105–9, 217; see also Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 760–62). For the similar Christian-traditionalist factionalization that occurred later in Iroquoia, see Daniel K. Richter, “Iroquois Versus Iroquois: Jesuit Missions and Christianity in Village Politics, 1642–1686,” Ethnohistory 32 (1985): 1, 9. 54. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 23:31. 55. Converts to Christianity were far more vulnerable than were the Jesuits to acts of coercion, shaming, or intimidation on the part of traditionalists eager to reestablish precontact religious uniformity (Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 715–21). Concern that fatal violence against the missionaries would disrupt what were often seen as vital trade links with the French effectively protected the Jesuits from traditionalists’ wrath even during very tense periods (thus the Wendat, despite their 1637 trial of Brébeuf for the capital crime of witchcraft, failed to execute him). It was this taboo that radical traditionalists factions sought to break with the 1648 killing of Jacques Douart. Despite the demonstrably greater vulnerability of Native Christian converts to retaliatory acts of violence, all the canonized North American martyrs to date have been European rather than aboriginal. 56. Karl H. Schlesier, “Epidemics and Indian Middlemen: Rethinking the Wars of the Iroquois, 1609–1653,” Ethnohistory 23 (Spring 1976): 129–45. 57. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 246–47. 58. Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 745; Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 264. 59. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 33:229–49. Like the 1648 murder of Douart, the slaying of canonized martyr Noel Chabanal in late 1649 seems to have been the result of a vow taken by radical traditionalists to “kill the first Frenchmen that they saw” (ibid., 231; Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 265). The similarities between Douart’s and Chabanal’s killings point out the intensely political process through which possible “martyrdoms” are identified and then promoted. The Jesuits’ acceptance of compensation in the murder of Douart precluded them from later recognizing his death as a martyrdom much like Chabanal’s, despite the strong similarities between the two. 60. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 254. 61. Jesuits’ fears that aboriginal apostasy would have negative effects on their own salvation mirrored the fears of their Recollet predecessors (see Le Clercq, First Establishment of the Faith, 1:142). 62. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 249–50. 63. Indeed, René Goupil had been executed by the Haudenosaunee in 1642 for just such a presumption (Devine, Canadian Martyrs, 142–43). 64. The use of boiling water in postwar ritual torture was very unusual, if not unheard of. Christophe Regnault, a Jesuit donné and veteran of the Wendake mission, observed, regarding the martyrdoms of Brébeuf and Lalemant: “I have seen the same treatment given to Iroquois prisoners whom the Huron savages had taken in war, with the exception of the boiling water,

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which I have not seen poured on anyone” (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:33). It is interesting to speculate whether the small faction of ex-Wendat were also behind the somewhat unorthodox decision to torture Brébeuf and Lalemant to death in Wendake (rather than the usual course of action, which would be first to take them back to Haudenosaunee territory). Did they intend their provocative torture of the duo, only a short distance away from the imposing Jesuit headquarters of Sainte-Marie, to undermine Jesuit morale or to act as a catalyst to collective action (much like the earlier murder of Jacques Douart)? 65. Ibid., 25, 31. 66. On the Jesuits’ inability to excise postwar ritual torture from Wendat communities and their utilization of pretorture baptism of captives, see Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 139–41, and Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 713–14. 67. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34:33. 68. Catholic discomfort with these profound parallels is nothing new. As noted by Cornelius Jaenen (Friend and Foe, 143–45), Jesuit missionaries often underplayed Catholic beliefs regarding the Real Presence and the ritual incorporation of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist because of their fears that their Native audiences might see these as paralleling their own practices of postwar ritual cannibalism. The Eucharist aside, seventeenth-century Catholics ritually ingested the remains of powerful figures in other ways. A key promoter of Brébeuf’s early cult, the Augustinian Hospitalière nun Catherine de Saint Augustine, routinely slipped the pulverized bone dust of Brébeuf into soups she prepared for the sick, demoniacs, and even recalcitrant Protestants, with purportedly miraculous results (Albert Jamet, ed., Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1636–1716 [Quebec: L’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1939], 148). Similarly, Brébeuf’s Jesuit colleagues often soaked his relics in water that they would then give to the sick to drink (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 50:87–89, 123, 56:103–5). 69. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 260; Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 20–21; Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 114. 70. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 256; Schlesier, “Epidemics and Indian Middlemen,” 136.

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the catholic rosary, gendered pr ac tice, and female power in french- indian spiritual encounters Tracy Neal Leavelle

A Spiritual Contest In 1712 the Jesuit missionary Gabriel Marest described for a colleague a tense encounter that occurred at his post in Kaskaskia, an Illinois Indian village near the Mississippi. A young woman holding a rosary in her hand passed by the cabin of a ceremonial leader. “This [healer],” the missionary reported, “imagining that the sight of a similar rosary had caused the death of his father — fell into a rage, took his gun, and was on the point of firing on this poor Neophyte.” Only the timely intervention of some onlookers saved the young woman from a tragic death. “I do not tell you how many times I have received like insults at their hands,” Marest complained, “or how many times I would have expired under their blows but for the special protection of God, who has preserved me from their fury.” Père Marest presented the incident as evidence of the battle against “superstitious” and sinful practices. “The more averse they are to the Kingdom of God,” he suggested, “the more ought our zeal be quickened to draw them near, and cause them to enter it.” For those seeking insight into the complex nature of French-Indian spiritual encounters, however, the brief episode offers more than simply another close call in the unfolding history of salvation the missionary shared with his friend.1 The rosary contained at least the potential for enormous spiritual power for both the girl and the healer who wanted to kill her. In Marest’s interpretation, the man feared the rosary because he believed another similar string of beads contributed to his father’s death. The Illinois and other Native peoples

in the region understood that certain objects possessed the power to heal or to harm. Marest explained that the medicine men relied on the manitous, or spirits, that animated objects like animal skins or feathers in their healing ceremonies. He also noted that “warriors carry their Manitous in a mat and they invoke them incessantly, that they may obtain victory over their enemies.” The Jesuit Jacques Gravier, respected for his linguistic work, translated the term Manete8a as “spirit, God . . . medicine.” The complex concept referred to the spirit itself as well as to its power or medicine. There was also a sense in which beings, human and other-than-human, could become manet8, in other words powerful or extraordinary. The healer, then, reacted violently to the sight of the rosary because it might possibly have had within it a manitou whose power could threaten his life. The rosary was also a symbol of Christianity and thus a reminder of the struggle for spiritual supremacy that engaged the missionary and the medicine man.2 The girl in the story, though, really has no voice. She merely passed by and became a target of attack. She survived and disappeared from view. However, the rosary she carried had by 1712 become a potent symbol of the emergence of a strong Christian Illinois community, and Illinois women formed the vanguard of the broad social and spiritual movement. Women seemed to discover in Christianity new forms of power that reflected older understandings of spirit and practice but that also created new paths for personal and communal development. They incorporated Christian ritual and prayer, including the rosary, into an already thriving religious life that separated them from many men in the community, especially the young men and the traditional healers. Marest commented, “The women [are] more disposed to accept the truths of the Gospel.” The shaman may have perceived as much of a threat in the girl and her fellow Christian women as in the missionary himself. Illinois women used their attachments to Christianity to claim increased control over their own bodies and their sexuality. Reciting the rosary, counting off the decades — ten repetitions of the Ave Maria, preceded by a Pater Noster — they called on their spiritual mother, Mary, for strength and perseverance. In the Illinois version of the Ave Maria, Mary, instead of being “full of grace,” became “the master of all good hearts.” The Illinois notion of a strong, healthy, and peaceful heart replaced the equally complex yet foreign concept of Christian grace.3 The conflict in Kaskaskia suggests that the Illinois and other Native peoples adapted the rosary to existing religious worldviews and practices. The rosary, powerful as both object and ritual, offered an opportunity to create connections and call on the support of new manitous, the Christian spirits that the Jesuits

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introduced in their missions. The physical rosary emerged as a productive site for a series of creative cultural convergences, and over time, in those communities where Christianity took root, the use of the rosary also signified major shifts in religious practice and social organization. In the Illinois community of Kaskaskia in particular, these developments represented new forms of gendered religious practice and increased female power, the translation of Christianity into a new local idiom.

Convergence Many years before Marest expressed his frustrations to his colleague, early in the Jesuit encounter with the Native peoples of the western Great Lakes, the missionary Antoine Silvy praised a man he called Joseph for his piety and his dedication to the rosary. Few residents of the large Mascouten and Miami village claimed to be Christian. By Silvy’s count, only 36 adults and 126 children had received baptism. He added only five more children and four adults to this modest number. The chapel was often full, but most people appeared only out of curiosity, not to pray with the missionary. Joseph was an exception. Silvy thought him the most remarkable of all the older Christians. The priest provided his superiors with an example in his report. “An accident that greatly surprised me, happened recently to this poor man, while I was saying mass, at which he was very devoutly assisting. For, when I was at the consecration and was elevating the sacred host, he suddenly fell into such convulsions that he seemed like one possessed. He was, However,” Silvy continued, “Brought to himself; and after mass, when I wished to know the Cause of that accident, I was greatly consoled on learning that it was none other than the respectful Awe that the good christian felt at that august mystery.”4 According to Silvy, Joseph always requested new prayers to incorporate into his ritual routines. He asked for a brief rosary of seven or eight words, and “he said it with such special attention and affection that he inspired me with devotion, and Gave me unequaled pleasure. It would be an exceeding consolation to have many neophytes like him.” Joseph seemed particularly concerned with calling down divine protection for his son, who had gone off to war in the conflict-ridden region.5 Joseph’s assistance alongside the missionary as well as the trance he endured during the mass point toward the very real possibility that Joseph had identified important intersections or convergences between Christianity and indigenous religious practices. Joseph may, in fact, have apprenticed himself to the mis-

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sionary to become a kind of Christian medicine man who could operate in both worlds. Silvy perceived him as the ideal neophyte — helpful, enthusiastic, and pious in practice — but Joseph’s performance at the mass would have been even more familiar in the large public ceremonies that were common in these Native villages. The French trader and colonial official Pierre Deliette described these ceremonies among the Miamis and Illinois in a memoir he left after many years of service in the Illinois country. Deliette wrote, “Two or three times in the summer, in the most attractive spot in their village, they plant some poles in the ground, forming a sort of enclosure . . . which they furnish with mats.” As people prepared the ceremonial ground, the medicine men and women convened in a cabin to discuss their plans and get themselves ready for the coming rites. At the appointed time, the men and women entered the enclosure and sat down. A leader rose to address the healers and the assembled crowd. “My friends,” he instructed, “today you must manifest to men the power of our medicine so as to make them understand that they live only as long as we wish.” Shaking their gourd rattles and chanting, the healers called on their manitous in turn. “Immediately,” according to Deliette, “three or four men get up as if possessed, among them some who resemble men who are on the point of dying. Their eyes are convulsed and they let themselves fall prostrate and grow rigid as if they were expiring.” In the climax of the ceremony, the healers expelled the offending manitous from the ailing men using their own spirits and powers.6 Deliette argued dismissively that these medicine men and women conducted the ceremonies to instill fear and uphold their power and influence in the community. However, the pattern seems remarkably similar to the mass Silvy described. Such masses typically took place inside a small wooden chapel or in a specially prepared ground with a large wooden cross towering over the scene. Silvy would have arrived to say mass with all his priestly accoutrements and called the assembly to worship. Joseph stood by as his assistant. At a critical moment in the mass Silvy elevated the sacred host for the consecration, the very moment of transubstantiation, and Joseph fell into a trance, as if possessed. In this case, the body and blood of Jesus Christ induced the trance, and the power of God pulled Joseph out of it so that he could continue his worship. Joseph worked closely with Silvy before and after the spectacular event to add to his repertoire of prayers and then used these acquired rituals to seek protection for his family. Silvy viewed him as the model convert. Joseph and others around him may have been just as impressed with his special access to new manitous and powerful medicine. The brief rosary offered new forms of protection in a rapidly changing and dangerous world. 162

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The Jesuit missionary and historian Pierre de Charlevoix recognized and commented on the possibilities for combining Native understandings of spiritual power with Catholic objects and imagery. Charlevoix traveled through the heart of New France and Louisiana in the early 1720s gathering information on the geography of the continent and the cultures of its Native peoples. In October 1721 he encountered an Illinois leader who wore a copper cross and a small image of the Virgin around his neck. “I imagined he had been a Christian,” Charlevoix wrote, “but was informed it was quite otherwise, and that he had dressed himself in that manner only to do me honour.” Charlevoix then recounted a story that he had heard from several people about the man and his necklace. Having acquired the object, the Illinois man asked what it represented, and “he was told that it was the mother of God, and that the child she held in her arms was God himself, who had made himself man for the salvation of the human species . . . and he was further told, that in all dangers the Christians constantly addressed themselves to this holy mother, who seldom failed to extricate them.” Later, during an ambush, the man called on Mary for protection. His enemy discharged his gun, aiming for the man’s head. Miraculously, the gun misfired. Four more times the warrior cocked the piece and fired, yet each time without result. Finally, the Illinois man raised his own gun, only to have his enemy surrender in shame. Charlevoix explained that from that point on the man never traveled “without carrying his safeguard with him, by means of which he believes himself invulnerable.”7 Charlevoix hoped that this experience would lead the man eventually to accept Christ as his savior, but there is no indication that he did so. If the account is even reasonably accurate, it appears that he simply incorporated the necklace into a familiar set of practices. Deliette explained that Illinois men relied on the manitous associated with animals for support and protection in their activities. “They have also several birds which they use when they go to war and as to which they cherish much superstition,” he recorded in his memoir. Preparing for war, the men gathered in a cabin, spread their birds out together on a large mat, and sang and chanted over them throughout the long night, “saying: stone falcon, or crow, I pray to you that when I pursue the enemy I may go with the same speed in running as you do in flying, in order that I may be admired by my comrades and feared by our enemies.” The skins offered access to the spirits of the birds as well as to the qualities these feathered creatures possessed. In a similar fashion, the necklace provided an object of mediation between human and other-than-human worlds, in this case the great spirits, or manitous, introduced by the French.8

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Redness and Power Missionaries quickly responded to these cultural convergences and the growing interest in Catholic ritual items, thinking that God’s grace would someday inspire a sincere conversion and orthodox practice. When Jacques Gravier supervised the first widespread conversions among the Kaskaskia band of Illinois in the early 1690s, he complained that he never had enough rosaries on hand to reward the increasing number of people who crowded his lodge to practice the catechism. Although he acknowledged the influence of grace in inspiring his neophytes, he admitted that the prospect of receiving a small item animated the children and parents in attendance. “It is true that the hope of getting a red bead . . . or a needle, a medal, a cross or a rosary (especially if it be red), a small knife, or other curious object, given as a reward, incites the children to answer well; but they must answer very well for several days, to obtain either the rosary, the red bead, or a cross, and for the other articles in proportion.” More than a decade later, Gravier continued to request rosaries from his superiors as an important physical complement to his missionary labors. He also asked for red chalk and vermillion, highly coveted by the Indians as body paint.9 The popularity of the color red is yet another indication that the participants in this cultural encounter discovered and exploited productive intersections between cultures. The Native peoples of this region appear to have associated certain colors, such as black, white, red, and green, with particular types of spiritual power. Although the evidence is not entirely clear on this point, it seems that red may have been identified with important spiritual transformations. Blood and deep red vermillion marked moments of transition and transformation in the cycle of life. The color identified ritual items as spiritually potent. Human beings did well to prepare appropriately for these events and to handle ritual objects with care so as not to upset the manitous, the other-than-human beings who had the power to heal as well as to injure.10 Deliette, for example, noted that the Illinois and Miamis painted red the faces and hair of deceased men in preparation for their interment and the journey to the world of spirits. He also remarked that at the first sign of menstrual blood each month women separated themselves from the community in small huts where only other menstruating women were allowed access. Although Deliette does not say so explicitly, the women likely engaged in important ritual activities reserved for women. They renewed reciprocal relationships with their manitous through rituals of respect and exchange that offered access to power and that recognized the potency and fertility of the female body. He provided a little more information on the ceremonies surrounding the onset of puberty 164

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in young women, that remarkable moment when they obtained the ability to bring life into the world. The women traveled a great distance from the village to fast and pray in isolation until they formed a relationship with their personal manitou. “When [the spirit] has spoken to them they are always happy and achieve the gift of great power as regards the future,” Deliette wrote. At the end of the fast and the first menstruation, they returned to their communities as fully formed and more spiritually powerful women.11 There are other signs as well of the association of power and the color red. Jacques Marquette described the ceremonial pipe, or calumet, as a pipe made of red stone and adorned with the heads and feathers of birds, often red. The Illinois and other Native nations used the pipe as the central ceremonial object in the most sensitive diplomatic and religious rituals, those points of troubling uncertainty when events could go either well or terribly and tragically wrong. They considered the calumet so important and powerful that Marquette recalled that “it seems to be the God of peace and of war, the Arbiter of life and of death.” Gravier supplied some linguistic evidence of the link between medicine and the color red in his Illinois dictionary. He explained that the term manet8ighin8i referred to “red or blue cloth, and none other.” The word combined the root for spirit or medicine, manet8a, with that for a kind of cloth. Other words existed for the color red, even for red cloth, but this example suggests that certain forms of red or blue cloth, rich in color and cultural meaning, required a descriptor that identified them specifically with spiritual power.12 Rosaries — and red ones, it seems, were the most highly prized — offered access to new sources of power in a familiar form. Indians rapidly assimilated the beads into their ritual lives. The use of rosaries during illness highlights the attractiveness of these imported items as well as the ways they could operate within Native cultural traditions. Sickness represented a kind of liminal state between the strength and balance of good health and the weakness and decline that led to death. The illness invaded the body and attacked the mind and spirit of the victim. Effective intervention removed the physical evidence of illness, restored the body to health, and preserved or refreshed the harmonious spirit one needed to live and thrive. In the public ceremony Deliette witnessed among the Illinois, the men who fell into trances appeared to be “on the point of dying.” He described a man who fell to the ground and then rose up again. He held “an eagle’s feather in his hand, the barbs of which are reddened and form a figure suggesting that he has been wounded therewith, but has been saved from the consequences by his medicines.” The medicine was so potent that it struck another member of the assembly, who fell to the ground with blood spilling from his mouth. The female power in french- indian spiritual encounters

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healers rushed in to care for the stricken man. They administered remedies, chanted loudly, pulled his arms and legs, and shook him until a small serpent emerged into view. One of the medicine men displayed it for the crowd and, according to Deliette, proclaimed, “Here is the manitou that killed him, but my medicine has restored him to life.”13

The Power to Heal In 1672 the missionary Claude Allouez traveled through the region west of Lake Michigan as a kind of healer. He relied on instruction, prayer, and objects like the rosary to encourage his sick patients to put their faith in the Christian God, hoping for deliverance but ready for death. In one village where many suffered, Allouez discovered a number of people willing to experiment with his medicine. He wrote after the death of one woman, “The other sick persons Continue to practice Christian patience. Many are astonished That they die not, and acknowledge that It is prayer that makes Them live.” Later, he asked a man why he no longer wore the rosary the missionary had presented to him at his baptism. “He replied,” according to Allouez, “that his son had It still; that the latter had been ill during The past few Days; and, to cure Him, He had given Him his Rosary; and that, in fact, he had no sooner tied it round His Neck than His health was restored.”14 Two years later Allouez found a Mesquakie man, Joseph Nikalokita, blind and gravely ill, in a hunting camp. When Allouez entered the sick man’s cabin, Nikalokita made the sign of the cross and spoke knowledgeably about Christianity to the other Mesquakies present. The missionary explained further the great mysteries of Christianity and presented Nikalokita with a crucifix. “He pressed it upon his eyes,” Allouez recorded, “and, with a voice Broken by sobs, he cried out many times: ‘Son of God, have pity on me; I am dying. Make me live with you in Heaven!’ ” Allouez baptized him in preparation for a good death. “God was pleased to restore him to health,” Allouez wrote, “[and] to make him the herald of his greatness.” The missionary’s medicine defeated the illness. The crucifix drove the sickness from Nikalokita’s body. Allouez reported that Nikalokita spoke out publicly against traditional Mesquakie manitous and celebrated Christianity. He always carried his rosary with him and used the beads to guide and concentrate his prayers. When Nikalokita’s wife, children, and nephews became ill, many people in the village blamed his beads. Nikalokita responded that he alone remained in good health, and he gave credit for his good fortune to the success of his prayers with those beads. Allouez claimed that many Mes-

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quakies so valued their beads that they refused to part with them in traditional patterns of gift exchange.15 The priest celebrated the conversion of Joseph Nikalokita and offered him as an example of the transformative power of God’s saving grace. Most of the baptized Indians who appeared in these missionary relations remained nameless, so the fact that Allouez recorded his name and highlighted the conversion narrative shows how much significance he attached to the event. However, Nikalokita may just as easily have viewed Allouez as a successful healer. The missionary prayed over him, poured holy water over his head, and supplied a cross as a physical manifestation of the spiritual power on which he called. He prayed for release from his illness, even if it meant the transformation that awaited him in death. His survival presented evidence of the efficacy of the missionary’s spirits. Nikalokita then substituted the medicine that arrived with the missionary for the Mesquakie manitous he previously looked to for assistance. The rosary emerged as a prominent, public symbol of this new attachment. While Nikalokita’s conversion suggests the assimilation of Christianity into a predominantly Native framework of spiritual power and healing, the rosary also became for many others a reflection of an even deeper engagement with the foreign faith. Two decades after Allouez’s encounter with Nikalokita, in the early 1690s, Jacques Gravier recorded a series of events among the Kaskaskia band of Illinois that led to the establishment of the most influential and lasting Christian Indian community in the region. The transition to Christianity involved substantial conflict and reflected cultural continuity as well as significant innovation. The Illinois treated Gravier as a man who possessed the power to do great good as well as serious harm, much like the ceremonial specialists he despised so much. When sickness broke out in the village, some people deliberately avoided and even misled the missionary. Gravier complained bitterly about the response and lamented the continuing influence of the healers he derided as fraudulent jugglers who merely performed tricks to awe the people. He wrote, “Some are so prejudiced by the jugglers that, through fear that I may give them medicine, they say that they are quite well and disapprove of my frequent visits. They cry out against me as if I were the cause of the disease, and of the mortality.” Separated from dying children and concerned for the state of their souls, Gravier resorted to subterfuge and secretly baptized them without the consent of their parents. The healers took advantage of the opportunity to speak out against the priest. “Some jugglers openly oppose me,” he worried, “and do all they can to cast discredit upon our religion.”16

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Gravier recognized the problem he faced and challenged the healers directly in order to attack their credibility and demonstrate the omnipotent power of God over the evil he believed they represented. As the contagion spread through the village, Gravier argued forcefully that those who maintained their allegiance to the old ways were most likely to become ill. He blamed the healers for causing the outbreak in the first place, “point[ing] out to them that the disease had commenced only since they had practiced those ceremonies, and — in mockery of the holy water, and of the sprinkling with it that I performed every sunday in the chapel — had performed an impious sprinkling in their public jugglerly.” Gravier found one healer who seemed to think that both the old and the new traditions might offer some help during the crisis. He encouraged people to attend the missionary’s catechism class twice a week, yet he also requested the assistance of his own personal manitous. Gravier showed up at the man’s cabin one day unannounced and reported that he “saw 3 or 4 serpent-skins hung up, with some painted feathers, and the skins of various pretty small birds.” Another day he discovered a dog suspended from a pole and, believing it was an offering for the spirits, threw it into the grass.17 Although he continued to battle the healers for spiritual authority, Gravier noticed that women and children seemed most open to his teachings. His chapel swelled with children and young women seeking instruction. They impressed him with how quickly they learned the catechism, which they recited in their own language. The conversion in 1693 of a young Illinois woman of about seventeen years of age marked the turning point in the history of the mission of the Immaculate Conception. Illinois women emerged as the prime mediators in the creation of an indigenous form of Christianity that transformed the Kaskaskia community and that also enhanced their own spiritual power and social influence.

Women and Power Marie Rouensa was the daughter of the most influential Kaskaskia leader, and she became Gravier’s model convert. Rouensa displayed deep devotion and piety in developing a life of Christian prayer. She showed strength and leadership in repairing the rift in her community between Christians and non-Christians, and she remained ever zealous in her evangelization of others. Gravier believed that Marie Rouensa had received very special spiritual gifts, unusual among the Indians he wanted so badly to change. He wrote that her “fervor . . . has nothing of the savage in it, so thoroughly is she imbued with the spirit of God. She tells me the thoughts and the elevated sentiments that she has regarding 168

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God, — with such ingenuousness that I cannot sufficiently thank God for revealing himself so intimately to a young savage in the midst of an infidel and corrupt nation.”18 Rouensa’s evolving religious practice and her unrelenting efforts to influence the people around her had a profound impact on the Kaskaskia community. She first made a bold statement about her attachment to Catholicism when she refused to marry the French trader Michel Accault, a connection arranged by her powerful father. Rouensa argued that Accault was a Christian in name only and that his behavior reflected the worst characteristics of the French in the region. Her controversial decision opened a deep divide in Kaskaskia between the Christians, mainly women, and those who remained loyal to the chief. Eventually, in a rather remarkable turn of events, she convinced Accault to resume his Catholic duties and persuaded both of her parents to embrace Christianity. She married Accault, raised a family within the church community, worked tirelessly as a catechist and religious adviser, and became one of the wealthiest people in the rapidly developing region. Marie Rouensa and others contributed in the ensuing decades to the creation of a uniquely Illinois form of Catholicism that reflected in part the special interests of women. Gravier guided Rouensa into a routine of Catholic religious practice that connected in a number of ways with the ritual practices of Illinois women but that also introduced considerable new content. “In the month of September,” Gravier recalled, “I had drawn up for her a daily order to regulate her prayers and occupations, from the hour of rising until night. I was exceedingly surprised on the following day on hearing her repeat all that I had explained to her at great length, even to the shortest prayer, and word for word as I had told her.” This spiritual program encompassed intensive prayer, including the rosary, isolation in a small cabin for study and contemplation, and ritual purification through a process of self-affliction. Rouensa wore a girdle of thorns for two days, “having heard [Gravier] say that many christians, penetrated with regret for their offenses and with sorrow for having crucified Jesus Christ by their sins, practice Holy severities upon themselves.” The missionary reported that she wept often while gazing at an image of Jesus she kept in her small apartment and that she had a deep reverence for the female saints of the church. She seemed especially concerned that she emulate as well as she could the high moral principles expressed through her namesake, Mary. “I beg her to teach me,” she said to Gravier, “what I should say to her, that she may protect me against the Demon — who assails me on all sides, and would cause me to fall had I not recourse to her, and did she not receive me in her arms, as a good mother receives her frightened child.”19 female power in french- indian spiritual encounters

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Rouensa turned to Mary for spiritual protection and guidance, much the same way that Illinois women had previously sought the support of manitous. The time she spent isolated in prayer recalled the practice of menstrual separation and the conduct of female rituals. The girdle of thorns and other forms of self-affliction replicated the fasting and physical suffering that young women endured to identify and develop a relationship with a personal manitou. The ritual order that Rouensa followed revealed a continuing emphasis on reciprocity in spiritual relationships. She showed her devotion to God and requested the intercession of Mary not only through prayer and moral conduct but also by seeking out new Christian converts in the community. Gravier described her labors: “The grown girls and the young women who have been baptized she induces, whenever she can, to come to her home, that she may instruct them; and she tries to inspire them with horror for dances, for night assemblies, and for evil of all kinds, and to instruct them regarding confession.” Deliette documented the presence of female healers and ceremonialists among the Illinois. Rouensa fulfilled these responsibilities within familiar structures of Illinois ritual and spiritual experience, but with a major shift in meaning and content.20 The rosaries that Gravier found so valuable in his efforts allowed for the exploration and exploitation of cultural convergences between Christianity and Native religious practice. Gravier reported that many older girls learned to confess very well, some of them making general confessions of their whole lives “with astonishing accuracy.” Two young girls of thirteen or fourteen years made their confessions using little pieces of wood as counters to keep track of their transgressions. The beads of the rosary combined the mnemonic device of wooden counters with direct access to spiritual power, creating a potent and highly desirable ritual object.21 The sacrament of confession promised the expiation of sins. Praying the rosary offered a reminder of the absolute reliance of the individual on the grace of God and presented a model of moral conduct in the form of mediations on Christian mysteries. Illinois-language versions of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria — the central prayers of the rosary — reveal the challenges of translating critical Christian concepts like sin and grace into a Native language as well as the influence of Illinois language and culture on the creation of an indigenized form of Christianity.22 The Pater Noster addresses a series of petitions to God the Father that concludes, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” In a manuscript prayer book attributed to the Jesuit Claude Allouez, the requests differ in sig-

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nificant ways, illuminating the creative processes at work in these spiritual encounters: Kik8 nitirerindans8mina a8ia 8echakitehiaminthe, We do not think of the things or people who anger us, echitehes8kane kik8 he 8ichakitehiranghi. and you must not think things of those who make us angry. Kirahama8iname arima8e kata, mere8iteheianghi. Please prevent us from having a bad [sick] heart. Tcheki mare8aki kirahama8iname. Defend us from all bad things. The Illinois had no concept of sin, and the missionaries constantly struggled to explain it. In the case of the Illinois they settled on the much broader concept of “bad things.” In the Pater Noster the Illinois Christian asked God for a release from all the bad things that weakened the heart. These bad things had less to do with sin and evil than with the everyday concerns of maintaining inner beauty and positive relationships with other people and with God. Illinois Christians cultivated through the religious practices associated with the rosary the spiritual resources to heal and strengthen the heart.23 The Illinois version of the Ave Maria continued this pattern. “Rejoice in Mary,” the opening words exclaim, “you are the master of all good hearts.” The Illinois text developed a correspondence between the Christian concept of grace and the Illinois notion of a good heart. Gravier defined grace as 8asseteheï8ni. His entry included other meanings like “interior light, consolation, . . . beauty of the heart.” In Illinois, Mary became “the master of all good hearts,” a model of interior beauty and spiritual balance worth emulating. The final appeal in the prayer is also different. The Illinois text replaced “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners” with “Beautiful Mary pray to God for us, your children.” The word “holy,” also absent in the Illinois language, became in this instance “beautiful.” Jesuit translators tried to enlarge the meaning of the Illinois term pekisita, or beautiful, to embrace the imported concept of holy or sacred. Mary was a beautiful woman with the power to heal ailing hearts. The Illinois prayer also made her not the mother of God but rather the spiritual mother of all Christians who requested her aid. The Jesuits once again abandoned the concept of sin in favor of more expansive and inclusive ideas. Illinois women like Marie Rouensa gained an important new figure to guide their spiritual progress.24

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Rouensa also dramatically enhanced her social and economic status in the community after her conversion. Her initial refusal to marry Michel Accault revealed divisions in the community between Christians and non-Christians. In addition, her actions contradicted Illinois customs in which families, and men in particular, arranged the marriage. One Jesuit went so far as to claim that women were virtually “the slaves of their brothers, who compel them to marry whomsoever they choose.” The French official Diron D’Artaguiette concurred, writing that, once married, “the husband has full power and authority over his wives, whom he looks upon as his slaves, and with whom he does not eat.” These statements likely overstated the relative status of women in Illinois society, but Rouensa and others like her took great risks when they adopted such an independent stance. Pierre Deliette confirmed in his detailed description of the Illinois wedding ceremony that women had some say in choosing a partner. He also noted that they sometimes refused to consummate the marriage when they were dissatisfied with the arrangements, although such bold measures exposed them to intense social pressure. Nevertheless, it is clear from the accounts of Deliette and other observers that Illinois men often placed strict limits around the lives and activities of their sisters, daughters, and wives.25 Marie Rouensa briefly set herself apart from the community led by her father and sought refuge with other Christian women. She refused to marry Accault merely to forge a social and economic alliance between the Frenchman and her powerful father. Rouensa changed her mind only when she realized that her position as the daughter of a Kaskaskia chief and as the wife of a prominent trader provided a special opportunity to participate in the transformation of her community. Rouensa developed a strong voice from this position of social strength, and her influence and authority increased substantially through her religious activities among the Kaskaskias and her successful economic pursuits. By the time she died in 1725, she had amassed a considerable fortune that included a house, several plots of productive land, agricultural products, buildings and farm equipment, domestic animals, and five slaves, four of them black and one Indian. Very few people in the Illinois country could claim such an estate.26 Rouensa’s attachment to Christianity lasted to the end of her life, through two marriages and the births of several children. Sacramental registers show that she baptized her children and often served as a godmother for others. Her last will and testament also reveals her continuing commitment to her adopted faith. She disinherited her son, named Michel Accault after her first husband, “for his disobedience and the bad behavior that he has exhibited toward me and his entire family.” It appears that Michel left the settled French-Indian community of Kaskaskia for an Indian village less dedicated to the practice of Christian172

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ity. In a codicil dictated a week later, Rouensa gave her son another chance. “I take pity on my son Michel Aco who has given me grief with his foolishness. . . . If he should repent, he may be returned to my will and may enjoy once again his rights to my estate. If he is so unfortunate as to persist in his foolishness and fail to repent and also remain among the savage nations, I transfer his share of the estate to his brothers and sisters and he will never again have any claim to it.” Michel eventually received his portion, but only after the death of his mother. Rouensa requested in her will that she be buried in the village, and the sacramental register indicates that she received the rare honor. She was interred under the pew where she worshiped on June 25, 1725.27 Women remained at the center of the Illinois Christian community through the end of the French era in North America. The Jesuit Gabriel Marest remarked that Illinois women were more attracted to Christianity than were men. He explained the divergent responses as the result of the division of labor in which women had primary responsibility for agricultural and domestic work. The men he considered lazy because they passed their time in hunting, warfare, and diplomacy. Although moral judgment colored his analysis, the missionary was essentially correct in noting that women and men led separate yet obviously interrelated and complementary lives. The houses in the village and the fields that surrounded them constituted in many ways women’s space. Inside this space was the mission church, where the separation of women and men continued in the ritual life of the community. According to Marest, the men and women sat on opposite sides of the chapel during the morning mass. Later in the evening of each day the Christian Indians gathered for instruction, prayer, and hymns. “They generally end their day,” the missionary recorded, “with private meetings, which they hold in their own houses, — the men apart from the women; and there they recite the Rosary in two choirs, and far on into the night they sing Hymns.”28 Christian Illinois religious life revolved around such rituals. Indeed, Illinois Christians referred to themselves as araminatchiki, “those who pray.” The religious practices of Illinois women openly expressed new forms of spiritual and social power that seemed to create a stronger community of women. The healer who threatened the young neophyte recognized the threat this posed to the existing religious and social organization of the village. According to Marest, he identified the rosary the girl carried with spiritual danger. The rosary was both a painful reminder of his father’s death and physical evidence of the developments that threatened his status in the community. For her part, the young woman perhaps rubbed the beads between her fingers as she approached the frustrated healer and repeated the Illinois phrases that asked for a more peacefemale power in french- indian spiritual encounters

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ful and serene heart, for protection from all the bad things in the world. In the aftermath of the attack she must have realized, if she had not already, that her decision to explore Christianity had an impact well beyond her own private religious life. She had become an active participant in the ongoing transformation of her community.29 Like the healer who appeared to sense in the rosary a powerful object similar to his own medicine bundle, women, too, looked to such cultural convergences to understand the offerings of the missionaries. They reinvented practices that had deep roots in the lives of Illinois women. Marie Rouensa displayed her piety through separation from the community, retreating to a small room for prayer, contemplation, and self-denial, a practice that would have been familiar to women of previous generations. Her public life of evangelization, communal ritual, and family relations, however, represented an expansion of female influence among the Illinois. In the two decades between Rouensa’s conversion and the healer’s attack, Illinois women translated Christianity into a series of practices that proclaimed not only their devotion to Jesus, Mary, and the saints but also their renewed sense of strength within their community.

Notes 1. “Letter from Father Gabriel Marest, Missionary of the Society of Jesus, to Father Germon, of the same Society,” November 9, 1712, in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896–1901), 66:241–46 (hereafter cited as JR). 2. Ibid., 233–34; Jacques Gravier, “Dictionary of the Algonquian Illinois Language,” MS (photocopy and microfilm copy), American Indian MSS, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., 246. The symbol “8” represents the phonemes o, oo, or w (translations from the French are mine); W. Vernon Kinietz, The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615–1760 (1940; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 161–225; A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” in Contributions to Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 357–90. 3. “Letter from Father Gabriel Marest,” 231; Claude Allouez, Facsimile of Père Marquette’s Illinois Prayer Book (Quebec: Quebec Literary and Historical Society, 1908), 19–20 (the translations from Miami-Illinois are mine). The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Daryl Baldwin and David Costa in the difficult work of translation. For contrasting perspectives on Christianity and Native women, see Carol Devens, Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Karen Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (London: Routledge, 1991); Eleanor Leacock, “Montagnais Women and the Jesuit Program for Colonization,” in Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (New York: Praeger, 1980), 25–42; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Am-

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herst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Jacqueline Peterson, “Women Dreaming: The Religiopsychology of Indian White Marriages and the Rise of a Metis Culture,” in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 49–68; Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Nancy Shoemaker, “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, ed. Nancy Shoemaker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 49–71. 4. Antoine Silvy, “Relation of 1676–77,” in JR, 60:207–9. 5. Ibid. 6. Pierre Deliette, “Memoir of De Gannes Concerning the Illinois Country,” in Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, vol. 23, The French Foundations, 1680–1693, ed. Theodore Calvin Pease and Raymond C. Werner (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1934), 369–71. 7. Pierre de Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage to North America (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 2:208–9. 8. Deliette, “Memoir,” 375–76. 9. “Letter by Father Jacques Gravier in the Form of a Journal of the Mission of l’Immaculée Conception de Notre Dame in the Ilinois Country,” February 15, 1694, in JR, 64:231; “Letter of Father Jacques Gravier, upon the Affairs of Louisiana,” February 23, 1708, in JR, 66:135. 10. Christopher Miller and George R. Hamell, “A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 323–25. 11. Deliette, “Memoir,” 353–54. 12. Jacques Marquette, “The First Voyage Made by Father Marquette toward New Mexico,” in JR, 59:129–37; Gravier, “Dictionary of the Algonquian Illinois Language,” 164, 246, 358. 13. Deliette, “Memoir,” 370–71. 14. Claude Allouez, “Relation of 1672–1673,” in JR, 58:63. 15. Claude Allouez, “Relation of 1675,” in JR, 59:225–31. 16. “Journal of the Mission of l’Immaculée Conception,” 177. 17. Ibid., 185–89. 18. Carl J. Ekberg, “Marie Rouensa-8cate8a and the Foundation of French Illinois,” Illinois Historical Journal 84 (Autumn 1991): 146–60. 19. Ibid., 213–25. 20. “Journal of the Mission of l’Immaculée Conception,” 219; Deliette, “Memoir,” 353–54. 21. “Journal of the Mission of l’Immaculée Conception,” 167–79. 22. Tracy Neal Leavelle, “ ‘Bad Things’ and ‘Good Hearts’: Mediation, Meaning, and the Language of Illinois Christianity,” Church History 76 (June 2007): 363–94. 23. Allouez, Illinois Prayer Book, 19. 24. Gravier, “Dictionary of the Algonquian Illinois Language,” 384; Allouez, Illinois Prayer Book, 19–20; Leavelle, “ ‘Bad Things’ and ‘Good Hearts,’ ” 387–90. 25. Deliette, “Memoir,” 330–35; “Letter of Father Julien Binneteau, of the Society of Jesus, to a Father of the Same Society,” [January] 1699, in JR, 65:67; Diron D’Artaguiette, “Journal of Diron D’artaguiette” [April 19, 1723], in Travels in the American Colonies, ed. Newton D. Mereness (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 73. 26. “Inventory of the Estate of Marie Rouensa,” in Ekberg, “Marie Rouensa-8cate8a and the Foundation of French Illinois,” 158–60.

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27. “Last Will and Testament of Marie Rouensa,” June 13, 20, 1725, Kaskaskia Manuscripts 25:6:13:1 and 25:6:20:1, Randolph County Courthouse, Chester, Ill. (translations from the French are mine); Marthe Faribault Beauregard, ed., La Population des forts Français d’Amérique (xviiie siècle): Répertoire des baptêmes, mariages et sépultures célébrés dans les forts et les établissements Français en Amérique du nord au xviiie siècle, vol. 2 (Montreal: Bergeron, 1984), 107, 108, 115, 132, 140, 146–47, 205. 28. “Letter from Father Gabriel Marest,” 231, 241–43. 29. Jean Le Boullenger, “Miami-Illinois Dictionary,” MS (microfilm copy), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R.I., 42.

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part iii Circulating Texts

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the souls of highl anders, the salvation of indians scot tish mission and eighteenth- century british empire Laura M. Stevens

In May 1768 Alexander Mowbray, a merchant of Edinburgh, wrote to Eleazar Wheelock, the founder of an Indian school in New England, with news of the death of one of his students.1 This student, a twenty-six-year-old Narragansett named Tobias Shattock, had been traveling to London with his brother John to appeal a case involving their tribe’s land.2 While hosted by Mowbray, both brothers had caught smallpox, and only John had survived.3 Throughout his letter Mowbray took pains to describe the outpouring of assistance that the Shattocks’ illness had provoked. Several physicians, including the Philadelphian Benjamin Rush, who was studying in Edinburgh, had come to their aid, Mowbray’s wife had “laid aside all Concern in the family in order to attend” them, and two nurses had been hired for their care. The Indians’ sickness had become an issue of widespread concern, as “the News flying thro’ the Town — the Compassion of many Godly people were moved for them, the door of our house was Seldom shutt for people enquiring after them.”4 Mowbray went so far as to observe that, for his wife and him, Shattock “was now in his distress become as dear to us as our own son.”5 Mowbray assured Wheelock that Shattock’s funeral, like his care, had been worthy of a king’s son. Prominent residents of Edinburgh, particularly members of the evangelical community, had attended it, along with colonists visiting Edinburgh such as Rush and Charles Beattie, a minister of Pennsylvania. The description of the burial conveyed the particular significance that the mourners had given to the event: “I performed the last act of Duty to him with a sore heart by Carrying his head to the Grave[.] Mr. Beattie was at the right Shoulder

Mr. Erskine the left & a number of oyr Minrs & Gentlemen round the Pall — the best people in Town were Invitted & attended the Funeral & in our Church yard was interred the first Christian Indian that ever we heard of very near the place where is Interred the bodys of these who Suffered for the word of Christs patience in Scotland, against Oppressing powers.”6 Christian convert, Indian boarding school student, letter writer, transatlantic traveler, and tribal advocate, Tobias Shattock is a fleeting but significant figure in eighteenth-century American and transatlantic history. His life constitutes a tragically brief chapter in several historical narratives, including those of Indian literacy in English, of Native Christian communities, of Indian visitors to Britain, and of the struggle to retain Native, communal ownership of land. The agonizingly halting pace at which the news of his death reached home conveys in microcosm the fragile nature of eighteenth-century transatlantic communications, for it was not until mid-July that Joseph Fish, a white missionary to the town of Narragansett, recorded in his diary, “Visited John Shaddick [sic] and Family, under Sore Affliction, on the (probable,) death of their Two Sons in England: Supposed, by public prints, to have Died 9th of May last.” The impersonal notification of his family through a printed death notice contrasts sharply with the richly textured letter sent to Wheelock, as does Fish’s narration of his response to the family when they received confirmation of Tobias’s death in September: “Saw and Conversd with his Father, Mother and Widow. All behavd decently, and receivd an Exhortation Well.”7 While the Shattock family’s grief, vividly present even through Fish’s breezy account, is stark and painful in its silence, in Mowbray’s eloquent and no doubt heartfelt letter, Shattock’s death becomes an event that is not really about Shattock or his reason for traveling abroad. Rather, it is about the emotional ties between white evangelicals in Scotland and America connected by their concern for a Christian Indian. The Scottish pride underlying Mowbray’s account is as hard to miss as his sorrow is. Indeed, these two emotions are intertwined, for he expresses a sort of pride in the grief that many residents of Edinburgh felt for their Narragansett visitor, a grief so strong that it compelled them to incorporate him symbolically into their own history. Assimilated in death as he probably would not have been in life, Tobias Shattock was made to suggest Scotland’s Protestant virtue, its compassion, and its connectedness with other lands. Mowbray described this burial as an accomplishment, a “first” Christian Indian grave site to match, perhaps, England’s long possession of Pocahontas’s. The interment of Shattock next to Scotland’s Protestant martyrs was meant as a compliment to Shattock, but it also suggested Scotland’s transformation from a land whose outer reaches

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required civilization, to a full-fledged part of a burgeoning empire that spread Christianity abroad.8 Scotland, after all, had undergone significant and recent change, especially in its relationship to England. Since 1603, when James VI of Scotland had succeeded his cousin Elizabeth to rule England as James I, England and Scotland had become separate states with a shared monarch. In 1706 and 1707 the Acts of Union in, respectively, the English and Scottish Parliaments combined these two states into one nation-state, with one Parliament and one coin but with separate established churches and civil legal systems. Throughout this time Scotland struggled against its widely perceived and economically verified status as inferior partner. The Union was complicated further by Scottish ambivalence to the English Parliament’s 1701 Act of Settlement, which ensured, after the overthrow of the Stuart and Roman Catholic monarch James II (James I’s grandson) in the Glorious Revolution, that James II’s daughter Anne, who became queen in 1702, would be succeeded by her closest Protestant relative: Sophia, Electress of Hanover, or her descendants. The Hanoverian succession provoked resistance in Scotland, especially in the northern Highland region, long after the coronation of Britain’s first Hanoverian king, George I, in 1714. These opponents of the Hanoverians were called Jacobites for their loyalty to James II (the Latin form of “James” is “Jacobus”) and the rest of the Stuart line. Jacobites had launched rebellions in 1715 and 1745, finally meeting with decisive defeat in the Battle of Culloden (1746). By the time of the Shattock brothers’ visit, the British government had done much to dismantle the Highland clan structure and culture that had supported the rebellion. Scotland, especially its lowland regions, had emerged from these turbulent events with a commitment to Britain, its Hanoverian kings, its Protestant identity, and its burgeoning empire.9 Part of this participation in the imperial project involved Christian missions. The interment of Scotland’s “first Christian Indian” was an especially poignant outcome of more than three decades of Scottish missionary efforts in the British colonies. Almost all this work took place under the aegis of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands and Foreign Parts of the World (sspck) and its boards of correspondents in the colonies. It was not a coincidence that one of Shattock’s pallbearers, John Erskine, was a member of the sspck’s Committee of Directors and author of one of the society’s anniversary sermons.10 In the 1730s this society had begun to supplement its original task of establishing English-language charity schools throughout the Gaelic-speaking and predominantly Roman Catholic Highlands by supporting Protestant missions to Indians in British America.11 In the 1740s

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it had employed David Brainerd, who was made famous by his involvement with a revival among a group of Delaware Indians as well as by Jonathan Edwards’s account of his life.12 After David Brainerd’s premature death, the society had transferred its support to his brother John, who ministered to the same Delaware community until 1768.13 It had undertaken all this work through close communication with boards of correspondents in New York and other colonies of North America. Only a year before the Shattocks’ visit, Scots had donated more than £2,500 to Wheelock’s school when Wheelock’s prize student, the Presbyterian minister and Mohegan Samson Occom, undertook a two-year fund-raising tour of the British Isles.14 Although an organization with English connections, the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and Parts adjacent in America, had funded some of Occom’s education, the Scottish society had recently employed him as a missionary to the Oneidas.15 Recommendations by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, in Favour of the Academy Established by Mr. Eleazar Wheelock, which had been published in support of Occom’s tour, had exhorted the Scottish people to assist “this great and godlike design of spreading the knowledge of Christ among the benighted savages in North America.”16 When John Gibson, a minister of West Kirk, delivered the society’s anniversary sermon shortly after Shattock’s death, he reported that because “some truly apostolic men sent out and supported by the Society, have put their life in their hand . . . that they might be messengers of joy to the bewildered Indians, . . . the wilderness and the solitary place have been made to sing for joy at the glad sound of salvation.”17 Taking place between the carnage of the Seven Years’ War and the political fragmentation of the American Revolution, and on the heels of Occom’s visit, Shattock’s death coincided, ironically, with the most optimistic era of Scottish missionary efforts in British America. The missions supported by the sspck have received a great deal of scrutiny over the past two decades, with some attention paid to the society’s role in fostering British loyalty in both Scotland and America.18 Two recent monographs by Margaret Connell Szasz and Colin G. Calloway also have explored the many connections between Native Americans and Highlanders in transatlantic context.19 Szasz focuses on overlaps and influences between the sspck’s educational activities among Indians and Highlanders (some of whom had migrated to America), while Calloway considers the intersecting fates of these two peoples who occupied strikingly similar roles on the edges of the British Atlantic world. The rhetoric and textual self-presentation of the sspck, however, has received less notice, especially the ways in which descriptions of Indians and the Christians trying to convert them informed the expression of British nationalist feel182

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ing in an Atlantic framework. The tragic intensity of Mowbray’s letter highlights the complexity of this expression, as it describes Shattock’s incorporation into a Scottish setting but circulates emotion and information in a transoceanic, multidenominational context. Written to a Congregationalist American minister about the death of an Indian, this letter by a Presbyterian Scottish merchant calls our attention to the epistolary ties and circumatlantic chains of acquaintance that sustained British missions in America. It also suggests how the expression of shared feeling for Indians assisted in the articulation of a Protestant sense of Britishness that was strengthened by what Ned Landsman has termed provincial identities around the Atlantic basin.20 Eric Richards has shown that Scotland’s peripheral and dependent position within the Union actually equipped Scots to become central figures in the British colonial and imperial enterprise. “Out of disadvantage, out of provincial inferiority, the Scot emerged well prepared for the world of transatlantic trade, for India and beyond.”21 This essay, in a sense, develops a parallel argument about the textual presentation of Scottish missionary operations. It argues not only that from their provincial position Scottish missionaries and their supporters presented themselves as central to Britain’s transatlantic missionary outreach but also that British missionary rhetoric became more securely positioned in an Atlantic affective framework with the participation of Scottish writings. Through a survey of the sspck’s publications before the American Revolution, especially its anniversary sermons, occasional “Account[s]” and “State[s]” of the society, this essay considers the impact that this organization had on the transatlantic discourse of British mission.22 It attends to the parallel and mutually reinforcing positions that American Indians and Highlander Scots held in these texts as icons of domestic and foreign savagery, or residents of realms described, in a popular biblical reference, as “the dark places of the earth . . . full of the habitations of cruelty.”23 The publications of the Scottish society helped to generate, even as they described, a transatlantic network of British Protestants bound together by the compassion they felt and the efforts they made for both these peoples not yet brought into the fold of Christian civilization. The effects of this network, assembled through prayer, epistle, and publication as much as through money and actual missions, were multiple and profound. Even as it enhanced the actual operations of missionaries in America, this organization did much to define Britishness through sentiment and through missionary effort directed at the peripheries of the nascent empire, rather than through ethnicity, geography, or sect. Objects of both compassion and fear in these writings, Indians and Highlanders assisted in the development of a transoceanic British identity as one that combined Protestant Christian tenderheartedness scottish mission and eighteenth- century british empire

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with Enlightenment ideals in a determined effort to spread civilization both at home and abroad.


The Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge was chartered in 1709 as a voluntary organization affiliated with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and dedicated, in the words of the royal letters patent, to “the further promoting [of ] Christian Knowledge, and the Increase of Piety and Virtue within Scotland, especially in the Highlands, Islands, and remote Corners thereof, . . . and for propagating the same in Popish and Infidel Parts of the World.”24 For its first twenty years the society focused on its primary charge, northern and western Scotland. It enjoyed steady success, so that in 1729, on the eve of its involvement with American missions, it reported that 2,757 students were being taught at 78 schools. In 1768, the year of the Shattock brothers’ visit, it counted 7,794 students in 171 schools.25 It was not until after the sspck received two substantial bequests, one of which was contingent on the society’s supporting missionary work in America, that it became involved in Indian missions.26 While it involved quite a bit of effort, the society’s transatlantic expansion did not require a dramatic overhaul of its self-presentation. Indians had always been present in the sspck’s publications, positioned at the edge of its horizon of activity. Proposals Concerning the Propagating of Christian Knowledge (1707), a document issued by the General Assembly of Scotland to authorize a collection preceding the sspck’s founding, placed the domestic mission in global context by proclaiming, “It should move Pity and Compassion, that so great a part of the World is to this day living . . . without Knowledge of the true God.” The tract cited the accomplishments of John Eliot in America as an inspiration for Scottish interest in the spread of Christianity, and it noted the desire of “some young persons” in Scotland “even to Travel to Forreign Parts” for this work. Negative examples of missions countered positive ones, as the text condemned Spanish cruelties in Mexico and cited Scots’ eagerness to combat the global expansion of popery.27 From the beginning, then, Indians were implicitly present in these texts as receptacles for Protestant pity and as markers for the potential extension of missionary energy. Once missions were under way in America, Indians and Highlanders often were presented alongside each other as dual foci of the society’s activity. In 1732 the sspck followed its extract of a letter of support from Jeremy Belcher, governor of New England, by noting that the letter “gives ground to hope . . . that many charitable christians will contribute something to promote the Knowledge of Christ among the Native Americans, tho’ they did something formerly towards 184

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schools in the Highlands and Islands.”28 Some of the anniversary preachers described foreign missions as the supplement to domestic ones, as Robert Dick did in 1762.29 Others described the missions as equal in importance, as James Smith did in 1733 when he called his audience to “contribute to the Charges necessary for instructing the ignorant both at Home and Abroad.”30 Whether of equal or lesser importance, foreign missions, epitomized in the figure of the Indian, were presented as the complement to domestic ones. This pairing of Highlander and Indian, of home and abroad, was a formulation that underlined the centrality of Protestant missions to the national interest. This was a corollary of the belief, expressed succinctly by David Plenderleath in his anniversary sermon of 1754, “that the Christian religion . . . does greatly contribute to advance the dignity, promote the felicity, increase the strength, and establish the safety of a kingdom.”31 The conviction that Christianity, without reference to sectarian specifics, was the nation’s safeguard on a practical as well as spiritual level informed the society’s establishment, which was in several ways a response to one of the more complex aspects of the Union: the retention of a Presbyterian Church of Scotland alongside the Anglican Church of England. The staunch loyalty that the sspck’s members held for country and king was reiterated in the group’s publications, and the propagation of that loyalty was part of its mission.32 In its cofounding by a Scottish Presbyterian, Sir Francis Grant, Lord Cullen, and an Episcopal priest from Edinburgh, James Kirkwood, the society asserted that collaboration between Anglicans, Scottish Episcopalians, and Presbyterians in the name of a nonsectarian goal was widely beneficial. Such collaborative impulses did not always bear fruit, especially with the Church of England. Alden Vaughan has pointed out that a board of mostly English trustees was established to manage the funds Occom raised in Britain because some English donors were unwilling to entrust their money to a Scottish organization.33 The rhetoric of cooperation in service of a higher cause nonetheless remained central throughout the century. This cause was, first and foremost, the cultural assimilation of Highlanders. While the Act of Union of 1707 had made Scotland and England into one nation, the outer reaches of Scotland constituted a separate culture with its own language, with a substantial population of Catholics, and with only tenuous allegiance to the Hanoverian monarchs.34 The sspck’s members saw the establishment of charity schools as a crucial step in transforming Highlanders into loyal Protestants who would have no desire to support invasions from the expelled Catholic and Scottish Jacobite dynasty. As the society’s first major publication after its founding, the Account of 1714, reported, “Many of those Highlanders, &c. are in an interest absolutely inconsistent with the Safety of the Governscottish mission and eighteenth- century british empire

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ment.”35 The importance of religion to political allegiance, a belief violently corroborated by the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745, was a theme reiterated in the society’s publications. The Account of 1748 asserted “that the prime Movers of this last Rebellion came from the remotest Corners of the whole Highlands, where the Society’s Influence had scarcely reach’d.”36 Such comments implied that the 1745 uprising might have been prevented if the sspck had acquired the resources to establish more schools. The society’s persistent claim that its work dampened rebellious impulses also framed its textual treatment of Indians. In an era when religion often facilitated secure alliances, and when Catholic missionaries had enjoyed enviable success among the Native peoples of America and northern Scotland, bringing Protestantism to those who resided on the peripheries of British territory on both sides of the Atlantic was seen as a protection against French infiltration. As The State of the Society . . . for the Year 1754, printed on the brink of what would become the Seven Years’ War, observed, “At a time, when the friendship of the Indian nations appears to be of so great consequence towards the security and preservation of our American colonies, no attempt to instruct them, however feeble, ought to be regarded with indifference.”37 But national security was not the only rationale cited by the sspck, nor was it the only factor linking the society’s portrayals of Indians and Highlanders. In both foreign and domestic missions it combined the pragmatic goal of inculcating political loyalty through education in the English language and Protestant faith with a more idealistic vision of saving souls and civilizing the uncivilized. This was a vision very much in keeping with the early eighteenth-century culture of what David Owen has called “associated philanthropy,” in which groups of genteel men pooled their resources and founded voluntary societies in the pursuit of charitable ends.38 English voluntary societies that came into being during this era included Societies for the Reformation of Manners (ca. 1690), the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (spck, founded in 1698), and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (spg, founded in 1701). The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, which was established in 1649 and refounded after the Restoration as the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and Parts adjacent in America, anticipated aspects of the later societies’ organization and promotional rhetoric. The publications of the sspck deliberately positioned the group within this international Protestant movement, stressing its connections with other societies and with correspondent boards in London, other European cities, and North America.39 The causes or precipitating factors for the voluntary societies’ inception 186

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range from developments in moral philosophy to efforts at Protestant “comprehension” or unification in England after the Glorious Revolution. Features common to these groups include collaboration between clergy and laity, horror at the global propagation of Roman Catholicism, and a focus on the charitable work that should unite Protestants in spite of minor differences. Above all, these societies based their endeavors on the belief that it was the joy as well as the duty of all Christians to join forces in the alleviation of suffering. This joy was a sensation of pleasure and an expectation of salvation for helping others, but it also was connected with an enlightened self-interest that marked economic and political well-being as the result of increased adherence to Christian morality.40 While the sspck had much in common with other voluntary societies, its publications were informed by eighteenth-century philosophical traditions that reflected its Presbyterian affiliation and connection with Scottish intellectual culture. On the one hand, they evidenced the immersion of the society’s authors in the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the work of men such as Francis Hutcheson and, later in the century, Adam Smith, who emphasized the importance of sympathy to morality. They also displayed adherence to other strands of Christian Enlightenment thought, such as the idea that belief was compatible with reason and inclined humans to be peaceable, polite, and humane.41 On the other hand, many sspck publications after the 1730s showed the influence of transatlantic evangelical revivals. Robert Kent Donovan has observed that after the Church of Scotland developed informal factions in the 1740s, most sspck members aligned themselves with the Church of Scotland’s Popular Party, also called High or Evangelical, rather than with the Moderate Party.42 Not all the society’s anniversary preachers were identified with the Popular Party, which differed from the Moderate through a stricter adherence to Calvinist theology, “a fervent experiential spirituality,” a resistance to aristocratic patronage in the awarding of ministerial livings, and encouragement of lay participation.43 While John Erskine, for example, who delivered the sermons of 1756 and 1758, was a prominent member of the Popular Party, William Robertson, who delivered the sermon of 1755, was a well-known Moderate, and other preachers held ambiguous positions. Still, the revival exerted an influence on the sspck that transcended the inclinations of individual preachers, as it fostered the development of a transatlantic network that facilitated Indian missions and in turn was strengthened by the cause of saving Indian souls.44 As Timothy Hall has noted, activities such as Indian missions helped colonial and European Christians of the eighteenth century imaginatively span the world “by self-consciously exploiting a potential to unite across vast distances in simultaneous activity.”45 scottish mission and eighteenth- century british empire

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The sspck’s textual treatment of Indians and Highlanders needs to be understood in the context of Protestant philanthropic discourse and nascent transatlantic nationalism. As they described their efforts to spread Christianity, the sspck’s spokesmen asserted their full inclusion in a British nation buttressed by an international Protestant network. The primary characteristic of this community was the heartfelt desire of its residents to save peoples understood to be in dire spiritual need because they were not Christians. This ultimately was a binary vision of the world, one in which the fundamental difference between Christian and non-Christian (a category that emphatically included Catholics) overrode differences of location, ethnicity, or sect. It was also a vision articulated through the language of feeling. It unified English people with colonials and Scots, just as it informed collaborations among Britons, Danes, and Dutch, by compassion for peoples unaware of the gospel. It also defined those outside these boundaries as incapable of compassion. As they were triangulated with scripturally informed discussions of the pre-Christian world and with depictions of Highlanders, Indians were crucial to the sspck’s effort to present a salvation history in which compassionate Scots saved compassionless heathens, strengthening Britain in the process.


The sspck consistently presented its mission, through implied syllogism, as the conclusion of two apparently straightforward premises: that to perform charity, especially toward people’s souls, is very good, and that to be a heathen is very bad. As they urged readers and listeners to support the society’s work, few of the sspck’s sermons neglected to meditate on the great miseries that heathens felt in themselves and propagated in others. Hugh Blair, a figure better known for his lectures on rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, based much of his sermon on the argument that “without religious Principle and Hope, Man is a Creature miserable and forlorn.”46 This assertion amounted to a preoccupation for the sspck, as a quick survey of its sermon titles — The Misery of Ignorant and Unconverted Sinners (1733), Supernatural Revelation the Only Sure Hope of Sinners (1741), and The Absolute Necessity of Salvation through Christ (1758), to name a few — indicates. The notion that humans could not be saved without Christianity was a rather obvious one for a missionary society, as to suggest otherwise was to render its work redundant. It is worth noting, however, that simply by attending so closely to this issue the sspck preachers also positioned themselves in a theological controversy of importance to the self-image of eighteenth-century Britain. This was the debate between orthodox Christians and heterodox thinkers over the 188

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question of whether God was cruel in denying salvation to heathens who had never heard of the gospel.47 As they argued that heathens required Christ to be saved, the sspck preachers allied themselves with other Protestants who had been arguing since the seventeenth century that deism constituted a threat to the moral fiber of Britain and its colonies. On an intellectual as well as active level, then, the confrontation with heathenism stressed common concerns of British Christians while it united spiritual with political interest. The depiction of heathen misery unfolded against a portrayal of Christians as compassionate spectators eager to relieve this suffering. This tactic was hardly unique to the sspck, but it received particular emphasis in these writings and drew upon a narrative of salvation history acquiring some prominence among Scottish Presbyterian intellectuals. In their treatment of heathenism, many of the sermons seem to have been influenced by The History of the Propagation of Christianity, and the Overthrow of Paganism, a two-volume tome that Robert Millar, a minister of the Church of Scotland, had published in 1723. Millar, who ended his epic narrative of Christianity’s struggle to eradicate heathenism with a dedication to the sspck and an excerpt from its Account of 1720, noted that he had written the book to “move our Bowels of Pity for that slavery and thraldom to which the Heathens, who make up so great a part of the world, are yet chained by the Enemy of Mankind.”48 Alexander Webster presented a similar vignette of spectatorial pity when he said, in the sermon of 1741, “Let us be deeply affected with the deplorable Condition of ignorant Unbelievers amongst ourselves, and with the miserable State of other Nations, to whom the Gospel has not yet been preached.”49 This approach asked readers to prove that they felt compassion by giving to the sspck. It had the secondary effect of positioning the society’s supporters in a transatlantic community of the compassionate. Such an argument complemented the assumption, also widely held in the sspck’s discourse, that charity facilitated unity. As John Gowdie argued in his sermon of 1735: “Charity is the bond of peace, and links men together in the closest and truest friendship.”50 In the society’s early years the favored foil for the depiction of Christian pity, as befit the group’s primary mission, was the Highlander. The Account of 1714 described the sspck as an outgrowth of a Society for the Reformation of Manners: “The Design . . . took its Rise among a few private Gentlemen that did usually meet in Edinburgh for Reformation of Manners; and Anno 1701, reflect[ed] on the Ignorance, Atheism, Popery, and Impiety, that did so much abound in the Highlands and Isles of Scotland.”51 In articulating a mission to eradicate these vices as they were embodied in the residents of Scotland’s outer reaches, the members of the sspck signaled their commitment to the virtues scottish mission and eighteenth- century british empire

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that defined much of the urban gentlemanly culture of Britain: learning, politeness, and reasonableness informed by Protestant belief. It was not simply their difference from Highlanders that marked the sspck’s supporters as part of Great Britain, however. It was also their feeling for the targets of their mission: “We have Motives from the Objects themselves, that cannot but excite Sympathy and Compassion in such as are not divested of Humanity.”52 No quality so clearly demonstrated the sspck’s members’ similarities to other Britons as their pity for the Highlanders’ very exclusion from this community. As the sspck became more actively involved with Indian missions, its publications increasingly paired Indians with Highlanders. A passage from the sspck’s sermon of 1730, the first to be commissioned by the society, demonstrates the philosophical significance of Indians to this organization. This sermon by John Matthison, a minister of the High Church of Edinburgh, was delivered just as the society was setting up its correspondent boards in America and preparing to launch an Indian mission. In this passage Indians are the obvious but unmentioned foreign counterparts to the Highlanders and Islanders Matthison does mention, as he calls upon his audience to support the sspck’s work: Let us pity a heathen World, who never heard of this Mystery, let us pray for them, and contribute our utmost to bring them to the Knowledge of it. There are vast Numbers of Mankind sitting in Darkness, and in the Region of the Shadow of Death, living in the utmost Barbarity, and stupid Ignorance, not only in foreign Parts, but even at home in the remote Highlands, and Islands of Scotland. Our Bowels should yearn towards those miserable Creatures, we should pity and pray for them, that the Light of the Gospel may be sent to those dark Places of the Earth, which are full of the Habitations of Cruelty.53 These sentences are as much about the sspck’s audience as they are about the objects of its missionary energy. Highlanders and Indians serve largely to position the rest of Scotland within what might be called a transatlantic British Christendom. This is a category delineated by spectatorship and affect as well as by behavior and belief. In fact, its primary depiction, through repeated use of the third-person plural, takes place through a vignette in which those inside the category of “we” contemplate those outside it. In a description rich with scriptural allusion, especially to Psalms 23 and 74, Matthison presents “the heathen World” as one characterized by darkness, barbarity, ignorance, and cruelty. He then calls his audience to respond to this vision not with disgust but with a pity actualized through prayer and financial generosity. To respond otherwise, he notes, is to show oneself not to be a true Christian. 190

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Depictions of Indians dramatically amplified the sspck’s treatment of heathenism because of Indians’ more widely publicized status as “forlorn” and “wild and wandering,” “perishing,” and “untutored”;54 their association with the “dark and miserable Corners of the Earth”; and their suffering “cruel methods of torture” by “the church of Rome.”55 They also did so, paradoxically, by providing vivid examples of cruelty, a quality that in several of the sermons demonstrated the depravity into which humans sank without Christianity. As Robert Wallace argued in his sermon, aptly titled Ignorance and Superstition a Source of Violence and Cruelty, “Ignorance of God and of Religion, and false Conceptions of the Divinity, must be the Origin of Violence and Cruelty.”56 Preached in 1746 on Psalm 74:20, “Have respect unto the covenant, for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty,” the sermon was a commentary on the recent Jacobite rebellion, which Wallace attributed to the Roman Catholic sympathies of many Highlanders. In a tactic common to much British nationalist discourse, Wallace elided the categories of Catholic and heathen, rooting the cruelty of both peoples in their idolatry. Heathenism, he declared, has its origins in the devil’s machinations and in a highly flawed understanding of God. “Hence,” he declared, “sprung many cruel and horrid Rites, by which Heathens sought to appease their Deities. Hence . . . their offering up to their Divinities their Enemies and Prisoners taken in War; yea, sacrificing the noblest of their Country, and even their tender and dearest Children.”57 After this rhetorical ascent through various horrors to the atrocity of child sacrifice, Wallace cited torture and cannibalism, practices inextricably identified with Indians in the popular British imagination thanks to a century’s worth of captivity narratives, travel narratives, and fiction. Witness, he wrote, “the cruel Torments, with which some ignorant and savage Nations put their Enemies to Death; of the Cannibals, who eat human Flesh.” These examples did not stand alone but were in a list alongside the customs of ancient Britons, witchcraft trials, and the depraved willingness “of the blinded Nations, who sell their Children and their Countrymen for Slaves.”58 Presented as a catalog of cruelty, these descriptions signaled allegiances to Protestant Christianity, to a rationalist refutation of superstition, to a growing distaste for slavery that coexisted with a conviction of African inferiority, and finally to a belief, widely held in the Scottish Enlightenment in particular, that Indians, like ancient Britons, exhibited the earliest stage of human development.59 This declaration of affective allegiance was one that positioned Wallace, and by extension the sspck’s supporters, squarely in the pale of moderate Enlightenment thought. Indians provided crucial evidence, buttressed by so many examples of brutality, to support Wallace’s argument that without Christianity humans sank into cruelty. More scottish mission and eighteenth- century british empire

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important, they provided a dramatic backdrop for the presentation of a Scottish society that exhibited the best traits of British civilization while it extended those qualities to the nation’s outer reaches, obliterating such cruelty in the process. During the Seven Years’ War, images of Indian cruelty became less fantastical but no less frightening, supported as they were by reports of attacks on British colonists by French-allied Indians. Ten years before he would relocate to New Jersey to become president of Princeton, John Witherspoon dealt with this topic in the sspck’s sermon of 1758. He delivered a series of rhetorical questions leading up to the argument that Britons could have prevented the war’s brutality if they had converted more Indians: Are we not engaged in war with a potent and formidable neighbour? Did not this war take its rise from the disputed limits of our territories in America? And are not our colonies in that part of the world exposed to the most cruel and merciless depredations? Are not families, which ought to be quiet and peaceable habitations, frequently alarmed in the silence of the night with the cry of war; and the tenderest relations often butchered in each other’s presence, and that by a people of a strange language, while the weak mother and helpless infant can only lift a supplicating eye, but cannot ask for mercy? Who then are the instruments of this cruelty? Must we not answer, Those very Indians, a great part of whose territory we possess, and whom, with a contempt equally impolitic and unchristian, we suffer to continue in ignorance of the only living and true God?60 The effect of Witherspoon’s analysis was to weave together the society’s practical, emotional, and religious motivations for Christian missions. At the core of each motivation was the terrible scene he sketched of Indians slaughtering British civilians. This vignette, which alluded to Herod’s massacre of the innocents (Matthew 2:16–18) and prophecies of slaughtered women and children such as Hosea 13:16, even as it referred to recent accounts from America, combined the claims of a traditional jeremiad with a moralistic vision shaped by the culture of sensibility. Witherspoon replicated earlier arguments that Puritans such as Solomon Stoddard had presented, calling Indian massacres a divine scourge for the colonists’ failure to Christianize Indians, but he positioned his argument within eighteenth-century debates over the significance of compassion to morality.61 According to him, British colonists were victims of the very cruelty they could have softened into compassionate behavior if the British people had attended to the Christian conversion and civilization of America’s Natives. Having failed to feel enough pity for Indians, or perhaps having failed to act upon that pity, 192

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Britons must now witness the terrible suffering of their women and children at the hands of the same foreign Natives they had neglected to help. As with Wallace’s sermon, this passage was ultimately less about the Indians at its center than it was about the readers Witherspoon was engaged in persuading to support the sspck’s work. The central claim of his sermon was that compassion proves the Christian. Indians supported this argument by demonstrating the cruelty into which humans could sink without Christianity, but also by presenting an urgent opportunity for his audience to express its pity. Just as a mission to Indians elevated the sspck’s work from regional to imperial significance, a focus on the figure of the Indian expanded the reach of the society’s rhetoric, showing above all that metropolitan Scots were concerned about heathens not directly threatening to their locale. Through its increased focus on Indians, in text and in action, the sspck made Scotland a point of origin that equaled, even superseded, London for the transatlantic propagation of Christianity along with its accompanying virtues: politeness, peacefulness, and, most of all, pity.


Perhaps no moment so lucidly demonstrated the sspck’s transatlantic reach as an exchange between David Brainerd and an Indian woman, which the society quoted in a footnote to its Account of 1748: “An Indian Woman, of whom I had good Ground to hope well, enquired of me one Morning, Whether I was not sent to preach to the Indians, by some good People, a great Way off? I replied, Yes, by the good People in Scotland; she answered, That her Heart loved these good People so, the Evening before, that she could scarce help praying for them all Night; her Heart would go to God for them, &c.”62 The society’s publications are filled with requests for and promises of prayers. They serve as gestures of affection, as surrogates for financial contributions or actions, and as vectors of imaginative reach linking missionaries with their supporters across vast distances. “I need not ask your prayers for the missionaries gone forth on the service of Christ,” Charles Chauncy wrote to the sspck in a prefatory epistle to the ordination sermon of a missionary employed by the society. “And God forbid,” he assured them, “that they should cease praying for you.”63 That an Indian would feel sufficient compassion to pray for the people who had sent a missionary to her indicated her conversion to Christianity, providing vivid evidence of the society’s growing success in America. Perhaps more significant, though, this exchange featured the role that Scotland itself had played as a point of origin for the extension of Christian feeling abroad, not so long after Scotland had been a staging ground for an almost devastating rebellion within scottish mission and eighteenth- century british empire

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Britain. Positioned as it was before a letter from Isaac Pemberton, president of the society’s Board of Correspondents in New York, after a sermon that called its audience to “extend our Regards to those dark and miserable Corners of the Earth” and alongside a reprinting of the original letters patent by Queen Anne, this dialogue did much to position a Scottish society at the center of a transatlantic effort to express Christian compassion by saving Indian souls.64 When Patrick Cuming, professor of divinity and ecclesiastical history at the University of Edinburgh, said in the sspck’s sermon of 1760, “Our duty is to speak to the heart, and warmly to address every power of the soul,” he was doing much more than describing a religious mission in keeping with the popular culture of sensibility.65 Like other preachers of the anniversary sermons, he was showing what made Christianity better than other religions, fostering unity rather than division, peace rather than war. As John Witherspoon noted in his anniversary sermon, “True religion always enlarges the heart, and strengthens the social tie.”66 This was an outlook that fostered links between Christians separated by geography, ethnicity, or sect, as Thomas Randall noted in his sermon of 1763: “It is Christianity only that hath thrown down all distinctions amongst men; that hath opened new, great, boundless, and eternal scenes for the exercise of its divine benevolence.”67 For Randall, the extension of the sspck’s operations abroad had taken place because its members’ religion had instilled in them a compassion capable of transcending such divisions and of sensing, in reference to Paul’s dream of the Macedonian (Acts 16:9), the Indians’ need for salvation: “A voice was heard from afar, saying, ‘Help us.’ Nor was a deaf uncompassionate ear lent to the cry.”68 To support the society’s mission to the Indians was, quite simply, to show that one felt the pity that only a true Christian could feel, as the State of the Society asserted in 1750: “The Thing indeed recommends itself, and must do so to every Person, whose Heart is capable of the least Tincture of Compassion for such vast Numbers of such poor forlorn Indians.”69 As epitomes of savagery, Indians demonstrated the necessity of Christianity for salvation. They were even more significant, though, as objects of pity. It was in the expression of that pity that the sspck was able to show how Christianity fostered unity and peace by building networks with colonists dedicated to their cause, by lessening the threat Indians posed to frontier colonists, and by strengthening a nation founded on Christian virtue. When the society published letters from its correspondents or missionaries, when it quoted the requests of colonists for prayers or the promises of prayers in return, and when it showed them all working together to save Indian souls, it was providing further evidence that, through its compassion, it strengthened a transatlantic national commu194

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nity. Missions could be supported out of concern for colonists, pity for Indians, or patriotism, as the Account of 1774 suggested when it “earnestly intreat[ed] every lover of his country, every loyal subject, every true Protestant, all who wish well to the interest of pure and undefiled religion, to embrace this opportunity of testifying the sincerity and activity of their principles.”70 It was a remarkable, if ancillary, achievement of this organization that it was able to assert that supporting a Scottish society would prove a person to be British. A survey of the publications of the Society in Scotland for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge reinforces a recent emphasis upon the transatlantic framework in which we should understand eighteenth-century British culture. The texts of the sspck also show that, indispensable as a transatlantic paradigm has become, it is important that it not become overly focused on binary relations between colonial periphery and a single metropolitan center (i.e., London). Scottish missionary writings reveal a vibrant network connecting British provinces with each other and often overshadowing English missions. When it undertook the conversion of Indians in addition to Highlanders, the Society in Scotland for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge asserted the importance of Scotland to the security of Britain. It also delineated a geographically dispersed community of shared emotions, actions, and desires, which may well have influenced the imaginative structures and emotional allegiances underlying Britain’s empire. The writings of the sspck did more than raise funds for missions to Highlanders and Indians; they articulated, after the Act of Union, a new sense of what it meant to be British. In idea, if not in actuality, this mission unified Britons in England, Scotland, and North America through the concern they should have for their religious others, whether those others be located within their region or across an ocean.

Notes 1. Alexander Mowbray to Eleazar Wheelock, Edinburgh, May 14, 1768, in The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, ed. James Dow McCallum (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Reprints, 1932), 211–14. Wheelock’s school, named Moor’s Indian Charity School, had been founded in 1754 and moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, in the 1760s. Tobias and John Shattock had attended the school for approximately a year when they interrupted their studies to appeal their tribe’s land dispute in Britain (William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, eds., Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765–1776 [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982], 33). 2. The Shattocks were attempting to prevent the Narragansett sachem Thomas Ninigret from selling off tribal lands to pay off his personal debts. The dispute over this land is summarized in the introduction to Simmons and Simmons, Old Light, xx–xxvii. Alden T. Vaughan also describes the Shattock brothers’ journey and the factors motivating it in Transatlantic

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Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 179–81. 3. John Shattock survived the smallpox but died in Charlestown in 1771 from tuberculosis. Wheelock notified Mowbray of John Shattock’s death in a letter of October 15, 1771 (in McCallum, Letters, 217–18). See also Joseph Fish to Eleazar Wheelock, Stonington, January 30, 1771, and John Shattock to Joseph Fish, December 30, 1771, in McCallum, Letters, 214–16, and Simmons and Simmons, Old Light, 70. 4. Mowbray to Wheelock, in McCallum, Letters, 212. 5. Ibid., 213. 6. Ibid. 7. Simmons and Simmons, Old Light, 46, 49 (italics in original). 8. The reference to the Protestant martyrs would seem to suggest that Shattock was buried at Greyfriars, which was a prison for the Covenanters in 1679 and which contains the Martyrs’ Memorial. There is, however, no record of Shattock’s death or burial in the parish records of Greyfriars at the Central Library. Perhaps based on Mowbray’s phrase, “in our Church yard,” Vaughan writes that Shattock was buried in Mowbray’s parish church yard (Transatlantic Encounters, 181). 9. In summarizing these events I have drawn on David Daiches, Scotland and the Union (London: J. Murray, 1977); Rosalind Mitchison, A History of Scotland, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1982); Jeremy Black, Culloden and the ’45 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); and John Stuart Shaw, The Political History of Eighteenth-Century Scotland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 10. John Erskine, The Influence of Religion on National Happiness: A Sermon Preached before the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, at their Anniversary Meeting (Edinburgh, 1756). 11. A Short State of the Society in Scotland, for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1732), 29–31; Henry Hunter, A Brief History of the Society in Scotland, for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands; and of the Correspondent Board in London (London, 1795), 22–27; William Kellaway, The New England Company 1649–1776, Missionary Society to the American Indians (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1961), 187; Frederick V. Mills, “The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in British North America, 1730–1775,” Church History 63 (1994): 15–30; Edwin Welch, Popish and Infidel Parts of the World: Dr. Daniel Williams and the Scottish SPCK (London: Dr. Williams’s Trust, 1996). 12. David Brainerd, Mirabilia Dei inter Indicos; or the Rise and Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace, Among a Number of Indians (Philadelphia, 1746); Jonathan Edwards, An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd, Minister of the Gospel, Missionary to the Indians, from the Honourable Society in Scotland, for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and Pastor of a Church of Christian Indians in New-Jersey (Boston, 1749). 13. Of John Brainerd’s work see, e.g., John Brainerd, A Genuine Letter from Mr. John Brainard, Employed by the Scotch Society for Propagating the Gospel, A Missionary to the Indians in America (London, 1753), and George Macloskie, ed., John Brainerd’s Journal (1880; repr., Newark, N.J.: Historical Records Survey, 1941). 14. W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (1899), intro. Margaret Connell Szasz (repr., Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 146; Leon Burr Richardson, ed., An Indian Preacher in England (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications, 1933); Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 190–210. 15. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 192.

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16. Recommendations by The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, in Favour of the Academy Established by Mr. Eleazar Wheelock, of Lebanon, in Connecticut, in New England, for the Education of Indian Missionaries (n.p., n.d.). The document is a written account of a memorial dictated by SSPCK directors to general meeting, June 4, 1767 (read in John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.). 17. John Gibson, The Unlimited Extent and Final Blessedness of God’s Spiritual Kingdom: A Sermon, Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, at their Anniversary Meeting, in the High Church of Edinburgh, on Friday, June 3. 1768 (Edinburgh, 1768), 36. 18. See Mills, “Society in Scotland,” 15–30, and Ian Douglas Maxwell, “Civilization or Christianity? The Scottish Debate on Mission Methods, 1750–1835,” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 123–40. A comprehensive footnote on the SSPCK’s missions could easily sprawl to several pages. For some examples of work on the Brainerds’ mission, see Paul Harris, “David Brainerd and the Indians: Cultural Interaction and Protestant Missionary Ideology,” American Presbyterian 72 (1994): 1–9, and Richard W. Pointer, “ ‘Poor Indians’ and the ‘Poor in Spirit’: The Indian Impact on David Brainerd,” New England Quarterly 67 (1994): 403–26. On Wheelock, see, e.g., James Axtell, “Dr. Wheelock’s Little Red School,” in The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 87–109, and Laura Murray, “ ‘Pray Sir, Consider a Little’: Rituals of Subordination and Strategies of Resistance in the Letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 1764–1768,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, ser. 2, 4 (1992): 48–73. On Occom, see, e.g., Harold Blodgett, “Samson Occom” (Dartmouth College Manuscript Series, 1935); Richardson, Indian Preacher; Love, Samson Occom; Polly Stevens Fields, “Samson Occom and/in the Missionary’s Position: Consideration of a Native-American Preacher in 1770’s Colonial America,” Wordsworth Circle 32 (2001): 14–20; Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Joanna Brooks, ed., The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in EighteenthCentury Native America, foreword by Robert Warrior (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 19. Margaret Connell Szasz, Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Encounters in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); Colin G. Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). On overlaps between the SSPCK’s missions to Highlanders and American Indians, see also Donald E. Meek, “Scottish Highlanders, North American Indians, and the SSPCK: Some Cultural Perspectives,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society 23 (1989): 378–96. 20. Ned C. Landsman, “Witherspoon and the Problem of Provincial Identity in Scottish Evangelical Culture,” in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 29–45; Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 21. Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 101. 22. The SSPCK began to commission anniversary sermons in 1730, as it noted in A Short State of the Society in Scotland, for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1732), 28. Stand-

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alone Account(s) were published in 1714, 1720, 1774, and 1783; State(s) were published in 1729, 1732, and 1741. In 1730, 1748, and then routinely after 1751, brief descriptions of the “State of the Society” also were appended to the anniversary sermons. 23. Psalms 74:20. All Bible quotations are taken from the authorized King James Version (New York: Family Library, 1973). Cited in several SSPCK publications, this verse provided the text for the anniversary sermon of 1746: Robert Wallace, Ignorance and Superstition a Source of Violence and Cruelty, and in Particular the Cause of the Present Rebellion. A Sermon Preached in the High Church of Edinburgh, Monday January 6, 1745–46. Upon Occasion of the Anniversary Meeting of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1746). 24. Robert Walker, A Short Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. With a Sermon Prefix’d to it; Preached in the High Church of Edinburgh, Monday January 4. 1748. upon Occasion of the Anniversary Meeting of the Foresaid Society (Edinburgh, 1748), 29. The original royal letters patent were reprinted in full in this publication (29–41). 25. State of the Society (1729), 33; Gibson, Unlimited Extent, 34. 26. The well-known English nonconformist Dr. Daniel Williams bequeathed an amount of money that, when invested in land, resulted in annuities amounting to £56. This donation was contingent on the society’s supporting three missionaries to American Indians. The other bequest was £1,000, from an Englishwoman named Sarah Bowerman (A Short State of the Society in Scotland, for Propagating Christian Knowledge [Edinburgh, 1732], 29–30; Kellaway, New England Company, 187; Welch, Popish and Infidel Parts of the World). 27. Proposals Concerning the Propagating of Christian Knowledge, in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Forraign Parts of the World (Edinburgh, 1707), 2. 28. Short State of the Society in Scotland (1732), 31. 29. Robert Dick, The Counsel of Gamaliel Considered: A Sermon, Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, at their Anniversary Meeting (Edinburgh, 1762), 30. 30. James Smith, The Misery of Ignorant and Unconverted Sinners: A Sermon Preached in the High Church of Edinburgh, Monday, January 1, 1733. Upon Occasion of the Anniversary Meeting of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge; and Published at their Request (Edinburgh, 1733), 20. 31. David Plenderleath, Religion a Treasure to Men, and the Strength and Glory of a Nation. A Sermon Preached in the High-Church of Edinburgh, January 7. 1754. Before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1754), 10–11. 32. For example, the Account of 1720 assured its readers that all SSPCK members were “zealous for the Protestant Religion, and loyal to His Majesty King george, and are for the Protestant Succession in his Royal Family, without regard to other smaller Differences” (An Account of the Rise, Constitution and Management, of the Society in Scotland, for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 2nd ed. “Enlarged by a Member of the Society” [Edinburgh, 1720], 22). 33. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 199. 34. Charles W. J. Withers, “Education and Anglicisation: The Policy of the SSPCK toward the Education of the Highlander, 1709–1825,” Scottish Studies 26 (1982): 37–56. 35. An Account of the Rise, Constitution and Management, of the Society in Scotland, for Propagating Christian Knowledge (London, 1714), 6. 36. Walker, Short Account, 1748. 37. “State of the Society in Scotland, for Propagating Christian Knowledge, for the Year

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1754, appended to The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, and its Connexion with the Success of his Religion, Considered: A Sermon Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, at their Anniversary Meeting,” by William Robertson (Edinburgh, 1755), 57 (italics in original). 38. David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1964), 3. On this topic generally, see F. W. B. Bullock, Voluntary Religious Societies, 1520–1799 (St. Leonards-on-Sea: Budd and Gillatt, 1963), and Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 125–50. 39. Soon after its founding, the SSPCK set up Boards of Correspondents in London, Bristol, Dublin, and Holland, and in 1729 it began to establish Correspondent Boards in the American colonies (Account [1714], 31; The State of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, Anno 1729 [Edinburgh, 1729]). 40. I have discussed the rhetoric and philosophy of associated philanthropy in connection with missionary work in more detail in The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 84–110. 41. On the Scottish Enlightenment, see generally Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 42. Robert Kent Donovan, “The Church of Scotland and the American Revolution,” in Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 83. 43. Ibid., 81. 44. Ned Landsman has observed that the transatlantic “concerts for prayer” organized by Whitefield and others in conjunction with the midcentury revivals contributed to Presbyteriandriven movements for Protestant union, assisting in the development of a transatlantic British identity that accommodated provincial perspectives. Indians strengthened these networks by offering an uncontroversial basis for Christian unity (From Colonials to Provincials, 124–32). 45. Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 77–78. See also Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 811–32. 46. Hugh Blair, The Importance of Religious Knowledge to the Happiness of Mankind. A Sermon Preached before the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge: At their Anniversary Meeting in the High of Edinburgh, on Monday, January 1. 1750 (Edinburgh, 1750), 19. 47. I have explored this topic in connection with the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in Poor Indians, 111–37. 48. Robert Millar, The History of the Propagation of Christianity, and the Overthrow of Paganism, Wherein The Christian Religion is confirmed. The Rise and Progress of Heathenish Idolatry is considered. The Overthrow of Paganism, and the spreading of Christianity in the several Ages of the Church is Explained. The Present State of Heathens is inquired into; and Methods for the Conversion Proposed (Edinburgh, 1723), A2, iii (italics in original). 49. Alexander Webster, Supernatural Revelation the Only Sure Hope of Sinners: A Sermon Preached in the High Church of Edinburgh, Monday January 12. 1741. Upon Occasion of the Anniversary Meeting of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1741), 42 (italics in original). 50. John Gowdie, The Propagation of the Gospel, and the Blessed Effects thereof: A Sermon

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Preached in the High Church of Edinburgh, Monday, January 6. 1735, Upon Occasion of the Anniversary Meeting of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1735), 11. 51. Account (1714), 6. 52. Ibid., 3. 53. John Matthison, The Necessity of Divine Revelation, and Knowledge thereof, in Order to Salvation: A Sermon Preached in the High Church of Edinburgh, Munday [sic] 5 January 1730. Upon Occasion of the Anniversary Meeting of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1730), 21 (italics in original). 54. “State of the Society,” published with Blair, Importance of Religious Knowledge, 46, 44; Walker, Short Account, 68; John Bonar, The Nature and Necessity of a Religious Education: A Sermon, Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1752), 39. 55. Walker, Short Account, 22 (italics in original); Plenderleath, Religion a Treasure to Men, 48. 56. Wallace, Ignorance and Superstition, 12. 57. Ibid., 27–28. 58. Ibid., 29. 59. Troy Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in EighteenthCentury Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 171–209. 60. John Witherspoon, The Absolute Necessity of Salvation through Christ: A Sermon, Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1758), 39–40 (italics in original). 61. Solomon Stoddard, Question: Whether God is not Angry with the Country for Doing so Little towards the Conversion of the Indians? (Boston, 1723). 62. Walker, Short Account, 70. 63. Charles Chauncy, All Nations of the Earth Blessed in Christ, the Seed of Abraham: A Sermon Preached at Boston, at the Ordination of the Rev. Mr. Joseph Bowman, to the Work of the GospelMinistry, More Especially Among the Mohawk-Indians, on the Western Border of New-England. August 31. 1762 (Boston, 1762), vii. 64. Walker, Short Account, 22 (italics in original). 65. Patrick Cuming, A Sermon Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, at their Anniversary Meeting (Edinburgh, 1760), 40. 66. Witherspoon, Absolute Necessity, 37. 67. Thomas Randall, Christian Benevolence: A Sermon Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, At their Anniversary Meeting (Edinburgh, 1763), 74. 68. Ibid., 95. 69. “State of the Society,” in Blair, Importance of Religious Knowledge, 46. 70. [Alexander Belsches], An Account of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 1709–1774 (Edinburgh, 1774), 53.

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print culture and the power of native liter acy in california and new engl and missions Steven W. Hackel and Hilary E. Wyss

Much has been made of the distinction between Protestant and Catholic forms of evangelization, especially in terms of missionary work. Certainly there is a great deal to be said about the different strategies members of each religious group employed to reach prospective Indian converts, most specifically in terms of the relationship between literacy and religion. Protestantism, which emphasized an individual’s direct reading of the Bible, encouraged high rates of literacy; Catholicism, in which priests generally interpreted the Bible for parishioners, did not. Nonetheless, surprising similarities emerge where conventional wisdom had suggested there were only differences. Both Catholic and Protestant missions involved some literacy training for Indians, and those Natives who acquired this training — often in concert with culturally devastating practices — in fact put this training to a broad variety of uses. While missionaries considered literacy training a practical method of confirming and disseminating European values, Native peoples often used literacy for their own purposes — including, at times, as a means of reaffirming an identity that was very much in opposition to that imposed by missionaries. In this essay we discuss how literacy was acquired and used by Indians in Alta California and New England, two seemingly disparate regions of colonial America. We focus on the experiences of a few obscure yet important individuals, compare the experiences of Native American men with those of Native American women over the first few generations of contact, and explore the degree to which literacy provided Indians with the means to serve their communities, reinvent themselves, and challenge missionaries’ expectations.


Scholars widely agree that literacy played a central role in Europe’s colonization of the New World. For Spain on the Pacific Coast and England on the Atlantic, conquest and the written word went hand in hand. During the sixteenth-century explorations of the Pacific Coast, Spanish mariners produced maps, charts, and journals in which they detailed their discoveries, allowing those who would come later to profit from their work, just as the English did nearly a century later. Through print culture, the meaning and emphasis of Spanish and English colonial settlement were disseminated as never before. So, too, did literacy shape relations with the indigenous peoples of both Alta California and New England. The first missionaries to California were optimistic that Catholicism would triumph in California against all odds because they had read the published exploits of the Catholic nun Sister María de Jesús de Agreda and so believed that their Creator had already exposed Indians of the Mexican north to the Gospel. Alta California was envisioned by Spanish officials as a mission province — a place where missionaries would civilize Indians by teaching them to live under their supervision. And the link between the written word and the Spaniards’ intent to control California Indians’ minds and bodies was explicit in the sacramental registers in which Franciscans recorded the baptisms, marriages, and burials of nearly ninety thousand Indians at California’s twenty-one missions. In the eyes of the Franciscans, these baptized and “booked” Indians had agreed to live their lives as Catholics and had ceded control over their spiritual lives to the Franciscans just as California, once formally possessed by Father Junípero Serra and Governor Gaspar de Portolá, had given itself over to Spain. New England, too, was envisioned by some as a mission province, although as historians have pointed out, this was more often in theory than in practice. Nonetheless, the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was an image of a half-naked Native figure holding an arrow in one hand and a bow in the other, pleading to the (presumably English) observer, “Come over and help us.” Up until the American Revolution in 1776, New England alternated devastating wars of conquest like the Pequot War (1636) and King Philip’s War (1675–76) with ambitious missionary experiments like John Eliot’s praying towns, John Sergeant’s Stockbridge community, David Brainerd’s New Jersey mission, and Eleazar Wheelock’s boarding school. Each was intended to convey right living and thinking through rigorous discipline; close attention to dress, food, household management; and the inculcation of “civility” through indoctrination in English culture, not least of which was literacy training. Each of these ventures was memorialized and given meaning through a series of publications 202

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by advocates of English evangelization. Thus missionaries John Eliot and John Mayhew recorded what they characterized as their “triumphs” in civilizing and converting New England’s seventeenth-century Algonquian Natives to English Protestantism in a series of tracts published from 1643 to 1671 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (spg) commonly known as the “Eliot Tracts”; John Sergeant’s Stockbridge community was celebrated in an account by the minister Samuel Hopkins, who wrote a glowing account of his young friend’s missionary work and untimely death called Historical Memoirs just as David Brainerd was lauded by his friend and mentor Jonathan Edwards in his account of the heroism of the young missionary. Eleazar Wheelock kept donations to his Charity School pouring in through his series of narratives published between 1763 and 1774, even as he increasingly turned his attention away from the education of Native students. In both Alta California and New England, Natives were keenly aware of the import of the written word to the colonists. When the Kumeyaay challenged Spanish rule in 1775, they burned Mission San Diego and perhaps intentionally destroyed the mission’s sacramental registers. More than a century later, some Indians of the Monterey region remembered that they had once been written into the mission’s books and the Franciscan world. One elderly woman laughed at first when an inquiring visitor asked her age. Then the old woman stated that she never thought about when she was born but that she was certain that “it was written down once, in a book, at the Mission.”1 Similarly, in New England’s infancy as a colony, Natives who did not themselves acquire literacy were very aware of the importance of the written word to the English way of life. Early English missionaries assured potential converts that their God had provided them with a book that contained all matter of truth; acquiring right religion was essentially a matter of acquiring literacy. Furthermore, unlike in Native systems of exchange, the English political negotiations were not ratified through oral discourse as witnessed by councils but rather through the affixing of a signature or mark to a piece of paper — even when that piece of paper was unintelligible to certain parties to the agreement. By the eighteenth century most Native communities throughout New England were eager to acquire their own schools; there are pleas throughout the colonial records from Native communities for financial help from the state in maintaining teachers. By focusing on two particular situations, Eleazar Wheelock’s school, which was in operation for roughly sixteen years in mid-eighteenth-century Connecticut, and Indian literacy and acquisition in the California missions between the 1770s and the 1850s, we hope to show a paradoxical result of missionaries’ print culture and the power of native literacy

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attempts to teach Native Americans literacy. Taught by exceptionally conservative religious men for the narrowest of purposes, namely, the eradication of indigenous identity and the imposition of a European one, Indians were quick to see the legal and political power literacy represented in the colonial world and wielded that power to define themselves and their people in ways that were dramatically different from how the colonial order had defined them.2 Such subversive uses of literacy have important analogues in other periods and other national histories. One group of scholars — Steven Justice, Caroline Castiglione, and James Amelang among them — have articulated the ways in which people assumed to be nonliterate have used the written word creatively and aggressively.3 As these scholars’ terms suggest — “adversarial literacy,” “insurgent literacy,” and “assertive literacy” — the skills of reading and writing could be powerful tools against ruling power structures and elites. Furthermore, scholar Joanna Brooks reminds us (via Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd) that “our challenge in the field of early American minority literatures is to recognize that differences in content, shape, and texture, which have been read as markers of inadequacy, are in fact elements of signification. . . . We must be willing to read in every textual feature the potential for intelligence and strategy.” Brooks shows us that by attending to the material realities of the production of texts, we as scholars can begin to understand the complicated relationship of communities of color to textuality. When the ability to read, write, and publish is implicated in a colonial system that is equally implicated in what Brooks herself calls “the unnatural horrors of enslavement and colonization, . . . forced displacement, . . . near extermination,” we must become aware of our assumptions about the meaning and value of texts.4 This approach brings to light manuscripts like hand-copied versions of print texts, unpublished manuscripts, letters, petitions, and the like, all of which gave voice to those whose work might not otherwise have been recognized.


The Franciscans’ own writings — and most Native Americans’ inability to sign their own name to legal documents — suggest the rarity of alphabetic literacy among California Indians during the colonial period. One common means of quantifying literacy in the past is to measure the percentage of people in a population who could sign their name. The ability to sign is generally assumed to “correspond to a middle range of literacy skills or roughly to the ability to read fluently.”5 An inability to sign does not rule out the possibility that an individual could read, as reading was a skill generally acquired before writing.6 In a small sample of legal cases that involved Indians accused of crimes in Alta California, 204

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we found fifty-four Indians whose testimony was recorded by a scribe, but not one Indian who signed his or her name. Instead, at the foot of the record of their testimony, all penned a crude mark, which was almost always a shaky cross. In comparison, of the soldiers and settlers who testified in these same cases, about one in four signed their name. By another measure, the soldiers’ literacy rate was slightly higher. In 1782, military officials compiled lists of soldiers at Monterey and San Francisco, and they indicated whether each soldier was literate. Of seventy-one soldiers, 34 percent, or twenty-four, of the total could write, and the rest presumably could read but not write.7 This signature literacy rate of roughly 25–34 percent is roughly consistent with studies of the non-Indian population of colonial New Mexico, and it reaffirms the fact that literacy rates in northern New Spain were much lower than in British North America, where roughly 35 percent of the colonial population could read and write.8 As was the case elsewhere in colonial America, attempts to teach Indians in California to read and write occurred within the larger context of missionary proselytism and were deeply gendered.9 At every mission in California, Franciscans taught a few young boys to read Spanish so that they could assist as catechists and choristers. With the aid of these boys, missionaries then created bilingual dictionaries, phrase books, catechisms, and confessionals. But these guides remained in the hands of the missionaries, and there was never an attempt in California to teach Indians how to read and write in their own languages. This practice was consistent with prevailing Spanish policies in the eighteenth century that promoted Spanish as the language of the empire among a sea of non-Spanish speakers and writers. Earlier, in central New Spain scribes had written in Nahuatl using the Roman alphabet, but by the eighteenth century this practice was on the wane, as much from official Spanish policy as from cumulative changes in Nahuatl itself. How boys in California were taught to read and write in Spanish is not clear, but Franciscans at each mission probably tutored a few Indians they felt had unusual talents. Many of these boys had been baptized as orphans, and as the padres expected, they developed deep loyalties to the Franciscans.10 Apparently, these youths learned readily, and some soon became “quite fond” of “reading and writing.” Missionaries at Santa Clara reported in 1814, “Certainly some of the Indian boys learn how to read with undoubted facility . . . [yet few do so since] we missionary fathers are interested only in teaching and explaining the Christian doctrine and in having singers and musicians for church functions.”11 The Franciscans in California did not teach Indian girls to read or to write. Girls and women, they believed, could best learn and practice Catholicism by following its precepts, not by serving as catechists, pages, or sacristans. Nowhere in print culture and the power of native literacy

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California were Indians of either sex taught to read and write simply so that they could read and write.12 To missionaries, literacy was a tool to be deployed strategically, in the service of the spread of Christianity. Nevertheless, the historical record provides important instances of literate California Indians using their skills beyond the limits prescribed by their Catholic instructors. The most famous of these among the California Indians is Pablo Tac, who was born and baptized at Mission San Luis Rey in 1822. Father Antonio Peyri hoped to train Tac for the priesthood, and in 1834 he took Tac to Rome and enrolled him at the College of the Propaganda Fide. Before his death in 1840 at age nineteen, Tac captured the attention of a linguist, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was the chief custodian of the Vatican Library. Mezzofanti had Tac prepare a grammar of Luiseño and a dictionary of Luiseño terms. Apparently, at that time, Tac penned his account of mission life. Tac wrote it in Spanish, and his account shows literacy being used largely as men like Peyri intended, in support of Catholicism and the Franciscan enterprise. Yet Tac provides the only Native account of the Spaniards’ coming to California, and therefore it is invaluable. Tac wrote admiringly of the Franciscans and seemed to wish they had come sooner to California. “The life of that time [before the missionaries arrived] was very miserable, because there was always strife. The god who was adored at that time was the sun and the fire. Thus we lived among the woods until merciful God freed us of these miseries through Father Antonio Peyri.” “O merciful God,” Tac lamented, “why didst Thou leave us for many centuries, years, months and days in utter darkness after Thou came into the world?”13 The closest Tac comes to a critique of the Spanish and the missionaries is his pointing out that “through a sickness that came to California 2,000 souls died, and 3,000 were left.”14 Yet, as Joanna Brooks might observe, even this largely conformist narrative is an act of self-representation and selfhood in that it appears in the hand of a California Indian. A more explicit link between literacy and insurgency is suggested by the life of José Pacomio Pogui of Mission La Purísima, even though there are no documents written in his hand that survive. José Pacomio distinguished himself as a boy at the mission, where he learned to read and write, most likely at the feet of the Franciscan missionaries. When he chafed at Franciscan rule, he helped put together the Chumash rebellion of 1824, one of the most coordinated anticolonial uprisings against the California missions. His counterpart at Mission Santa Barbara was the Indian alcalde Andrés Sagimomatsse, who also was literate, for it is known that Andrés exchanged written messages with Father Antonio Ripoll during the crisis.15 Banished from Santa Barbara for his rebellion, José Pacomio served out his 206

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punishment at the Monterey presidio. A decade after his rebellion and having completed his punishment, José Pacomio settled in Monterey, where he lived with his wife and seven others. The former rebel took an active and public role in Monterey. In 1836, he won appointment by the Monterey town council as a comisario de policia. And in 1833 and 1839, if not in the intervening years, he voted in municipal elections. Of this public service, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo recalled that he acted with “judgment and perspicacity.”16 José Pacomio’s alphabetic literacy cannot be disentangled from the other skills of which it was a part — most notable, a fluency in Spanish culture that encompassed modes of dress and behavior and patterns of work, organization, and perhaps even religious observance. Literacy, and the cultural fluency of which it was a part, therefore, facilitated José Pacomio’s participation in the economic and political worlds of Monterey during the last decade of his life. Additional evidence of California Indians’ assertive and even insurgent literacy comes from the period just after the Chumash rebellion.17 It was then that missions in existence for many decades were beginning to be dismantled by secular authorities, creating new opportunities for literate Indians to assert themselves. In 1825, as Spanish and Mexican officials implemented policies designed to allow Indians to sever their ties with the missions, José María de Echeandía took over the governorship of California. The central government in Mexico had urged him to dismantle the missions. As a first step, in 1826, Echeandía granted Indians the right to separate themselves from the missions “provided they had some means of gaining a livelihood.” In response, numerous neophytes petitioned for their freedom in short written appeals of a paragraph in length.18 When viewed collectively, these documents show Indians’ discontent with the missions, their hopes for a better life beyond them, and the liberating role that literacy could play in Indians’ lives. For example, in his petition to the governor, Juan Santos of Mission Santa Clara stated that he was working in San Jose as a mason and that with his freedom he intended to live “as a settler of the pueblo, not as a neophyte of the mission.”19 At just about the same time that individuals like Juan Santos were petitioning for their own freedom, a Chumash man, Pacifico Sum’Camiol of Mission San Buenaventura, wrote a petition calling for the Indians’ liberation from his mission en masse. Pacifico was twenty-nine and had lived his whole life in the mission. In three letters and a memorandum, he voiced the Indians’ grievances with mission life and expressed their hopes for the future. Pacifico’s letters reveal to an extraordinary degree that many Indians believed that with the onset of secularization a transitional moment had arrived. The precise way Pacifico wrote within a Spanish epistolary culture of obedience and subjection, folded print culture and the power of native literacy

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his letters once and then again to form envelopes, and addressed them on the outside suggests that he may have corresponded with government officials before or perhaps that he had been a scribe or a copyist at the mission. In a first letter to Echeandía, dated October 23, 1826, Pacifico envisioned new freedoms within a less restrictive order. Placing himself metaphorically at Echeandía’s feet, Pacifico hoped that the governor would look upon the Chumash of San Buenaventura with “eyes of pity” and “place in liberty” 125 men he listed on an attached memorandum. In signing his name to the document, Pacifico inscribed a beautiful and personal signature flourish, and to my eye its coiling, swirling geometric patterns resemble an object of great import in California Indian society, a woven basket.20 Signature flourishes were emblems of literate members of Spanish society, and all the Franciscans and governors in California cultivated their own distinctive marks. Pacifico’s was highly unusual. His could only have been the product of a man who was used to wielding a pen. Pacifico’s list of the neophytes who desired freedom from the mission clearly responded to Echeandía’s requirement that Indians seeking to leave the missions be able to support themselves and their families. Pacifico, therefore, listed the men by their skills, as masons, tile makers, carpenters, muleteers, laborers, weavers, vaqueros, and soap makers. Since with freedom these men would have left the mission with their extended families, Pacifico in effect had called for the end of San Buenaventura.21 Less than a week after sending his memorandum to the governor, Pacifico, and two other men from the mission, Gervasio, and Peregrino María, wrote a second letter that justified their desire for freedom and made three demands. The trio called for the mission to be converted into a town so that they could work for themselves. They also wanted a different missionary, one who “would not punish them, and who would always provide them food and clothing.” Here they were attacking Father Francisco Suñer, who was widely considered to be of “violent character.” Finally, they requested that the Californio soldier Juan Lugo be made the mission’s foreman. The demands of Pacifico, Gervasio, and Peregrino María revealed the limits of their vision or the limits of what they thought attainable; they wanted to improve their lot but had resigned themselves to living within a colonial system, under Catholicism, and supervised by a non-Indian.22 Nevertheless, their words challenged Franciscan authority and the Spanish social order. In a final letter to the governor the trio detailed what they would need to achieve economic independence. They asked for a distribution of the mission’s money, lands, seeds, rakes, axes, cattle, horses, and mules, and they closed their

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letter by assuring Echeandía that they wanted nothing more and that “these were their final voices and words.” So they were. Pacifico and his signature flourish appear nowhere else in the written record. Pacifico died in 1843 and was buried in the mission cemetery.23 Governor Echeandía did not go along with the Indians’ demands, most likely because of the Franciscans’ disparaging views on the matter. Father Suñer charged that Indians were lazy by nature, “more animal than rational,” and untrustworthy.” “Sometimes,” Suñer wrote, “he [the Indian] comes dressed in sheep’s clothing, but within he is a rapacious wolf; his voice is that of Jacob and his hands are those of Esau. . . . There are many [Indians] . . . who bless what they would like to curse and kiss the hand that they would like to burn.”24 Even by Franciscan standards, this was an extremely sharp condemnation. Perhaps it was Pacifico’s willingness to use against the mission his literacy — a skill he had doubtless acquired from the Franciscans, perhaps even from Suñer — that accounts for the padre’s angry tone and bitter sense of betrayal. Admittedly, while there are very few cases of California Indians before 1830 using literacy acquired in the missions to their own advantage, there is evidence that the practice became more common after mission secularization in the 1830s, even though many Indian leaders who came of age in the 1820s and 1830s probably died in the smallpox epidemic of 1844. A notable example is the Cupeño leader, Antonio Garra. The Cupeños lived in the interior near Warner’s Hot Springs, and they had limited contact with missionaries until the early 1800s. Garra was from the village of Cupa and was baptized at Mission San Luis Rey in 1823 at the age of twenty. How he acquired his literacy is a bit of a mystery, but perhaps a clue can be found in the life of his father, Elias, who was baptized in 1810 and was the first Cupeño to receive the sacrament, some thirteen years before the son. If the son stuck close to the father, he would have first come to the mission at age seven, at just the age when Father Peyri — the teacher of Pablo Tac — would have found the young boy an attractive candidate for literacy training. In 1833, ten years after Antonio Garra was baptized, Mission San Luis Rey was secularized, and most Cupeños returned to Cupa or settled near Pala. Afterward, they raised livestock and crops and tried to protect their land from encroaching settlers. In 1847, Stephen Watts Kearney, military governor of California, recognized Antonio Garra’s authority among the Cupeños. And three years later, Benjamin Hayes, a Los Angeles judge, traveled to Cupa and wrote back that Garra was a sophisticated man who lived in a house formerly owned by the mission, “dressed well,” “talked Spanish,” and, most interesting, “had

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many books.” Other reports claimed that Garra was conversant in Latin, which he could have learned only at Mission San Luis Rey. In 1851, Garra launched what he hoped would be a pan-Indian rebellion against the American presence in southern California, and it is through this rebellion that one can see that Spanish-language literacy acquired in the missions was common to Indian leaders in southern California during the 1850s. Literacy, as a rare skill, marked these men as worthy of elite status; it was emblematic of their ability to communicate with a wider world, something increasingly necessary in California after the Spanish invasion and the Mexican period; and it was valued by Spanish, Mexican, and American officials who considered it a marker of “civilization.” The spark for Garra’s 1851 rebellion was a ruling by San Diego officials that the Cupeños had to pay county taxes. In 1850 the Cupeños had done so, but in 1851 they refused, and the sheriff went to Cupa and confiscated $250 in cash along with eighteen cows and five horses. Soon after, Garra began to send written messages to Indians from Baja California to Santa Barbara. His goal was to wipe the American presence from southern California.25 As hostilities were beginning, Garra wrote to a Californio, José Antonio Estudillo, “Now the blow is struck . . . all the Indians are invited in all parts.”26 Soon thereafter, Garra’s son wrote a letter to the Luiseño leader, Manuelito Cota, enlisting the support of the Luiseños. But Cota wrote back expressing his loyalty to the Americans.27 Then Pablo Apis, a captain at Temecula, wrote that he would not involve his people. Domingo, the actual captain of the Luiseños at San Luis Rey, received a letter from the authorities in San Diego telling him not to get involved. He then wrote back to Cota saying that he would side with the Americans. Garra then wrote to Ortega telling him to move ahead with the rebellion and explaining that the Indians had risen because of the taxes — “not for the mere wish of revolting.”28 The point here is not so much who was on what side but the exchange of letters between Indian leaders, Californio agitators, and American officials. Antonio Garra badly needed the help of the Cahuilla leader Juan Antonio, and he wrote him a pleading letter: “If we lose this war, then it is forever; never will it stop; this war is for a whole life.” Juan Antonio then received a letter from the Los Angeles county judge Agustín Olvera asking why Garra was in rebellion. Ten days later Juan Antonio wrote back that he had spoken with other Indian captains, and all except Garra wanted peace. Juan Antonio then wrote Garra a letter suggesting a meeting. Garra reluctantly accepted. At the meeting Juan Antonio seized Garra and turned him over to American authorities, who arrested him. A month later, Garra was executed by firing squad, thus ending his pan-Indian rebellion. 210

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As if to underscore this point, the San Diego Herald published a little note in the section of its paper normally reserved for ship sailings. It ran: departures, — Antonio Garra, Tierra Caliente. It was signed by General Joshua Bean, head of the California Militia, and O. M. Wozencraft, a federal Indian agent charged with negotiating land cessions from California Indians.29 Mocking in tone, and smacking of contempt, the note celebrated the belief that Anglos — certainly not Indians — controlled the printed word in southern California. But as the literacy of Pablo Tac, José Pacomio Pogui, Juan Santos, Pacifico Sum’Camiol, and Antonio Garra demonstrates, many Indian men, graduates one could say of the missions’ narrow academies of Catholic learning, had mastered Spanish-language literacy and tried to use it in pursuit of their own goals, ones that often ran counter to Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American objectives. Colonial California produced no Guaman Poma de Ayala, no Samson Occom — Indian men who wrote widely and left to posterity magnificent testimony of their literacy — but it had produced a handful of literate insurgents who used their literacy to improve their lives and those of their communities.


Whereas few Indians in the Catholic missions of California became literate, Protestant Christianity in New England was predicated on the assumption that literacy was essential to a true understanding of God’s word as recorded in the Bible; no missionary work, therefore, was complete without a thorough regimen of schooling. From the 1640s onward, missionary efforts emphasized teaching Indian children about English ways, and Indian parents were encouraged to place their children in English homes to learn cultural traditions including literacy skills. Missionary John Eliot notes that the son of Wabon, one of the leading men of a nearby community, was enrolled in an English school in Dedham in 1646.30 As early as 1650, John Eliot reports having himself taught one Native American young man to read and write in English, with the intention of having him translate religious works in the regional Algonquian language, called Massachusett.31 Eliot felt certain that learning to read would be difficult enough for Native converts without the additional burden of having to learn a different language; he was also confident that providing religious texts would open the floodgates to the wholesale conversion of Native Americans to Christianity once they were able to see for themselves the truth (as he saw it) of Christianity. Despite his central role in creating a written form of the Massachusett language (along with the Indian Bible, Eliot and his Native assistants produced an Indian print culture and the power of native literacy

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grammar), John Eliot did not see his mission as a way of maintaining Indian cultural identity but rather as a means of restructuring Native identity along English models. Thus Eliot instituted praying towns, which were dominated by rules and regulations modeling English dress, manners, and customs and devaluing Native practices and beliefs even as schools taught Massachusettlanguage literacy. Eliot reports that his goal was to teach all men to read and write and all women to read — a common distinction in literacy skills in the seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century, many of the assumptions that had guided Eliot’s praying towns had altered significantly. The early notion that cultivating Native Christian communities into praying towns could produce better Native Christians was largely abandoned after King Philip’s War of 1675–76, and many of the Native communities were left to fend for themselves on the margins of English settlements. John Eliot and his colleague Daniel Gookin found themselves beleaguered outsiders as anti-Indian sentiment all but shut down missionary work in the surrounding communities of Boston in the late 1670s. And yet even despite the war and its effects, literacy in certain Native communities increased significantly. In 1727, when white missionary Experience Mayhew wrote Indian Converts, there is clear evidence of Native writing skills among more than just a handful of exceptional figures.32 Missionary efforts did not die: they simply shifted to Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and other less centralized locations. By the early eighteenth century Native ministers and other men of Martha’s Vineyard were writing family records, dying words, and even sermon notes, all of which inform Mayhew’s biographical entries on the men, women, and children among Martha’s Vineyard’s Wampanoags included in his work. As historian David Silverman has noted, what becomes clear through Mayhew’s work is that the Native community of Martha’s Vineyard developed along lines that adhered in striking ways to precontact life.33 Indigenous lifeways maintained themselves even as European forms and structures became part of everyday life, and reading and writing became convenient strategies for maintaining precontact lifeways and participating in a broader colonial world for a small but significant group of Native figures. Throughout New England, Indian Bibles (Bibles translated into the Massachusett language as part of the English effort to convert Native Americans) reveal some of the ways in which Natives used literacy for their own purposes. First printed in 1663 as part of Eliot’s plan to spiritually and culturally convert Native Americans to English Protestantism, these Bibles were in use through the eighteenth century. Extant copies of this Bible contain all kinds of marginalia that indicate a widespread comfort with literacy among Native American 212

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converts. Certainly many of the marginalia in Indian Bibles are religious in nature; a surprising number of them, however, are not explicitly so. One man records the winter weather of February 1715; another notes his whereabouts in 1729; still another notes his departure on a sea journey in 1716.34 Indeed, the existence of land deeds, wills, and other records written and signed by Native Americans from throughout New England attests to the fact that literacy in Massachusett was relatively widespread. Documents within an English court system were usually translated into English; the prior existence of such documents in Massachusett, however, suggests that they circulated in Native social, cultural, and political worlds as well. In fact, scholars Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon estimate a vernacular literacy rate of roughly 30 percent among New England’s Native populations in the early eighteenth century, a figure that compares favorably with Anglo-American literacy in the same period.35 By the 1750s few Native communities in New England remained isolated from English settlers; the dominant language in certain communities was increasingly becoming English, and many inhabitants of Native settlements dressed in English clothing and lived in English structures as they adapted English social and economic practices to their lives. Women’s literacy increased among both Anglo-Americans and Native Americans as more and more women were acquiring both reading and writing skills. This was particularly relevant for the Algonquians of New England, since a great number of Native communities had more women than men, owing in no small part to the long-term impact of wars that drew Native men from their communities throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the fact that employment opportunities for Native men, such as going to sea, itinerant farm labor, and military service, often took them away from home for extended periods of time. By the time Eleazar Wheelock opened his school in 1753, literacy training for boys and girls in Native communities throughout New England would have been available at least in some limited sense for a hundred years. Many of the students attending his school would have had some access to literacy before arriving, even if they hadn’t fully acquired the skills yet. And for Wheelock, the education of Native girls and boys went hand in hand, at least initially. Clearly, Eleazar Wheelock’s school did not provide the only access to literacy for New England’s Natives in the mid-eighteenth century. It was, however, unquestionably the most well-funded, publicized, and ambitious institution for educating Native Americans in the eighteenth century. As such, this school in many ways set the standard for ideas about Native education, literacy, and religion in New England in the mid-eighteenth century. And while the Alta California records only thinly detail the means of transmitting literacy to the few print culture and the power of native literacy

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who acquired it, Wheelock’s records are rich in detail about the actual practices through which Natives were to acquire literacy, as well as the ways in which these Natives made use of their literacy skills. Wheelock introduced his project to the general public with the 1763 publication of A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and present State of the Indian Charity School at Lebanon, in Connecticut. The goal of this boarding school was to produce missionaries and educators to go out into Indian communities, recruit the most promising children, and send them back to the boarding school for training as missionaries to go out to other Native communities and so on, thus creating endlessly expanding circles of the process through which eventually all Natives would convert to Christianity. Central to the account of the school is the idea of English control and supervision of Indian proselytes even as Wheelock seems to have been advocating a Native-centered system of religious conversion. By establishing the inadequacy of the Native character, Wheelock effectively positioned himself and other Euro-Americans as necessary to the success of any Native venture — even as he argued that Natives must be at the forefront of missionary work. He confidently assured his readers that “Indian Missionaries will not disdain to own English ones, who shall be associates with them, (where the English can be introduced) as elder brethren; nor scorn to be advised or reproved, counseled or conducted by them; especially so long as they shall be so much dependent upon the English for their Support.”36 Wheelock was convinced that it was only by replacing “the pernicious Influence of Indian Examples” with English models of behavior that boarding schools like his could succeed in producing qualified Native American missionaries.37 To that effect he controlled his students’ every waking hour, or as Wheelock himself explained in some detail: They are obliged to be clean, and decently dressed, and be ready to attend Prayers, before Sun-rise in the Fall and Winter, and at 6 o’Clock in the Summer. A Portion of Scripture is read by several of the seniors of them: And those who are able answer a Question in the Assembly’s Catechism, and have some Questions asked them upon it, and an Answer expounded to them. After Prayers, and a short Time for their Diversion, the School begins with Prayer about 9, and ends at 12, and again at 2, and ends at 5 o’Clock with Prayer. Evening Prayer is attended before the Day-light is gone. Afterwards they apply to their Studies, etc. And in general, Wheelock claimed that his pupils were “orderly and governable: They appear to be as perfectly easy and contented with their Situation and 214

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Employment as any at a Father’s House. I scarcely hear a Word of their going Home, so much as for a Visit, for Years together, except it be when they first come.”38 Despite Wheelock’s public assurances, extant letters from his students suggest a very different version of the Charity School environment. Wheelock’s records contain numerous “confessions” from students for infractions as varied as fighting, drinking, swearing, and running away. The repeated acts of rage, frustration, and grief in the school record suggest that life with Eleazar Wheelock was for so many of his Native students a wrenching cultural experience. Each and every writer at one point or another begs leave of Wheelock to return to his or her home and family. Young Hezekiah Calvin is perhaps most eloquent as he speaks of returning home in letter after letter: “There is something that makes me want to go home, what, I cant tell, Home is in my Mind all the time I want to go Home soon & see my Relations”; “My Mind is all the while Cleaving to go home . . . when I am alone I am almost crazy I will catch my hair & pull & Cry, for to go Home.”39 Wheelock’s students found themselves in a rather tortuous situation in which either they could attempt to meet his rigid expectations for their conversion to English ways or they could reject Wheelock’s model and return to their communities, publicly dismissed by Wheelock as disgraces to religion, the school, and the “Grand Design” of wholesale Indian conversion. Although the documents authored by Native students at Moor’s Charity School suggest that the decision was an agonizing one, our record of what was at stake is dramatically compromised by the role of writing and literacy in Wheelock’s plan. Clearly, writing was at the core of the disciplinary system through which Wheelock controlled his young charges, and they were keenly aware of it. For example, young Hezekiah Fowler, Delaware, opened one letter with the words “With shamefacedness & humbleness of Heart I write you these Lines.” Another letter explained, “It is with Shame I put pen to paper.”40 Jacob Fowler (Montaukett) wrote, “It makes me tremble to think to write to such a great gentleman as Mr E Wheelock is, I am afraid I shall say Something that will be displeasing to him. — If I do I humbly ask Your Forgiveness Sir.”41 Some young students’ infractions were documented before they could write, and so they had to put their mark to lengthy confessions written out by Eleazar Wheelock, his son Ralph, or even one of the older Charity School students, confirming for them the association of writing and shaming. The act of writing at Wheelock’s Charity School was inextricably connected to contrition and humiliation; few escaped the humiliation of public, written confessions of bad behavior, and in fact few of the letters connected to Wheelock’s school expressed anything other than abject humility. print culture and the power of native literacy

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While Wheelock’s male students certainly struggled with their role in his school, the girls were hardly spared either. Although Wheelock’s educational plan included girls from the very beginning, his reasoning for this inclusion is revealing. Although girls were trained as “House-wives, Schoolmistresses, Tayloresses, &C.,” their real function was to keep at bay the possibility of Indian missionaries “turning savage in a Manner of living.”42 In other words, according to Wheelock, girls were central to the “civilizing” process in that they would provide the domestic base from which their missionary husbands could operate. They were useful as they served the needs of others; for Wheelock there was no intrinsic value to an educated girl. As helpmates to their more valuable missionary husbands or as models of right living to the larger Native community, the young women in his school were seen by Wheelock primarily as a ready pool of mates for the young men who would need to marry to make the best missionaries. Auxiliary to the real work of boys’ education, the girls’ school received far less funding than the boys’; their academic education was limited to a single day per week, and their work (sewing, spinning, and the like), which subsidized the school for boys, required them to train in the homes of local merchants and craftspeople instead of living at the school. Young Native girls like Mary Secuter, Sarah Simon, and Miriam Storrs (the only three girls from Wheelock’s school to have left evidence of their written literacy) experienced education at Wheelock’s school in substantially different ways than did the boys; none seems to have acquired more than limited writing ability, although each of them acquired a clear sense of her own vileness and how much she disappointed Wheelock.43 Mary Secutor wrote, “I am quite discouraged with mySelf. . . . I have been more trouble to ye Docter then all my mates. Don’t think I desarve ye honour of being in your School.”44 Sarah Simon wrote bitterly that “it seams to me all the true Christan never meats with Such a Struggle with Saton as I do and So that makes me fear I am no Christan becase the Devil is So bese with me more than he is with any one Els.”45 While these letters certainly engage with the conventional epistolary language of selfabasement, the level at which they embrace such language powerfully suggests Wheelock’s control and the wrenching, despairing world he created for his students, who had to reject everything they loved for the “prize” of becoming the kind of person Wheelock could love. While Wheelock saw literacy as a way of turning Native students into docile figures eager and willing to work under the watchful supervision of white missionaries, none of his students in fact turned out that way. By 1771 Wheelock complained that his school was a failure and none of his students had lived up to his expectations. In his 1771 narrative, Wheelock wrote sonorously: “I began 216

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to be fully convinced, by many weighty reasons, that a greater portion of English youth, must be prepared for missionaries to take entirely the lead of the affairs in the wilderness.” He continued mournfully that although over the years there had been “near forty” Native students in his school who were sufficiently masters of English grammar, arithmetic, and a number of them considerably advanced in the knowledge of Greek and Latin, and one of them carried through college. . . . I don’t hear of more than half who have preserved their characters unstain’d, either by a course of intemperance or uncleanness, or both; and some who on account of their parts, and learning, bid the fairest for usefulness, are sunk down into as low, savage, and brutish a manner of living as they were in before any endeavours were used with them to raise them up . . . six of those who did preserve a good character, are now dead.46 Either through death or moral weakness, Wheelock concluded, his students all failed him. But while they may have been failures in Wheelock’s eyes, as Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks and others suggest, Wheelock’s Native students seem to have had very different notions of what literacy could provide for them and their communities. From the beginning Moor’s Charity School provided Natives something quite outside the context for which Wheelock had intended it. For example, when the elder Sarah Simon sent her sons to boarding school, she explained to Wheelock that she did it so that one would be “capable of Bisness” and the other would be “a publeck man” — decidedly secular goals for a school for missionaries.47 The letters in Wheelock’s archive suggest that although Wheelock saw literacy as a tool of indoctrination, it turned out to be easily adaptable to a variety of goals. Thus even though his students were very aware of Wheelock’s distaste for Native community, their letters nonetheless beg for permission to return to their homes for a variety of reasons. Letters at times even critiqued Wheelock’s behavior as students insisted on their need for personal dignity and demanded some accounting for what they perceived to be Wheelock’s poor treatment of them. Occasionally Wheelock’s former students’ uses of their literacy skills made their way into the historical record in ways that were outside Wheelock’s control: Hezekiah Calvin forged a pass for a slave (an act for which he was imprisoned for a time); Samson Occom wrote petitions for a variety of Native communities and recorded the cultural practices of his own as well as his wife’s communities. And even as Wheelock was publicly airing his disappointment with his students, young Joseph Johnson had returned from his sea journey and his profligate ways and was working as a schoolmaster in a Native print culture and the power of native literacy

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community. He had come under the powerful influence of Samson Occom (who eventually became his father-in-law) and had turned his attention to the range of possibilities available to him for helping his people rather than destroying himself. We can see the personal transformation through a series of diaries and letters that Johnson wrote from 1771 to 1773.48 Most significant, literacy provided the means through which Wheelock’s former students (most of whom he wrote off as failures) came together to form the Native community of Brotherton, a Native Christian community established on Indian land by Indians without the control of white missionaries or politicians. Again, Joseph Johnson was central to this endeavor, as was his spiritual and emotional mentor, Samson Occom. From 1773 until his death some time in 1776, Johnson worked toward the creation of the Brotherton community, convinced that his fate and that of other Christian Indians throughout New England’s Algonquian communities was tied to the founding of a new kind of Indian community. The founding of this community emerged through traditionally indigenous exchange — community meetings, personal exchanges, diplomatic envoys, and lengthy public speeches. However, the community would not have happened without the newer forms of Native literacy at the core, ironically, of Wheelock’s school. Johnson, having practically grown up in the pan-Indian community that Wheelock somewhat unintentionally established in Lebanon, Connecticut, cemented his intertribal alliances as a schoolteacher in Native communities in New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut; he disseminated his ideas and the ideas of others through print culture, with the publication of sermons and letters. He also raised money for Brotherton from white benefactors through various written exchanges. He circulated letters among New England’s Algonquian Indian groups, urging them to band together as Christians in this new community. He recorded the negotiations with the Oneidas for land not only in more traditionally Native systems of exchange and discussion but also in written form that circulated among those with an interest in the fate of Brotherton. Hardly the abject boy writing tragic missives pleading forgiveness from his mentor, Johnson had, by the end of his regrettably short life (he died in his mid-twenties), become adept at deploying the literacy he acquired from Wheelock to establish a most insistently and distinctively Native community.49 The vision that missionaries like Eleazar Wheelock offered their students was not one that necessarily served them well in the world outside — or even as they made their way to adulthood. Poor young Miriam Storrs wrote to Wheelock after her departure from his school that things were not as she had expected them to be: “I have been under many trials . . . prest down to the dust which caused me soo to weep nights and hours when I Saw every one out of y Sight 218

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Dear Sir I want to See the Doct[or] again.”50 Yet Hezekiah Calvin wrote helplessly: “The devil is always tempting me to some mischief, & it seems to me that I am as ready to comply as he is to tempt. . . . I shall never be good for any thing.”51 The skills that Native students took from their experiences with Wheelock cannot be underestimated, however, and literacy was certainly one of the most powerful. While many of these young men and women simply dropped from the historical record, others went on to succeed in structuring a world of their own making, independent of Wheelock, and participating in a variety of ways in new kinds of Indian communities like Brotherton as well as their tribally based home communities. Indeed, within and beyond Wheelock’s school, literacy increasingly became one of the threads that bound Native communities: families separated through work, intermarriage, misfortune, or opportunity maintained ties through personal letters of a most intimate and even nonreligious nature. Wheelock’s students may have chosen lives that Wheelock found reprehensible, but their lived experiences reveal their own notions of how literacy could reaffirm personal and communal identity. Their words are a testament to the tenacity of just that identity.


Just as Wheelock’s educational ventures have more often than not been seen as detrimental to Native communities, historians have often portrayed the California missions as disastrous for Indians. And scholars have observed that most Indians left the missions with little of value other than a basic familiarity with spoken Spanish and basic ranchhand skills. But clearly some Indians did gain skills that would be of great use after the missions were secularized in the 1820s and 1830s. Arguably chief among them, literacy acquired in the missions played an increasingly important role in the lives of a select group of Indians, especially those who sought to shape the world around them as the institutions of colonial California were falling apart at the start of the Mexican period. The written texts of Native writers in both New England and California remain remarkably elusive to modern scholars. Although we can read into and through them for marks of resistance, acquiescence, accommodation, and selfdefinition, there is a sense in which they remain fragmentary, incomplete, and frustratingly silent for us. After all, why would Native American communities necessarily embrace literacy? What does it mean that missionaries like Eleazar Wheelock provided for the education of Native women yet cared little about what they wrote? Why were these women that interested in engaging in the world of print culture, so dominated by men? How do we measure alternative worlds/words when our access to early America is so heavily informed by texts? print culture and the power of native literacy

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Perhaps by relying on a close and nuanced understanding of Native written texts we can begin to imagine the world beyond them.

Notes 1. Helen Hunt Jackson, Glimpses of California and the Missions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903), 154–58. 2. Scholars have examined the spread of literacy among Indians elsewhere in colonial North America. For representative works, see E. Jennifer Monaghan, “ ‘She Loved to Read in Good Books’: Literacy and the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1643–1725,” History of Education Quarterly 30 (Winter 1990): 493–521; Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 28–47; William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 350–54; and Bernardo P. Gallegos, Literacy, Education, and Society in New Mexico, 1693–1821 (Albuquerque, 1992). 3. See, for example, Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Caroline Castiglione, “Adversarial Literacy: How Peasant Politics Influenced Noble Governing of the Roman Countryside during the Early Modern Period,” American Historical Review (June 2004) http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ ahr/109.3/castiglione.htmlœ (February 2, 2009); and James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 4. J. Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12, 8. 5. F. W. Grubb, “Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research,” Social Science History 14, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 452; David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1980). 6. This was certainly the case at Mission Santa Cruz, where the padres stated, “Proof enough that they desire to learn no more is the fact that many of them once learning to read, and indeed well, never advance to the art of writing” (Maynard J. Geiger and Clement Woodward Meighan, eds. and trans., As the Padres Saw Them: California Indian Life and Customs As Reported by the Franciscan Missionaries, 1813–1815 [Santa Barbara, 1976], 37). 7. Archives of California, Prov. St. Pa. B. Mil. iv, 601, 663–94. 8. Grubb, “Growth of Literacy in Colonial America,” 453; Bruce Curtis, “Some Recent Work on the History of Literacy in Canada,” History of Education Quarterly 30 (Winter 1990): 615–17. 9. Monaghan, “‘She Loved to Read in Good Books,’” 493. 10. On Franciscan practices in California and responses to them and the mission, see Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) 11. Geiger and Meighan, As the Padres Saw Them, 35–37. At Mission San Carlos groups of boys learned to read and write and were then employed “in all church functions” (ibid., 36). 12. In general, Spanish society had sought to control literacy, and since the 1560s the Spanish Inquisition had sought to preserve religious orthodoxy in Spain’s colonies through a rigorous

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control over what appeared in print. This was true in Alta California, where book ownership was monitored and at least one soldier was brought before the Inquisition for authoring scandalous poetry. Literacy, in Spanish culture, was also closely tied to the acquisition and protection of private property. But Spaniards saw California Indians as having no private property worth protecting, so they felt they were under no obligation to teach them literacy. 13. Mina Hewes and Gordon Hewes, eds., “Indian Life and Customs at Mission San Luis Rey: A Record of California Mission Life Written by Pablo Tac, an Indian Neophyte” (Rome, [ca. 1835]), reprinted in Edward D. Castillo, Native American Perspectives on the Hispanic Colonization of Alta California (New York, 1991), 41–42. 14. Ibid., 98. 15. On the Chumash rebellion, see James A. Sandos, “levantamiento! The 1824 Chumash Uprising Reconsidered,” Southern California Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 109–33, and “Levantamiento! The 1824 Chumash Uprising,” The Californians: The Magazine of California History 5 (January/February 1987): 8–20. 16. For the quotation, see Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos históricos,” I, 290, C-D Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. For more on Pacomio, see Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, Building and Builders in Hispanic California, 1769–1850 (Tucson and Santa Barbara: Southwestern Mission Research Center and the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, 1994), 106–7. 17. For more on literate Indians during the period of mission secularization, see Hackel, Children of Coyote, 375–84. 18. For background on the 1826 decree, see Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, 7 vols. (San Francisco, 1884–90), 3:102–3. For the decree itself, see José María Echeandía, circular letter to presidial districts of San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Monterey, July 25, 1826, Monterey, copy made by José María Estudillo, August 1826, in Taylor Collection, unnumbered, at end of box 9, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. 19. Juan Santos to Prefect, July 27, 1839, Pueblo of San Jose, Archives of Monterey, doc. no. 1560, C-A 150, reel 9, 475, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. 20. Pacifico, Mansueto, and Francisco Javier to Echeandía, October 23, 1826, San Buenaventura, Archivo General de la Nacíon, California (hereafter cited as AGN CA) 18, Expediente 33, 458a–458b. 21. At the time of the petition, there were some 850 Indians at the mission. Pacifico et al., “Memorandum of the Neophytes who have presented themselves with all submission asking for their departure,” October 23, 1826, San Buenaventura, AGN CA 18:33:459a–459b. 22. Pacifico, Gervasio, and Peregrino María, October 28, 1826, San Buenaventura, AGN CA 18:33:457a–457b. On Suñer, see Maynard Geiger, OFM, Franciscan Missionaries in Hispanic California, 1769–1848: A Biographical Dictionary (San Marino, Calif., 1969), 252–53. 23. Pacifico, Gervasio, and Peregrino María, November 23, 1826, San Diego, AGN CA 18:33:460a–460b. 24. Suñer, December 19, 1826, Mission San Buenaventura, AGN CA 18:33:461a–462b. 25. Scholars have given this rebellion close attention, but none has examined it in the context of expanding literacy in mid-nineteenth-century California. On the rebellion, see George Harwood Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California (Berkeley, 1975). 26. Antonio Garra to José Antonio Estudillo, November 21, 1851, Daily Alta California, December 3, 1851, quoted in Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 77.

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27. For further evidence of Cota’s Spanish-language literacy, see Manuelito Cota to Cave Couts, March 1, 1862, document CT 193, Couts Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. 28. Antonio Garra to Joaquín Ortega, November 28, 1851, document CT 1522, Couts Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. 29. Quotation in Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 110. 30. Michael Clark, ed., The Eliot Tracts (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 83 31. Ibid., 206 32. Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts, ed. Laura Liebman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 33. David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 34. Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), 447, 445, 449. 35. Ibid., 14. 36. Eleazar Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and present State of the Indian Charity School at Lebanon, in Connecticut (Boston, 1763), 18 (italics in original). 37. Ibid., 25. 38. Ibid., 36–37. 39. James D. McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Manuscript Series, 1932), 63–64. 40. Ibid., 60–61. 41. Ibid., 118. 42. Wheelock, Plain and Faithful Narrative, 15. 43. Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 218–31. 44. McCallum, Letters, 238. 45. Ibid., 230. 46. Eleazar Wheelock Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon, in Connecticut (Hartford, 1771), 17, 19–20. 47. McCallum, Letters, 228. 48. Ibid., 47; Joanna Brooks, ed., The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 144–58; Laura Murray, ed., To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 80–166. 49. For more on Brotherton, in addition to Brooks, Collected Writings; McCallum, Letters; and Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, see W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (1899), intro. Margaret Connell Szasz (repr., Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), and Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 123–53. 50. McCallum, Letters, 239. 51. Ibid., 66.

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part iv Creating Communities

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hendrick aupaumut christian- mahican prophet Rachel Wheeler

In April 1819, the Reverend Levi Parsons set out on a tour to raise money for his upcoming mission to the Jews in the Holy Land. Like many contemporary Christians, Parsons believed conversion of the Jews would hasten Christ’s Second Coming. His stop in New Stockbridge, New York, proved especially weighty, for in his audience sat several dozen listeners who appeared to him as sons of Abraham — members of the Mahican Nation. Parsons preached with fervor from Romans 10:1, “Brethren my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved.” The topic would not have been altogether new to the Stockbridge Indians, for their regular minister, John Sergeant, had found occasion in the past to preach on the subject of the millennium and the special role of the Jews in the latter days. Parsons passed the hat after the sermon, collecting $5.87 to support his mission to the Jews. Hendrick Aupaumut, chief sachem of the Muhheakunnuk (Mahican) Nation, presented Parsons with two gold ornaments, several baskets, and a lantern with an inscription that read, “This to illumine the streets of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is my chief joy.” Aupaumut then delivered a remarkable address to the assembly of “head men of the remnant of the Children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob commonly called Jews, at or about Jerusalem,” to affirm their kinship with the descendants of the original chosen people, a kinship made more poignant by their common status as diaspora peoples.1 By way of introduction, Aupaumut recounted his people’s history. He told how his forefathers had worshiped the Great Spirit with sacrifices until one day eighty-four years ago a white man by the name of John Sergeant (father of the

Stockbridges’ present minister) arrived at their fireside as “one of the messengers of the great and good Spirit.” From Sergeant, they learned that “jesus Christ was sent into this world to save poor sinners that he was crucified and had again rissen from the dead and had gone into the heaven.” Aupaumut wished to inform his Jewish brethren that the people of the Mahican Nation were “siting [sic] at the front door to the house,” with their friends, Unnannaumpauh, “commonly called Indians” [i.e., people of other Indian nations], sitting to the west. Having recounted a bit of Mahican history, Aupaumut turned to Jewish history. The Bible taught that “all nations in the world descend from one man and woman, and that Jesus, a member ‘of the Jewish Tribe,’ came to die for all, so,” wrote Aupaumut, “we can call you brothers and address you as such.” This world might not hold much promise for Jews or for Indians, but Aupaumut had hopes for the next. He looked forward to the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, when “you are to return from different parts of the world to the country of your ancestors,” and to a day when there would be “no distinction between the different Tribes, wheather white, red or black.” Aupaumut concluded with an exhortation: “If you and Annunnaumpauh [sic] or Indians would be faithfull to the end, truly worship the great and good spirit, we shall meet and see each other at the great day of Jesus when you and all the faithfull Gentiles will be received into heaven or Wohwekoiyewwonkunnuhneh uhtauk mauth chaick annemenauwonkun, or when there is full of peace and joy and consummate happiness.”2 A common creation, devotion to the Great Spirit, and a savior who waited for his faithful people of all colors in a promised land of peace. This vision guided Aupaumut’s long career as leader of the Stockbridge Mahicans during the early decades of the American Republic. Aupaumut’s vision is particularly noteworthy for several reasons: first, it represents yet another variation (albeit a unique one) of what scholars have come to call Christian republicanism, and second, it stands in marked contrast to the increasingly racialized and nativistic philosophies embraced by many of his contemporaries, both Euro-American and Indian. Finally, and most important, Aupaumut’s writings provide insight into the legacy of mission encounters in the formation of Christian-Indian identity. Seen as a visionary whose actions reflected not simply the expediency of an intercultural broker or accommodationist but the creative merging of Christian and Mahican traditions into a new framework of corporate identity, Aupaumut gains new interest as a historical figure.3 Just as Aupaumut challenged the prevailing tendencies toward racialist thinking in his day, so his story should challenge historians to abandon a long-

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standing focus on the question of cultural authenticity. This can be done by studying Aupaumut alongside other Native prophets of his era, and for this, a return to Anthony F. C. Wallace’s theory of revitalization can be particularly helpful in that it dissolves the nativist/accommodationist dichotomy that has long characterized the writing of Indian history. In Wallace’s classic definition, a revitalization movement is a “deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.” Often led by individuals who themselves have experienced acute stress, these movements appear in a number of variations — utopian, revivalistic, millennialist, messianic, or reformist — yet all follow a common process. Since Wallace, revitalization has become so closely linked to resistance movements that we miss important opportunities to understand “nativist” and “accommodationist” movements as two different answers to the same question of how best to adapt to new circumstances while maintaining continuity with the past.4 For the most part scholars have not studied Native Christianity as a subcategory of revitalization movements. The question is more than semantic. The reluctance to engage Indian Christianity as a form of cultural revitalization suggests a lingering, often unconscious, fixation on the idea of “authenticity.” Deviations from both Native culture and Christianity are measured from the moment of contact. We ask how Indians “used” Christianity in defense of “traditional” culture or believe that Native Christians imbibed the missionary presumption of Indian inferiority together with the communion wine. The premise behind these questions creates an interpretive dilemma: either Native Christians are sincere and therefore oppressed, or they resist oppression and are therefore insincere Christians. Further confusion arises from the historical Protestant bias of religious studies scholarship that prioritizes belief over practice. Thus, both the exclusivist Christian view and traditional academic understandings of religion keep us from appreciating what Jace Weaver terms the dimorphism of Native traditions. Understanding Native Christianity as a revitalization movement provides a way out of this interpretive quagmire, allowing full recognition of the dynamics of colonial power and Indian agency.5 Perhaps ironically, recent work by missiologists studying African Christianity provides the additional interpretive tools necessary to consider the revitalization implications of Native American Christianity. Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh’s scholarship is rooted in the premise that Christianity has always been inculturated by the host society. This seemingly commonsensical idea challenges imperialistic claims of missionaries to be the sole arbiters of Christian truth and provides the basis for examining how the indigenous Christianity that emerged

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from the missions spoke to the subjective experiences of Indian individuals and communities, while also recognizing the severe cultural tensions that almost always arose with the development of Christian and non-Christian factions.6 What happens, then, if we consider Hendrick Aupaumut as a prophet of cultural revitalization? First, we can appreciate that both nativist and Christian revitalization movements are answers to the question of how to maintain continuity with the past, make sense of the present, and chart a path for the future. As revitalizers, Aupaumut and the nativist prophets all drew on indigenous and imported elements to create a new cultural system that promoted the physical and spiritual well-being of Native peoples and protected ownership of Native lands. Second, we can more clearly discern the important differences between the various types of revitalizers, differences that cannot be explained simply as defense or abandonment of tradition. Nativism, as defined by Gregory Dowd, does not mean “revitalization of a dead or dying culture” but rather “independence of, and resistance to, direct intervention by the American republic.” Most revitalizers incorporated Christianity’s dualistic worldview that divided humanity into the good and the bad, the saved and the damned, insiders and outsiders. But Aupaumut and nativist prophets drew the demarcating line quite differently. Most nativist prophets emphasized the emerging idea of race as the defining element of identity: the Great Spirit had created distinct red, white, and black people and had ordained different religious codes for each. Aupaumut, in contrast, divided the world between followers of the “Great and Good Spirit” and followers of the evil spirit, believing some of both types to be found among all peoples, regardless of color. Ultimately, then, the difference between Aupaumut and nativist prophets lies not in whether they abandoned or preserved tradition but rather in their stance toward the American Republic: Did they imagine an American Republic with room for Indian brethren, or did they see the existence of the newly formed American Republic as a threat to their existence?7 Aupaumut deserves the attention of historians not only because his extensive writings provide a unique window onto Indian experiences in the early years of the American Republic. Read differently, Aupaumut’s writings document his engagement in the ideological debates of the day. More than a mere echo of white calls for Christian or republican unity (both of which often rested implicitly or explicitly on the exclusion of racial others), Aupaumut’s Christianinflected vision extended the reach of Native fictive kinship ties to forge fraternal bonds of mutual obligation between the citizens of a diverse American Republic. His was a rare voice that articulated a republican vision not dependent on racial difference.8

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The Stockbridge community in which Aupaumut was born and raised came into existence in 1734, nearly a quarter century before Aupaumut’s birth in 1757. Although the Stockbridges came to be the primary claimants to the tribal designation “Mahican,” this should not obscure the fact that Mahican represents an amalgamation of numerous different, and previously loosely affiliated, communities from the Hudson to the Housatonic River valley, including Mahican proper, Housatonic, Esopus, and Wappinger, among others. In many respects, the Stockbridge project would be a model for Aupaumut’s later efforts to blend Native traditions with new imports from colonial society — particularly Christianity, literacy, and English husbandry — in the project of creating and preserving community. The mission community was the result of talks between members of two Housatonic-Mahican villages and Massachusetts provincial authorities. The villagers sought new sources of spiritual power, as well as the tools of English “civilization” that would help them negotiate a world increasingly dominated by Europeans. The mission gave residents greater facility with the culture of their neighbors — in this case English colonials — while also serving as an island of secured land for Mahican and Housatonic Indians. Even in the early years of the mission, the Stockbridge Mahicans saw Christianity as a means to buttress traditional notions of fictive kinship, cementing or forging ties of mutual obligation. The ties with powerful colonists promised to increase Mahican capital with Indian nations to the west. Similarly, the Mahicans’ long-standing ties with western Indians, particularly Miamis, Delawares, and Shawnees, accounted in part for the Massachusetts leaders’ interest in securing Mahican allegiance. And more fundamentally, Massachusetts officials sought to settle friendly Indians along the province’s vulnerable frontier, while freeing up more Indian lands for settlement and fulfilling the promise of their forebears to spread the gospel.9 Little is known about Aupaumut’s early life. The accepted date of his birth is May 1757, meaning he may well have been baptized by Jonathan Edwards during the last year of the famous theologian’s service as missionary at Stockbridge. Whether or not Edwards performed the baptism, his theological legacy seems to have left an impression on Aupaumut, as suggested by a letter he wrote to Edwards’s son Timothy. “My friend,” he wrote, “I should be thankful if you would lent me a Book. The Authors is your Father — Concerning Affections or if you han’t such — wish to have the other mention — the Will.” The tone and content of Aupaumut’s letters to Timothy Edwards suggest an easy familiarity and friendship. Such friendships forged during Aupaumut’s youth in Stockbridge

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with some of his English neighbors may have been partially responsible for his later resistance to separatist ideas.10 Beyond personal ties between Indian and white residents of Stockbridge, the Mahicans consistently affirmed their allegiance to their colonial allies by fighting in every war from King William’s War to the Revolution. However constrained Mahican actions may have been by the realities of colonial power, Stockbridge leaders articulated their loyal service as the fulfillment of ancient kinship obligations. Sandwiched between two commanding imperial powers (British and Iroquois), they sought to transform their status into a position of strength, reminding neighbors of the Stockbridge mediating role. Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, the chief sachem (most likely Solomon Uhhaunauwaunmut), in response to the Provincial Congress’s request for Stockbridge assistance, wrote to John Hancock expressing Mahican loyalty to the colonists against the British and offering to broker an alliance with the Iroquois. In return, the Stockbridges expected the Americans would honor the long-standing alliance between the two peoples: whereas once “I was great and you was little, very small,” wrote Uhhaunauwaunmut, now conditions were changed, and “you take care of me and I look to you for protection.” Stockbridge Mahicans offered not only their diplomatic services but also their lives to the American cause, but Stockbridge men soon discovered that colonial and military officials appreciated their contributions irregularly, paid them infrequently, and failed to protect their lands.11 Shortly after the Revolution Aupaumut assumed the role of sachem. As sachem, he steered a course similar to that charted by his predecessors. Through frequent and extensive travel, he maintained ties with tribes to the west and missionary and governmental agencies to the east. Among the western tribes, Aupaumut invoked historical ties of friendship and mutual aid, promoting settled agriculture and Christianity and seeking a safe haven in case of another removal. In return, he offered his knowledge of white ways and the promise that such fluency rendered Indian peoples less susceptible to abuse by whites.12 The historical continuity of Aupaumut’s foreign policy, however, is less important than the imagined continuity as expressed in Aupaumut’s writings. In various writings and speeches, Aupaumut mythologized the founding of the mission, linking it to an ancient Mahican past, thereby affirming the Stockbridge Mahicans as the true heirs to the Muhheakunnuk legacy.13 When Aupaumut narrated his people’s history from the vantage point of the late eighteenth century, he highlighted migration, piety, and facility with neighboring cultures as the central features of Mahican heritage. While it takes a different form, Aupaumut’s account of his peoples’ origins is not unlike that of nativist prophets: all recounted their people’s origin in a way that established 230

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continuity between the distant past, their current circumstances, and the future renewal of ancient values through prescribed action. By narrating a past in which proto-Christian virtues were espoused, Aupaumut transforms the Mahican acceptance of a Christian missionary into a decision to restore ancient values that had been abandoned by other Indian peoples. If Aupaumut’s published histories emphasize internal community values, his letters and speeches often highlight Mahican diplomatic ideals, especially Mahican loyalty to the ties of fictive kinship. Like his letter to the Jews, these accounts underscore the Mahican position as the “front door” to other Indian nations through which neighboring peoples must pass in order to ensure peaceable relations. The metaphor — especially intriguing given the Shawnee prophet’s moniker, “the Open Door” — implied that Mahican mediation was vital to maintaining peaceful relations among diverse peoples. According to Aupaumut, Mahican homelands lay to the west. These ancestral Muhheakunnuk peoples were “more civilized than what Indians are now in the wilderness,” asserted Aupaumut, living in towns and villages and cultivating crops of squash, corn, and beans. They were pious, worshipping “one Supreme Being who dwells above, whom they style Waun-theet Mon-nit-toow, or the Great, Good Spirit, the author of all things in heaven and on earth.” With the inculcation of core values in children and a rule of government that was “democratical,” the Muhheakunnuk people lived an Edenic existence until they were driven from their homeland by famine. Forced to seek a new home, the people moved east until they came upon the “great waters or sea, which are constantly in motion,” which reminded them of “Muhheakunnuk our nativity.” During the hard journey, they “lost their ways of former living and apostasized.” Aupaumut’s account of Muhheakunnuk history carefully establishes that his people abided by Christian precepts long before Europeans arrived in the New World. He is thus able to acknowledge the current strains on Mahican culture and present the introduction of Christianity as a means of reviving rather than supplanting ancient Mahican ways.14 Aupaumut’s account of Stockbridge’s founding is particularly illuminating. According to Aupaumut, a council of sachems, counselors, and young men (about two hundred in all) gathered to weigh the Massachusetts’ proposal of a missionary to be sent among them. Despite the dissenting voices, the council decided not to reject the offer out of hand. Rather, the people should “let it [the gospel] be preached in one certain village, and let every man and woman go to hear it and embrace it; if they think best.” The village chosen was “Waunahkqtokaher (or Housatonack),” and there, explained Aupaumut, “my nation were collected, such as were disposed to hear the gospel.” In Aupaumut’s telling, opponents hendrick aupaumut

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to the plan were not those who defended tradition but rather those who had “learned to follow the examples of the bad white people, particularly in drinking the poisonous liquours to excess.” Residents from various villages gathered to listen to Sergeant’s preaching, but others remained suspicious of Christianity, and these, according to Aupaumut, came under the influence of “some wicked Dutch people” and “ardent spirits.” Those who didn’t join the mission community eventually drifted away, some to “live among other nations” and the rest to be “buried under the earth.” Consequently, their villages “are, as it were desolated, and possessed by the whites.” Housatonic, later incorporated as the town of Stockbridge, was the only village to survive, “and the descendants of that, who embrace the civilization and Christian religion, are now still remaining as a nation.” When Aupaumut surveyed the fate of other Mahican communities, he noted that the Stockbridges were the only Mahicans “now still remaining as a nation,” which he attributed to their embrace of “the civilization and Christian religion.” Christianity and allegiance to ancient ties of kinship were the keys to preserving ancient Muhheakunnuk values.15


As sachem of the Stockbridge Mahicans in the decades around the turn of the century, Hendrick Aupaumut translated history into policy; he drew from his understanding of Mahican history to chart the future of his people. Read in this way, Aupaumut’s diplomacy emerges more clearly as a project of revitalization. In the decisive decade of the 1790s, Aupaumut did what he could to cement the dependence of the western Indian confederacy and the United States on Mahican service as intermediaries, promoting selective adaptation of Christianity and the “arts of civilization” to Indian neighbors while exhorting American officials to fulfill the kinship obligations to the Indians. To both, he promoted a vision of a virtuous republic composed of independent white and red nations united by a common devotion to “the great and good spirit.” The larger dynamics of American Indian relations eventually presented insurmountable obstacles to the realization of Aupaumut’s vision. U.S. Indian policy during the early decades of the American Republic evolved as a jumble of humanitarian rhetoric, military incursions in the name of defending white settlers, and the eventual extinction of Native ways of life. With their victory in the Revolutionary War, Americans imperiously laid claim to the lands of the British-allied tribes of the Ohio and Great Lakes regions. Not surprisingly, the Native owners resisted this claim. Early efforts by tribal confederacies to challenge the U.S. military were never entirely successful, but the border warfare was enough to convince some American officials that the 232

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young nation should avoid an all-out Indian war. Instead, the new nation was to deal fairly with Indian peoples, restraining American settlers and offering just compensation for land. In addition, missionary efforts were resuscitated with a newfound commitment to helping the poor heathen make the inevitable transition to a civilized state. But despite the softer rhetoric, the U.S. government did little to enforce the line of settlement, and violence continued, ultimately culminating in General Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers and the subsequent Treaty of Greenville in August 1795, which transferred much of what is now south-central Ohio to the United States and effectively marked the end of united opposition to American expansion. In short, U.S. Indian policy in the early Republic sought at once to “civilize” the Indians by encouraging them to abandon their traditional gendered economy in favor of the European model of individual landownership, male agricultural labor, and female domestic labor. Settled on small family farms, Indians would need less land, thereby making more available for European settlement. At the same time, the United States acquired Native lands by refusing to prevent settler incursions into Indian Territory and by encouraging dependency that could be leveraged into land concessions. Though decidedly contradictory, the policy possessed the virtue (in the minds of its formulators) of acquiring Indian lands without the cost in dollars and human lives of an all-out war.16 Aupaumut’s career as sachem spanned these crucial decades and is surprisingly well documented — evidence survives for at least five attempted embassies to the western Indians of the Ohio and Great Lakes regions. From 1807 to 1815, Aupaumut was living among the White River settlements in Indiana and continued to travel regularly. Aupaumut’s first opportunity to articulate his vision of the Mahican “front door” to the United States came at the Treaty of Painted Post held at Newtown Point (present-day Elmira, New York) in June 1791. Colonel Timothy Pickering had been sent by the federal government to confirm a peace with the Iroquois and to scout for an emissary to carry the new government’s message of peace to the hostile tribes to the west. According to Aupaumut, the Oneidas (among whom the Stockbridges lived) had requested the Mahican presence at the treaty, and so Aupaumut and his party set out from New Stockbridge in early June on a mission to meet with the western Indians with the hope of negotiating a peace. Securing a commission from the federal government would increase the Stockbridge delegation’s negotiating power, and so Aupaumut presented his tribe’s qualifications to Pickering, emphasizing why Mahicans were better qualified for the role than the Iroquois. He argued that Mahicans had been “a true friend to the people of my own colour” while the Iroquois had long waged brutal wars against the western Indians. Further, hendrick aupaumut

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Aupaumut explained to Pickering, the Mahicans were bound to the western tribes by ties of kinship. Such connections would strengthen Mahican chances of success in mediating a peace, for the western tribes, Aupaumut affirmed, had “always paid great respect to my advice,” sure that the Mahicans “know more of the white people than any other Indians.” Finally, unlike the Iroquois, the Muhheakunnuk were “your true and nearest brother” whose “blood has been spilt with yours.” In what must have been an ironic reminder of American betrayals of the Mahicans, Aupaumut asserted that his people fought purely from filial loyalty and not for land, for “I had no territory to fight for, nor had I to fight for liberty; for liberty I always possessed.” This was classic Stockbridge policy: emphasizing the Mahican role as “front door” and underscoring faithful execution of kinship obligations as a means of exacting the same from allies. Pickering was persuaded — the western Indians were another matter.17 Aupaumut’s party would not reach their destination on this journey because they were stopped by British officers at Niagara, suspected of being spies for the Americans. Although Aupaumut may never have delivered his intended speech to the Shawnees, the speech reveals much about Mahican diplomatic strategy. Like his address to Pickering, the speech to the Shawnees was rhetorically masterful, legitimating Shawnee complaints while also invoking Shawnee status as younger brothers in the effort to compel them to accept a Mahican-negotiated peace. Aupaumut first reminded the Shawnees of the covenant of friendship that existed between their forefathers and how “we saved you from being destroyed by your enemies.” Just as the Mahicans had once before rescued their threatened younger brothers, so now they stood ready to mediate an “honourable peace” between the Shawnees and the United States, sparing them from destruction. Aupaumut’s loyalty to the Americans was principled, not unthinking, and as evidence, Aupaumut stood ready to promise the Shawnees “if those people with whom you are at war [i.e., the United States], shall refuse to listen to a just and honourable peace,” then “we can join with you against them.”18 Aupaumut attempted the journey again in the summer of 1792, charged by the U.S. secretary of war, Henry Knox, “to convince them [the western Indians] of the moderation, justice, and desire of the United States for peace.” He and his counselors spent several days exchanging ceremonial greetings with the gathered tribes and spreading the news of the United States’ message of peace, with the result that “some of the principal chiefs” now spoke well of the peace plan, where once “there was not one man to be found that would speak in favor of the United States.” His method, as usual, had been to emphasize the Muhheakunnuks’ loyalty to their Indian brethren and to counsel trust in Mahican mediation. Whatever his successes, Aupaumut still had formidable ob234

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stacles to overcome; among the gathered nations, Shawnee warriors remained steadfastly against a peace with the United States.19 On July 16, Aupaumut prepared to deliver the speech of the United States to the western confederate Indians. Aupaumut acknowledged that he too had been suspicious of the U.S. government’s intentions, having been neglected by the new nation following victory over the British. But, he explained to the gathered tribes, he had accepted an “invitation from the great man of the United States” to attend a council in Philadelphia, and there he discovered “that the business was for the wellfare of all nations.” There, Aupaumut had been asked to carry this message to the upcoming council, to which he readily agreed, “for the sake of our good friendship, and for peace.” Again, Aupaumut stressed fidelity to the ancient ties that bound the Mahicans to many of the Indian nations present.20 Aupaumut attempted to win the western tribes over to peace by arguing, in effect, that the newly formed American Republic resembled traditional Native governance in that the power of leaders depended on the consent of the governed. He assured the gathered Indian leaders that the “United Sachems will not speak wrong” and would honor any promises made to the Indians “because out of 30,000 men, they chuse one men [sic] to attend in their great Council Fire — and such men must be very honest and wise, and they will do justice to all people.” In this description, representatives functioned as sachems whose power rested on the consent of the governed, rather than on the power of coercion. For Aupaumut, proof of the new government’s intentions was to be found in the renewed interest in missionary work among the Indians. Since gaining their independence, noted Aupaumut, “they [the Americans] begin with new things, and now they endeavour to lift us up the Indians from the ground, that we may stand up and walk ourselves” Aupaumut was pleased that the Americans were apparently returning to the strategy of diplomacy long embraced by Mahicans: education in the ways of neighboring cultures.21 But while Aupaumut may have persuaded some of the western Indians that the United States harbored only good intentions, the confederacy remained deeply divided, and negotiations ultimately failed over the issue of the boundary between American and Indian territory — the western Indians insisting on the Ohio River and the Americans rejecting such terms. When the American commissioners received word in August 1793 that the confederacy would accept no peace without confirmation of the Ohio boundary, they promptly packed up and left, setting in motion the events that ended with the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Aupaumut cited the behavior of the “Big Knives” (the frontier settlers who were examples of the “bad white people”) as the principal obstacle to settling a peace.22 hendrick aupaumut

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After the failed treaty in the summer of 1793, Apuamut would never again figure so centrally in American diplomatic affairs, but he did not abandon his mission. Over the next decades, Aupaumut continued to assert Mahican utility as intermediaries to various parties. And even more than before, Aupaumut promoted his vision of a virtuous republic in which independent Indian communities lived peacefully alongside white followers of the Great Spirit. He pursued this mission by calling on the United States to honor its debt to Mahicans while promoting the Stockbridge way of indigenized Christianity to neighboring tribes. The failure of his efforts in 1793 and the sporadic support of the United States seem only to have further convinced Aupaumut that Indians must regain self-sufficiency and revive ancient values — not through a return to traditional practices but rather through the embrace of Christianity and the “arts of civilization.” This strategy is evident in his address to a gathering of Stockbridges on a day of public thanksgiving in December 1793. Before partaking of the meal, he reminded his people of the reason they had to thank God, for “through the goodness of God, we have been carried throu all the Tryals we have experienced in the year passed” and “we have been allowed to sit together in love and peace and partake of the bounty of heaven.” Most important, the Stockbridges could celebrate their independence and be thankful “not in eating the food we might have obtained from the white people, our neighbours which was our state of dependence in the Country from whence we came, but we have now been fed by the labour of our own hands. This is matter for thankfulness.” Self-sufficiency was no longer possible through hunting, and thus Aupaumut extolled European-style agriculture and husbandry as the best path for cultural revival. That Mahican values remained strong despite the changing means of subsistence is suggested by the fact that following the feast the remaining provisions were distributed to the aged and the poor. The invocation suggests that the value of European husbandry lay not in “reducing” Indians to a state of “civilization,” as both missionaries and government officials imagined, but in providing a means to remain an independent people. The following year, when some young Stockbridge men had advertised in the newspaper to lease their lands to white neighbors, Aupaumut became furious, preferring that the Stockbridges worked the land themselves. He feared such leases opened the door to abuse and, by providing an alternate source of income, kept the Stockbridges from learning the necessary farming and husbandry skills. Aupaumut articulated self-sufficiency as the primary benefit of adopting European-style agriculture and left unspoken the considerable transformation of gender roles and settlement patterns implied by such a change. Agriculture had always played 236

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an important role in Mahican subsistence, but as in most northeastern Native societies, tending the crops was women’s work. The extent of the shift in roles at New Stockbridge is apparent in John Sergeant’s records of the yardage of cloth woven by Stockbridge women.23 Aupaumut’s next recorded mission took place in the spring of 1803, with a journey to Miami, Delaware, and Shawnee communities settled along the White River in what had recently become Indiana Territory. The delegation’s mission was threefold: to renew ancient ties, recommend settled agriculture and Christianity, and confirm the ancient Miami pledge of land to the Mahicans should removal again become necessary. In addition, Aupaumut exhorted the Delaware at the Moravian settlement to forswear alcohol and to accept schoolteachers to teach their children to read and write. All these initiatives, to Aupaumut’s mind, were means of preserving community. Influence with their distant kin rested equally on Stockbridge familiarity with white ways and faithfulness to ancient tribal ties. As Aupaumut observed to the Moravians, the White River Indian communities, “having heard that they [the Stockbridges] had been long instructed by the white people, would naturally expect to receive from them just ideas of their arts, sciences and religion and would give more credit to their accounts, than to any thing that could be said to them by missionaries or others that were not of their color.” If the Stockbridges were to be the source of life-giving advice to tribal kin, they were also the key intermediaries that could provide missionaries with access to western Indian peoples. In recounting the accomplishments of the 1803 journey to representatives of the Hampshire (Massachusetts) Missionary Society, Aupaumut emphasized the sway of the Stockbridges over western tribes, reminding the visitors, “We look upon ourselves as the front door, by and through which you can go through all the different Tribes.”24 The Stockbridge party reached the White River communities in the spring of 1803. In a speech delivered to the Delawares, the Stockbridges cited their own experiment, by which “the Muhheakunnuk nation have been endeavouring to learn the arts of civilization and Christian religion.” By long experience, they had discovered “this is the best way for us to live, and much easier than the ancient way.” Tradition was not to be rejected outright but supplemented with new practices better suited to the realities of living in proximity to whites. Do not “forsake your hunting,” counseled the Stockbridges, “nor any of your wholesome customs” but only the bad customs, such as excessive drink introduced by the white followers of the “evil Spirit.” In addition to advising them to adopt English-style husbandry, Aupaumut exhorted the White River Delawares to “have compassion on your young men, women and children” by letting them learn “what our white brothers call abc.” The advantages were legion, as hendrick aupaumut

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Aupaumut explained in an evocative metaphor: “A is like as if you stand at the head of a living stream, the further you follow, you will find it wider, which has no end; and by following it faithfully, you will find various advantages; among other things you will be able to open the eyes of our and your grandchildren, the different tribes in this country, who always look to their grandfathers for advice and council.” Literacy was key to restoring fallen Delaware status among other Indian nations and to securing Delaware lands because, as the Stockbridges discovered, “our white brothers cannot so easily cheat us now with regard to our land affairs as they did our forefathers.” Aupaumut promised that, if the Delawares followed this advice, “the great and good Spirit will bless you, that you will become a wise people, and you will be happy indeed in this life and the life to come: and you will be able to hold your lands to the latest generation, for this is the will of the great and good Spirit.” But if they failed to heed the advice, “you will become poor, in every respect, and you will be scattered; your villages will be desolated or possessed by a people, who will cultivate your lands . . . and finally, you will become extinct from the earth.” The cost of neglecting the Stockbridges’ advice was extinction.25 By this point, the demoralized Delaware communities along the White River had given up fighting the Americans and may have found in Aupaumut’s rhetoric and the Stockbridge example hope for a reasonable accommodation with the United States. Tetepachsit responded the following day with a formal acceptance of the Mahican proposal, thanking the Stockbridges for their “compassionate feelings” toward their grandfathers and announcing, “I and my chief, heroes, young men, women and children, unanimously have agreed to accept, and take hold with both hands all what you have recommended to us.”26 Just weeks after the council on the White River, representatives of the Delaware, Shawnee, Pottawatomie, Miami, and several other tribes ceded most of their lands in what would become Ohio to the United States. Governor William Henry Harrison of Indiana attributed the success of the 1803 treaty in part to Aupaumut’s influence, and with good reason. Signatories Tetepachsit, Buckongahelas, and Chief Little Turtle of the Miamis (whose mother was Mahican) all had close ties to Aupaumut. While at first glance his role in the treaty appears to confirm the view of Aupaumut as a pawn of the United States, another interpretation is possible. In their move to the White River, the Delawares had already abandoned hope of a continued presence in Ohio. Aupaumut offered hope to the Delawares that lands in Indiana would be permanently secured for them and that they could regain their self-sufficiency by following the Stockbridges’ recommendations. Over the next years, Aupaumut labored continuously, and successfully, to secure a permanent residence on the White 238

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River. In 1808, Aupaumut obtained confirmation from President Jefferson of the “right to a certain tract of land of that have been granted by the Miamis to the Delewars-Muhheconnuk and Monsies,” although this promise would later be broken.27 Aupaumut found in democracy and the “civilizing” efforts of missionary societies the promise of ensuring a stable alliance with whites while restoring the virtues of ancient Mahican society. For him, Mahican identity had never been strictly tied to blood; neither was it inextricably linked to means of subsistence. Aupaumut believed that Native identity was best preserved through the preservation of community, which was best achieved by selectively adapting European ways. Aupaumut’s opponents too were deeply troubled by the state of Indian societies, but the nativist prophets believed the cure was to be found in continued resistance to the American Republic.


With his promotion of English-style agriculture and advocacy of Christianity, Aupaumut would seem to have little in common with Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet. And Aupaumut saw the prophet as a threat to his vision — a feeling that was probably mutual. In fact, the two men agreed on much: both believed Indian peoples were suffering tremendously, both advocated union among Indian nations, and both envisioned a world in which “the deplorable situation of our colour” would be ameliorated. Whether advocating or renouncing affiliation with the United States, Aupaumut, Tenskwatawa, and other prophets such as the Seneca Handsome Lake claimed that their teachings upheld the natural order of things and restored ancient Indian values. The need to link the present to the past explains the central place of creation stories in prophetic teachings. The defining difference between Aupaumut and other prophets was in their views of how to relate to the American Republic and thus how they drew the lines of alliance. Aupaumut forged a Mahican-inflected Christian republicanism that sought to bind white and Indian followers of the Great Spirit into a virtuous republic of independent peoples.28 A closer look at Tenskwatawa’s vision prepares the way for a comparison with Aupaumut on three issues in particular: creation stories, explanations of the current circumstances of Native peoples, and prescriptions for cultural revival. Since at least the mid-eighteenth century, many Indians had rebuffed missionary overtures, citing their belief that the Great Spirit had created distinct red and white and black people and had ordained different ways to live in the world for each. It was upon this tradition that nativist prophets from Neolin to Tenskwatawa would build their movements. In a version of Tenskwatawa’s hendrick aupaumut

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vision recounted by Aupaumut, the prophet told of having been “caught up in the 12th heavens . . . twice and sit converse with the great spirit face to face,” where he learned that “Great Creator created or made his nation first before any other people under heaven.” “The Americans,” the Creator revealed, “I did not make. They are not my children, but the children of the Evil Spirit.” Indian peoples’ troubles were the result of association with the Americans, and thus it was only through rejection of American ways and faithful fulfillment of the Creator’s commands, as revealed to Tenskwatawa, that harmony could be restored. Through adherence to new rituals, Tenskwatawa promised he could “obtain a power to overthrow all the Big Knives” so that the Indians could recover the lands taken by whites. Tenskwatawa was commanded by the Creator to teach “all nations of this Island” and warned that if the Indian nations would not heed his call they would be “utterly distroyed by the evil spirits in the air, and great snakes under the earth, they shall be tormented in the darkness by the Devil, untill they shall be burnt to ashes.”29 Like Tenskwatawa, Aupaumut believed there were distinct peoples in the world: followers of the “Great and Good Spirit” and followers of the “Evil Spirit.” But whereas the Shawnee prophet placed whole nations into one category or another, Aupaumut rejected a racialized division of humanity, insisting that good and evil people could be found among Indians and white. Throughout his career, Aupaumut rejected exclusivist claims. He lauded whites who were “no respector of colour,” praised Indians who “have a true human feeling towards their fellow creatures both White, Red and Black,” and sought to forge alliances based on a belief in common ancestry in Adam and Eve.30 The scattered records chronicling Aupaumut’s career contain numerous expressions of his Christian-Mahican republicanism. The first mentions of this vision appear in the narrative of his 1792 journey, in which he enjoined members of the confederacy to distinguish between the “Big Knifes” and the “great men of the United States,” arguing that “if the great men of the United States have the like principal [sic] or disposition as the Big Knifes had, my nation and other Indians in the East would [have] been long ago anihilated.” Aupaumut considered the Big Knives outcasts from their home society, who ran away “because they were very mischivous, such as theives and robbers and murderers,” and were trying to escape punishment. Such sorts of people could be found in all societies: “We the Indians have such people also.”31 Aupaumut believed Indian communities had suffered tremendously from contact with “evil-minded” white people, whose influence created “what white people commonly call Savages.” Aupaumut’s 1803 speech to the Delawares made the same distinction:

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As there was and is two great spirits, the one holy and good, and the other bad; likewise there has been and is two sorts of white people, who follow two different paths; the one believes the great and good Spirit, and the other the evil spirit. And I will now tell you further, that the one loves the Indians in general, and the other has no compassion on them. The one has been endeavouring to civilize and christianize them; and the other has taught them to drink the poisonous liquors to excess, and many other wicked practices. This has been the case with the different tribes elsewhere, ever since white people came over to this island. Some of the tribes accepted the offers of the good white people, but the rest with contempt rejected them and took hold, with both hands, of the cup of the evil-minded. Aupaumut agreed with Tenskwatawa that abandoning ancient values and following the example of white followers of the evil spirit caused Indian suffering. Nativists and Aupaumut alike empowered their followers by locating the blame for current circumstances internally — if the fault was within, then internal transformation could ameliorate their situation. Whereas Tenskwatawa’s movement encouraged the development of a pan-Indian identity, resistance to the Americans, and the rejection of white ways, Aupaumut advocated selective adaptation and alliance with the followers of the “good spirit” from all nations. Although his language was quite different, Aupaumut too exhorted his listeners to heed his advice lest they be destroyed. To survive in the new world created by Europeans, Indians would have to learn the arts of European civilization. Therefore, Aupaumut welcomed the commitment of the United States to “put their hands on us, and lead us in the means of life untill we could stand and walk as they are.” In retrospect, such hope may seem naïve, but the relative independence and self-sufficiency of his community at New Stockbridge offered hope.32 Aupaumut rooted his republican vision in the Mahican tradition of the “front door,” drawing further support from the biblical account of creation. For Aupaumut, the moral of the story of Adam and Eve was that all humans were bound together by kinship obligations. In an 1803 letter to William Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, Aupaumut established a common fraternity with whites. “Brother, attend,” he began the letter, immediately justifying the use of the fictive kinship term: “the reason I call you brother, is because I firmly believe that you and I sprong from one man, whose name was Adam.” Kinship was further cemented by Mahican covenant with early English settlers, con-

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firmed by “sealing it with their blood, in all your wars against white nations, and their bones testified the same, that lay among yours in many places.” Aupaumut used similar language in his letter to the Jews, written in 1819, informing them that “all nations in the world descend from one man and woman, and that Jesus came to die for all, so we can call you brothers and address you as such.” Aupaumut’s conviction of common humanity led him to warn against exclusivist ideologies and praise those who were no “respector of colour” and who were “willing to hold friendship with our nation tho’ of different language and complexion from yours.”33 Aupaumut vigorously opposed nativism among whites or Indians. As the Shawnee prophet’s movement gathered speed in the White River area among the Shawnee, Delaware, and Miami settlements, Aupaumut moved to the region, hoping to counter the prophet’s influence and promote his own plan for Indian welfare. Aupaumut felt duty bound to “cut off the Prophets influence.” If the prophet was not silenced, Aupaumut believed, “the price will be we shall war with one another merely for one man’s deadly poisonous tongue.”34 Aupaumut most clearly articulated his reasons for opposing nativist ideas and promoting a republican vision when responding to messengers from the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, who arrived in New Stockbridge in the summer of 1805 bearing a message of pan-Indian unity. Aupaumut did not oppose traditional ceremonies but objected to their practice to the exclusion of others. He thanked the prophet’s emissaries for “their good counsels” and told them, “We are well pleased to find you are so faithful in delivering what you believe is right and good,” praising in particular their resolution to forsake alcohol. But, he warned, “you must not depend on the Prophet you speak of alltogether for instruction, but you and we must depend on the good spirit alltogether.”35 Aupaumut recommended instead that education be broad. The visitors’ chiefs, counseled Aupaumut, should “give liberty to your young men and women, that you and they may go to hear the Ministers of the Gospel.” If white people offer to teach them to read and write, and instruct them in Christ’s religion, they should avail themselves of the opportunity “because by learning to read and write you may know the mind and will of the great and good spirit.” Recommending the Stockbridge model, Aupaumut informed the messengers: “We give liberty to our young men and women to go and hear the Ministers of the gospel any where. Also to come here to hear and see the ancient way of worship of your forefathers and if any should find in his mind to be his duty to join this or that society we will not forbid them because if you and we use both these means, then when one fails, the other may stand, but if you and we depend only on the one instrument, and neglect all the rest then when the one fails you and I 242

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must come to ruin.” Separatist movements, Aupuamut believed, could not secure Indian survival. “We don’t respect this party or that,” he asserted, “but we love them all alike.” Tolerance, a broad education, and respect for kin constituted Aupaumut’s program of revival. The course Aupaumut steered for his tribe was thus not simply strategic assimilation but the product of a complex ideology with roots in Mahican tradition and Christian theology.36


By the time Aupaumut wrote the letter to the “Children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” in 1819, his hope that a Christian-Mahican republicanism could triumph over American and Indian forms of nativism had faded. The previous summer, in July 1818, a party of Stockbridges had set out from New Stockbridge to take up residence along the White River in Indiana on the tract of land, consisting of one hundred miles square, given them by the Miamis. But there may have been an additional reason for their departure. A visitor to New Stockbridge noted that “Captain Hendrick and his tribe” had “formed a new tribe of about 50 souls,” with John Metoxen as chief, for the “express purpose of preventing the Delawares from selling their land.” On the eve of their departure, the initial migrants drew up and signed a document in which they vowed to “covenant, and ingage each other with the gracious help of the Lord to conform ourselves to our confession carefully watch over each other and follow all the ordinances of the gospel so far as God in his providence shall afford us opportunity.” Within months of their arrival at the White River, however, the new settlers discovered that the state of Indiana was eyeing the land as a possible location for its state capital, and the government refused to honor Stockbridge claims. Eventually, the Indiana contingent and the remaining population from New Stockbridge settled on the Fox River in Wisconsin. They were able to purchase the land with compensation from the federal government for their lost territory, although there would be several more moves before the Stockbridges took up their permanent home in Shawano County, Wisconsin, in 1856 — a quarter century after Aupaumut’s death.37 As chief sachem of the Stockbridge Indians, Hendrick Aupaumut located himself within a long tradition of Mahican diplomacy that rested on familiarity with many cultures. He understood his people’s embrace of Christianity as a return to ancient Mahican values. He found in Christianity a basis for a universal fraternity within which the traditional fictive kin relationships would be reinforced rather than destroyed. In American democracy, Aupaumut found a revival of traditional Mahican governing principles. He envisioned a world in which self-sufficient Indian states could exist peacefully side by side with white hendrick aupaumut

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Americans, with peace ensured by a shared commitment to Christian fraternity, renewed periodically through performance of the ancient rituals of fictive kinship. Aupaumut promoted the adoption of white ways not so that Indians would melt away into the larger sea of white society but so that they might stand a chance of maintaining vibrant, independent communities. In April 1819, when Levi Parsons stopped in New Stockbridge on his tour to raise funds for a mission to the Jews, the Stockbridges’ future was bleak. Aupaumut’s hopes of extending traditional kinship ties through the universalism of the Christian creation story seemed doomed. Revolutionary promises of liberty and democracy proved not to apply to Indian peoples. For the most part, tribal and colonial peoples had settled into essentialized definitions of identity that affirmed a vast chasm between Indian and white. Nearing the end of his life and dismayed that that chasm seemed only to be growing wider, Aupaumut turned his thoughts to the next world, hoping the distant Jews, a diaspora people like the Stockbridges, would prove faithful to the vision of universalism and ensure a happy reunion on a day when “there will be no distinction between the different Tribes, wheather white, red or black.”38

Notes 1. John Sergeant, diary entry dated April 8, 1819, Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, Records, 1794–1892, Dartmouth Archives, Hanover, N.H. (hereafter cited as DA); John Sergeant diary, September 12, 1794, Harvard University Grants for Work among the Indians, Journals of John Sergeant, 1790–1809, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as HUA). The Stockbridges had recently learned that their planned removal to Indiana, to a tract of land promised them by their Miami kin, had been thwarted by the United States’ suspect purchase of the land (Sergeant diary, January 23, July 1, 1819, DA; Aupaumut to Pickering, December 29, 1808, 43:234, Timothy Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. [hereafter cited as TPP]). Parsons was among the first Protestant missionaries to travel to Jerusalem in an effort to convert the Jews (Memoir of Rev. Levi Parsons, Late Missionary to Palestine, ed. Daniel O. Morton [1824; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1977], 217–18). On Mahican history, see Ted J. Brasser, Riding on the Frontier’s Crest: Mahican Indian Culture and Cultural Change (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1974); Philip Colee, “The Housatonic-Stockbridge Indians, 1734–1749” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Albany, 1977); Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Colin G. Calloway, The Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Shirley Dunn, The Mohican World, 1680–1750 (Fleischmanns, N.Y.: Purple Mountain Press, 2000); and Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth Century Northeast (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). 2. This letter is signed by Aupaumut, listed as sachem, and five counselors; throughout this

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essay I have referred in the text to Aupaumut as the signer or speaker when he is the first name among others (Aupaumut excerpt, Sergeant diary, April 8, 1819, DA). Ives Goddard suggests that Aupaumut’s original likely read “Wohwekoiyewwaukunnuk neh uhtauk mauthchoiek annumenauwaukun,” meaning “in heaven, the place where there is universal joy” (Ives Goddard, pers. comm., January 23, 2009). 3. On Aupaumut, see Jeanne Ronda and James P. Ronda, “ ‘As They Were Faithful’: Chief Hendrick Aupaumut and the Struggle for Stockbridge Survival, 1757–1830,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 33 (1979): 43–55; Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of An Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory 43 (1996): 431–57; and Hilary Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 105–22. There is a rich literature on the figure of the intercultural broker; the most significant works are Margaret Connell Szasz, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Nancy Hagedorn, “ ‘A Friend to Go between Them’: The Interpreter as Cultural Broker during AngloIroquois Councils, 1740–1770,” Ethnohistory 35 (1988): 70–80; and Daniel Richter, “Cultural Brokers and Intercultural Politics: New York–Iroquois Relations, 1664–1701,” Journal of American History (1988): 40–67. On the subject of Christian republicanism, two recent works bear noting: Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). On racialized identities, see Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 189–236. 4. Anthony F. C. Wallace, “Revitalization Movements,” American Anthropologist 58 (1958): 264–81, and The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage Books,1969). For a revision of Wallace’s thesis, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See also R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 5. One notable exception is William McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Fortunately, the question of whether native “conversions” were “authentic” has largely gone by the wayside. James Axtell began to deconstruct the question in his essay “Were Indian Conversions Bona Fide?,” in Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 100–121. Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literature and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), vii–viii. 6. To be sure, the vectors of transmission have been more or less violent throughout the history of Christianity, and the degree of violence often predicts the degree of tension experienced by neophytes, individually and communally. See especially Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996); Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002); Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989); and Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003). 7. Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 129.

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8. This essay is a foray into intellectual history. The contours of Hendrick Aupaumut’s thought — his perceptions of tribal and white-Indian relations — are of primary interest. There is, however, extensive information contained in Aupaumut’s writings that could shed significant new light on the intricate relations between the Iroquois, the Indians of the Ohio country, and those of the Great Lakes region. 9. For the Stockbridges’ efforts to affirm traditional kinship ties by recommending Christianity, see their message to the Shawnees in 1739 as recorded in John Sergeant to Stephen Williams, Housatunnuk, May 14, 1739, MS 800, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill.; John Sergeant diary, May 12, 1739, Stiles Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; and Samuel Hopkins, Historical Memoirs Relating to the Housatonic Indians (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1753), 89. 10. “Hendrick A.” to “Hon’ble Timothy Edwards, Esq. Stockbridge or Wunnuqhqtoqhoke,” Stockbridge Public Library, Stockbridge, Mass. The letter has a date of 1775 added by a later hand. Lion Miles suggests a more likely date of the 1790s (Lion Miles, pers. commun.) The book Aupaumut was referring to is A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, published in 1743, and Freedom of the Will, published in 1754. For another of Aupaumut’s letters to Timothy Edwards, see Aupaumut to Timothy Edwards, July 25, 1786, Oneida, Stockbridge Indian Study Collection, HC 2000.115, Stockbridge Public Library, Stockbridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as SISC). On Aupaumut’s birth, Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut,” cites Electa Jones, Stockbridge, Past and Present (Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles and Co., 1854), 119–21, but no year is given there. Ronda and Ronda, “‘As They Were Faithful,’” cites Brasser, Riding on the Frontier’s Crest, and Marion J. Mochon, “Stockbridge-Munsee Cultural Adaptations: ‘Assimilated Indians,’ ” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, no. 3 (1968): 182–219, but Brasser makes no mention of Aupaumut’s date of birth. 11. Copy of a letter from sachem of Stockbridge Indians to John Hancock, president of the Provincial Congress, April 11, 1775, 33:629, Massachusetts Archives, Boston, Mass. For the request of the Congress, see Frazier, Mohicans of Stockbridge, 195–96. 12. Aupaumut was one of two sachems in 1787. See Sachems Joseph Shauquethqueat and Hendrick Aupaumut and four others to “The Honorable Timothy Edwards — Jahleel Woodbridge, Esq. and John Sergeant’s Missy,” New Stockbridge, June 3, 1787, SISC. Leadership generally ran in the female line, as Aupaumut himself asserts in his undated history of the Muhheakunnuk people. 13. Hilary Wyss offers a thoughtful discussion of Aupaumut’s published histories in Writing Indians, 105–22. 14. Aupaumut’s history was published as “Extract from an Indian History,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 1st ser., 9 (1804): 99–102. Another version appears in Jones, Stockbridge, Past and Present, 14–20. 15. The final letter of the town name was likely mistranscribed as an “r” instead of a “t,” which would conform to how Aupaumut spelled the name of the village usually known as Wnahktukook. Quotations are from “Extract from the Indian Journal, being the 6th Speech that was delivered to the Delaware Nation residing at Waupekummekut, or White River, on the 15th day of April, 1803,” in “Letter to the Rev. Mr. Hopkins of Salem,” Massachusetts Missionary Magazine 2 (1804): 468–69. Other accounts of this meeting include one written by Stephen Williams and printed in Nathaniel Appleton, Gospel Ministers Must Be Fit for the Master’s Use (Boston, 1735), iv, and Hopkins, Historical Memoirs, 22–24. 16. Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (East Lansing:

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Michigan State University Press, 1967), 99–101; Richter, Facing East, 226. Much has been written about U.S. Indian policy during this period. See especially Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The American Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1962); Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790–1795 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985); and Richard White, Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On intra- and intertribal tensions debates, see White, Middle Ground, esp. chap. 10, “Confederacies”; Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 6; and Andrew Cayton, “ ‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour’: Power and Civility in the Treaty of Greenville,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew Cayton and Fredricka Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 235–69. 17. These include a 1786 journey, the aborted 1791 mission, and additional diplomatic meetings held in 1792, 1793, 1802, 1808, and 1812 (Sachems Joseph Shauquethqueat and Hendrick Aupaumut and four others to “The Honorable Timothy Edwards — Jahleel Woodbridge, Esq. and John Sergeant’s Missy,” New Stockbridge, June 3, 1787, SISC; Sergeant diary, June 9, 12, 1794, Harvard Grants, HUA; Aupaumut to Timothy Edwards, June 6, 1791, Muhheaconnuck or New Stockbridge, SISC). There are two versions of Aupaumut’s speech in the Pickering Papers, one in vol. 60, folder 69, and the other in vol. 61, folder 236. The former is the corrected version of the latter (Aupaumut’s Speech at Newtown Point as recorded by Timothy Pickering, June 20, 1791, 60:69; Aupaumut, Speech at Newtown Point, June 20, 1791, 61:236, TPP). According to Secretary of War Henry Knox, the purpose of the treaty was “to conciliate the said Indians [Five Nations], and attach them to the United States; to prevent them listening to, or being combined with, the Western hostile Indians.” Secretary of War Henry Knox to Governor Clinton, August 17, 1791, American State Papers, Indian Affairs, vol. 4 (Washington: Gales and Seton, 1832), 169. 18. Sergeant, June 9, 1791, Harvard Grants, HUA. Aupaumut assured the chiefs that “we were independent people, and could go where we pleased,” but he must have realized his task would be more difficult than he had expected (“Aupaumut, Narrative of Journey to Niagara and Grand River,” 59:9, 11, TPP). 19. Secretary of War to General Israel Chapin, May 8, 1792, and Secretary of War, “Instructions to Captain Hendrick Aupaumut, Chief of the Stockbridge Indians,” May 8, 1792, American State Papers, Indian Affairs, 4:233; notes from Pickering’s examination of Aupaumut, February 5, 1793, 59:38, TPP; Hendrick Aupaumut, “A Short Narration of My Last Journey to the Western Contry,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania Memoirs 2 (1827): 78–93, 86–91; Aupaumut to Pickering, December 11, 1792, 59:26, TPP. On the tribal makeup of the communities at the Auglaize, see Helen Hornbeck Tanner, “The Glaize in 1792: A Composite Indian Community,” Ethnohistory 25 (1978): 15–39. 20. Aupaumut, “Short Narration,” 92, 118, 126; see also speech as recorded in Sergeant diary, February 18, 1793, Harvard Grants, HUA. Pickering’s speech at Philadelphia can be found in “The Speech of Timothy Pickering, Commissioner, to the Sachems and Chiefs of the Five Nations,” Philadelphia, April 30, 1792, American State Papers, Indian Affairs, 4:232–33. 21. In his tribal history, probably written in the early 1790s, Aupaumut claimed, “Our ancestors’ Government was Democratical” (Jones, Stockbridge, Past and Present, 20; Aupaumut, “Short Narration,” 127).

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22. Aupaumut, “Sketch of the Western Indians,” in “Religious Intelligence,” Christian Disciple 5 (February 1817): 58–59. By this point the term “Big Knives” was generally used to mean the United States. It had originally referred to the Virginia governor but came to mean backwoods settlers who settled in Indian country, many of whom were from Virginia. Aupaumut was trying to resurrect this meaning. The commissioners had been instructed to confirm the boundaries set at the Treaty of Fort Harmar. They were not to concede the Ohio boundary, even if it was the only means of securing a peace (“Lincoln’s Journal,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 5 (1836): 154, 156, 157, 163–68. For a detailed account of this treaty, see Reginald Horsman, “The British Indian Department and the Abortive Treaty of Lower Sandusky, 1793,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 70 (July 1961): 189–213. 23. Sergeant diary, December 3, 1793, September 9, 1794, Harvard Grants, HUA. On native agricultural patterns and gender roles, see Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). By July 1794, the Stockbridges had purchased thirty sheep and were about to open a spinning school among the women (Sergeant diary, July 20, 1794, Harvard Grants, HUA). See also Aupaumut to John Parrish and Henry Drinker, New Stockbridge, June 19, 1798, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Records, ca. 1745–1983, AA41, box 1, folder 2, Haverford College Archives, Haverford, Pa., and Diary of the Indian Congregation at Goshen on the River Muskingum, January 7, 1803, box 171, folder 12, Records of the Moravian Mission to the Indians of North America, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pa. (hereafter cited as RMM). 24. Diary of the Indian Congregation at Goshen, January 7, 11, 1803, box 171, folder 12, RMM (italics in original). Signed by Aupaumut and six others. Text of Aupaumut’s recounting to representatives of the Hampshire Missionary Society follows an entry dated May 30, 1805, in the Sergeant diary, Harvard Grants, HUA. See also Sergeant letter, July 22, 1804, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians, box 4, folder 13, Philips Library, Salem, Mass. (hereafter cited as SPGAI). 25. The belt of wampum given in confirmation included a piece of paper, sewn on one end, on which was written “ABC 123.” The printed version of this speech does not record what Aupaumut understood to be signified by “B” and “C” (“Extract from the Indian Journal,” Massachusetts Missionary Magazine, 468–70). Traditionally Miami land since 1796, Woapicamikunk had been home to a community of about forty Delaware families, including Buckongahelas. Within miles were other Delaware and Shawnee villages, including the residences of the Delaware-Munsee chiefs, Tetepachsit and Hackinkpomska. In 1797, Tecumseh settled nearby (John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life [New York: Henry Holt, 1997], 99). 26. Response of Tatepuhqsch (Tetepachsit), April 16, 1803, “Extract from the Indian Journal,” Massachusetts Missionary Magazine, 468–70 (italics in original). 27. Sergeant noted in his diary, “From the President of the United States he [Aupaumut] obtained a pattent of this same that it should be the property of said tribes forever” (Sergeant diary, June 25, 1809, Harvard Grants, HUA; “Articles of a treaty between the United States of America, and the Delawares, Shawanoes, Putawatimies, Miamies, Eel River, Weas, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias nations of Indians,” in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, ed. Charles J. Kappler, 7 vols. [Washington: GPO, 1902–71], 2:64–65). For Harrison on Aupaumut’s usefulness, see letter dated June 8, 1803, printed in Massachusetts Missionary Magazine 2 (1804): 471. On Mahican-Miami ties, see Aupaumut, “Short Narration,” 87. On Little Turtle’s parentage, see Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 146.

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28. Aupaumut, Quinney, and Quauquauchmut to William Henry Harrison, April 26, 1803, in “Letter to the Rev. Mr. Hopkins of Salem,” Massachusetts Missionary Magazine, 466. 29. The prophet’s statement about the Americans as children of the Evil Spirit is quoted in Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet, 38; the rest is drawn from Aupaumut’s account of the prophet’s vision. Aupaumut recorded this version as related by Sac emissaries to the Delaware settlement on the White River (Aupaumut to John Sergeant, January 3, 1807 [1808], box 1, folder 6, Dean Family Papers, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Ind.). Also included in Sergeant Sergeant to Rev. Dr. Marsh, New Stockbridge, March 25, 1808, SPGAI 4:14. Early Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian missionaries all encountered the objection that Christianity was intended for white people, not Indians (David Brainerd, Mirabilia Dei Inter Indicos [Philadelphia, n.d. (1746)]), 220; The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols. [Philadelphia: Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942–58], 1:168; George Henry Loskiel, History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Indians of North America, trans. Christian Ignatius La Trobe [London: Brethren’s Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel, 1794], pt. I, 17–18). For a comparative discussion of prophets’ visions and their ceremonial prescriptions, including those of Neolin, Handsome Lake, Tenskwatawa, and several others, see Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 123–31. 30. Sergeant diary, August 9, 1797, Harvard Grants, HUA; Aupaumut extract, March 27, 1808, “Kauwisahquak on St. Mary,” Sergeant diary, May 30, 1808, SPGAI 4:14. 31. Aupaumut, “Short Narration,” 128. 32. “Religious Intelligence: Extracts from the Report of the select committee of the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and others in North America: Read and accepted, 8th November, 1816,” Christian Disciple 5 (February 1817): 57–65; Aupaumut, “Extract from the Indian Journal,” Massachusetts Missionary Magazine, 468–69. In contrast, Aupaumut argued, the British policy was to “just cover them with blanket and shirt every fall, and the Indians feel themselves warm, and esteem that usage very high — therefore they remain as it were on the ground and could not see great way these many years” (Aupaumut, “Short Narration,” 127). 33. Aupaumut, Quinney, and Quauquauchmut to Harrison, in “Letter to the Rev. Mr. Hopkins of Salem,” Massachusetts Missionary Magazine, 466–67. The letter to the Jews is signed by Aupaumut, listed as sachem, and five counselors (Aupaumut extract, Sergeant diary, April 8, 1819, DA). Farewell address by Aupaumut, John Quinney, and Joseph Quinney to John Sergeant’s daughters (Sergeant diary, August 9, 1797, Harvard Grants, HUA). 34. Aupaumut extract in Sergeant letter, March 25, 1808, May 30, 1808, SPGAI 4:14. 35. The Onondaga emissaries of Handsome Lake addressed the Stockbridges: “I will not use my own words, but repeat what I have heard from the Prophet. The great good spirit created all nations of our colour that we should be united as one people.” Sergeant diary, November 20, 1805, Harvard Grants, HUA; Sergeant diary, September 2, 1805, Harvard Grants, HUA (emphasis mine). 36. Sergeant diary, August 11, 1805, Harvard Grants, HUA (emphasis mine). 37. Elijah Brainerd to the Reverend Abiel Holmes, Cambridge, Mass., October 18, 1818, SPGAI 4:14; Sergeant diary, July 19, 1818, DA; Sergeant diary, August 22, 1822, SPGAI 4:14. 38. Aupaumut excerpt quoted in Sergeant diary, April 8, 1819, DA.

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to become a chosen people the missionary work and missionary spirit of the brotherton and stockbridge indians, 1775–1835 David J. Silverman As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the people, and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land, and feed them upon the mountains of Israel by the rivers, and in all the inhabited places of the country. — Ezekiel 34:12–13

Between 1803 and 1805, several councils took place between the Onondagas and Oneidas of the Iroquois League and the Stockbridge Indians, a group that had moved from western Massachusetts to Oneida country in upstate New York shortly after the American Revolution.1 In all likelihood, the attendees also included representatives from the Christian Indian community of Brotherton, composed of Narragansetts, Mohegans, Pequots, Niantics, Tunxis, and Montauketts from coastal New England and Long Island, making their own start fresh among the Oneidas. The main topic of these meetings was how to reverse the death, dispossession, and despair that had wracked Native people for nearly fifty years amid unyielding Anglo-American war and encroachment. One party, which included the Onondagas and a faction of Oneidas, found inspiration in prophets like the Seneca Handsome Lake, whose visions taught that that Great Spirit would restore his favor to Indians if they reformed their rituals and mor-

als. Though Handsome Lake himself was no militant, seekers in a similar vein, including the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, lent their revivalist messages to Indian resistance movements against U.S. expansion throughout the 1790s and early 1800s. The Onondagas’ endorsement of Handsome Lake thus carried a dangerous tinge.2 The opposing camp, made up of the Stockbridges, perhaps a majority of Oneidas, and the Brothertons, saw no future in this course. They too wanted the Great Spirit to smile on Indian peoples, but they believed that pursuing Christianity, white civility, and cooperation with the United States was the best means to this end. The two groups’ positions were clearly incompatible, and in other contexts their spokesmen showed nothing but contempt for each other, but the Iroquois council setting muted this antipathy. The ritual-laden protocol of the Iroquois had a four-hundred-year track record of nurturing mutual respect and open communication between partisans, and the weight of that tradition rested on all the discussants; in this forum, they were supposed to talk as if they were kin and then to talk some more.3 And so the conversation unfolded. The Onondagas, informed by their long-standing resistance to European missionaries and by their losses at American hands during the Revolution, saw little value in heeding their enemies’ religion.4 Ever since New England missionaries began appearing in Iroquoia in the 1760s, western Iroquois (Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas) had repeatedly warned the Oneidas that adopting Christianity would reduce them from “real Indians,” by which they meant independent warriors and hunters, into “mere women” like the New England tribes, by which they meant tillers of the soil (only females and “hedgehogs” were meant to scratch the earth, they asserted), “broom makers,” and beggars of charity from the same whites who had impoverished them in the first place.5 Moreover, Christianity did little to improve Indian morals, at least in the Onondagas’ estimation. The Onondagas’ speaker called the Christian Indians to task for their sins, charging, “You often hear the word of the great book which forbids such things, & have ministers to tell you these things, yet often you are much worse than we be in this present.” The Onondagas’ explanation for this pattern was that the Great Spirit did not intend Christianity for Indians but rather for white people alone. Instead, they submitted, the Indians’ authentic path to strength and happiness was the gospel of Handsome Lake. Handsome Lake’s message was that “the great and good spirit created all nations of our colour, that we should be united as one people” through common rituals and a common piety. The prophet called upon Indians as a race to revitalize their ceremonial lives and to abstain from plural marriages, infighting, abortion, poisonings, and consumption of liquor, which, like Christianity, “was made by the to become a chosen people

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white people, and the great father above gave liberty only for them to use it, that he wholly forbid his red children to tast[e] it on any consideration what ever.” If Indians abided by this agenda, the Great Spirit would restore his favor to them. If they did not, their degradation would continue. The Onondagas concluded these speeches by asking the Stockbridges “whether or not they would agree to join in the general reformation” with followers of the Seneca prophet, but they could not have expected to receive a positive answer. After all, the Stockbridge community — descended from a combination of Mahicans, Wappingers, Esopus, and other groups from the Hudson River and Housatonic River valleys — had hosted Congregationalist missionaries since the mid-eighteenth century. Following the Revolution, the Stockbridges themselves had become ardent promoters of Christianity among the Oneidas and even peoples living in places as far away as the Ohio country and Great Lakes region. Probably one of the Stockbridge representatives at these meetings was Hendrick Aupaumut, who had just returned from a diplomatic and missionary campaign to the western tribes. Accordingly, the Stockbridges’ “chief speakers” rejected the Onondagas’ invitation and instead advocated their own agenda of Christianity and white-style civility. Though the Stockbridges praised the Onondagas’ determination to “forsake all wicked practices and to follow the good path,” they declared the Onondagas’ efforts to be futile as long as they were under “temptations of the evil spirit.” That evil spirit, the Stockbridges believed, was the source of Handsome Lake’s visions, for the great deluder, Satan, often disguised himself in holy garb. Thus, the Stockbridges turned the table on the Onondagas, urging them to swear off Handsome Lake and instead to “go to hear the Ministers of the Gospel” and accept white offers of education. Only God’s grace could overcome sin, and God would withhold his blessings from Native people as long as they rejected Christianity. The Stockbridges then closed their talk with a warning: if the Onondagas and Indians in general rejected Christianity and civility, “you and I must come to ruin.” Indians as a race of people shared a common destiny. Their faith would determine just what that destiny would be. Though the Iroquois and New England Indians had a century of experience wrangling over Christianity, their debates in the post-Revolutionary era were unprecedented in their urgency, since everyone involved had come to view the stakes in nearly apocalyptic terms. The United States was engrossing Indian country at a terrifying pace, threatening to rob Native people of everything they had and even to blot them out of existence. For all the Indians’ religious differences, they agreed that their only hope was to win the Great Spirit’s assistance, and soon. The burning disagreement was how. 252

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Conversations between Indians about Christianity are conspicuously rare in the historiography of missions despite their self-evident importance. Scholarship tends to focus on interactions between colonial missionaries and their indigenous charges rather than between the Natives themselves, and no wonder. Colonists produced the vast bulk of missionary records, and historians who depend upon these materials are largely beholden to their perspective — largely, that is, but not entirely. Interspersed among accounts of Jesuits and Hurons, Franciscans and Chumash, Congregationalists and Wampanoags, are fleeting glimpses of Indians themselves doing the hard work of evangelization such as interpreting Christian terms and concepts into Native languages, employing Indian protocol for Christian purposes, and placing missionary agendas in indigenous political contexts.6 However, the implications of this tantalizing evidence can be explored satisfactorily only in the best-documented episodes of inter-Indian missionary work, like that undertaken by the Stockbridge and Brotherton Indians. Evidence of these Indians’ activities appears not only in the writings of white missionaries such as John Sergeant Jr., Samuel Kirkland, John Dean, and others but also in the papers of literate Indian leaders such as Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and Hendrick Aupaumut. In turn, these materials permit the investigation of themes pertinent to any and all Indian missions regardless of time and place: comparison of the messages propagated by European missionaries and their Native counterparts; the ways in which Native people turned Christianity into their own religion; Indian use of Christianity to cope with colonialism; and the role of Christianity in shaping Indians’ sense of identity. The rich sources pertaining to Brotherton and Stockbridge, then, afford a rare opportunity to connect Indian ideas to Indian actions at a time of intellectual ferment. Above all, the Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians’ missionary work reveals how meaningful such activity could be to Indian missionaries themselves and their home communities. Stockbridge and Brotherton leaders believed that nothing less than Indians’ survival as a race depended upon their adoption of Christianity and civility. They reached this conclusion not only because they judged that such reforms would promote good relations with the United States but also because they had determined that God cursed Indians as Indians for the sins of their forefathers and that, inscrutable as God was, the best chance of having him lift this curse was by strictly adhering to his dictates. Put another way, these Natives did indeed perceive fundamental differences between “Indians” and “whites.” However, they did not argue that such distinctions rested in biology, as growing numbers of whites held in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, or that race was a manifestation of customs, laws, to become a chosen people

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science, and societal discourse, as is the consensus among academics today.7 Drawing on Calvinist providentialism and the Nativists’ case that the Great Spirit created Indians and whites separately and rewarded or punished them according to their adherence to his dictates, these Christian Indians submitted that the colonial regime’s racial hierarchy began and ended with God — not the Great Spirit but the biblical Jehovah. Whites prospered as a separate group of people because generations upon generations of them had accepted the Word, even if they followed it imperfectly and even hypocritically at times. Indians as Indians suffered mightily from land loss, disease, drunkenness, factionalism, poverty, and a host of other ills because generations upon generations of them had rejected God’s law and thus drawn his wrath. The Indians’ only hope of lifting this curse was to adopt Christianity and civility, and not just as individual communities or tribes but en masse. It was a vision as utopian as the future was dark for Native peoples, a cry of desperation and faith proportionate to the misery produced by colonialism. It was the way Indians facing the literal extinction of their peoples wrested back some influence over their own fate. That is a story worth considering.


For all the spiritual overtones of their community projects, the Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians migrated to Oneida country primarily to secure a large land base sufficiently distant from the threat of colonial encroachment but not so far away as to sever their ties to the East, while the Oneidas wanted these newcomers to fortify the tribe’s borders against white expansion up the Mohawk and Susquehanna rivers. Brotherton’s constituent tribes had been hemorrhaging land ever since the seventeenth century, and in the years leading up to the Revolution, collusion between their often corrupt sachems and equally crooked colonial guardians and legislatures had made this problem critical.8 The Indians’ desperate attempts to rally the Crown to their defense got nowhere in part because of weak imperial authority made weaker by the Revolutionary crisis. Thus, in 1775, after at least two years of discussion, portions of several Indian communities on both sides of Long Island Sound agreed to band together to form a new Christian community on territory awarded to them by the Oneidas. The Oneidas’ willingness to host these communities derived from a number of considerations. Their grant was consistent with the Iroquois’ time-tested strategy of settling uprooted tribes on the league’s periphery as a first line of defense, usually against Indian enemies but more recently against white encroachment.9 In this particular case, the Oneidas wanted to use the Christian Indians to prop up the boundary drawn by the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix.10 At the same time, 254

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the Oneidas wanted to learn more about how New England Indians used their Christianity, literacy, and connections to English power brokers to adjust to colonial dominion. The Oneidas’ offer of land was, in a sense, simply their most dramatic gesture in a string of overtures to Christian coastal Indians and their English advocates since midcentury. Those measures included hosting as missionaries and schoolteachers the Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, the Montaukett David Fowler, and the colonist Samuel Kirkland, all of whom had trained at Eleazar Wheelock’s boarding school in Lebanon, Connecticut. The Oneidas also sent some of their own children to Wheelock to be educated.11 And the purpose of these decisions? As the Oneidas themselves told Occom in 1761, learning “the right way of God,” putting “all our sins and all our heathenish ways & customs . . . behind our Backs,” providing their children with formal education, promoting sobriety, and soliciting colonial protection of their lands were all of a piece “that none may molest or incroach upon us.”12 Yet plotting this strategy proved easier than implementing it. The first group of migrants to Oneida country abandoned their infant settlement within a year because the Revolution transformed Iroquoia into a bloody ground crisscrossed by British and American armies and their civilian partisans. Once peace was restored in 1783, they revived the plan, for their home communities were in worse straits than at any time in memory following their loss of men and accumulation of debt during the war. Having absorbed their own wartime blows, the Stockbridge Indians decided to join this experiment too. Already before the Revolution, whites had been elbowing the Stockbridges off their land despite the community’s origins as a Christian Indian haven.13 The U.S. victory over Britain, to which the Stockbridges contributed more than their fair share, proved to be the death knell for this Berkshire Indian town, for not only did Stockbridge men die in droves in the American army, but the survivors returned home to find that whites had seized yet more of their territory.14 Thus, when the coastal Indians, some of whom who had taken refuge with the Stockbridges during the Revolution, decided to return to Oneida country, the Stockbridges followed suit, forming their own town called New Stockbridge.15 The Oneidas, reeling from British and Tory attacks on their people and property, the division of the Iroquois League into British and American supporters, and the fleeing of pro-British Oneidas to Canada, were all too happy to oblige, as they were desperate for allies to hold back the postwar surge of white American expansion.16 Their hope, according to Samuel Kirkland, was “in the course of two years to have more than 1000 Indians in their vicinity, who will be disposed to attend the word of God & among those, some heart lovers of the religion of Jesus, to use their own expression.”17 to become a chosen people

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The New England and Oneida Indians’ joint campaign for a secure land base rested on a shared commitment to seek Christian Indian unity and, through it, God’s blessing.18 They conceived that God would reward them with peace, prosperity, and acceptance by whites only when they proved themselves worthy by living as Christians and spreading the Word among other Natives. Their task, in other words, was not to impress colonial society — they had already experienced the futility of that exercise over the years — but to attract God’s smile. Indian racial unity and prosperity would emerge from the Natives’ mutual faith and piety. The name the coastal Indians chose for their new community, Brotherton, captured the utopian spirit of the moment, as did the term the participants in this movement used to refer to one another, “Christian Indian Brothers and Sisters.”19 Writings by two of Brotherton’s principal organizers, the Mohegan ministers Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson (correspondence belonging to the third leader, the Montaukett David Fowler, does not survive), consistently expressed a Christian utopian vision for the new community regardless of whether the addressee was a missionary sponsor, colonial official, or another Indian, which suggests that this idea was no mere rhetorical flourish or political posturing. Occom’s earliest statement on the subject, made to the New York Presbytery, proposed that a Christian Indian town in the “Wilderness” would be “the likeliest way to bring the Indians hear [sic] [to] Consider the Christian Religion and to bring [them] to Husbandry.” He explained that Natives from the interior “have very Prejudice against the English ministers, and all English, but if a number of Regular Indian Christians Went amongst them and Set good Example before them they may think and be Convinced.” It was a project in which Occom believed “with all my Heart.”20 Johnson was even more effusive about the potential for a Christian Indian community in Iroquoia. In an address to the Connecticut Assembly in 1774 he waxed, “Who knows, but that even by this Design, will be opened a way of extensive good to those poor perishing nations, that as yet sit in heathenish darkness . . . to civilize and Christianize our fellow Natives, who hath received us as Brothers.”21 The following year he wrote to John Rodgers of New York that “the prospects of a great future good to my brethren in these parts and also those that inhabit the western Wilderness animates my Soul to press forward,” adding, “I greatly desire the Prosperity of my sinking Nation,” an apparent reference to Indians as a whole rather than just to the Mohegans.22 Johnson’s favorite metaphor for this experiment, one also favored by Occom, was that there was a “door opening for the great good to the western Nations.”23 The two men also expressed their missionary ambitions by citing Isaiah 35:1, as when Occom baptized three of his grandchildren in the first ritual of its kind at 256

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Brotherton and then wrote in his journal, “[I] hope and pray that it may be only the begining [sic] of multitudes in this Wilderness, till the whole Wilderness Shall Blossom as the Rose.”24 Johnson shared a similar message with his Indian congregation at Farmington, Connecticut, on the eve of their first migration to Oneida country. He charged his followers, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; go and proclaim to all nations, and kindred, and tongues that inhabit this Earth . . . Behold this north america, once a howling wilderness, a barren wilderness, now blossom like a rose . . . One thinks, that this once wilderness where once beasts of prey, and the more savage natives once inhabited is becoming as the garden of the lord.”25 The Oneida grant represented something more profound than just land to Occom and Johnson. It was an opportunity for the Christian Indians of New England to help the Natives of Iroquoia and beyond transform themselves from enemies of God and sufferers of his wrath into his chosen people. Then, and only then, could Indians as a race hope to reverse their diminishing fortunes. Remarkably, Johnson’s vision might have extended from his belief that Indians were of Jewish descent. In the late 1760s, Joseph Johnson toured Oneida country alongside the Reverend Jacob Johnson of Groton, Connecticut (a colonist of no relation), to scout out locations for the relocation of Wheelock’s boarding school. During their travels they learned an Iroquois story that in ancient times the Great Spirit had led their ancestors across the sea to the Iroquois homeland among the Finger Lakes. This account inspired the Reverend Jacob Johnson to muse about Indian origins, and in 1769 he collected his ideas in an essay published in New London’s Connecticut Gazette.26 His thesis was that “the Indians are the seed of Abraham by Ishmael.” The biblical Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Abraham’s slave woman, Hagar. Abraham banished mother and son to the wilderness because his primary wife, Sarah, was jealous of them, but God comforted Hagar that he would turn Ishmael’s progeny into a “great nation.” God’s promise, combined with Ishmael’s archery skills, led Johnson to surmise that Indians possessed Jewish ancestry. The implication was that Christianizing them was an essential step toward the conversion of all humankind and the onset of the Second Coming, according to eschatological readings of certain biblical passages. Johnson implored readers to “persevere in our prayers, and endeavor to propagate the Gospel among [the Indians], ’til the blessing descends from heaven upon them, and all nations, both Jews and Gentiles under the whole Heaven.” Did the Mohegan Joseph Johnson share his counterpart Jacob Johnson’s opinions? His statements and actions suggest that quite possibly he did, that he saw Brotherton as a piece in the cosmic puzzle to convert the Jews. to become a chosen people

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In more general terms, Johnson’s and Occom’s evangelical principles appear to have been shared by other Christian Indians who migrated to Oneida country. For instance, in April 1790, three Montauketts told Samuel Kirkland that Brotherton represented “a probability that God may build up their Nation” and that “they thought [that if ] they could all be united with regard to religion, they would move up and make one effort to live like the white people, and leave the issue with that God who governed all the Nations of the Earth.”27 The Stockbridge Indians had similar aspirations for their own community. In 1785, shortly after their relocation, the Stockbridges held a fast “to Confess their Sins before god, and to repent and beg the Pardon of all their Sins and desire the Blessing of god up on them, and to Prosper them in their New Settlement,” as they put it.28 Two years later, when the Stockbridges invited Occom to minister to them, they explained, “We believe that this god has brought us up into this Wilderness, where we might begin to serve him in Sincerity and in Truth. . . . We have felt and Experienced the goodness of God, for Raising and lifting one of our own Collour, to be Instrumental to build up the Cause and the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.”29 This campaign “to build up the Cause and the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ” was not just a local reform movement. The Stockbridges told the New York Assembly that they were “now trying to rise and become a people by collecting scattered Tribes to this Place.”30 Stockbridge’s Hendrick Aupaumut added that his community and Brotherton were critical to the United States’ efforts “to impart to us — the means of Civil life . . . to raise all of our Nations in general.”31 These statements, considered together, reflect the unifying vision behind the experimental Indian communities of post-Revolutionary Oneida country: the Brotherton, Stockbridge, and Oneida people would proselytize by witness by serving as examples of Christian, civilized Indians who had survived the tumult of colonization and entered the road to recovery. They were certain that other Indians would be inspired to join them. The Christian Indians’ utopian hopes reflected the depth of their desperation, but so did their countervailing premonitions of doom. The Oneidas’ explanation for their Christian experiment was that, after “many Years attending to the vast difference betwixt white people & Indians,” they could not escape that “the one appear[s] to be favourites of Heaven & honourable in the sight of men, the other to be dispised & rejected by both.” They concluded: “We Indians . . . must give up our pagan customs. We must unite all our wisdom & strength to cultivate the manner & civilization of the white people who are thus distinguished by the favour & protection of the great Spirit above, & embrace the religion of the divine Jesus or we Indians shall before many years be not only dispised [sic] by the nations of the Earth, but utterly rejected by the Lord jesus the Saviour of the 258

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white people.”32 Another Oneida warned that if his people failed their Christian test, “we shall expect nothing but ruin.”33 Such fears underwrote the Oneidas’ pledge to the New England Indians to abide by “one Ruler, even God our Maker,” and “to follow the directions given to us in Gods Word.”34 The Oneidas hoped this covenant would lead them out of the earthly hell into which their people were descending. The Stockbridges agreed with the Oneidas that they lived in a moment of reckoning contingent on their own Christianity. Desperate, they pleaded with Occom to become their preacher because “now it looks very Dark upon us[.] All helps from abroad are gone. And we are now brought to look about, and Consider of our Situation, and we believe that this will be the last, that God will make a trial with us — if this will not set us to contrive for our own souls — God will leave us to our own Destruction.”35 Lengthy struggles with colonialism had finally come to a head for these Indians: they had grown poor, weak, and subject to a nation that hated them despite their innumerable sacrifices for it. With their people’s very existence on the brink, they could conceive of no other option than to prove their worthiness to God through Christian worship and upright living and pray that he would finally extend them relief. Failure would result in their doom, at the very least, and potentially the destruction of all Indian people, for if one of the very first Indian groups to adopt reformed Protestantism could not live according to God’s law, attract his smile, and inspire other Indians to reform, the prospects for Native America were very dim indeed. Such ideas drew on both white and Indian sources. From the very beginning of European colonization, English religious leaders had attributed Indian misfortune such as devastation by epidemic disease to God’s providence. Indeed, in the jeremiads for which Puritan New England is so well known, colonial spokesmen attributed their own people’s disasters to God’s punishment for their corporate immorality.36 That tradition continued in the late eighteenth century among missionaries to the New England Indians. John Sergeant Jr. chastised the Stockbridges that “the reason why God left Indian churches and Tribes to distruction [sic] was because of their national sins of drunkenness, Idleness, and the like, and gave their country to a more industrious and virtuous people.” “It was agreeable to Gods method of breaking mankind,” he lectured on another occasion, “to punish them for national sins.”37 Contemporaneously, a series of Indian prophets east of the Mississippi influenced by this strain of Christian providentialism began preaching that the Great Spirit punished Indians as a group because their accommodations to white demands violated his special purposes for them. By this thinking, Indians would recover their spiritual power and self-determination only when they began living again like to become a chosen people

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“true Indians.” The Christian Indians of Oneida country added yet another strand to this discussion. Their belief in God’s curse was distinctly Calvinist in its origins, consistent with their reformed Protestantism, even as it expanded God’s judgment to include Indians as a race of people rather than as separate tribes, reflective of the message of Nativist prophets. The Christians aimed to quicken their spiritual power and autonomy through ritual and social reforms, echoing the prophets, but their means were Christianity and civility, as their missionaries would have had it. In short, the Christian Indians’ beliefs were at once colonial and anticolonial, Christian and Nativist, Indian and white, original and derivative. They became the driving force of a people who sought to live harmoniously with white society as distinct Indian communities. The Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians made remarkable strides toward reaching their own high expectations, at least in the opinion of most white observers. In 1796, Jeremy Belknap and Jedidiah Morse reported that at Stockbridge, with its three hundred people, “about two-thirds of the men and ninetenths of the women are industrious. Agriculture and the breeding of cattle and swine are their chief employments.”38 The following year, a visit by Quaker Thomas Eddy to Stockbridge found that “many of the Men are sober & well disposed, and among the women are some remarkably Religious characters.”39 New York State’s appointed guardians for Brotherton wrote equally favorably about their charges, noting that “several of them have good Farm houses and barns and seem disposed to improve in Agriculture, and the whole of them are comfortably situated.”40 By the turn of the century, these Indians’ material wealth included livestock, miles of fences, harrows, plows, scythes, spinning wheels, looms, chairs, tables, chests, and practically all the other items one would expect to find on the small farms of northern New England and upstate New York.41 Brotherton even had its own gristmill. Moreover, Brotherton governed itself on a New England town model, albeit with some distinctive Indian characteristics.42 All of this is not to say that the Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians had fulfilled their utopian fantasies. Within a few years their people were at odds over religion, with Presbyterians and Separate Baptists constituting the main divide, and the question of leasing land to whites.43 Liquor abuse became a serious problem, especially at Brotherton, and was reflected in the rise of social ills like domestic violence and school truancy.44 Nevertheless, the fact that the troubles of these communities centered on the amount of land they should put to the plow rather than whether they would use the plow at all, and on the vibrancy of their churches and schools rather than on the existence of such institutions, indicated that Brotherton and Stockbridge had made significant strides toward achieving their goal of promoting civility by example. 260

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The Indians’ leaders also fulfilled their pledge to evangelize their Indian neighbors. Shortly after reviving the Brotherton project following the Revolution, Occom penned an evangelical address to “all the Indians in this Boundless Continent.”45 Whether, how, and to whom he circulated this message are uncertain, but its content is telling. Occom presented himself as an honest broker, emphasizing, “I am an Indian also, your Brother, and you are my Brethren the Bone of my Bone and Flesh of my Flesh.” To further ingratiate himself with his audience, Occom incorporated metaphors of the Iroquois’ Woods Edge Ceremony, in which hosts symbolically dried the tears, cleared the throat, and unstopped the ears of visitors so they could participate in councils calmly and rationally. Occom encouraged his audience, “Lend me both your Ears and listen with great attention, and let nothing Croud into your Ears whilest I am Speaking, and prepare your Hearts let there be room for my words & keep them there Close and lose them not, awake your Understanding and Call home all your Roving Thoughts and attend Diligently and I will Speak.” This talk addressed nothing more than Christian basics — Occom identified God as the supreme spirit, recounted the biblical story of creation, and praised Jesus as the savior of fallen humankind. Yet content was almost beside the point. The resonance of Occom’s words extended from his status as a fellow Indian and his employment of Indian protocol. In Indian country, a message was only as strong as the identity of the messenger and the way in which he delivered it. The Brothertons and Stockbridges also conducted missionary work by hosting foreign Indians, particularly Oneidas, at their religious events. In the mid1780s, Occom witnessed Oneidas attending a prayer meeting at the house of Brotherton’s David Fowler, participating in a Christian Stockbridge wedding, spending the Sabbath eve in Brotherton, and more.46 The services of John Sergeant Jr. at Stockbridge and Samuel Kirkland at Oneida included mixed audiences of Stockbridges, Oneidas, Brothertons, and Tuscaroras, and the two men often rode circuit among these peoples to conduct weddings and funerals and to proselytize, as did Occom.47 The Oneidas told Sergeant that they appreciated the opportunity to worship alongside the Stockbridges because they held those Indians to be “far superior to them in knowledge and a civilized life which protected them from designing men.”48 It was a message that Stockbridge’s Hendrick Aupaumut took with him on missionary ventures beyond Iroquoia. Beginning in the 1790s and extending into the early 1800s, he made several visits to Ohio Valley and Great Lakes tribes to promote peace with the United States and the adoption of Christianity and civility. His message to these Indians was that if they followed the Stockbridges’ course “the great and good spirit will bless you that you will become a wise people, and you shall increase, both in number and to become a chosen people

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substance, consequently you will be happy in this life, and the life to come.”49 This was the mantra for the Christian Indians of Oneida country. Yet for all the Indians’ missionary work and progress in implementing civilized reforms, white encroachment and the attendant social strain on Native communities made it impossible for them to sustain their Christian experiment.50 The Brothertons’ leases to whites ultimately produced one state-directed sale of Indian land after another, thereby making the Christian Indians’ supposed haven resemble the hollowed-out places they had fled back east. Whites numbering in the tens of thousands flooded onto this newly available territory, plaguing the Indians with lawsuits, trespass, liquor sales, arrests, and racial degradation.51 The Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians had once viewed Oneida country as a place to seek God’s blessing; instead, his foot pressed on their necks more heavily than ever.


Though the Christian Indians’ trials in the 1790s and early 1800s led many of them to despair that “God was about to give them up as a Nation,” the Stockbridges, led by Aupaumut, revitalized their revitalization movement with the prospect of taking up new lands among the Miamis and Delawares on the White River in Indiana. As in the case of the Brotherton and New Stockbridge movements of the 1780s, a spirit of Christian utopianism infused this campaign. The idea, once again, was for Christian Indians to settle far away from white society so they could pursue their reforms in peace and inspire other Natives to do the same.52 Indeed, the Stockbridges viewed the host tribes as a potentially ripe mission field because they were long-standing friends. The Stockbridges had traditionally served as the Miamis’ “front door,” or broker, in diplomacy with eastern powers such as the Iroquois and the British colonies.53 Promoting Christianity, civility, and peaceful relations with the United States among the Miamis was, in this sense, the extension of a familiar Stockbridge role.54 Moreover, the Miamis’ invitation to the Stockbridges to join them in Indiana was about a century old and had been renewed periodically over the generations.55 The Delawares considered themselves morally bound to the Mahicans for having saved them “from being distroyed by . . . enemies” sometime in the distant past.56 They could be counted on to lend Stockbridge missionaries an ear. The final inspiration for the Stockbridges to move to Indiana was an oral tradition that their people had kin living beyond the Mississippi River. From a base at White River, Stockbridges’ leaders hoped “as soon as they are able to send messengers to find that lost sheep of their tribe, and recommend civilization in the proper way & time.”57 In all these respects, the Stockbridges could rest assured that old relationships 262

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would help offset the dislocation of yet another move and that those relationships would contribute to the success of the people’s missionary work. The Indians’ evangelical hopes for this project swelled as the eve of their move drew near. When Aupaumut raised the possibility of relocating to Indiana in the 1790s, Samson Occom cheered the “agreeable Prospect opening amongst the Western Tribes, to Introduce Civilization and Christianity,” to which he added, “I am now Convinc’d that the Indians must have Teachers of their own Coular [sic] or Nations — They have very great and rooted Prejudice against the White People and they have too much good reason for it.”58 Launching a successful mission among the White River tribes would not only restore the Stockbridges’ influence as political go-betweens but, they hoped, set things right with God. And with God’s blessing, finally the Stockbridges and their charges would enjoy the security they had craved for so long. Aupaumut told the White River Indians that if they rallied together as civilized Christians “our white brother can not so easily cheat us now with regard to our land affairs as they have done to our forefathers.”59 Aupaumut’s worldly aspirations were grounded in his people’s spiritual beliefs. A group of New Jersey Delawares who merged with the Stockbridges in 1802 in anticipation of the move to Indiana explained, “We may have some hopes left still to unite all our tribe in one place, & become a good & civilized people like our white brethren, in that can we fully believe that the good Spirit will bless us as he does the whites, & we should increase like them & fill the country & be a happy people.”60 No less than the New England Indians’ migration to Oneida country, the planned move to White River crackled with utopian spirit. Unwilling to repeat the disaster they had experienced in New York, the Stockbridges and some Brothertons who agreed to accompany them methodically confirmed their title to White River lands with the Miamis, Delawares, and federal officials, including President James Monroe, before relocating.61 Finally, in 1818, everything was in place. That summer the prospective migrants met in New Stockbridge, New York, to sign a covenant for their new church congregation and to hear a sermon preached by Sergeant from Acts 22:21: “And he said unto me, depart, for I will send thee from hence unto the gentiles.”62 An advance party of seventy-five men and women took to the road with fanfare, only to discover upon their arrival in Indiana that the federal government had just bought the land from under them at the Treaty of St. Mary’s.63 A furious Aupaumut penned one letter of protest after another to Washington, rebuking the government for undercutting a holy experiment to which it had given its own blessing. “We saw them lying in darkness and paganism,” Aupaumut wrote of the Miamis and Delawares, “and believed that our god called upon us to send to become a chosen people

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among them a colony of our nation in which was built a church of our Lord and Savior, that we might be the means of Civilizing and Christianizing them and doing to them great good.”64 But Aupaumut could not shame the country into abiding by its word. He and the rest of the New York Indians (as they were by then collectively known) were learning the hard lesson that a people’s race, not their Christianity, civility, or political loyalties, determined whether they would enjoy a place in the burgeoning white man’s republic. Indians could make every reform whites demanded of them and still find themselves treated as disposable savages by the United States. This stark realization left the Stockbridges and their neighbors, in their own words, “blasted.”65 Having already committed themselves financially, politically, and emotionally to leaving New York, the Stockbridges and Brothertons, joined by the Oneidas and other Iroquois bands under the leadership of the eccentric Mohawk preacher Eleazar Williams, redirected their sights to Menominee and Ho-Chunk (or Winnebago) territory in eastern Wisconsin.66 Though this land was less fertile than White River, it was so remote that white encroachment seemed to pose little threat, and though the Wisconsin tribes were strangers to the New York Indians, their inexperience with large-scale white settlement and aggressive missionary work meant they were less jaded toward Christianity than were most eastern nations.67 With an eye toward exploiting these advantages, in the summers of 1821 and 1822 delegations from the New York tribes purchased from the Menominees and Ho-Chunks approximately 6.7 million acres along the Fox River west of Green Bay for less than $4,000 in goods.68 Within a few years the New York and Wisconsin Indians would be locked in a vicious dispute over the terms of this transfer, but during negotiations they mutually envisioned a future in which they would rise in unity. For the New York tribes, such thinking was but an extension of their hopes for Oneida country and White River. The Brothertons predicted that they would be joined along the Fox River by “many thousand” Indians from “the other parts of the United States before many years.”69 The Stockbridges thought similarly, telling the St. Regis Mohawks that in Wisconsin “our several Tribes might at some further day sit down together in peace & have an opportunity which their forefathers had established and of promoting mutually their prosperity and happiness.”70 Once the New York Indians had turned their newfound territory into a thriving, multitribal Indian settlement, their own communities would serve as “examples” of “civilized people” to the surrounding Natives and “by maintaining & keeping pacific intercourse with them to be instrumental of preserving a continued peace between them and the United States.”71 The New York Indians’ enthusiasm for this venture was so intoxicating that it gave Sergeant “strong faith that in the 264

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Northwest Territory the Lord intends some important revolution in favour of the natives in that country.”72 It is unlikely that the Ho-Chunks and Menominees wanted anyone to proselytize them, but some of them appear to have been interested in learning about the easterners’ civilized ways. The Brothertons’ agent, Thomas Dean, claimed that in the negotiations for Fox River the Menominees said “they was glad the Waupanokis (New York) Indians was coming to live in that country” because the Wisconsin tribes were “poor and their game was scarce and the crops of wild rice was uncertain and the Wapuanokees (New York Indians) could teach their young men how to till the Land and live like white people.”73 Brotherton’s David Fowler, Stockbridge’s John W. Quinney, and the Oneidas’ Daniel Bread remembered the Menominee chiefs confessing “that they feared the white people[,] that . . . the Knives of the pale men were sharp and their nails were long and when fastened upon the lands of the Indians they went deep and held fast. They feared their own ability to keep them off and wished us who were better able to cope with them to have an interest in the soil and thus prevent any frauds which might thereafter be practised.”74 These were powerful sentiments indeed, but it is unclear whether they actually came from the mouths of the Wisconsin Indians or were put there by the New York tribes; the latter recorded their memories of these exchanges a few years after the fact with the design of appearing as altruistic as possible to the United States during its arbitration of their conflict with the Menominees over the Fox River lands. However, it appears likely that at least some Wisconsin Indians initially saw the easterners as a source of new skills and strategies. If so, the most significant difference between the parties was that whereas Ho-Chunks and Menominees thought civilized reforms and diplomacy could secure their land and autonomy, the Stockbridges, Brothertons, and Oneidas believed they required God’s blessing. Shortly after reaching terms with the Wisconsin tribes, New York Indians began streaming into their newfound settlements along the Fox River, a flow that eventually reached nearly a thousand people.75 The challenges of starting anew in this place were substantial, ranging from acquiring supplies to clearing the forest and erecting houses, but within a few years the New York Indians had built the first schools and Protestant churches in the region, constructed some of the first sawmills and gristmills, and appeared well on their way toward achieving their dream of flourishing, Christian Indian agricultural settlements. Even skeptical government officials could not escape that the Brothertons were “farther advanced in civilization and the arts of domestic life than perhaps most of the [white] borderers on a distant frontier.”76 Tensions with the Menominees and Ho-Chunks precluded the New York Indians from launching an active misto become a chosen people

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sion among those tribes, but in the early 1830s Stockbridge’s John Metoxen, Austin E. Quinney, and John W. Quinney visited the nearby Sacs and Foxes, whom they characterized as “heathen” suffering in “darkness,” to explore the possibility of evangelizing them.77 By almost any standard, the Brothertons and Stockbridges were poised to demonstrate the viability of civilized, Christian Indian communities and to spread their faith. However, once again the United States undercut the New York tribes’ efforts. The Indians’ success in Wisconsin had the unintended consequence of drawing white attention to the area, so when Washington received petitions from HoChunk and Menominee opponents of the 1822 treaty, it began proceedings to uproot the Stockbridges and Brothertons again, this time to much smaller sites on Winnebago Lake in the Wisconsin interior, and to have their former lands transferred to the United States. The New York tribes sent multiple delegations and a flurry of correspondence to Washington in opposition to this plan, but the government finally put it into effect in 1832 with the promise that it would never ask its “Christian Indian children” to move again. The words, of course, were hollow. With tens of thousands of white settlers streaming into Wisconsin to take up the Indians’ former lands, it was a mere three years before the territorial and federal governments began pressuring the New York Indians to pull up stakes again, this time for Kansas. The Stockbridge Indians told their missionary, Cutting Mash, that these events were “a manifestation of God’s displeasure against them,” the latest stage of a curse that had followed them from New England, to New York, to Indiana, and now to Wisconsin.78 Given this pattern, there was little reason to believe that God’s judgment would stop at the Kansas border, for as the Brothertons explained, “It would not be 20 years & perhaps half that time before we should be told our title to the Land was not good as we must remove further.”79 Thus, instead of accepting the government’s offer to move a fourth time in fifty years, instead of placing their hopes, yet again, in a dream dashed to pieces that Christian, civilized living and missionary work could turn them into God’s chosen people, the Brothertons as a whole and a portion of the Stockbridges petitioned to drop their official Indian legal status, divide up their common lands into privately owned lots, and become U.S. citizens in exchange for the right to stay in their homes on Winnebago Lake. Their request was well timed, for public fallout from the Jackson administration’s removal of the southeastern tribes left Congress anxious to prove its commitment to the fair treatment of civilized Indians. Thus in 1839 Congress granted full citizenship to the Brothertons following the division of their lands, and in 1843 it did the same for the Stockbridges.80 A number of these Indians would come to resent this deci266

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sion — indeed, after three years, most Stockbridges “gave back” their citizenship in order to become legal “Indians” again. Yet in the meantime they wavered, as they had for much of their history, between two different views of their future, one ripe with the possibility of their enjoying equality, prosperity, and security and the other auguring dispossession, poverty, and dispersal. What did these Indians expect from life as citizens in Wisconsin? One of Brotherton’s spokesmen, Thomas Commuck, pointed to his people’s longstanding belief in God’s curse when he predicted that within a generation or two his people would meld into the white population and lose their Indian identity as part of an “overwhelming tide of fate, which seems destined, in a few short years, to sweep the Red Man from the face of existence.”81 The Oneidas near Green Bay echoed his despondency. Repeated betrayals and removals at the United States’ hands had beaten them down to the point that their highest ambition was “only . . . to have our land secured so that no one shall interfere with us.”82 For most of the New York Indians, the dream of Indians as a race becoming God’s chosen people and enjoying peace, prosperity, and security was dead. Yet amid these sunken hopes, a few Brotherton leaders proffered a different view related to the utopian ideals behind their community’s founding. They declared citizenship “a new epoch in the history of our nation” because “already we anticipate a permanent resting place for ourselves and posterity: the tyranny and oppression — that discord and jealousy, which, for the last three or four years have reigned so despotically over us, we trust will then be precipitated from the throne, and the more welcome sovereigns, Justice and Humanity — equal rights and privileges, be seated thereon.”83 Wherever Indians stood in this debate, they did more than mimic their white neighbors’ melodramatic clichés about the disappearing Indian or the glory of republican citizenship. They harbored such extreme hopes and fears about citizenship, in part, because such thinking had been a part of their history for at least two generations. During this period, particularly in moments of crisis, they had come to define race in providential rather than biological terms, arguing that, although Indians could learn to behave like whites, they could not rise like whites because God had cursed Indians as Indians, less for their own sins than for the sins of their ancestors. In contrast, whenever the Indians came into the possession of new lands, their leaders called upon them to seek out the blessings enjoyed by whites by redoubling the campaign for Christianity and civility. These competing visions coalesced in the Indians’ response to U.S. citizenship. Those who believed Indians as a race were doomed hoped that becoming legal “whites” would allow at least some of them to buck that supposed destiny. Those who sustained their faith in God’s justice to become a chosen people

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could imagine Indians as a whole competing as equals in white society, bringing unprecedented stability, prosperity, and perhaps even community survival to their people despite their having forfeited their official Indian status. Ultimately, neither the naysayers’ nor the romantics’ predictions played out in full. Most Brotherton and Stockbridge citizens lost their lands in a matter of years to creditors, courts, and the taxman. At the same time, some of them managed to sustain their identities as Stockbridge and Brotherton Indians by maintaining their people’s social network in and around their former Wisconsin lands. For these generations, being Indian remained a challenge of race and place, not in the sense of trying to build a Christian Indian utopia by attracting God’s blessing or by averting the curse of God in the form of landed dispossession, but in the sense of sustaining their distinct peoplehood in the absence of an intact tribal territory. This legacy of U.S. colonialism — some might call it the curse of God — lives on to this very day in the lives of Brotherton and Stockbridge peoples in Wisconsin and places beyond.

Notes 1. These conversations appear in Journals of John Sergeant, 1789–1809, entries for June 30, 1803, June 30, 1805, August 10, 1805, September 2, 1805, October 20, 1805, Harvard University Grants for Work among the Indians, 1720–1812, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants). 2. The classic study of Handsome Lake is Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Random House, 1969). See also Elisabeth Tooker, “On the Development of the Handsome Lake Religion,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133, no. 1 (March 1989): 35–50. On other examples of Iroquois revivalism during this period, see Elisabeth Tooker, “The Iroquois White Dog Sacrifice in the Latter Part of the Eighteenth Century,” Ethnohistory 12 (1965): 129–40. On other contemporary prophets, such as Tenskwatawa, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); and Alfred Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 3. The literature on Iroquois ritualism is enormous. For useful introductions, see William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); Christopher Vecsey, “The Story and Structure of the Iroquois Confederacy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45 (1986): 79–106; Mary Druke Becker, “Linking Arms: The Structure of Iroquois Intertribal Diplomacy,” in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 29–39; and Elisabeth Tooker, “The League of the Iroquois: Its History, Politics, and Ritual,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, vol. ed. Bruce G. Trigger, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 418–41.

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4. Daniel K. Richter, “Iroquois versus Iroquois: Jesuit Missions and Christianity in Village Politics, 1642–1686,” Ethnohistory 32 (1985): 1–16; Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 108–28; Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 5. Samuel Kirkland to Eleazar Wheelock, March 6, 1766, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, together with the Early Archives of Hanover, New Hampshire through the year 1779, microfilm ed., 16 reels (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Library, 1971), 766206 (hereafter cited as Wheelock Papers); Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd (1749), ed. Norman Pettit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 576, 580; Sir William Johnson to Charles Inglis, April 26, 1770, The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: State University of New York, 1921–65), 7:597–99 (hereafter cited as Johnson Papers); Samuel Kirkland to Ebenezer Pemberton, March 25, 1771, Misc. Bound MSS, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. (hereafter cited as MHS); “An Account of some Extraordinary Charges attending the Mission of Saml. Kirkland, from October 6th 1770 to October 6th 1771,” folder 21g, Samuel Kirkland Papers, Hamilton College Special Collections, Clinton, N.Y.; Gideon Hawley, “Book or Journal after my mission into the Country of the Six Nations, Beginning at January 27th to the last of May 1754,” Gideon Hawley Journal and Letters, 1753–1806, vol. 1 of 4, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass. (see his conversation with an Indian named Isaac); Samuel Kirkland, The Journals of Samuel Kirkland: 18th Century Missionary to the Iroquois, Government Agent, Father of Hamilton College, ed. Walter Pilkington (Clinton, N.Y.: Hamilton College, 1980), 23–24 (hereafter cited as Kirkland Journals); Samuel Kirkland Journal, June 1787–March 1788, entry for September 21, 1787, box 1, folder 6, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in North America, Records, 1752–1948, 23 boxes, MHS. 6. David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 62 (2005): 141–75. 7. Among many works that address these points, see Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” New Left Review 181 (May–June, 1990): 95–118; Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247–64; Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (February 1995): 1–20; M. L. Blakey, “Scientific Racism and the Biological Concept of Race,” Literature and Psychology 45 (1999): 29–43; Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, eds., Race Critical Theories (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002); and Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 8. David W. Conroy, “Defense of Indian Land Rights: William Bolan and the Mohegan Case

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in 1743,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103 (1993): 395–424; Laurie WeinsteinFarson, “Land Politics and Power: The Mohegan Indians in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Man in the Northeast 42 (1991): 9–16; Wendy B. St. Jean, “Inventing Guardianship: The Mohegan Indians and Their ‘Protectors,’ ” New England Quarterly 72 (1999): 362–87; Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native People and the Struggle for History in New England (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005); Laurence W. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); Paul R. Campbell and Glenn W. LaFantasie, “ ‘Scattered to the Winds of Heaven’: Narragansett Indians, 1676–1880,” Rhode Island History 47 (1978): 66–83; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 15–57; Jane Smith, “Last of the Niantics,” MS in box 55, folder 10, of Brotherton Indian Collection (MSS 395), R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Department, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, Mass. On the Oneidas’ dilemma, see Karim Tiro, “The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Indian Nation from Revolution through Removal” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999), 70–90. 9. Laurence M. Hauptman, “Refugee Havens: The Iroquois Villages of the Eighteenth Century,” in American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History, ed. Christopher Vecsey and Robert W. Venables (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1980), 128–39; Francis Jennings, “ ‘Pennsylvania Indians’ and the Iroquois,” in Richter and Merrell, Beyond the Covenant Chain, 75–91; Douglas W. Boyce, “ ‘As the Wind Scatters the Smoke’: The Tuscaroras in the Eighteenth Century,” in Richter and Merrell, Beyond the Covenant Chain, 151–63; Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 156–204. 10. Though there had been talk for some years of creating a community of Christian Indians deep in Indian country, the first mention of the actual Brotherton project is in Samson Occom to the Officers of the English Trust for Moor’s Indian Charity School, November 10, 1773, in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, ed. Joanna Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107 (hereafter cited as Occom Writings). The coastal New England Indians’ negotiations with the Oneidas can be traced in Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, January 6, 1774, Occom Writings, 109; Joseph Johnson’s Speech to the Oneidas, January 20, 1774, Oneidas’ First Answer to Joseph Johnson, January 21, 1774, Oneidas’ Second Answer to Joseph Johnson, January 22, 1774, Joseph Johnson’s Second Speech to the Oneidas, January 24, 1774, Oneidas’ Third Answer to Joseph Johnson, January 24, 1774, and Joseph Johnson to Connecticut Assembly, June 2, 1774, in To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776, ed. Laura J. Murray (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 206–11, 217–22, 235; Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, May 2, 1774, 774302, Wheelock Papers; Extract from Indian Records, October 15, 1773 (12:1037–38), Extract from Indian Records, January 13, 1774 (12:1060), Certificate of the Oneidas, Grant of a Tract of Land to the New England Indians, October 4, 1774, Johnson Papers, 13:683–84. 11. For a brief overview of Wheelock’s educational work among Indians, see James Axtell, “Dr. Wheelock’s Little Red School,” in his The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 87–109. 12. Quoted in Eleazar Wheelock to Henry Whitefield, November 25, 1761, 761625.1, Wheelock Papers. 13. Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York:

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Oxford University Press, 1985), 196–204; Rachel M. Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); Lion G. Miles, “The Red Man Dispossessed: The Williams Family and the Alienation of Indian Land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1736–1818,” New England Quarterly 67 (1994): 46–76. 14. Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 85–107. 15. W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (1899), intro. Margaret Connell Szasz (repr., Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 240–41. 16. Anthony Wonderly, “An Oneida Community in 1780: Study of an Inventory of Iroquois Property Losses during the Revolutionary War,” Northeast Anthropology 56 (1998): 19–42. 17. Samuel Kirkland to James Bowdoin, March 10, 1785, folder 84c, Kirkland Papers. 18. Hilary Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 153. 19. Examples of Occom referring to his Brotherton peers as “Brother” and “Sister” abound in Occom’s journal. See Occom Writings, 248–411. For analysis of Joseph Johnson’s application of the term “Brethren,” primarily to Indians rather than whites, see Laura J. Murray, “What Did Christianity Do for Joseph Johnson?: A Mohegan Preacher and His Community,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 176. 20. Occom Writings, 107. 21. Joseph Johnson to the Connecticut Assembly, June 2, 1774, in Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 235. 22. Joseph Johnson to John Rodgers, February 15, 1775, in Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 251. 23. Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, October 17, 1774, in Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 244; Occom Writings, 109. 24. Occom journal entry for August 26, 1787, Occom Writings, 376. 25. Sermon of Joseph Johnson, Farmington, May 7, 1774, Samson Occom Papers, folder 22, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn. 26. Connecticut Gazette, October 20, 1769. 27. Kirkland Journals, 162. 28. Occom journal, entry for November 8, 1785, Occom Writings, 309. 29. Muheacunnuck Tribe to Samson Occom, August 27, 1787, folder 11, Occom Papers. 30. Stockbridge Indians to New York Assembly, February 5, 1797, box 3, folder 11, Assembly Papers, vols. 40 and 41, Petitions, Correspondence, and Reports regarding Indians, Record Series A1823–78, 8 boxes, New York State Archives, Albany, N.Y. (hereafter cited as NYSA). 31. Hendrick Aupaumut to Timothy Pickering, March 6, 1793, Pickering Papers, vol. 59, MHS. 32. Quoted in Samuel Kirkland to James Bowdoin, March 10, 1784, folder 85c, Kirkland Papers. 33. Kirkland to James Bowdoin, March 10, 1784, folder 85c, Kirkland Papers. 34. Oneidas’ Second Answer to Joseph Johnson, January 22, 1774, in Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 218–19. 35. Muheacunnuck Tribe to Samson Occom, August 29, 1787, 787479, Wheelock Papers. Also in folder 10, Occom Papers. 36. The classic study is Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). For a compelling recent statement, see Christopher Grasso, A Speak-

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ing Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1999), esp. 30–40. 37. Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, entries for August 14, 1794, January 18, 1795. 38. Jeremy Belknap and Jedidiah Morse, Report on the Oneida, Stockbridge, and Brotherton Indians, 1796, Indian Notes and Monographs No. 54 (New York: Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian, 1955), 21. The population figure comes from John Pierce to the Philadelphia Year Meeting Indian Committee, July 1, 1796, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Records 1745–1983, box 4, Quaker Collection, Haverford College Special Collections, Havertown, Pa. (hereafter cited as PYMR). 39. Thomas Eddy to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee, September 26, 1797, box 3, PYMR. 40. Brotherton Superintendents to Governor Lewis Morgan, February 25, 1804, Brotherton Records, Hamilton College Special Collections, Clinton, N.Y. (hereafter cited as BR-NY). 41. Brotherton Records, 37–38, 57–58, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wis. (hereafter cited as WHS). See also “A Statistical Account of the Brothertown, Stockbridge, South Settlement of the Oneida, and Onondaga Tribes of Indians, taken in the year 1819,” box 5, folder 32, vols. 40–41, Petitions, Correspondence, and Reports Regarding Indians, Record Series A1823–78, NYSA. 42. BR-NY; Occom journal, entry for November 7, 1785, Occom Writings, 308–9. 43. Kirkland Journals, 207, 251, 268; Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, folder 23, entry for July 20, 1794; undated petition to New York Assembly, ca. 1792, Occom Papers, folder 13; Report of the Commissioners to the Legislature of the State of New York, February 18, 1796, Brotherton Indians Record Book, NYSA. 44. Report of William Floyd and Thomas Eddy, November 7 1802, and Superintendents of Brotherton to Governor Lewis Morgan, February 25, 1804, BR-NY, 36–37, 64; Albany Centinel, June 30, 1801, 3; Commercial Advertiser (New York City), June 24, 1817, 2, and October 1, 1817, 2; Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser, June 30, 1817, 2; Utica Gazette, September 16, 1818; Pittsfield Sun, October 5, 1818, 3; The Life and Confession of John Tuhi, An Indian of the Brothertown Tribe, while under the Sentence of Death for the Murder of his Brother, Joseph Tuhi, as taken from his own mouth, in prison in Whitestown, Oneida County, State of New-York a few days previous to his Execution, which took place at Utica, July 25th, 1817 (n.p., 1817) 45. “To all the Indians in this Boundless Continent,” folder 25, Occom Papers. The writing is undated, but Occom mentions in it that he is sixty-one years old at the time of writing, which would put the year at 1784. 46. Occom journal, entries for October 25, 1785, July 30, 1786, October 18, 1787, Occom Writings, 306, 339, 381. 47. John Sergeant Journal, 1793–94, entries for January 19, 1794, January 23, 1794, January 25, 1794, February 7, 1794, WHS; Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, entries for March 14, 1790, April 10, 1790, April 25, 1790, May 1, 1790, July 19, 1790, December 3, 1793, January 10, 1794, February 7, 1794, July 26, 1794; Journal of John Sergeant, entries for July 8, 1814, September 13, 1815, September 28, 1815, October 7, 1815, November 2, 1817, New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y. (hereafter cited as NYHS); Kirkland Journals, 126–27, 128, 132, 134–35, 159, 161–62, 168, 172, 200, 204, 211, 224, 252, 254, 257, 296, 410. 48. Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, entry for June 12, 1794. See also entry for July 20, 1794; “Good Peter’s Narrative of Several Transactions respecting Indian Land, April,

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1792,” Pickering Papers, 60:128; Oneida Agreement, December 3, 1794, Pickering Papers, vol. 62. 49. “Extracts from the Journals of the Indians along with the 6th speech delivere’d the Delaware nation residing at Waupehaummhuhk or White River on the 15th of April, 1803,” Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, entry for August 4, 1803. On Auapumut’s travels, see Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (2005): 187–220; Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory 43 (1996): 431–57; and Jeanne Ronda and James P. Ronda, “ ‘As They Were Faithful’: Chief Hendrick Aupaumut and the Struggle for Stockbridge Survival, 1757–1830,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 33 (1979): 43–55. 50. On these themes, see James W. Oberly, A Nation of Statesmen: The Political Culture of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, 1815–1972 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 19–25; Laurence M. Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester III, Chief Daniel Bread and the Oneida Indians of Wisconsin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 20–31; Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Tiro, “People of the Standing Stone,” chap. 4. 51. For specific examples, see Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, entry for January 6, 1797; Samson Occom, “Indians Must Have Teachers of Their Own Coular or Nation,” November 1791, Occom Writings, 133–34. 52. Kirkland Journals, 254 53. Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut,” 6. See also John Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, entry for April 30, 1805; “A speech delivered to Col. Pickering at a Treaty at New Town Point, June 20th, 1791, by Capt. Hendrick of the Mohukunnuk Indians,” vol. 61, Pickering Papers; Samuel Kirkland to Timothy Pickering, April 22, 1791, vol. 61, Pickering Papers. 54. Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut.” 55. “At a Council, New Stockbridge, Dec. 5, 1794,” vol. 62, doc. 113a, Pickering Papers; “Statement of the Claims of the Stockbridge Indians to a tract of land at White River,” vol. 14, no. 60, O’Reilly Papers, NYHS. 56. John Sergeant to H. R. Storrs, February 8, 1820, vol. 14, no. 63, O’Reilly Papers. 57. Ibid. 58. Occom, “Indians Must Have Teachers of Their Own Coular or Nation,” 133–34. 59. “Extract from the Journals of the Indians along with a speech deliver’d the Delaware nation residing at Waupehaummuhhuhk or White River on the 15gh of April 1803,” John Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, journal of July 1, 1803–January 1, 1804. 60. Memorial of the Delaware Indians, New Stockbridge, November 25, 1819, vol. 14, no. 545, O’Reilly Papers. On the Delawares joining Stockbridge, see Sergeant Journals, Harvard Grants, entry for July 29, 1802. 61. On these negotiations, see “Extracts from Hendrick’s letter from White River, July 7, 1809,” Journal of John Sergeant, NYHS; “Brothertown to the tribes composing the Confederation of the West (i.e.) Dellawars, Mohiconick, Monsey, Wisspsey, & Nanticoky Nations, June 16, 1811,” box 1, folder 8, Dean Family Papers, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Ind.; a packet entitled “Acct. and Vouchers, Supers. for Brothertown Indians, 1809,” box 17, and “Stockbridge to “Esq. Tuchy and other Peace Makers and Chiefs of the Brothertown Indians, July 8, 1808,” loose item, in New York Comptroller’s Records, Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse, N.Y.; Memorial of the Delaware Indians, New Stockbridge, November 25, 1819, vol. 14, no. 545, O’Reilly Papers; “Report of Commissioners Erastus Root and James McCall,

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Sept. 20, 1830,” Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Green Bay Agency, reel 315, 1824–32, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as NA). 62. John Sergeant Journals, entries for July 24, August 2, 15, 1818, box 4, folder 12, Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, and Others in North America, Records, 1752–1948, 23 boxes, MHS. 63. Jonathan Johnston, Indian Agent, Piqua, to Captain Hendrick and the Chiefs of New Stockbridge, August 17, 1818, Misc. MS, NYHS. 64. Stockbridge Indians to James Monroe, November 16, 1819, no. 5, Stockbridge Indian Papers, Huntington Free Library Collection, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. 65. Stockbridge Indians to New York Assembly, January 19, 1822, box 6, folder 13, Assembly Papers, vols. 40 and 41, Petitions, Correspondence, and Reports regarding Indians, Record Series A1823–78, NYSA. Generally on this period, see Oberly, Nation of Statesmen, chap. 2. 66. Oberly, Nation of Statesmen; Hauptman and McLester, Chief Daniel Bread; Laurence M. Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester III, The Oneida Indian Journey: From New York to Wisconsin, 1784–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 67. Samuel Denkin to J. C. Calhoun, January 23, 1823, Record Group 107, Secretary of War, Letters Received, D-154 (16), NA; Brotherton Indians to James Monroe, etc., February 8, 1825, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Six Nations Agency, 1824–34, reel 832, frames 56–59, NA. 68. Robert W. Venables, “Victim versus Victim: The Irony of the New York Indians’ Removal into Wisconsin,” in Vecsey and Venables, American Indian Environments, 140–51; Oberly, Nation of Statesmen, 29–38. 69. Brotherton Indians to James Barber, Secretary of War, January 17, 1827, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Six Nations Agency, reel 832, NA. 70. Stockbridge Tribe to St. Regis Tribe, January 13, 1825, box 1, folder 12, Dean Family Papers. 71. “Petition of the Chieefs and Warriors of those tribes of Indians that have migrated from New York to Green Bay, Dec. 4th, 1829,” Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Green Bay Agency, reel 315, 1824–32, NA. 72. Sergeant to the Reverend Mr. Codman, June 24, 1821, Papers of the Society for Propagating the Christian Knowledge, 1764–1893, folder 3, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. 73. Deposition of Thomas Dean, 1831, Thomas Dean Papers, 1814–36, 1 reel, WHS. 74. Fowler, Quinney, and Bread to Enos T. Throop, April 13, 1831, Thomas Dean Papers, WHS. See also Journal for 1824 survey to Fox River, entry for September 6, 1824, Thomas Dean Papers, WHS; Affidavit of Thomas Dean, January 1832, box 2, folder 7, Dean Family Papers; “Communication with the New York Indians,” ca. 1831, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Green Bay Agency, reel 315, 1824–32, NA. 75. Report of Jasper Parrish to Thomas L. McKinney, January 15, 1827, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Six Nations Agency, reel 832, NA; J. F. Schermahorn to Lewis Cass, July 12, 1836, Letters Received by Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, New York Agency, reel 583, 1835–39, NA. 76. “Report of Commissioners Erastus Root and James McCall, Sept. 20, 1830,” Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Green Bay Agency, reel 315, 1824–32, NA.

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77. J. N. Davidson, Muh-he-ka-ne-ok: A History of the Stockbridge Nation (Milwaukee: Silas Chapman, 1893), 30–31; Cutting Marsh, Expedition to the Sacs and Foxes (June–September 1834), Cutting Marsh Papers, WHS. 78. Cutting Marsh to John Codman, April 1831, Misc. MS 831290, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. 79. Brotherton Peacemakers to Thomas Dean, November 30, 1836, box 2, folder 9, Dean Family Papers. 80. Documentation relating to these events is voluminous. The most orderly and accessible materials are in the Congressional Serial Set. See Brothertown Indians — Wisconsin (To accompany Bill H.R. No. 1112) February 6, 1839, Serial Set vol. no. 351, session vol. no. 1, 25th Cong., 3rd sess., H. Rep. 244; Wisconsin. Memorial of the Legislature of Wisconsin Territory, praying that the right of citizenship may be extended to the Stockbridge Indians on the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago. February 14, 1838. Referred to the Committee on Indian Affairs, Serial Set vol. no. 327, session vol. no. 7, 25th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Doc. 173; Stockbridge Indians. (To accompany Bill H.R. No. 559.) July 30, 1842, Serial Set vol. no. 411, session vol. no. 5. 27th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rep. 961; Stockbridge Indians. Memorial of the chiefs and sachems of the “Indian Party” of the Stockbridge Indians, praying for the repeal of the law of Congress for 1842 for their relief. February 17, 1846, Serial Set vol. no. 483, session vol. no. 4, 29th Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 128. 81. Thomas Commuck, “Sketch of the Brothertown Indians,” Wisconsin State Historical Society Collections 4 (1859): 297–98. 82. “Council on Sept. 1, 1836, with the Oneidas,” Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–80, microfilm 234, Green Bay Agency, reel 316, NA. 83. “Brothertown Indian,” Wisconsin Enquirer (Madison), June 15, 1839, 3, cols. 1–2.

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conclusion turns and common grounds Mark A. Nicholas

Fields of study can resemble compasses pointing in the directions that draw scholars’ attentions. But the metaphor of the compass is particularly useful here. Studying Native peoples as part of early America’s religious history now has a particular magnetism that is spinning the arrows of many disciplines. Scholars in this volume use history, literary critique, religious studies, and anthropology to approach Native Christians with new questions, examine sources in new ways, and discover new areas of study for early American and Native American religious experiences. Our authors look at the indigenization of Christian material objects and Christian texts; the physical settings for encounter around religious ideas; Natives in dialogue with Christian precepts and practices; and Native Christians’ emotions, senses, and intellectual worlds. As other scholars engage with the arguments and ideas from this volume, scholars of various disciplines examining Native Americans and Christianity will continue to turn in their own directions, expanding and complicating how various subfields position Native Americans within America’s religious landscape. Though our authors turn in their own disciplinary directions, they find themselves mapping some shared analytic terrain. All our authors seek to put Native Americans front and center. All recognize Native Americans as actors and not merely subjects of the encounter with Christianity. Together they acknowledge (explicitly or implicitly) that the historical actors were not static nor were their encounters set pieces in a particular place. If the essays here are indicators, scholars are no longer bound only to villages or mission communities. Christian Native Americans of all sorts were on the move; Euro-American missionar-

ies occupied their own important places, shifting local and regional as well as imperial relationships with Christian Natives and non-Christian Natives. Native Christians and missionaries, as suggested in this volume, need to be understood in their spatial and geopolitical contexts. And regional and transnational comparisons of Christian Natives or Euro-American missionaries should no longer be out of reach. Fundamentally, the volume recognizes that Native religious belief existed before contact and must be understood as a factor in the long encounter with Christianity. Our authors, as a whole, look at a range of cultural capital as exchanged and valued in early American religious encounters. Cultural capital is not something of superior economic value, though “culture as capital” means the exchangers attached various types of importance to culture. For Pierre Bourdieu and other theorists, cultural capital is especially embedded within the operations of education, where the educators have often claimed some type of cultural dominance over the educated. Mission programs worldwide therefore provide opportune settings to study cultural capital at work. Globally, missionaries, for the most part, have believed that their interpretations of the world — their concepts of space, time, and the human condition, and an ability to read and write, to reason and worship God — make their cultural systems superior to those of indigenous populaces. For many missionaries, their cultural capital flowed in one direction, from them to peoples native to the colonized soil. In fact, it is fair to generalize that early America’s missionaries were not too dissimilar from missionaries among indigenous peoples of other settler colonies and imperial-occupied territories, as well as those caught in moments of state formation. Missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, have typically viewed their cultural capital as putting them in unchanging positions of power and authority as they Christianize indigenous populations. Because Euro-American missionaries were prominent agents of Christianity among America’s Native peoples, mission encounters are most useful to study cultural capital’s movement — sites or places where religious-related signs and symbols or material objects were transferred, as well as points where religious ideas, beliefs, and values were shared. Most important, within this volume, cultural capital does not follow the one path most commonly studied, from missionaries to Native peoples.1 In fact, in this volume cultural capital during intense religious experiences veered in many directions — from missionaries to Natives; from Native Americans to missionaries; and from one indigenous people to another. Cultural capital, represented in religious discourses and ideas and objects as well as religious practices and geographies, is one common ground that brings these essays together in a unique way for deep analysis. conclusion

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Even though previous early American mission historians were uninformed by Bourdieu’s theories as well as unpracticed in thinking of the mission–Native American relationship in comparison with other world settings, they have, nonetheless, studied cultural capital, privileging some forms over others. A previous generation has tended to focus on the structure and nature of missionary faiths given to Native Americans and indigenous cultural change or persistence under mission guidance. The cultural capital looked at in this volume is not completely disconnected from that in earlier works, although there is a new common ground in our volume. The scholars in this volume step away from the one-way movement of cultural capital. Cultural capital is in continuous and separate dialogues as our authors take their cue from various disciplines and missionaries studied elsewhere to advance the idea that religious cultural capital became “lived” by Native individuals or communities.2 And because early American religious encounters were messy, the authors here take into account where balances of power changed over time and in different places. In fact, several contributors have discovered where exchanges of cultural capital challenged, if not toppled, Euro-American religious authority, even if Euro-American missionaries still viewed themselves as maintaining positions of various types of dominance over Native peoples.3 Before the work of David D. Hall, scholars set aside to the realm of folklore and superstition the many accounts of lived religions. In this volume, an unbelievable array of sources shed light on moments when missionaries, in being forced to recognize unique parallels between seemingly incompatible lived religions, let go of the cultural capital they had used to vault themselves into positions of power. Douglas Winiarski’s turn toward the “supernatural economy” in Plymouth, New England, for example, shows that in explaining away ghosts and demons, healing unknown ailments, and dealing with terrifying natural disasters, missionaries and Native Americans together, at the local level, actually reconciled out elements of Christianity with other forms of spirituality. In examining material culture in the Catholic rosary, Tracy Neal Leavelle draws out a previously unexplored lived religion among Illinois women who found the rosary’s colors, textures, and rituals appealing to satisfy an urgent need for spiritual power. As Leavelle shows, Jesuit cultural capital became something else in the hands of Illinois women. Lived religions, in both essays, touched an array of sensory experiences, rattling or settling hearing and sight, offending or tantalizing taste and smell or touch. Because Native Americans often refused to alleviate their sensory overloads by adhering only to the strict dictates of prayer or scriptural knowledge but also found solace within the hid278

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den places of underground lived religions, many of the lived religions have slipped through the cracks of religious and mission history. But where do such indigenous grassroots practices and sensory experiences actually fit within the generally accepted notions of “spirituality” and “religion”? The exploration into points where Natives outside the confines of churches and meetinghouses borrowed, adapted, and accommodated various Christian routines, with or without the help of missionaries, to make sense out of the tactile or the audible, the visual or the olfactory, provides exciting opportunities. Scholars can unpack or discard old frameworks of spirituality and religion. Here the focus should be on practice, on people living what scholars have traditionally labeled religion or spirituality. Almost seamlessly, practice became part of everyday life. Scholars in this volume also treat emotions as a form of lived cultural capital. When pressed toward conversion, Native peoples were inundated by feelings, some of them unfamiliar and of course discomforting, and Native Americans, like others, reflected on the internal self, as they were often uncertain of the correct path to take. After all, under the guidance of most missionaries, “conversion” was more than just learning the faith. For a number of denominations, conversion meant an attempted stripping away of indigenous lifeways in order to replace them with a new culture. Being bombarded with the teachings of organized religions and then told to change sexual behavior, gender roles, family structures — everything that was part of Native American daily patterns — would ultimately lead to a mishmash of emotions, from hatred to happiness, sexual desire to sexual apathy, spiritual elation to hollowness within the soul. On the other side, early American missionaries, educating peoples judged as subordinate, weighed Native American passion and reason according to where they existed, intersected, or parted ways. Missionaries might have placed Native emotive expressions somewhere on a sliding scale between faith and reason, only to simply push to the side as unimportant or ignorant Native American emotions that were deemed “un-Christian.” But by using their own emotions to sift through mission cultural capital, indigenous peoples were oftentimes stabilizing themselves internally to then use what they could to empower their communities. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once posed the question “Can the subaltern speak?” Joanna Brooks’s theoretical position regarding Samson Occom takes mission scholars closer to the point of answering the question “How did the subaltern feel?” On the exterior, Samson Occom’s religious knowledge was that of a person who developed the Christian cultural capital that gave him status and power among both Anglo-Americans and Native peoples — that is, as the educated and well-behaved exemplar of the Christian Naconclusion

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tive American. But as Brooks shows, the expectations of him as the preeminent literate indigenous minister in a colonial system of domination were internally a source of pride but also of horror and pain. When critiqued with postcolonial theory, the documentary record linked to Occom reveals how mission colonialism oftentimes tore down interior Native spirits, only to find Native peoples like Occom rebuilding their interior selves in new ways. Correspondence, sermons, diary entries — any document penned by Anglo missionaries — were oftentimes stained by colonial discourses of emotional violence and therefore must be read with caution. Occom’s writings, in spite of his standing, were expressive of the emotional trauma he felt — in hurt, suffering, and absolute despair. Yet if Occom’s history is any indication, he tapped his emotions not to feel victimized but as a source to motivate and take what he had learned from missionaries to help other Natives use the Christian message in struggles for self-preservation and autonomy. Accepting that Native Americans were Christian and then digging deeper into the archives and printed material armed with theories and questions about internal self-expression, scholars can bring a long-needed sense of intimacy to the study of Christian Native Americans. Only in sifting through the layers of colonial discourse in other missionary documentation can scholars textually analyze points where Christian Native American emotions themselves spoke out, and spoke out loudly.4 Certain disciplines or approaches like literary studies seem particularly good at probing and recovering emotions, with close reading of people’s words as reflections of larger social and cultural relations of power. As refreshing as Brooks’s work is, historians have, in large part, remained bound by the dictates of the missionaries’ sources on emotions in asking questions about “conversion” and whether “Christianized Indians” outwardly expressed that they were truly acting as Christians, thus meeting the missionaries’ standards of Christian feeling. Laura Stevens’s transoceanic look at missionary emotions in print finds that the missionaries’ emotive expressions in some circumstances acted as self-fulfilling cultural capital. Stevens’s work with texts couched in the language of Enlightenment sentiments and promoting the “indigenous as heathen” in need of conversion points to a transoceanic exchange in textual caricatures of the Native American. This exchange with people overseas only shored up what some people already envisioned and endorsed what they should feel good about: a united, benevolent, Protestant British empire. Unraveling missionary textual emotions, Stevens advises against superficial readings of missionary literature. Steven Hackel and Hilary Wyss also engage in textual analysis, looking at literacy rates as a powerful form of cultural capital. Mission claims to domi280

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nance oftentimes rested on the supposition that literacy was more important than orality, and Natives were deemed inept peoples because they could not read and write and thus were presumed not to be capable of reason. Moreover, Native Americans in various mission contexts could never meet Euro-American missionary literacy standards. But as Hackel and Wyss show, though it occurred less commonly in colonial California than in New England, indigenous peoples turned the cultural capital of the missionaries into a form of subversion against colonial orders. Both Hackel and Wyss, like Brooks and Stevens, give penetrating analyses of texts in reaching beneath the surface of textuality. Natives in both California and New England took the mission tool of textual production to satisfy personal desires and maintain self-preservation and communities. Like Stevens, Hackel and Wyss therefore point out the hypocrisy of literacy in the mission exchange, where missionary textuality was to meet set expectations and did so for the missionaries, who saw only the surface of indigenous literacy. As Hackel and Wyss take a stance, like Brooks, in offering the strong warning that texts were devices of colonial dominance, other scholars must read texts and examine processes of making texts with careful theoretical repositioning to better understand why Native Americans chose to become literate. For Wyss and Hackel, as for Brooks, to become literate was a conscious indigenous decision, not a form of cultural capital that was imposed by force; moreover, not all Native peoples readily sought it out as they became Christian. For Christian Native peoples, one could be Christian and not read or write — illiteracy and Christianity were actually compatible.5 In their own ways these authors point to an overlap between literary studies and historical studies, both disciplines seeking to recover lost archives and sensibilities, to help the subaltern speak. Two authors turn to ritual and performance, examining both as forms of cultural capital that were exchanged, adapted, modified. In showing how objects became indigenous and gendered when handed over by the Jesuits, Tracy Neal Leavelle’s essay strongly warns that Christian material culture oftentimes lost some of its Christian meanings and symbols in Native rituals. Rosaries, crucifixes, and Bibles could all be consumed on indigenous terms, transformed into spiritually charged objects of meaning, performance, and intertribal conflict. In Emma Anderson’s essay are a group of Wendat “apostates” as adopted Iroquois who joined the mourning wars to justify their new anti-Catholic stance, as the anti-Catholic Iroquois with whom they lived fixated on mourning wars’ bodily harm to replenish communities and fuel intertribal warfare. But Anderson’s triangulated approach to two Jesuits’ torture and death casts exciting new light on Jesuit-Iroquois cultural encounters. Jesuits understood the theatricality of the mourning wars, and in their last breaths performed the ritual torture in conclusion

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acceptance. Here, Anderson points to a cross-fertilization of Iroquois-Jesuit bodily dramaturgy. Jesuits seized upon an Iroquois theater of torture, but only to keep their missionary bodies in a position of dominance. Iroquois cultural capital went in the opposite direction because the Jesuits used their deaths to show the Iroquois how a baptized body was a transitory vessel passing from the human realm to God’s blessed light. But as Anderson also points out, hagiographers have latched on to the stories of Jesuit-Iroquois bodily violence, although missing completely the Jesuit adoption of Iroquois cultural capital in mistakenly privileging the Jesuits who sacrificed their bodies as martyrs. In capturing the ritual performance of the death of two Jesuits, Anderson is able to caution against hagiography as well as simplistic interpretations of why Iroquois or their allies tortured or killed missionaries in early America. Because of Anderson’s work, Jesuit martydom and Iroquois mourning wars might be considered theatrical stages upon which cultures grafted their own cultural capital.6 Rachel Wheeler and David J. Silverman both turn to the “articulated ideas and cultural logic” of Native Christianities as cultural capital in an important moment of American state formation, as the early Republic was in the making. The turn Wheeler and Silverman take is in putting biblical teachings squarely into the “cognitive world” of Native peoples, a generation exposed for years to Calvinist teachings and who took the missionaries’ cultural capital and turned it into something of their own. These Native Americans thought about Christianity and put that thought into action.7 The early American Republic was a Protestant national experiment and could be inclusive or exclusive, depending on where people stood on the Protestant spectrum. Understanding the Republic’s Protestant experientialism, Native ministers entered such debates, innovating and constructing Christianity to intellectually attack the challenges that beset their communities. For other scholars the message is clear. It is now time to abandon the idea that churches and white ministers were the only providers of the cultural capital of spiritual salvation and Christian education in the early American Republic. Scholars have to find the ways Native spiritual leaders sought to create religious ideologies to salvage themselves, educate their own people, and engage in white American religious forums. Native Americans did think about religion on their own, and that mental world, once neglected or ignored, is no longer out of reach. For Wheeler, the Mahican Hendrick Aupaumut drew on several religious ideologies to create his own version of Christian republicanism, one inclusive for Native peoples that would help protect the homelands. Silverman looks at the cognitive world of two Brotherton preachers, Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, and finds an indigenous intellectualism that was sorely tested. Occom and Johnson labored to fashion a Native intellec282

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tual Christianity to lift their people out of what the two men perceived as a Godordained racial difference. Scholars of early America now know a little more about what Native American missionaries knew. The approaches of Wheeler and Silverman, like the contributions from Jace Weaver and Maureen Konkle and others noted elsewhere in this volume, validate Native American intellectual contributions in the missionary experience. Two of our contributors turn to brinkmanship as a means by which people transgressed racial boundaries, an expression of the cultural capital of dominance accepted by most northern missionaries in the early American Republic and thrust upon Native Christians that divided them as “whites” and “disappearing Indians.” Both authors focus on transitional individuals who went to great lengths to negotiate their way in this racialized environment among or as Native Christians. Daniel Mandell’s story of Frederick Baylies’s “eagerness” among southern New England Natives is a cautionary tale in two important ways. Mandell stresses that missionaries themselves were transitional individuals in that Baylies moved from the eighteenth-century Calvinist traditions of proselytizing and stepped into the evangelists’ era of the Second Great Awakening. Baylies, as a liminal figure, negotiated his way through prevailing racial misperceptions about southern New England Indians. Baylies’s brinkmanship with Native Americans came at a critical juncture in which New England’s Native peoples lost land, intermarried with outsiders, and entered new coercive labor markets but upheld their own churches and beliefs even though they had been subsumed as distinctively non-Indian. Race had practically erased “Indian” as an identity from southern New England, putting remnant communities into one lower-class group of “blacks.” Still, Baylies’s brinkmanship combined with Christian Natives’ own powers of negotiation reminds us that successive generations of Native peoples, like the white ministers who looked to aid them, took part in the Second Great Awakening. Baylies, in fact, would not have had a job if southern New England Indians were not running their own churches and schools to maintain community. Joel Martin, like Mandell, focuses on one figure whose brinkmanship transgressed several boundaries of a northern, white middle-class value system. Although benevolent, many missionaries demoted Native peoples and their tribal standing. The power of race was undeniable, as Martin makes clear, because missionary organizations themselves were so blinded by the cultural images of their day that they concluded that their men and women in the mission fields made little progress toward “civilizing Indians.” They needed proof in the flesh. The Christian Cherokee David Brown did not wallow in negative stereotypes of the Cherokees but turned the cultural capital of racial degradation to his advantage in his brinkmanship for Cherokee conclusion

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national sovereignty by manifesting eloquence in English and decorum in his dress and behavior. Baylies and Brown, the Christian Anglo-American and the Christian Cherokee, respectively, both worked against the grain of a new, powerful cultural capital — the racial construct of the “vanishing Indian.” To take stock of the contributions in this volume is to find semiotic and real exchanges of cultural capital. Several essays consider texts and other material objects as spatially transmitting particular signs and symbols. Brooks, Stevens, and Hackel and Wyss show how texts, or the indigenous ability to read or to write, opened spaces of indigenous and missionary articulation. Taking texts and objects as their own sites of signification of the Native American spiritual condition opens new possibilities for seeing material culture as religiously or spiritually edifying in indigenous terms rather than as mere objects used by missionaries to spread Christian messages. Bodies’ interior and exterior experiences also possess their own unique spatiality in this volume, with some of that space being purposefully dramaturgical. Bodies were themselves the focal point of interchange, but with larger cultural implications. Brooks casts her sights on the internal, emotive Native self, finding that Occom’s emotions had religious space, allowing him to move as a Christian Native through New England’s system of missionary patronage and patriarchy. Anderson’s position is exterior, interested in the theatricality behind the Iroquois mourning wars’ rituals of torment and death. Jesuit bodies, in torture and death, secured the position of Wendat “apostates” among non-Christian Iroquois, while Jesuit bodies were also repositioned within intertribal and imperial warfare and alliances. In addition, the Jesuits who understood the dramaturgy of the mourning wars were passive victims to retain power, as their torture and death, in their minds, sealed their fate as martyrs. In short, the Jesuit bodies were in highly contested and far-flung networks of power. Native Christian senses were also sites of cultural negotiation. Among Native Christians, hearing, sight, smell, and touch, as Winiarski and Leavelle show, oftentimes trumped the practices of organized religion as the means by which Christian Indians made sense of the unknown, and to have any success, Anglo missionaries had to adapt to such lived religions. Within their own intellectual worlds, Native Christians, for Wheeler and Silverman, turned missionary cultural capital into indigenous Christianity, promoting inclusion within a Protestant republic and finding some Anglo-Americans eager to listen to their Christian messages. Also caught in the early American Republic’s Protestant world of inclusion and exclusion, Frederick Baylies and the Indians he worked with, and Native Christians like David Brown, used Christianity to negotiate at a critical point against a harsh cultural capital that racialized Native

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peoples as disappearing.8 Indeed, the contributions here have taken mission history and early American religious history down turns that were once understudied or misunderstood, as our authors uncover where culture was “in motion” — was lived — during moments of intense religious concern.9


Staying with the theme of motion, mission place takes on a life of its own in this volume. From the praying towns of seventeenth-century New England to the Moravian mission communities in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, the community has been the central unit of place to study where Native Americans became Christians. Settled places have been easy targets for study. Living among Native villages or in their own communities for years, Euro-American missionaries kept uncommonly rich records; Indians were more often than not converted or baptized in communities; the often studied cultural change among Native peoples took place at the local level, whether in homes and villages or among mission communities. Our authors, in contrast, have for the most part chosen the more difficult task of staying on the move. With movement comes greater risk, difficulty with sources, but, at the same time, imaginative topic selection and innovation with theory, as well as entirely new perspectives that cut across early America. Many of our authors track the movements of Native Christians and EuroAmerican missionaries. Winiarski studies the unique career of Josiah Cotton, the lay minister in Plymouth, whose preaching among Wampanoag and Massachusett Natives took him from his farm, Plain Dealing, into Indian homes across most of the Plymouth colony. Hendrick Aupaumut, like many Second Great Awakening preachers, was peripatetic, but, as Wheeler’s ethnohistorical perspective shows, his movements followed Mahicans’ old understandings of their roles as intercultural brokers between eastern Indians and western confederacy groups in the Great Lakes and Ohio regions. Drawing on revitalization theory, Wheeler is clear that Aupaumut’s movements were that of a Native Christian prophet, seeking to pass his Native Christian message along traditional routes of Native American intertribal diplomacy. Movement stopped for Aupaumut once he and his people eventually took up settlement along the White River, in Indiana, where Aupaumut believed his Christian republican vision would hold his people to the lands. Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, like Aupaumut, were Indians of New England origins. Using the methods of ethnohistory, racial theory, and religious studies, Silverman follows the two Brotherton leaders who ended up traveling Oneida country in New York

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to spread their brand of racial-difference Christianity and find a place for their people. Under the leadership of a new generation of ministers, the Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians eventually moved in the 1820s to Wisconsin in the hope of removing God’s curse of racial difference in citizenship only to find their attempts at inclusion repeatedly smashed by American migration and removal. Mandell’s use of social and cultural history, and the discovery of a unique set of diaries kept by Frederick Baylies, allow him to follow Baylies in motion. Like other Second Great Awakening ministers, he moved about, from Martha’s Vineyard to Rhode Island, and island-hopped to Nantucket. In all these places, Baylies helped Native Christians fund schools and keep their churches intact while never undermining the Native peoples’ social structure of church leaders and cultural ways of learning and praying. David Brown, the Christian Cherokee followed in Joel Martin’s essay, traveled up and down the eastern seaboard, facing racial hardship as he called for Cherokee sovereignty before elite audiences in major cities. And in Anderson’s work, Iroquois and Wendat were in motion in response to intertribal conflicts as well as the Jesuit presence. Our contributors, in short, have shown just how much motion is key to understanding early America’s religious landscape. Like motion, comparison opens wider vistas to exploring Native Christians in the context of religious colonialism.10 Comparative mission history for early America is rare indeed. The comparison of literacy rates by Hackel and Wyss points to the benefits of such comparisons. Comparative histories not only throw into sharp relief denominational similarities as well as differences but also show how little or much Native Christians across early America shared in common. The field is in dire need of such comparisons. After all, Euro-American missionaries in various regions oftentimes established programs among different Native groups. Comparisons can be regional or transregional. Stevens’s transatlantic work brings another comparative approach to light, and it is one scholars of our field have yet to attempt. Missionaries in early North America must be compared with other mission programs in Latin America, Africa, Australia, and other colonized territories. Such comparisons will not only emphasize the transnational phenomenon of missionary work as an extended arm of colonialism but will also show just how much Native peoples have shared in common as Christians or non-Christians. A more macro approach to mission history will globalize Native peoples of early America as a key part of a large puzzle of indigenous religious history. When we organized this volume, the hard task was separating the diverse essays that at points shared so much in common. That is what brought us together

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for our two symposiums; we sensed that something unique but shared between disciplines was changing our field. Putting this collection together, we believe, represents where the field of early American mission history is at present and where it is going. The categories under which our essays appear, then, are by no means hard and fast, as readers will discover that although this conclusion has found some common grounds the essays crisscross in other ways. Our field, if anything, is now similarly interdisciplinary and unbounded. To return to the metaphor of the compass, we think our volume is a fitting starting point to plunge into other studies of Native Christians across early America’s religious landscape to keep the arrows representing many disciplines spinning.

Notes 1. The literature on missionaries in early America is far too vast to note here. An interesting work from Canada about “repositioning” missionaries in networks of colonial exchange has helped my thinking: Brett Christophers, Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998). One of my own works has looked at how Native Christians influenced the practices of missionaries, forcing them to adapt their preaching styles and translate Christian texts: Mark A. Nicholas, “Practicing Local Faith and Local Politics: Senecas, Presbyterianism, and a ‘New Mission History,’ ” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 73, no. 1 (2006): 69–101. 2. The notes to each essay in this volume display the range and mastery of disciplinary influence. On the idea of “lived” and the self here, I am influenced by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff’s classic work Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 3. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1977). A wonderful critique of Western thinking on the indigenous self is Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 2005). 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 24–28. On expanding the interpretation of “violence” against Native Americans, see Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2005). 5. My interpretation of literacy is informed by James Collins and Richard K. Blot, Literacy and Literacies: Text, Power, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6. On ritual as performance, see the classic anthropological works by Victor W. Turner: From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1972) and The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988). 7. Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1.

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8. On culture as space, particularly in the indigenous context, see Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 51. Influenced by Michel Foucault, although weary of Western theories of space, Smith points to space as a “cultural archive.” It “not only contains artefacts of culture, but is itself an artefact and a construct of culture.” 9. Michael McNally, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10. A recent comparative history is Rachel Wheeler’s To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008).

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coda naming the legacy of native christian missionary encounters Michael D. McNally

Each study in this volume has done much to complicate and open up our sense of past encounters between various Christian missionaries and various Native North American peoples. These encounters could transform missionaries even as their missionary projects could transform the cultures of Native communities. Missionary encounters have led to the tragic loss of many Native languages; missionary encounters have also led, through the mechanisms and practices of literacy, to the retention of Native languages. Missionary encounters could eradicate traditions; they could also provide material for new articulations of those traditions. The encounters could introduce or exacerbate divisions in Native communities and families, fomenting disastrous results, if not violence; through those encounters could also emerge novel social networks and institutions around which fragmented Native peoples could restore their communities. In calling attention to the many facets of missionary encounters, the careful work in this volume has reclaimed a complex past from, on the one hand, narratives of valorization and hagiography (truer of the first half of twentieth-century historiography but still very much present in many denominational histories today) and, on the other, narratives of vilification in works of anthropology, professional history, and ethnohistory that reduce the complexities of various encounters to a singular formula equating missions with the deleterious impact of colonialism.1 The works in this volume have also connected the study of this past to the present in important ways that are relevant to scholars and Native communities alike and to the numerous and thoughtful contemporary Native

Christian and post-Christian voices driven to lay claim to the lived realities of the legacy of missionary encounters and the structures of assimilation so closely associated with that legacy in the period following the studies of this book. These contemporary voices are perhaps most articulately exemplified by Iliff School of Theology professor George Tinker, who, in a book entitled Missionary Conquest, asserts that, even with all the complexities and good intentions of missionaries taken into account, those missionary encounters add up to “cultural genocide.” Tinker is not just playing the provocateur here — he draws on the language of cultural genocide with considerable self-awareness and caution: “The conscious intent to destroy a people is not necessary for an act to be genocidal or for it to succeed in destroying. What I call cultural genocide functions at times as conscious intent, but at other times at such a systemic level that it may be largely subliminal. In such cases, the good intent of some may be so mired in unrecognized systemic structures that they even remain unaware of the destruction that results from those good intentions.”2 Tinker’s claims are built upon a foundation of historical accounts of four “well-intentioned” missionary figures: John Eliot, Junipero Serra, Pierre-Jean De Smet, and Henry Benjamin Whipple, and Tinker is careful not to simply “chastise the missionaries” for failing to “demonstrate an awareness beyond what was culturally possible at that time.”3 Instead, Tinker roots his work in terms of “an ongoing process of owning our history, honestly knowing our past, so that our future may be freed from living in a cover up mode.” And this applies to non-Native peoples and the churches as well as Native people. “Both Indian and white must confront the lie . . . that finally results in both the oppressor and the oppressed blaming the oppressed for their own oppression.”4 Tinker’s third purpose is to “trace the connection between each mission effort and the governing social institutions of which the missionary church was a part, to show that the mission presence inadvertently or self-consciously facilitated the disruptive incursion of Euroamerican military, political, economic, and social power into an Indian nation’s existence.”5 In this coda, I wish to place the work of this current volume in conversation and critical tension with such positions as Tinker’s, not simply to identify particular oversights in Tinker’s own historical narrative chapters but to reckon more fully with the subjectivity of such approaches to the missionary past as Tinker’s. The contributions of this volume, as committed as they are to criticizing previous scholarship along such lines, generally concern encounters that took place in North America in what many of us consider a time long past. Here I wish to trace the trajectories of these encounters up through the present day, with an eye to how complex the relationship between Native people and 290

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Christianity remains long after the past encounters described here. In tracing those trajectories, I also want to emphasize, as authors here already suggest, that many Native people remember historical missionary encounters in ways that contrast with the kinds of memory mediated by professional historians. In no small part, this is because Native communities can experience “the pastness of the past” of missionary encounters in dramatically different ways, not only because of the profound presence of the past through oral tradition but also because Native lives are still powerfully circumscribed by the legacies of colonialism in all its forms. This is indeed a tall order to fill in one short coda, given the variety of these trajectories and the wide range of Native ways of remembering mission history. Surely I cannot match here the meticulous detail with which the authors in this volume have rendered their subjects. I should also clarify that my title does not indicate that I will here attempt to “name” the legacy of missionary encounters, either christening them in the ironic mode as benign encounters between wellintentioned, if misguided, missionaries and Native peoples able to assert their agency no matter what was thrown their way, or pronouncing them as inevitable instances of colonialism in the tragic mode. Rather, my aim is to recognize the difference, and not deficiency, in other ways of naming the significance of these encounters and to relate this book to those remembrances, published and orally transmitted today in Indian country, that are shaped by that legacy. In this regard, my purpose is not the bibliographic placement of this work but a consideration of its place alongside other forms of memory. One fruitful way, it seems to me, to enter that conversation between various ways of remembering the past — a conversation that includes the complexity in particular of Native memories of the missionary past — is to consider Native naming practices as they encountered the naming practices of Christian missionaries and those associated with the assimilation policies of about 1871–1934, which so significantly have framed Native ways of remembering past encounters with Christian missionaries.

Naming in the Anishinaabe Tradition and in Missionary Encounters The act of naming is a weighty matter in the tradition of the Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe, people native to the western Great Lakes, as it is in many Native communities. Names have power. They can have their source in visions, matters of direct revelation from spirits. They can be passed down from elder to younger generations. Names can be sought and earned and can indicate life transformacoda

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tions of many sorts. Multiple names can even be earned and their power and significance conjoined to the named. Naming ceremonies were crucial in the Anishinaabe ritual repertoire, establishing a lifelong and important relationship between namer and named, each we’enh (namesake) to the other. Families sought a name for their young children and older individuals for themselves by offering tobacco to respected and powerful elders, both women and men, seeking a share of their power and stature through the naming ceremony and the name that had come to them through the properly ordered ritual process. If naming was so important to Anishinaabe people traditionally, it could ultimately have been no neutral matter in the encounters between Anishinaabe communities and missionaries concerned with remaking Native people and signifying this transformation in the ritual of baptism. As John and Jean Comaroff argue in their studies of missionary encounters in nineteenth-century southern Africa, baptismal naming is an important instance of “linguistic colonialism.” This was the case in missionary encounters with Anishinaabe peoples. The power to name relied not on the authority of eldership or on the authority of the visionary power of the medicine woman or man but instead on the authority of ordained clergy and the authority of Christian ritual. And baptism generally, if not univocally, renamed Anishinaabe people with Francophone (in the case of many Roman Catholics) and Anglophone (in the case of Protestants) names, typically names from the Bible or the catalog of saints, and not infrequently including a new surname to completely transform identity. Episcopalian missionary Pauline Colby wrote in 1893 of a baby born to a Christian couple at Leech Lake, Minnesota. “The baby will soon be baptized and receive a Christian name,” Colby explained, “but of course he will also have an Indian name, which will be the one he will be known by until he goes to a church or government school.” Colby observed how Ojibwe names would not suffice in the official world of the mission or schools. “If the children have no Christian name when they enter . . . the principal or some other official registers them on the roll arbitrarily, and we have a George Washington Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland here right now. The girls seem to be named most frequently after some of the employees.”6 By Ojibwe standards, baptismal naming was often no less arbitrary. Indeed, baptismal names offered an important fund-raising opportunity. In the 1850s, James Breck baptized a Gull Lake Band Ojibwe girl, Selma Dimock, naming her after a benefactress from St. Luke’s Parish, New York City. To the elder Selma Dimock Breck wrote, “May this be some reward to you, madam, for your gracious deeds done to us from year to year. May your prayer follow this little one, and may God prosper her.”7 292

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Naming and Assimilation Baptismal names were conjoined, through bureaucratic American efforts at the turn of the twentieth century, with stable surnames to regularize paternity and patrilineal norms of property transfer. In 1903, the commissioner of Indian Affairs considered that “it was necessary to require Indians to adopt family names in view of the confusion in connection with heirship and transfer of property which had prevailed under the present system.”8 Baptismal records in missionary churches became crucial in bureaucratic efforts by the United States to regularize and regulate Native American lives in such a way as to incorporate Native peoples and identities into the broader American political, religious, and cultural economy. The conjoining of Christian and governmental naming practices provides a crucial window into the dynamics of culturally distinct ways of remembering past encounters between missionaries and Native peoples. One simply cannot understand the legacies of those encounters without coming to terms with the very real ways that missionary agendas and legacies became part of colonization through these policies. Although Christian mission efforts in the United States had, at least since 1819, formally drawn upon government resources in the Civilization Fund, it wasn’t until the “Peace Policy” under President Grant in the late 1860s, and the formal end of treaty making in 1871, that the Christianization efforts of missionaries were incorporated into formal U.S. assimilation policies designed to “kill the Indian” in order to “save the man,” to use the language of the father of the boarding school movement, Colonel Pratt. The boarding school movement was a major part of assimilation policy. Its purpose was to rip away Native children from the tight weave of extended family, ancestral land, and traditional practices on that land and place them in totalizing institutions that rewarded them for becoming women and men on the model of Anglo-American and capitalist norms of gender and labor and punished them for traces of continued Indianness. Many of the boarding schools were run by the government, but others were managed by denominations under contract with the United States. With their eventual English-only policies, and the frequent abuse and shaming of Native children, these schools did much to undermine the continued practice of entire Native languages. Boarding school education was conjoined in assimilation policy with a land policy of “allotment,” by which communal lands on reservations created by treaties were, by acts of Congress in 1887 and thereafter, carved into family farm plots (regardless of the farming potential of the lands); these plots were assigned coda

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to male heads of household, with “surplus” lands distributed at submarket rates to non-Indian settlers ostensibly to provide good examples of agrarianism, thrift, and civilization in close proximity. In the first decade of the twentieth century, under conditions of increased pressure by settlers, speculators, and, in the case of Anishinaabe lands, timber companies eager to supply the building of midwestern cities, allotments were recognized as alienable and often sold for a song to feed hungry children. Finally, assimilation policy targeted traditional Indian practices and customs deemed inimical to progress and discouraged them, sometimes even criminalizing them. This was particularly true of the ceremonial practices of Native religions. A series of executive branch directives from the 1880s on known as the Religious Crimes Code went so far as to criminalize such activities as the sun dance and the potlatch, or giveaway — what could be more inimical to progress than to privilege and ceremonialize the giving away of one’s own property! It is not difficult to see behind these formal policies of the U.S. government the vision of missionaries and Christian churches committed to the equivalence of Christianity and Anglo-American culture and economy. True, missionaries had been among the key supporters, if not the architects, of these policies, which were designed — or at least generously interpreted in the minds of reformers — to protect Natives, through American law, as citizens. But short of policy making, denominations exerted an even stronger force in reservation communities, where local missionaries frequently teamed up with the Indian agent to promote practices they deemed worthy of civilization by yoking the distribution of treaty annuities — to which Native people were entitled and on which they were utterly dependent for survival — to judgments of their worthiness. In this state of affairs, attending church on Sunday with short hair and lace dresses could mean the difference between eating or not. The formal policies of assimilation were discontinued, if not reversed, in 1934 through the Indian Reorganization Act (ir a) and related “Indian New Deal” legislation. Efforts by reformers in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration were supported by the 1928 Meriam Report by the forerunner to the Brookings Institution, which declared the various initiatives of the past fifty years of assimilation policy to have been a colossal failure. Allotment was ended, tribal governments were created with the possibility of holding communal property, and the rights of Native peoples to speak their languages and practice their religions were affirmed. But in most respects the significant damage had already been done: to land bases, families, languages, religions, and cultures. Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence Gross describes this damage — which was so insidiously and profoundly experienced — as a social, psychological, and spiritual 294

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disorder, which he terms “Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.”9 From this vantage Christianity, and the missionaries who historically brought it to bear, are more than figures or symbols or whipping posts of this broader injustice; they are its key agents and standard-bearers.

The Legacy of Naming Yet naming the reality of that injustice is as difficult as determining the relationship between one’s own name and one’s identity. Members of Minnesota’s Ojibwe communities bear the names of past baptizing missionaries and impatient bureaucrats who sat at desks on a field, and these names represent any number of postures toward the missionary past. There are the Whipples, named for the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, Henry Benjamin Whipple, who is exhibit A in Tinker’s analysis of cultural genocide, the subject of an entire chapter of Tinker’s Missionary Conquest. There are extended families carrying the name Morgan, Allen, Hanks, Brown, and White, among others. At some point, what was once arbitrary — names conferred in moves of “linguistic colonialism” — became necessary aspects of proud, familial identities associated with the personages and collectives that made something of those names. Perhaps these people had made something of the names long ago, as part of their colonialism. “A name is one of the most sacred privileges accorded to any person,” the White Earth newspaper, run by mixed-blood enrollee Gus Beaulieu, declared in the early twentieth century, “and even the Indians will resent any interference by the officials of the government with this right. Even if an Indian is not named Tom Smith or John Jones there would not be any less confusion if his Indian name should be translated into English, for he would probably not recognize it. The government officials may arbitrarily replace Indian names on allotment and pay rolls, but they cannot compel the Indians to make use of them in their daily intercourse with each other or to do business in their English names.”10 Indeed, Anishinaabe people in the past could be referred to locally by Anishinaabe names conferred in the traditional naming ceremony, alongside baptismal or government names, or by nicknames that supplement — and perhaps for some, that subvert — those official legal and Christian identities. (Anishinaabe people today can still be referred to locally by these traditional names or nicknames.) Even the dedicated Christian convert and ordained Episcopal priest John Johnson, who perhaps more than any other person was responsible for the creation in the nineteenth century of a viable Ojibwe Christian community in Minnesota, went locally by his given Anishinaabe name Enmegabowh, and his son by the daughter of the important Gull Lake chief coda

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Waubunoquod (White Cloud) went by the same name, presumably a result of his maternal grandfather’s conferring the name ceremonially in the Ojibwe way as the boy’s we’enh.11 From the perspective of Anishinaabe tradition, this is ultimately unsurprising, since traditional names had always served families and communities as living resources, presences even, of power, lineage, and identity, and such resources could be added together.

“Naming” the Legacy of Mission Encounters As we turn now to consider the larger legacy of the missionary encounters in the book, I suggest that the legacy of all those names and the naming of the legacy are related in their complexity. Today, most Anishinaabe people are baptized Christians, but this statistic says little about the place of Christianity in contemporary Anishinaabe communities, which would largely be true for most Native American communities. To be sure, there are Minnesota Anishinaabe people who are devout Catholics and members of the Episcopal Church, as well as growing numbers of Anishinaabe people who identify with the Missionary Alliance, Seventh-Day Adventist, Assemblies of God, or other evangelical and pentecostal churches associated with more recent missionary efforts. But what this all means in terms of importance or significance is another question entirely. Until recently, what we’ve known about the religious profile of Native Christianity, not to mention other Native traditions, has been largely anecdotal or has relied on the reportage of small populations of self-identified Native Americans (and largely off reservation) at the margins of general surveys of religion in America. A recent study by Cherokee sociologist Eva Garroutte and others, however, surveyed more than three thousand Native people living on Lakota and Navajo reservations to analyze, among other things, the relative salience to respondents of the beliefs of aboriginal religions, Christianity, and the peyotist Native American Church. Garroutte found that fully one-third of the respondents “assigned high salience to the beliefs of Christianity,” with another third assigning high salience to teachings of the Native American Church, the peyote way that variously incorporates elements of Christian belief into its ceremonial and ethical teachings (the Native American Church, it should be added, has a stronger presence in the communities surveyed than in most Native communities). In addition, at least half of respondents in both tribes described aboriginal beliefs “very important.”12 Some of the respondents who assigned high salience to Christian beliefs described aboriginal beliefs as very important also, as revealed by the overlap 296

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in the proportions stated above. It is this overlap that signals one of the most important dimensions of Native American religious traditions generally and bears some reflection in considering the place of missionary Christianity. Like other indigenous traditions, such as Vodun, Santeria, and Candomblé in Africa and in the African diaspora, Native American religions are characterized by what Joseph Epes Brown called “cumulative non-exclusive adhesion.”13 Or better, in anthropologist Pamela Amoss’s words, Native religions are “religiously musical.”14 In this interpretation they are artful, resourceful, and adept in the way they’ve drawn on the repertories of multiple historical traditions to fashion a working synthesis characterized more by what Pierre Bourdieu called the “logic of practice” than by the logic of orthodoxy or theological consistency.15 I have argued elsewhere that this model of practice, rather than that of belief, better accounts for the shape of much of the operative Christianity among Native Americans today, and this volume enriches this understanding of practice, with a whole section drawing on Latin American and other leading forms of scholarship developing this approach.16 A historical understanding of the practice of Native Christianity can help us fathom why it is that the bulk of Anishinaabe engagements with the Christian traditions in Minnesota — the primary outcome of the missionary past, if you will — are engagements with rites of passage, especially death and burial. In Minneapolis, All Saints Mission and the Office of Indian Ministry of the Catholic Archdiocese have growing attendance at Sunday mass and services, but the clergy at both locations will hasten to point out that they are busy presiding over wakes and funerals; community halls are crowded for the wakes that draw many people to the space and to the leadership of the clergy. The Catholic Indian ministry has even established a volunteer-driven nonprofit hearse service to transport bodies to reservation communities for burial.

Danny’s Quandary: Native and Christian? Indeed, perhaps it is no surprise that the Indian movement of the 1970s, and particularly the return to intertribal and tribal religious traditions in the wake of that movement, have created difficulties for many baptized Christians with their own Christianity. Many of those turning to the churches for support and space for wakes are decidedly non-Christians. Take, for example, the late Philip “Danny” Kier of White Earth. He hails from a family that had long been prominent in the lay leadership of St. Columba’s Episcopal Mission at White Earth village and before that at the Gull Lake Mission described above. But after one of his sons was killed in a gang-related violent incident in Minneapolis, even coda

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though Dan participated fully in the funeral wake in the guild hall adjacent to the little Episcopal church at Pine Point and welcomed the presence of elders who came to sing Ojibwe language hymns rooted in the missionary exchanges of the nineteenth century, Dan refused on principled grounds to darken the door of the church for the funeral service proper. He stood outside, lit a cigarette, probably praying the whole time, and waited quietly until the burial procession. Danny had read with interest what I had to say in Ojibwe Singers both about his son’s funeral and about his ancestor Suzanna Wright Roy, a late nineteenthcentury Episcopalian elder who exerted considerable influence on the tradition of hymn singing at White Earth and who used the Episcopal affiliation to the end of community survival with remarkable savvy.17 In fact, his comment that I had helped him come to understand why some of his people had become devout Christians meant more to me than any positive academic review. But as we came to know each other over the subsequent years, and as complications of diabetes found Danny making deeper and deeper forays into traditional Anishinaabe medicine and the religious traditions and ethics that stand behind that medicine, Danny would take advantage of my presence to pose such questions as “Mike, tell me when did gichi manidoo become the Great Spirit,” suggesting that the latter, a missionary English translation for the totality of being indicated by the sovereign Ojibwe term, was seriously reduced in the process of translation into the Christian God. Dan was from then until his untimely death in 2006 what I suppose you might call a post-Christian Anishinaabe traditionalist. His family’s Christian leanings, and those of his wife, perhaps held him back or slowed him down from the fuller training in traditional Anishinaabe religious knowledge and practices that he came to seek, but he never let go of the dilemma: the question of his Christianity seemed to be a driving force even after he had for all intents and purposes left the church. Danny’s quandary is one many Native people feel about the Christian tradition and the legacy of missionary encounters. Robert Two Bulls, himself an Episcopal priest, is hardly shocked by how many of his fellow Lakota Christians have left the Episcopal Church. “This comes as no surprise to me, given the general history of Christianity and its dealings with Native Americans,” Two Bulls writes. “Why be part of a community which does not follow the teachings of its teachers?” All the churches had walked hand in hand with the federal government as they implemented the policy of assimilation, often with disastrous results.18 In an anthology of writings by contemporary Native Christians, historian James Treat poses the question of how those Native peoples have resolved the dilemma of being at once Native and Christian, the title of the anthology. Treat’s work, like that of similar anthologies, suggests that, at least since the Indian 298

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movement and the resurgence of traditional identity and religion that has characterized Indian country in the period since the 1970s, Native Christians have somehow had to get their heads and hearts around being authentically Native while being authentically Christian, and this problematic has to do with the legacy of the missionary encounters described in this book.19 In response to the claims made by many self-designated traditional Native people, Treat appropriately hastens to present articulate voices of Native Christians who embrace Native and Christian identities, and do so not out of false consciousness but with eyes wide open to the violence and dispossession so clearly associated with much of the missionary/assimilation policy legacy. The voices include those of Native biblical scholars, theologians, women religious, clergy, spiritual leaders, and others who have articulate things to say in print about being both Native and Christian, often expressing a Christian theology that speaks of liberation, anticolonialism, and a distinctive Native American cultural witness to traditional beliefs and practices. Roman Catholic scholars and leaders — both Natives, like Lakota woman religious Marie Therese Archambault, and non-Natives, like Jesuits Carl Starkloff and Achiel Peelman — have most clearly extended the postconciliar liturgical and theological reforms to articulate an enculturation or inculturation of the gospel in and through Native languages and cultures.20 In their collaborative book A Native American Theology, Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George Tinker similarly find the question “can one be Christian and Indian simultaneously in contemporary society” to be the “ultimate question in the relationship between contemporary Native people and organized Christian churches.” The reference to Christian institutions is an important one to which we will return shortly. Like Treat’s, this book refuses to content itself with a singular view in favor of a chorus of Native Christian voices. The authors similarly set out to articulate distinctive forms of Native Christian thought that depart from and critique the colonialist legacy of the missionaries and the churches that continue to institutionalize forms of Christianity and extend that colonialism. Indeed, the authors of this volume take issue with the lingering colonialism and dehumanization of the postconciliar theologies of inculturation described above, viewing them as a “modification of cultural experience rather than a complete denial of it.”21 Kidwell, Noley, and Tinker argue that “an attempt to explicate an American Indian theology is an assertion of tribal sovereignty, the doctrine that Indian nations are sovereign entities with powers of self-government deriving from their original occupation of their lands before European contact. The assertion challenges the effects of European colonization and the role that Christianity played as a weapon used against Indian cultures.”22 coda

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It is no coincidence, perhaps, that many of the Native intellectuals most vocally critical of colonization, missions, and the erosion of cultural and political sovereignty past and present themselves emerge from either a Christian or post-Christian background. Vine Deloria Jr., George Tinker, Robert Warrior, and Jace Weaver all received seminary training, which helped give shape to their Christian or post-Christian criticism of missionary Christianity. This is perhaps unsurprising in the global arena of postcolonial study, much of which emerges from intellectual positions formed in the academic, religious, and political institutions of the West. But in the case of the naming of the legacy of Native American encounters with Christian missionaries, it is particularly important to note that varying positions can share a respect for multiple Native religious responses to those missionary encounters. Whether Native people remain cardcarrying Christians of the missionary churches, whether they seek to cleave or create semiautonomous institutions and movements of Native Christianity, or whether they disclaim Christian affiliation altogether in favor of “traditional” spirituality, there seems to be among the intellectuals’ writing, and the intellectuals and elders within Native oral traditions, a striking respect for various strategies of response. Indeed, the devoutly Episcopalian Ojibwe James Allen Jr. and others at the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota have founded a project that aims to eradicate barriers between the various religious alternatives, Christian and non-Christian, and could equip Anishinaabe people to surmount the arduous challenges to their well-being and survival. The point for Allen is that Native people at this moment find a spiritual path — not the spiritual path. Many Anishinaabe elders and leaders hewing to the Midéwiwin and other traditional Anishinaabe practices generally share such a position of respect for Anishinaabe people who identify with the Christian tradition, despite often frequent criticisms of Christianity in toto. Can a more detailed telling of history matter in this equation for Native peoples? Perhaps, as Joanna Brooks suggests in this volume, the work of the preceding essays can complicate the narrative of missionary intentions. A new mission history, led by the authors in this book, has gone out of its way to argue for and appreciate Native Americans’ agency in the creation of their worlds, and to be sure, the authors of this volume are attentive to the colonialism that constrains that agency. But in their zeal to move from formula to contingent history, from structure to agency, from acculturation to exchange, do historians and ethnohistorians not risk overstating the reach of Native agency and understating the ways that colonization, dispossession, and disease have set the dramatically unequal terms of power on which missionaries and Indians interacted? And do they not risk enabling opportunistic readers to regard the plain facts of material, 300

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cultural, and spiritual dispossession as matters of Native consent? These questions arise out of my own experience: like the other authors in this book, I have documented the destructive side of missions, but I found that my work read in a way that I did not intend and that I do not think captures the complexity of the encounters discussed. In the decade since Ojibwe Singers was released, I have received some disconcerting accolades from readers, mostly committed Episcopalians, who are obviously intoxicated by what they took to be my claim that Episcopalian missions in Minnesota, because they bore such fruit, were exempt from the colonizing agenda. Did they miss the chapter on the politics of Indian death in this present day of teenage suicide, gangland murders, and diabetes, the pain that occasions most Ojibwe hymn singing? Or did I, in effect, do interpretive violence to the violence of this mission history by making so much of practices and putting Native agency in the foreground? Because so much is at stake in the contemporary survival of Indian communities, I want to suggest that epistemological differences concerning the past raise very real ethical issues for the writing of mission history. Perhaps it is only when we professional historians are in dialogue with, perhaps even accountable to, Native communities or figures like Tinker and Deloria that we contextualize our own desire and discipline to contextualize missionary encounters as matters of their own time, that we remember to signal, if not study, the historical trajectories that follow the mission encounters we’ve explored, or that we are reminded that complicating some corner of missions history ought not whitewash the broader impacts of, say, the legal Doctrine of Discovery applied to Indian law in the 1820s, or the Religious Crimes Code of the 1880s, or the boarding schools experiments, each of which is, in no small part, the legacy of missionary activities.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Missionary Legacy in Both Tragic and Comic Modes The eminent anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss laments in Tristes Tropiques that the Westerner traveling the globe finds evidence galore of the “noxious byproducts” of modern Western civilization and the colonialism that has fed its appetite. Like other anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss considered missions to Native peoples of the Americas as part of those noxious by-products. In an evocative image, Lévi-Strauss refers to this as “our filth.”23 In The Predicament of Culture, anthropologist James Clifford reflects on the more conjunctural view of cultures as practices, as in the case of the creolizing coda

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of Caribbean cultures, in which “the roots of tradition are cut and retied, collective symbols appropriated from external influences.” I like to think here of the example of the piles of ninety-gallon drums left behind in Jamaica by Standard Oil but fashioned through the alchemy of cultural practice into the Jamaican steel drum. From such a vantage, Clifford writes that “culture and identity are inventive and mobile. They need not take root in ancestral plots; they live by pollination, by (historical) transplanting.”24 The “filth” that an expansive West, according to the disillusioned traveler of Tristes Tropiques,25 has thrown in the face of the world’s societies appears as raw material, compost for “new orders of difference.”26 But, crucially, Clifford doesn’t stop there. “It is also filth,” he goes on to warn. “Modern cultural contacts need not be romanticized, erasing the violence of empire and continuing forms of neocolonial domination. ‘Caribbean history’ is one of degradation, mimicry, violence, and blocked possibilities. It is also rebellious, syncretic, and creative. This kind of ambiguity keeps the planet’s local futures uncertain and open. There is no master narrative that can reconcile the tragic and comic plots of global cultural history.”27 Tragic and comic. In the end, the challenge of thinking about the legacy of the mission encounters is the challenge of rendering that history in a way that doesn’t hasten to reconcile the tragic and the comic by collapsing one into the other. If the tragic mode enables the reader of history to identify injustice and feel empathy at the risk of suggesting the story is over, the comic mode elicits the ultimate life-affirming resilience of Native cultures in motion and recognizes their presence, in the past and today, as creators of history. Here, Native voices speaking from Native experiences of this double reality are perhaps the better models, especially as they can draw on the deep wells of Indian humor to lay claim to both the tragic and comic.28 I’ll close with a story about Vine Deloria Jr., the Native American intellectual who, I pointed out earlier, drew upon the resources of a Native Episcopalian upbringing and seminary education as part of his trenchant critique of Christianity, missionaries, anthropologists, and other intellectual traditions of the modern West. The story, to me, does a better, or at least a more concise, job of summing up his immense contribution to knowledge than do the Deloria Reader and the dissertations that appropriately have emerged in recent years, as it speaks to a manner of asserting agency, through a comic vision, over a history that otherwise might be sealed in the register of tragedy.29 Several years ago, in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution, a worker found a brain in a jar; the brain was that of Ishi, the celebrated California Native who lived a highly public life with the notorious burden of being “the last Yahi.”30 When news of this find made its way 302

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into a Native American studies Listserv, there were, not surprisingly, a string of postings copiously lamenting the unspeakable tragedy of Ishi’s history and the caustic legacy represented by finding such an item in the basement of a venerable and professional American institution such as the Smithsonian at the turn of the twenty-first century. Then came a simple, one-sentence posting from Vine Deloria Jr. that said it all: “At least there’s one good brain at the Smithsonian.”

Notes 1. See, for example, Frances Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). 2. George Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 5. 3. Ibid., 9. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 10. 6. Pauline Colby, “Reminiscences,” n.d. (ca. 1908), typescript, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn. 7. Charles Breck, ed., The Life of the Rev. James L. Breck, D.D. (New York: E. and J. B. Young, 1883), 105. 8. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington: GPO, 1903). 9. Lawrence Gross, “The Comic Vision of Anishinaabe Culture and Religion,” American Indian Quarterly 26 (Summer 2002): 436–59. 10. The Tomahawk, cited in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1903). 11. Fragment (n.d.) in Henry Benjamin Whipple Papers, box 1, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn. 12. Eva Garroutte et al., “Religiosity in Two American Indian Populations,” Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 48, no. 3 (2009): 480–500. 13. Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 20. 14. Pamela T. Amoss, “Cultural Centrality and Prestige for the Elderly: The Coast Salish Case,” in Dimensions: Aging, Culture, and Health, ed. Christine Fry (New York: Bergin, 1981), 47–65. 15. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 16. See Michael D. McNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity,” Church History 69 (December 2000): 834–59. 17. Michael D. McNally, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 18. Robert Two Bulls, “We Can Remember, We Can Recognize, but Can We Reconcile,” First Peoples Theology Journal 4 (June 2006): 79–80. 19. James Treat, introduction to Native and Christian, ed. James Treat (New York: Routledge, 1996). One thinks also here of Christopher Vecsey’s impressive three-volume study of Ameri-

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can Indian Catholics: On the Padre’s Trail (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), The Paths of Kateri’s Kin (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), and Where the Two Roads Meet (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), as well as the volume Vecsey edited with Marie Therese Archambault and Mark G. Thiel, The Crossing of Two Roads: Being Catholic and Native in the United States (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2003). 20. Marie Therese Archambault, OSF, “Native Americans and Evangelization,” in Treat, Native and Christian, 132–55; Achiel Peelman, Christ Is a Native American (Ottawa: Wipf and Stock, 1996). 21. Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George Tinker, A Native American Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 9. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955; New York: Penguin, 1992), 24. 24. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 15. 25. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 38. 26. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 15. 27. Ibid. 28. On Indian humor, see Lawrence Gross, “The Comic Vision of Anishinaabe Culture and Religion,” American Indian Quarterly 26 (Summer 2002): 436–59. 29. See, for example, For This Land: Writings on American Religion, ed. James Treat (New York: Routledge, 1998), and Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader, ed. Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner, and Sam Scinta (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1999). Of the many dissertations, see, for example, Holly Rae Boomer, “Writing Red: Vine Deloria Jr. and Contemporary American Indian Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2000). 30. See Theodra Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961); Ishi, the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, ed. Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (1979; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); and Orin Starn, Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian (New York: Norton, 2004).

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contributors

emma anderson, associate professor, Department of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa, is the author of The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Harvard University Press, 2007). joanna brooks is associate professor of English, San Diego State University; editor of The Collected Writings of Samson Occom (Oxford University Press, 2006); and author of American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford University Press, 2003). steven w. hackel, associate professor, Department of History, University of California at Riverside, is the author of Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (oieahc, 2005) and editor of Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation (University of California Press, 2010). tracy neal leavelle, associate professor, Department of History, Creighton University, is the author of Colonial Conversions: Religious Encounters and Cultural Translation in French and Indian North America (forthcoming). daniel mandell, associate professor, Department of History, Truman State University, is the author of Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); King Philip’s War: The Conflict over New England (Chelsea House Publications, 2007); and Behind

the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (University of Nebraska Press, 1996). He is also the editor of New England Treaties, North and West, volume 20 of Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607– 1789 (University Press of America, 2003), and New England Treaties, Southeast, volume 19 of Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607–1789 (University Press of America, 2003). joel w. martin, vice provost for academic affairs, dean of the faculty, and Distinguished Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the author of Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Beacon, 1991) and The Land Looks after Us: A History of Native American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2001) and coeditor of Screening the Sacred: Religion, Ideology, and American Popular Culture (Westview, 1995). michael d. mcnally, associate professor and chair, Department of Religion, Carleton College, is the author of Honoring Elders (Columbia University Press, 2009) and Ojibwe Singers (Oxford University Press, 2000) and editor of Art of Tradition: Sacred Music, Dance, and Story of Michigan’s Anishinaabe (Michigan State University, 2009). mark a. nicholas, visiting assistant professor of history, Northern Illinois University, is coauthoring a Native American textbook with Ken Townsend for Prentice Hall. He is also completing two documentary readers for Prentice Hall and has two other books in progress: A Seneca New Order: Culture and the State, 1783–1855 for Michigan State University Press and Colliding Geo-Histories: American Nationhood and Indian Territory for the University of Arizona Press. michelene pesantubbee, associate professor of religious studies and American Indian and Native studies, University of Iowa, is the author of Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (University of New Mexico Press, 2005). david j. silverman, associate professor of history, George Washington University, is the author of Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2010).

306

contributors

laura m. stevens, associate professor of English, University of Tulsa, is the author of The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Daughters of Israel: Biblical Women and British Identities in Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature (forthcoming). rachel wheeler, associate professor of religious studies, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis, is the author of To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the EighteenthCentury Northeast (Cornell University Press, 2008). douglas l. winiarski, associate professor of religion, University of Richmond, has published essays in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, New England Quarterly, Religion and American Culture, and William and Mary Quarterly and has authored a forthcoming book entitled Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: The Travail of New England Congregationalism, 1690–1770. hilary e. wyss, Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature, Department of English, Auburn University, is the coeditor of Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) and the author of Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

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Accault, Michel, 169, 172 Accault, Michel (son), 172–73 Act of Settlement (1701), 181 Acts of Union (1706 and 1707), 181, 185, 195 African Americans: literary projects of, 10; intermarriage with Native Americans, 43, 51; leaders of Nantucket, 50; and supernatural lore, 111, 114, 115; Native Americans compared to, 227 Agreda, María de Jesús de, 202 Agriculture: and Gay Head, 58; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 68; and Wendat people, 128; and gendered division of labor, 173, 236, 251; and Stockbridge Indians, 230, 236–37, 239, 260, 265; and allotment policies, 293–94 Alcoholism: and Native American communities, 39, 41, 42, 43; and reform movements, 52, 58, 100, 237; threat of, 54; decrease in, 57; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 259; and Brotherton, 260 Algonquian language, 40, 42, 211 Algonquian people: and shamans, 108, 113, 114; cosmology of, 110; traditional religion of, 111; and supernatural lore, 113–14; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 203; and literacy, 213; and Brotherton movement, 218

Allen, James, Jr., 300 Allouez, Claude, 166–67, 170–71 Amelang, James, 204 American Bible Society, 55 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM): David Brown’s speaking tour for, 4, 67, 68, 69–70, 73–74, 76, 77, 80–81, 82, 86 (nn. 4, 7, 9), 286; fund-raising of, 4, 68, 69; federal subsidies for, 68; civilizing mission of, 68, 74, 76, 86 (n. 4); and Cherokee people, 85 (n. 1) American Republic: and Aupaumut, 226, 232, 235, 239; and nativist prophets, 228, 239–40, 282, 284; Indian policy of, 232, 233; and cultural capital of dominance, 283 Amos, Joseph, 55–56 Amoss, Pamela, 297 Anderson, Emma, 9, 281–82, 284, 286 Anglican Church of England, 185 Anishinaabe people, 291–92, 294, 295–96, 297, 300 Anne (queen of England), 181, 194 Apess, William, 35, 42 Apis, Pablo, 210 Archambault, Marie Therese, 299 Artaguiette, Diron D’, 172

Ashpo, Samuel, 26 Assimilation: and Native American sovereignty, 16; and Native American Christians, 24, 180, 298; and traditionalists, 88 (n. 32); of Christianity into Native traditions, 167; of Highlanders in Britain, 185–86, 189–90; and Aupaumut, 243; and legacy of missionary encounters, 290, 291, 299; and boarding schools, 293; U.S. government policy on, 293–94, 298; and naming, 293–95 Associated philanthropy, 186 Astrology, 93, 112, 114 Aupaumut, Hendrick: and Parsons, 225; history of Mahican Nation, 225–26, 230–32, 246 (n. 12); vision of, 226, 228, 232, 233, 236, 239, 240, 258, 282; letter to Jews, 226, 231, 242, 243, 244–45 (n. 2); as intercultural broker, 226, 285; as prophet of cultural revitalization, 228, 232, 236, 262, 285; and literacy, 229, 237–38, 242, 248 (n. 25); friendships of, 229–30; as sachem, 230, 232, 233, 243, 246 (n. 12); and white-Indian relations, 230, 237, 240, 241–44, 246 (n. 8); diplomacy of, 232, 233, 234–36, 238, 243, 247 (nn. 17, 18), 252, 261, 285; and self-sufficiency, 236–37; Tenskwatawa compared to, 239–41, 242, 249 (n. 29); speeches of, 240–41; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 253, 261, 263–64. See also Stockbridge Indians Baptist churches, 46, 55, 56, 58, 105 Barber, Jonathan, 23 Baylies, Frederick: and education, 38, 46–54, 55, 56, 64 (n. 50), 286; and social problems of Native American Christians, 39, 42; Native American Christians working with, 41, 46–47, 52–56, 57, 58, 284; and ecumenical moral uplift, 46; salary of, 47, 63 (n. 39); Native Americans hostile to, 53; as teacher, 53; support for Indian churches, 55; death of, 56, 57; brinksmanship with Native Americans, 283, 284 Baylies, Frederick, II, 63 (n. 37) Baylies, Sally Lee, 46 Bean, Joshua, 211 Beatty, Charles, 31–32, 179–80 Beaulieu, Gus, 295

310

Beecher, Catharine, 89 (n. 46) Beecher, Lyman, 77, 79 Belain, Peter, 52 Belcher, Jeremy, 184 Belknap, Jeremy, 260 Bergland, Renée L., 74 Bibles: distribution of, 46; and literacy, 51, 100, 201, 203, 211–13; translation of, 105, 211–12; indigenous terms of consumption of, 281 Black Elk (shaman), 13, 96 Blair, Hugh, 188 Boudinot, Elias, 67, 78, 79 Bourdieu, Pierre, 277, 278, 297 Bourne, Richard, 40, 99 Bowerman, Sarah, 198 (n. 26) Boyles and Williams funds, 47, 63 (n. 39) Bragdon, Kathleen J., 121 (n. 31), 213 Brainerd, David, 31, 182, 193, 202, 203 Brainerd, John, 182 Brant, Joseph, 26 Bread, Daniel, 265 Brébeuf, Jean de: martyrdom of, 125–27, 131–34, 137–39, 147–48, 150, 150 (n. 2), 153–54 (n. 31), 282; writings of, 126, 131; and Wendat Christians, 127, 132–33, 151 (n. 4); and Christian missions to Native peoples, 128; vows of martyrdom, 131–32; relics of, 132, 134, 149, 150 (n. 2); torture of, 132, 135, 138–40, 146, 148, 149; premonitions of martyrdom, 132, 152 (n. 17); physical remains of, 133, 148–49; Ragueneau on, 133–34, 137–38, 147, 153–54 (n. 31); and European exceptionalism in presentation of death, 138, 156 (n. 47); ritual behavior under torture, 140, 148, 149, 284; and integrated ex-Wendat captives of Haudenosaunee people, 140–42, 146–48, 157–58 (n. 64), 281; Wendat peoples’ accusations of witchcraft against, 144, 157 (n. 55); background of, 150 (n. 2) Breck, James, 292 Britain: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 39–40; Native American visitors to, 180; Scotland’s relationship to, 181, 183, 189–90; unification of, 181, 185, 187, 195 British identity: transoceanic, 11, 182–84, 188; and Scotland, 181, 183, 185, 189–90,

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195; and Protestantism, 183, 185, 188, 198 (n. 32), 199 (n. 44) Brooks, Joanna, 6, 8, 9–10, 13, 204, 206, 279–80, 281, 284, 300 Brooks, Lisa, 217 Bross, Kristina, 59 (n. 6) Brotherton movement: and resettlement, 23, 33, 34; and Occom, 23, 42, 218, 261, 270 (n. 10), 271 (n. 19), 285–86; and Niles, 31; home-based worship services of, 33; and rites of collective confession and reconciliation, 33–34; identification with exodus of Israel, 34; and Rhode Island Indians, 43; and Connecticut Indians, 44; fundraising for, 218; and literacy, 218, 219; and Native American lands, 218, 254, 256, 260, 262–64, 265, 266, 268; councils of, 250; relations with whites, 251, 262; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 253, 256–58, 261, 264–66; material wealth of members of, 260; and agriculture, 265; U.S. citizenship granted to members of, 266, 267 Brown, Catharine, 69, 72 Brown, David: promotion of Christian missions to Native peoples, 1, 2, 67–68, 71, 73, 75–76, 79, 81; on savagery of Europeans, 1, 3, 73; and conditions of Native Americans before European conquest, 1–2, 18 (n. 1), 73; and Native American sovereignty, 4, 18, 68, 71, 74, 76, 77, 80, 82–83, 88 (n. 32), 283–84, 286; speaking tour of, 4, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 73–74, 76, 77, 79, 80–81, 82, 86 (nn. 4, 7, 9), 286; relationship with Evarts, 4, 68–69, 78–81, 82, 84; and Native American lands, 4, 71, 73–74, 76, 77, 79–80, 83; and Cherokee rights, 67, 74, 77, 80–81, 85; Evarts’s audition of, 68–69; and social capital for Cherokee people, 69, 71; cultivation of allies among whites, 69, 71, 76, 79, 82; motivations for speaking tour, 70, 71; on Native Americans’ appearance, 71–72, 87 (n. 16); authenticity of “Indian” eloquence, 72; structure of speech, 72–73; Native American version of American history presented by, 73, 76, 77; whites’ reaction to, 76–77, 87 (n. 21); and intermarriage controversies, 78–79; and Cherokee negotiations with federal

index

officials, 79–81; refusal to perform, 79; and Sequoyah, 81–82; death of, 84; and cultural capital, 284–85 Brown, Joseph Epes, 297 Brown, Oliver, 48, 52, 56 Brown, Rachel Lowrey, 81 Buckongahelas (Delaware chief), 238, 248 (n. 25) Buell, Samuel, 28, 33, 36 (n. 12) Bunce, Isaiah, 77–78, 79 Butrick, Daniel, 81 Cahuilla people, 210 Calhoun, John C., 80 California: literacy of Native Americans in Alta California, 202, 203, 205–9, 213–14; legal cases in, 204–5; mission secularization in, 207, 209, 219 California Indians: literacy of, 204, 206, 207–8, 219, 221 (n. 12); pan-Indian rebellion of 1851, 210, 221 (n. 25) Calloway, Colin G., 8, 182 Calumet, 165 Calvin, Hezekiah, 26, 28, 215, 217, 219 Calvinism, 29–31, 36 (n. 12), 41, 43, 46, 187, 254, 260, 282 Campbell, Archibald, 72 Canada: Jesuits in, 130, 131, 151 (nn. 5, 9, 10); Brébeuf’s prominence in national myth, 150 (n. 2); Oneidas in, 255. See also Haudenosaunee people; Wendat people Carter, Betsy, 48–50, 51 Castaneda, Carlos, 14 Castiglione, Caroline, 204 Catherine de Saint Augustine, 152 (n. 14), 154 (n. 31), 158 (n. 68) Catholic Church: and religious exchange, 97; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 98, 184, 186, 191, 202; and Brébeuf, 125; and “in odium fidei” requirement for martyrdom, 126, 127, 133, 138–39, 147, 153 (n. 25); effect of Protestant Reformation on, 128; and Scotland, 185, 191; global propagation of, 187; and literacy, 201, 202, 206; Protestant missionary work compared to, 201, 277, 292; and mission secularization, 207, 209, 219. See also Franciscans; Jesuit missionaries; Martyrdom Cayuga people, 251

311

Chabanal, Noel, 150 (n. 2), 152 (n. 14), 156 (n. 47), 157 (n. 59) Chalcom, Jacob, 60 (n. 12) Champlain, Samuel de, 133 Chappaquiddick people: school of, 46–47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53; Baylies’s work with, 47, 54; reforms of, 57–58 Charlevoix, Pierre de, 163 Charter of the New Urbanism, 19 (n. 10) Chauncy, Charles, 193 Cherokee language, 81–82 Cherokee National Committee, 81 Cherokee people: influence of Christian missionaries on, 2, 85; land rights of, 4, 71, 73–74, 76, 77, 79–80, 83; David Brown defending rights of, 67, 74, 77, 80–81, 85; and Native American sovereignty, 68, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77, 82–83, 283–84; David Brown building social capital of, 69, 71; religious rites of, 69, 86 (n. 9); negotiations with Christian missions to Native peoples, 70–71, 79, 88 (n. 32); negotiations with federal officials, 79–81; as converts, 83, 89 (n. 42); influence on Christian missionaries, 85; assimilationists and traditionalists, 88 (n. 32) Chihwatenwa, Joseph, 156 (n. 47) Child indenture, 39, 42 Choctaw people, 75 Christian Island, 154 (n. 32) Christianity: and cultural genocide, 2, 3, 18 (n. 3), 96, 290, 295, 299; Tinker on, 2, 290, 299, 300, 301; “horse-shed” Christians, 103; and Enlightenment, 187; dualistic worldview of, 228; conversations between Indians on, 253. See also Catholic Church; Christian missions to Native peoples; Native American Christians and Christianity; Protestantism Christian martyrdom: rubric of, 151 (n. 4) Christian missions to Native peoples: David Brown’s promotion of, 1, 2, 67–68, 70, 73, 75–76, 79, 81; as tool of conquest, 2–3; multidisciplinary approach to, 5–6, 7; continuation of, 18 (n. 3); scholarship on, 24; feelings of Native Americans about, 35, 79, 88 (n. 32), 291; and John Eliot, 38, 39, 40, 44, 58, 59 (n. 6), 96, 98, 99, 111, 184, 202, 290; and Puritans, 39–40, 97, 98; and dress, 68, 96, 202, 207, 212; middle-

312

class support for, 68; and colonialism, 70–71, 181, 183, 192–95, 253, 286, 289, 299; and Native American sovereignty, 80; and Josiah Cotton, 97, 98–99, 101, 103, 285; and division of Native groups, 127; and Brébeuf, 128; and misperceptions of Native Americans, 128; cultural insensitivity of Catholic missions, 129; and SSPCK, 181–83, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190–95, 198 (n. 26); epistolary ties with Britain, 183; and U.S. government, 233, 235; Native American opposition to, 239, 249 (n. 29), 251, 253; and Joseph Johnson, 253, 255, 256–58; and Aupaumut, 253, 261, 263–64; European missionaries compared with Native missionaries, 253, 263, 283; and alcoholism, 259; and cultural capital, 277, 278; effects of, 289–90, 296–97, 299, 301–3; and naming in Anishinaabe tradition, 291–92. See also Missionization Christian republicanism: and Stockbridge Indians, 226, 239, 240, 241–42, 243, 282 Christiantown, Martha’s Vineyard, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53 Chumash rebellion of 1824, 206–7 Civilization Fund, 293 Clapp, Elisha, 43, 61–62 (n. 23) Clark, Harriet, 50 Clark, Martha, 48, 49, 50 Clifford, James, 301–2 Coe, Curtis, 43–44, 45, 48, 53–55, 65 (n. 60) Colby, Pauline, 292 Colonialism: and Native American conversion, 2; and religious practice, 8–9, 277; and religious exchange, 10, 94–98, 111, 115, 277; and difference, 10–11; colonized regions distinguished from metropolitan contexts, 11, 195; legacies of, 11–12, 268; Native American communities’ survival of, 13; Native Americans as victims of, 14; and Mohegan people, 23; and Native American Christians, 24, 29, 31, 34, 253, 255, 256, 259, 286; Native Americans’ feelings about, 24–25, 31, 35, 279, 280, 284, 290; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 70–71, 181, 183, 192–95, 253, 286, 289, 299; and Native American lands, 76; and intermarriage controversies, 79; role of literacy in, 202, 203, 204;

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dynamics of, 227; linguistic colonialism, 292; and Native American agency, 300–301 Columbus, Christopher, 1–2, 3 Comaroff, Jean, 292 Comaroff, John, 292 Commuck, Thomas, 267 Communitism, 12 Congregationalist churches, 43, 46, 95, 101, 252 Connecticut: and Native American Christians, 41, 42, 44, 100; and witchcraft accusations, 113. See also Moor’s Indian Charity School Conversion: as process, 15. See also Native American converts and conversion Cooper, Aaron, 51 Cooper, James Fenimore, 71 Cota, Manuelito, 210 Cotton, John, Jr., 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 108–9, 111 Cotton, Josiah: visitations of, 9, 100, 102; and witchcraft tales, 93–94, 98; and supernatural lore, 93–94, 98, 115; sermons of, 95, 98, 101, 104, 106, 107, 109; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 97, 98–99, 101, 103, 285; congregation of, 98–99; and religious literacy, 104, 121 (n. 31); and theological worldview, 104–5, 109, 115; and devotional practices, 105–6, 107; and sin and judgment, 107; and popular religion, 108–9; and spiritual healing, 109; and heaven, 109–10; and mortuary practices, 110 Crèvecoeur, John de, 64 (n. 47) Crosby, David, 61 (n. 16) Cross-disciplinary dialogue model, 6–7 Culloden, Battle of, 181 Cultural capital, 277–85 Cultural genocide: and Christianity’s corrosive power, 2, 3, 18 (n. 3), 96, 290, 295, 299 Cuming, Patrick, 194 Cupeño people, 209, 210 Cvetkovich, Ann, 24–25 Daggett, Herman, 77 Danforth, Samuel, 99–100 Daniel, Antoine, 150 (n. 2) Davenport, James, 23, 36 (n. 12)

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Davis, Natalie Zemon, 8 Dean, John, 253 Dean, Thomas, 265 Deism, 189 Delaware people, 182, 229, 237, 238, 242, 262, 263–64 Deliette, Pierre, 162, 163, 164–65, 166, 170, 172 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 95, 96, 300, 301, 302–3 Dene Tha people, 155 (n. 43) Denmark, 188 De Smet, Pierre-Jean, 290 Dick, Robert, 185 Doctrine of Discovery, 301 Domestic violence, 39, 100, 260 Donaldson, Laura, 35 Donovan, Robert Kent, 187 Douart, Jacques, 145, 153 (n. 27), 157 (nn. 55, 59) Dowd, Gregory, 228 Dress: and cross-cultural understandings, 8; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 68, 96, 202, 207, 212; and David Brown, 71–72, 284; adaptation of English clothing, 213 Dutch colonists: and Jogues, 131; relations with Native Americans, 136, 145, 188, 232 Echeandía, José María de, 207, 208–9 Economic development: and division of reservation lands, 57 Eddy, Thomas, 260 Education: Native Americans’ opinions of, 26, 46, 51, 60 (n. 12); of missionaries, 28, 217; and Baylies, 38, 46–54, 55, 56, 64 (n. 50), 286; and children’s indentured servitude, 42; management by churches, 44; and Puritan and republican culture, 44–45; and Society for Propagating the Gospel, 46–50, 53; and boys’ schools, 51; and girls’ schools, 51; and morality, 52, 57; Native Americans’ involvement in, 54, 56, 57; state backing for, 56, 57, 203; and U.S. War Department, 66 (n. 68); Cherokee peoples’ negotiations concerning, 82, 83, 88 (n. 32); and SSPCK, 181–82, 184–86; and gender roles, 205–6; and Protestantism, 211; and Aupaumut, 243; and Stockbridge Indians, 252; and cultural capital, 277; and boarding school movement,

313

293, 301. See also Literacy; Moor’s Indian Charity School Edwards, Jonathan, 182, 203, 229 Edwards, Timothy, 229 Eliot, John: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 38, 39, 40, 44, 58, 59 (n. 6), 96, 98, 99, 111, 184, 202, 290; Bible translation of, 105, 211–12; tracts published by, 203; and literacy, 211–12 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 181 English language: and literacy, 26, 180, 181, 182–83, 186, 211, 213; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 43, 99, 104, 182–83; and Cherokee people, 85 (n. 1); and Native American Christians, 180; and boarding schools, 214, 217, 293; and David Brown, 284; and naming, 295; and traditional religious practices, 298 Enlightenment, 114, 184, 187, 191, 280 Enslaved African Americans, 111, 115 Ephraim, Joseph, 60 (n. 12) Erskine, John, 180, 181, 187 Esopus people, 229, 252 Estudillo, José Antonio, 210 Europeans: treatment of Native Americans, 1; and middle ground with Native Americans, 3, 18–19 (n. 6), 107; European husbandry, 229, 236, 237, 260. See also Britain; Canada; Colonialism; Dutch colonists; New France; Spain; Whites Evangelicals and evangelicalism: New Light evangelicalism, 34, 41; and mysticism, 43–44; concern for Native American Christians, 180–81; transatlantic revivals, 187; Protestant distinguished from Catholic forms of, 201; publications of, 203 Evarts, Jeremiah: relationship with David Brown, 4, 68–69, 78–81, 82, 84; audition of David Brown for speaking tour, 68–69; and David Brown’s speeches, 69, 70, 76, 79, 80–81, 86 (n. 7); on Ridge, 77; and Arkansas Cherokees, 79–80; work to defeat Removal Act, 84–85; and Native American sovereignty, 84–85, 89 (n. 46) Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 233, 235 Fasting rituals, 107, 108 Feelings: of Native Americans about colonialism, 24–25, 31, 35, 279, 280, 284, 290 Fish, Joseph, 180

314

Fish, Phineas, 55, 63 (n. 39), 65 (n. 65) Folk wisdom, 100 Foreign Mission School, 77–78, 88 (n. 29) Fort Harmar, Treaty of, 248 (n. 22) Fort Stanwix, Treaty of, 254 Foucault, Michel, 288 (n. 8) Fowler, David, 26, 34, 255, 256, 261, 265 Fowler, Hezekiah, 215 Fowler, Jacob, 26, 215 Fox people, 266 Fox River, Wisconsin, 243, 264–66, 286 France: conflict over Protestant Reformation, 128; alliance with Wendat people, 133, 145, 153 (n. 27), 155 (n. 36), 157 (n. 55). See also New France Franciscans: and sacramental registers, 202, 203; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 202, 209; on Native American literacy, 204; and literacy instruction, 205–6; and use of literacy, 206; and signature flourishes, 208 Free Will Baptist movement, 41, 43–44, 60 (n. 10), 61–62 (n. 23) Freewill Indian Baptist congregation, 31 Garnier, Charles: as saint, 150 (n. 2) Garra, Antonio, 209–11 Garra, Elias, 209 Garroutte, Eva, 296 Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 41, 42, 43, 98; schools of, 47, 48–49, 51, 52, 53; and Indian-run temperance societies, 52; fear of whites, 53; census of, 54; and agriculture, 58; land use of, 58; tribal institutions of, 58; state funding for, 66 (n. 71) Gender roles: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 39, 68, 96; and Native American Christians, 42; and adoption ceremonies of Haudenosaunee people, 155 (n. 43); and Native American Christian women, 160; and agriculture, 173, 236, 251; and literacy education, 205–6. See also Native American men; Native American women; White women George, Sally, 44 George I (king of England), 181 Georgia, 84 Gibson, John, 182 Gladwell, Malcolm, 81

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Glorious Revolution, 181, 187 Godbeer, Richard, 111 Goddard, Ives, 121 (n. 31), 213, 245 (n. 2) Gold, Harriet, 78, 79 Gold, Stephen, 78, 79 Gookin, Daniel, 212 Goupil, René, 130, 150 (n. 2), 151 (n. 9), 157 (n. 63) Gowdie, John, 189 Grafton, Anthony, 20 (n. 30) Grant, Francis, 185 Grant, Ulysses S., 293 Gravier, Jacques, 160, 164, 167–69, 170, 171 Great Awakening, 31, 41, 115 Greenville, Treaty of, 233, 235 Greer, Allan, 20 (n. 29) Gross, Lawrence, 294 Hackel, Steven, 11, 280–81, 284, 286 Hall, David D., 8, 98, 103, 106, 107, 110, 278 Hall, Prince, 9 Hall, Timothy, 187 Hampshire Missionary Society, 237 Hancock, John, 230 Handsome Lake (Seneca prophet), 13, 239, 242, 249 (n. 35), 250–52 Hanoverian succession, 181, 185 Harjo, Joy, 13 Harrison, William Henry, 238, 241 Harvard College, 55 Harvey, Joseph, 77 Haudenosaunee people: and Wendat people, 125, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135–38, 141, 144–45, 154 (nn. 32, 35), 286; aboriginal traditions of, 126, 132, 134, 135, 136–37, 148, 149; and intra-aboriginal postwar torture practices, 126, 135, 136–40, 141, 142, 146, 147–48, 149, 150, 154–55 (n. 36), 155 (n. 38), 158 (n. 68), 281–82, 284; adoption rituals of, 126, 136–40, 142, 150, 155 (nn. 38, 43), 156 (n. 51); motivations for killing Brébeuf, 126, 137–39, 141, 149, 150, 155–56 (n. 46); and Brébeuf’s transmuted remains, 126, 148–49; integrated ex-Christian ex-Wendat captives, 127, 140–42, 146–48, 281, 284; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 128, 134, 139, 155 (n. 45); capture of Joques, 131, 151 (n. 9); relations with French, 133, 136, 154–55 (n. 36), 155 (n. 45); and running of gauntlet, 136, 155

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(n. 38); and Brébeuf’s torture and death, 137–40, 149, 155 (n. 42); self-designatory term, 150 (n. 1); divisions over treatment of Jogues, 152 (n. 11), 155 (n. 46); confederacy of, 154 (n. 34). See also Iroquois people Hawley, Gideon, 43 Hayes, Benjamin, 209 Hedge, Jacob, 102, 103 Hedge, Joanna, 103 Hedge, Rebecca, 103 Hedge, Will, 103 Herring Pond Indian church, 103 Herring Pond people, 65 (n. 65), 66 (n. 71) Herring Pond Reservation, 99 Hiacoomes (Wampanoag), 40 Hicks, Elijah, 79 Ho-Chunk people, 264, 265–66 Hood, Nathan, 99, 102, 103, 109, 110 Hood, Robin, 102 Hopkins, Samuel, 203 “Horse-shed” Christians, 103 Hossueit, Zachariah, 41 Housatonic people, 229 Howwoswee, Esther, 49, 51 Howwoswee, Moses, 54 Howwoswee, Zachariah, 43 Huntington, Sarah, 65–66 (n. 68) Huron people. See Wendat people Hutcheson, Francis, 187 Illinois Christians: community of, 160, 167, 169, 174; and gendered religious practice, 161, 168–74; and traditional religious practices, 161–62, 165, 170–71, 174; conversions of, 164; relations with traditionalists, 168, 169, 172; and prayer, 173 Illinois language, 170, 171 Illinois people: and manitous, 159, 160–61, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170; and spiritual healing, 159–60, 165, 167–68; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 159–61; aboriginal traditions of, 162, 164–65; mortuary customs, 164; power associated with redness, 164–66; traditionalism of, 168 Immortalist heretics, 105 Indian movement of 1970s, 297 Indian Removal, 74, 82, 83–84, 89 (n. 46), 266

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Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), 294 Innu people, 128, 155 (n. 36) Iroquois people: and Mahican Nation, 230, 233; councils of, 250, 251, 261; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 251, 252, 256–57; and Native American lands, 254; and Revolutionary War, 255; Woods Edge Ceremony of, 261. See also Haudenosaunee people Ishi (California Native), 302–3 Jackson, Andrew, 10, 82, 83–84, 266 Jacobites, 181, 185–86, 191 Jaenen, Cornelius, 158 (n. 68) James I (king of England), 181 James II (king of Scotland), 181 JanMohamed, Abdul, 204 Jeffers, Thomas, 43, 44 Jefferson, Thomas, 239 Jeffry, Isaac, 103 Jesuit missionaries: and Brébeuf’s martyrdom, 126, 127, 150 (n. 2); theology of suffering and expiatory death, 126, 128, 129; and martyrdom, 128, 129, 130–31, 132, 133, 152 (n. 13), 152–53 (n. 21); and Christian missions to Native peoples, 128–30, 143, 161; Native Americans’ resistance to, 134; and Wendat people, 143–44, 154 (n. 32), 155 (n. 36), 286; as responsible for epidemics, 144; and shamans, 144, 159–63, 167–68, 173–74; and interpretation of baptism, 145–47; Parkman on, 150–51 (n. 3); donnés assisting, 151 (n. 9); fears of aboriginal apostasy, 157 (n. 61); and beliefs of Read Presence, 158 (n. 58); and rosaries, 159–60; and Native Americans’ interest in Catholic objects, 163, 164; and concept of sin, 171 Jews in Holy Land: Parsons’s mission to, 225, 244, 244 (n. 1) Jogues, Isaac: martyrdom of, 130–31, 150 (n. 2), 152–53 (n. 21); Haudenosaunee capture of, 131, 151 (n. 9); background of, 151–52 (n. 10); Haudenosaunee divisions over treatment of, 152 (n. 11), 155 (n. 46) Johnson, Mrs. Abiah, 48 Johnson, Jacob, 257 Johnson, Joseph: and Moor’s Indian Charity School, 26, 28, 217; and Occom, 28, 29, 217–18; and Christian missions to Native

316

peoples, 253, 255, 256–58; writings of, 256; theological worldview of, 282–83; and Brotherton, 285–86; name of, 295–96 Justice, Steven, 204 Kearney, Stephen Watts, 209 Kendall, Edward, 111–12 Kidwell, Clara Sue, 299 Kier, Philip “Danny,” 297–301 King Philip’s War (1674–76), 40, 94, 96, 99, 101, 202, 212, 230 Kirkland, Samuel, 253, 255, 258, 261 Kirkwood, James, 185 Knox, Henry, 234, 247 (n. 17) Konkle, Maureen, 9, 10, 72, 87 (n. 13), 283 Kumeyaay people, 203 Kusseniyeutt, Benjamin, 106 Ladies Benevolent Society at Fall River, 48, 50 Lalemant, Gabriel: martyrdom of, 126, 133, 134, 138, 150, 150 (n. 2), 282; torture of, 132, 137, 138, 139, 146, 148, 155 (n. 42), 156 (n. 46), 157 (n. 64); background of, 151 (n. 5) Lande, Jean de la, 150 (n. 2) Landsman, Ned, 183, 199 (n. 44) Leavelle, Tracy, 7, 9, 278, 281, 284 Lee, Samuel, 111, 113 Leech Lake Reservation, Minnesota, 300 Legal cases: and literacy, 204–5 Le Jeune, Paul, 130 Lepore, Jill, 81 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 301 Literacy: of Native American Christians, 10, 42, 44, 51, 54, 60 (n. 12), 94, 100, 104–5, 115, 120–21 (n. 29), 121 (n. 31), 180, 255, 281, 286; Native Americans’ uses of, 11, 201, 204, 206–11, 217–19, 281; and Native American communities, 26, 218, 219; of Gay Head, 47, 51; and Bibles, 51, 100, 201, 203, 211–13; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 68, 202–3; religion’s relationship to, 201; and Native American women, 201, 205–6, 212, 213, 216, 219; measures of, 204; signature literacy rate, 204, 205; adversarial literacy, 204, 207; subversive uses of, 204, 281; and legal cases, 204–5; and cultural fluency, 207;

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and signature flourishes, 208, 209; as marker of elite status, 210; vernacular literacy, 213; and Moor’s Indian Charity School, 213–17, 219, 255; and written text of Native writers, 219–20; and Aupaumut, 229, 237–38, 242, 248 (n. 25); as cultural capital, 280–81. See also Education Little, Daniel, 45 Little Turtle (Miami chief), 238 Lloyd, David, 204 Long Island: and Native American Christians, 41, 43, 250, 254 Louisiana, 163 Lowry, George, 79, 81 Luce, Jedidiah, 48, 49, 50, 51 Lugo, Juan, 208 Luiseño language, 206 Luiseño people, 210 Mahican Nation: history of, 225–26, 229, 230–32, 235, 246 (n. 12); and Revolutionary War, 230; as intermediaries, 231, 232, 233–35, 236, 237, 241, 262, 263; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 252. See also Stockbridge Indians Maine, 45 Mandell, Daniel, 8, 283, 286 Manitous: and Illinois people, 159, 160–61, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170 Manomet Ponds Indian church, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104 Manomet Ponds Indian school, 104 Marchant, Henry, 56 Marest, Gabriel, 159–60, 161, 173 Marie de l’Incarnation, 152 (n. 17), 153 (n. 24), 157 (n. 52) Marquette, Jacques, 165 Marrant, John, 9 Marriage: and Native American Christians, 42, 169, 172; intermarriage between African Americans and Native Americans, 43, 51; intermarriage between whites and Native Americans, 77–79, 88 (nn. 29, 32), 283 Marshall, John, 84 Martha’s Vineyard: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 39–40, 46–47, 53, 56, 99–100, 212; and literacy, 51, 104, 121 (n. 31), 212; and religious practice, 110; and witchcraft accusations, 113; and

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supernatural lore, 115. See also Christiantown, Martha’s Vineyard; Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard Martin, Joel, 8, 283, 286 Martyrdom: of Brébeuf, 125–27, 131–34, 137– 39, 147–48, 150, 150 (n. 2), 153–54 (n. 31), 282; “in odium fidei” requirement for, 126, 127, 133, 138–39, 147, 153 (n. 25); and Jesuit missionaries, 128, 129, 130–31, 132, 133, 152 (n. 13), 152–53 (n. 21); definitions of, 131, 149, 150, 153 (n. 25); and textual relics, 134, 153 (n. 29); Roman model of, 137, 139, 147, 149; and European exceptionalism, 138, 156 (n. 47), 157 (n. 55); and agency of martyr, 139, 149, 282; as courtship of death, 152 (n. 13); Chabanal on, 152 (n. 14); and interpretation of deaths, 153 (n. 26); political process of identification of, 157 (n. 59); and Protestantism, 180–81, 196 (n. 8) Mascouten people, 161 Mash, Cutting, 266 Mashantucket Pequot people, 43, 44 Mashpee people, 55, 65 (n. 65), 66 (n. 71), 99, 102, 110 Massachusett language, 98, 104, 106, 211–13 Massachusett people, 39, 229, 231 Massachusetts: and charter for Society for Propagating the Gospel, 38; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 38–41, 99, 212; Native Americans’ involvement with state government, 57, 66 (n. 71); and Native American Christians, 99; anti-Indian sentiment in, 212. See also Martha’s Vineyard; Plymouth, Massachusetts; Puritans Massachusetts Bay Company, 39, 202 Mather, Cotton, 98 Matthison, John, 190 Mayhew, Experience, 98, 112–13, 212 Mayhew, John, 203 Mayhew, Matthew, 115 Mayhew, Thomas, 38, 39–40 Mayhew, Thomas, Jr., 38, 39–40, 55, 58 McLoughlin, William G., 88 (n. 32) McNally, Michael, 7 Menominee people, 264, 265–66 Meriam Report, 294 Mesquakie people, 166–67 Methodist churches, 55 Metoxen, John, 243, 266

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Metropolitan contexts: colonized regions distinguished from, 11, 195 Mexico, 98, 184 Mezzofanti, Giuseppe, 206 Miami people, 161, 162, 164, 229, 237, 238, 242, 243, 262, 263–64 Middleton, Paul, 152 (n. 13) Miles, Lion, 246 (n. 10) Millar, Robert, 189 Miller, Perry, 97 Mills, Kenneth, 8, 20 (n. 30) Mingo, Joseph, 53 Miscegenation, 78 Missionaries: as complex, ambivalent agents, 3; motivations of, 4, 300; influence of Native American Christians on, 85, 287 (n. 1), 289; imperialistic claims of, 227; and cultural capital, 277, 278, 282; feelings of, 280; records of, 285, 293; and treaty annuities, 294. See also Christian missions to Native peoples; Jesuit missionaries Missionization: as tool of conquest, 2–3; Native American agency in negotiating, 3, 4, 8; multidisciplinary approach to, 5–6, 7; Wendat peoples’ opposition to, 128, 129, 130, 142, 143 Mission La Purísima, 206 Mission San Buenaventura, 207, 208, 221 (n. 21) Mission San Carlos, 220 (n. 11) Mission San Diego, 203 Mission San Luis Rey, 206, 209–10 Mission Santa Barbara, 206 Mission Santa Clara, 205, 207 Mission Santa Cruz, 220 (n. 6) Mohegan people: and colonialism, 23; as working sailors, 26; lands of, 26, 27; tribal affairs of, 27; aboriginal traditions of, 44; and threat of removal, 46, 53; church of, 56, 66 (n. 68); state commissions visiting, 57; Huntington working with, 65–66 (n. 68); and education, 66 (n. 68); and supernatural lore, 113; and Brotherton, 250 Monroe, James, 88 (n. 39), 263 Montauketts people, 250, 258 Montauk people, 43, 110 Moor’s Indian Charity School: Occom as fund-raiser for, 23, 26–27, 182, 185;

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Wheelock’s dissatisfaction with, 27, 28, 29, 218; and Mowbray, 179; founding of, 195 (n. 1); and Christian missions to Native peoples, 202; donations to, 203; and literacy training, 213–17, 219, 255; and training of Native American missionaries, 214, 216; environment of, 214–16; as panIndian community, 218; relocation of, 257 Morality: and education, 52, 57; and David Brown’s speech, 72–73, 75, 82; and Native American Christians, 100; and Protestantism, 187, 189, 192; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 251; and Puritans, 259 Moravian Indians, 31, 32, 237, 285 Morgan, Edmund, 30 Morse, Jedidiah, 53, 63 (n. 35), 260 Moses, Joseph, 104 Mowbray, Alexander, 179–80, 183, 196 (nn. 3, 8) Multidisciplinary approach, 5–6, 7, 16, 18 “Murder will out” tradition, 112 Mysticism: of evangelical community, 43–44. See also Supernatural lore Nahuatl language, 205 Naming: in Anishinaabe tradition, 291–92; and assimilation, 293–95; legacy of, 295–96; and legacy of mission encounters, 296–97, 299, 300 Nandy, Ashis, 20 (n. 30) Nantucket, 50, 52, 56 Narrangansett people: Baylies working with, 41, 53–55, 56, 65 (n. 60); land use of, 42–43, 58, 61 (n. 19); school of, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52–53, 65 (n. 56); and Coe, 45; and Indian-run temperance societies, 52; state commissions visiting, 57; reforms of, 58; tribal institutions of, 58; and mortuary practices, 110; and supernatural lore, 113, 114; and Brotherton, 250 Natick people, 60 (n. 12), 98 Nationalism, 88 (n. 32) Native American agency: and missionization, 3, 4, 8; and Native American communities, 3, 57, 289; and communities, 3–4, 57; and intermarriage controversies, 79; dynamics of, 227, 276, 300–301 Native American Christians and Christianity: scholarly attention to, 7; and religious

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practice, 9, 95, 103, 110, 253, 279; and literacy, 10, 42, 44, 51, 54, 60 (n. 12), 94, 100, 104–5, 115, 120–21 (n. 29), 121 (n. 31), 180, 255, 281, 286; and religious exchange in colonial period, 10, 94–95; and identity, 12, 226, 228; and Native American identity, 12, 226, 228, 253; and Native American sovereignty, 17, 55–56, 58, 84, 88 (n. 32); and colonialism, 24, 29, 31, 34, 253, 255, 256, 259, 286; and processing of trauma, 25; missionary training of, 28; theological worldviews of, 29–32, 35–36, 99–100, 104–5, 106, 109; separatist communities of, 31–32, 34, 35, 41, 115, 243, 262; and rites of collective confession and reconciliation, 31–35; and Society for Propagating the Gospel, 38–39, 41; social problems of, 38–39, 42, 58; communities of, 41–42, 99, 180, 285; traditional religious practices of, 42, 44, 73, 75, 96, 100, 110, 111, 115–16, 161, 227, 229, 236, 237, 242, 243, 277, 278, 279, 281, 298; white hostility toward, 42, 61 (n. 16); and supernatural lore, 42, 94, 95, 110–15; threat of removal as motivation of, 46, 53, 63 (n. 35), 65 (n. 48); Baylies’s reports on meetings of, 52, 55; Baylies’s acceptance of worship of, 54, 55–56, 58; devotional practices of, 94, 95, 104–6, 107, 115; and spiritual healing, 94, 95, 107–8, 115; and religion and family, 94, 101–3, 115; and mortuary customs, 94, 107, 110, 115, 297; abandonment of faith, 134, 140–43, 145, 146, 156 (n. 50); and revitalization movements, 227, 228, 232, 236, 262; tensions with non-Christian factions, 228; and Aupaumut, 229, 231–32, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243; and unity, 256, 258; as chosen people, 257 Native American Church, 296 Native American communities: and Native American agency, 3, 57, 289; and Native American converts, 12; types of, 12–13; and Native Americans’ feelings about impact of colonialism, 25; and Native American literacy, 26, 218, 219; separatist communities, 31–32, 34, 35, 41, 115, 243, 262; praying towns, 39, 40, 98, 99, 202, 212, 285; and alcoholism, 39, 41, 42, 43; and relations with whites, 41, 260, 283;

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and Native American Christians, 41–42, 99, 180, 285; and Revolutionary War, 42, 250, 255; and yellow fever epidemics, 50; Baylies’s census of, 54; and Native American lifeways, 212; and cultural capital, 278, 282. See also Brotherton movement; Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard; Stockbridge Indians Native American converts and conversion: and colonialism, 2; and domination and displacement of indigeneity, 2–3; generalizations about converts, 4; multidisciplinary approach to, 5–6, 7, 16; negotiation of, 8; writings of converts, 9, 11–12; and Native American communities, 12; images of, 13–15, 68, 71–72, 82; and two-worlds approaches, 14–15, 20 (n. 29); authenticity of, 14–15, 35, 94, 227, 245 (n. 5); and Calvinist problem of assurance, 30–31, 34; and speaking tours, 67; and intermarriage controversies, 78–79; and Cherokees, 83, 89 (n. 42); conceptions of, 96; oratory of, 99; and spiritual healing, 109; and rosaries, 164, 167; and aboriginal traditions, 167; prayers of, 193–94; and religious texts, 211; and literacy, 212–13; and Wheelock, 214–15; Native American feelings about, 279 Native American history: and middle ground with Europeans, 3, 18–19 (n. 6); scholarship on, 7–8; and nativist/accommodationist dichotomy, 227 Native American identity: non-Native critics of, 12; and Native American Christians, 12, 226, 228, 253; and literacy, 204, 212; and race, 228, 251, 264, 267, 268, 283; and community, 239, 268; pan-Indian identity, 241; essentialized definitions of, 244; loss of, 267; and naming, 292, 295 Native American lands: expropriation of, 3; David Brown’s defense of land rights, 4, 71, 73–74, 76, 77, 79–80, 83; and Native American sovereignty, 17; resistance to loss of, 39, 41; state division of reservation lands, 57; and Tobias and John Shattock, 179, 180, 195 (nn. 1, 2); and Garra, 211; and Brotherton movement, 218, 254, 256, 260, 262–64, 265, 266, 268; and revitalization movements, 228; and Stockbridge Indians, 230, 231, 236, 238, 243,

319

244 (n. 1), 254, 255, 260, 262–64, 265, 266, 267, 268; and Revolutionary War, 232, 254; and U.S. government, 232–33, 238, 239, 244 (n. 1), 252, 263–64, 266, 267; ceding to U.S. government, 238; and nativist prophets, 240; and Oneida people, 254–56, 265; and allotment policy, 293–94 Native American languages: Algonquian language, 40, 42, 211; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 41, 289; Wampanoag language, 43; loss of, 43, 289; Cherokee language, 81–82; Massachusett language, 98, 104, 106, 211–13; Illinois language, 170, 171; translating Christian concepts into, 170, 253, 299; Nahuatl language, 205; Luiseño language, 206; and boarding schools, 293; and Indian rights, 294 Native American literature: authenticity of, 12 Native American men: and migratory labor, 41, 42, 43, 213; community involvement of, 57, 58, 66 (n. 68); as teachers, 103; and literacy, 201, 205, 212, 216 Native Americans: life before European conquest, 1–2, 18 (n. 1); literacy acquired and used by, 11, 201, 204, 206–11, 217–19, 281; authenticity of, 12, 14, 72, 87 (n. 13), 299; contact experience of, 17; feelings about colonialism, 24–25, 31, 35, 279, 280, 284, 290; myth of disappearing Indian, 34, 64 (n. 47), 74, 83, 96, 267, 283, 284; intermarriage of, 43, 51, 77–79, 88 (nn. 29, 32), 283; and epidemics, 50, 107, 108, 136, 144, 146, 150, 209, 259; stereotypes of, 71–72, 87 (n. 16), 95, 128; equality of, 76, 78; relations with Puritans, 95–96, 110–12; spiritual traditions of, 95–96, 100; and Brébeuf’s death, 125; relations with New France, 133, 136, 145, 154–55 (n. 36), 159, 163, 192; Scottish Highlanders’ connections to, 182, 183, 184–85, 186, 188, 190. See also specific peoples Native American sovereignty: David Brown’s work for, 4, 18, 68, 71, 74, 76, 77, 80, 82–83, 88 (n. 32), 283–84, 286; resurgence of, 16–17, 18; and Native American Christians, 17, 55–56, 58, 84, 88 (n. 32); resistance to loss of, 39, 40; Cherokee

320

peoples’ building social and political networks supporting, 70, 82–83; Evarts’s work for, 84–85, 89 (n. 46) Native American women: social and political power of, 42, 155 (n. 39), 172–73; as teachers, 44, 47–48, 49, 51, 57, 103, 104; as war captives, 136, 155 (n. 39); spiritual power of, 159, 160, 161, 164–65, 168–74, 278; and rosaries, 159–60, 169, 170, 173–74, 278; separation during menstrual cycle, 164–65, 170; and literacy, 201, 205–6, 212, 213, 216, 219; and Stockbridge Indians, 237, 248 (n. 23) Native New Light, 31–32, 34 Nativism, 227, 228, 230–31, 239–41, 242, 243, 254, 259–60 Naushon Island, 113 Ned, Francis: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 99, 103; family Bible of, 105–6, 121 (n. 34); and spiritual healing, 109; theological worldview of, 115 Ned, James, 103 Ned, Josiah, 106, 107 Neolin (prophet), 13, 96, 239 Netherlands, 188 New England: and Spanish privateers, 93; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 202–3; literacy rates in, 213. See also Martha’s Vineyard; Massachusetts; Plymouth, Massachusetts; Puritans New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, 98, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 182, 186 New France: and religious exchange, 97, 98; Christianization of, 126, 128–29; definition of martyrdom in, 131; relations with Native Americans, 133, 136, 145, 154–55 (n. 36), 159, 163, 192. See also Jesuit missionaries New Light evangelicalism, 34, 41 New Mexico, 205 New Spain, 205 Newspapers: and David Brown’s speeches, 69–70, 82–83, 86 (n. 3); and Cherokee converts, 83, 89 (n. 42) New Stockbridge, New York, 34, 225, 233, 237, 241, 242, 243, 244, 255, 262, 263 Niantic people, 250 Nicholas, Mark, 6, 7 Nikalokita, Joseph, 166

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Niles, Samuel, 31–32, 33, 41, 43 Ninigret, Thomas, 41, 195 (n. 2) Nipmuc people, 39 Noley, Homer, 299 Nootas clan, 102 Northrup, Sarah Bird, 77–78 Occanootus (Wampanoag headman), 102, 109 Occom, Mary Fowler, 26, 27 Occom, Samson: and hymnody, 9; sermons of, 9, 32–34; as fund-raiser for Moor’s Indian Charity School, 23, 26–27, 182, 185; and Brotherton, 23, 42, 218, 261, 270 (n. 10), 271 (n. 19), 285–86; drunken episode, 25, 26, 27–28, 29, 32; personal debts of, 26; letter of confession, 28; and Calvinism, 29–31; theological worldview of, 29–31, 35–36, 282–83; and rites of collective confession and reconciliation, 33; and racism, 61 (n. 16); and religious practices, 100; on witchcraft, 113; writings of, 211, 217, 256, 272 (n. 45), 280; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 253, 255–58, 261, 263; and Stockbridge Indians, 258, 259; feelings of, 279, 284 Occom, Theodosia, 26 Olvera, Agustín, 210 Onaharé, Joseph, 156 (n. 47) Oneida people: and Brotherton movement, 42, 218, 256–58, 263, 264; Occom as missionary to, 182; and Aupaumut, 233; and Stockbridge Indians, 250, 251; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 252, 258–59, 261; and Native American lands, 254–56, 265; and Revolutionary War, 255; and Native American identity, 267 Onondaga people, 250, 251–52 Ortega, Joaquín, 210 Osage people, 69, 86 (n. 9) Owen, David, 186 Painted Post, Treaty of, 233–34, 247 (n. 17) Parkman, Francis, 55, 56, 150–51 (n. 3) Parsons, Levi, 225, 244, 244 (n. 1) Paul, Moses, 32 Peabody, Elizabeth Manning, 86 (n. 3) Peabody, Nathaniel C., 86 (n. 3) Peelman, Achiel, 299 Pemberton, Isaac, 194

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Penes, Sam, 104 Penes, Simon, 104 Penn, William, 1 Pequot people, 43, 113, 250 Pequot War, 202 Pesantubbe, Michelene, 6, 7 Peyri, Antonio, 206, 209 Pickering, John, 81 Pickering, Timothy, 233–34 Plenderleath, David, 185 Plymouth, Massachusetts: Native American Christians of, 93, 94–97; and supernatural economy, 93–94, 95, 278; eclectic religious practice of whites, 100–101, 103, 105, 110–11; and witchcraft accusations, 113 Pocahontas, 180 Pogui, José Pacomio, 206–7, 211 Pohquunnuppeet, Peter, 34 Political issues and movements: and Native American Christianity, 8, 9, 10; and Native American sovereignty, 17, 70, 82–83; and Native American women, 42, 155 (n. 39), 172–73; and David Brown, 69, 76, 79, 82–83; and Removal Act, 83–84; and Haudenosaunee peoples’ torture of Brébeuf, 138–40; and postwar aboriginal adoption, 142; and identification of martyrs, 157 (n. 59); and Protestant missionaries, 186; and literacy, 203, 204 Poma de Ayala, Guaman, 211 Pomeroy, Benjamin, 36 (n. 12) Portolá, Gaspar de, 202 Postcolonial studies, 9, 10, 20 (n. 14), 97, 279–80 Pottawatomie people, 238 Poverty, 39, 41, 42, 51, 58 Powhatan (Native American leader), 69, 86 (n. 9) Pratt, Richard H., 293 Praying towns, 39, 40, 98, 99, 202, 212, 285 Prentice, Charles, 77 Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 184, 185, 187 President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, 186 Price, Jacob, 51 Print culture, 202. See also Newspapers Protestantism: and religious exchange, 95; and popular religion, 98, 100; and Native

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American Christians, 104, 259, 260; and martyrdom, 180–81, 196 (n. 8); and British identity, 183, 185, 188, 198 (n. 32), 199 (n. 44); and morality, 187, 189, 192; uniting of Protestants, 187–88, 194; theological worldview of, 188–89; and literacy, 201, 211, 212; Catholic missionary work compared to, 201, 277, 292; and religious studies scholarship, 227; and American Republic, 282. See also Evangelicals and evangelicalism; Puritans Protestant Reformation, 128 Puritans: and assurance, 30–31; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 39–40, 97, 98; and education, 44–45; and unitary commonwealth, 46; relations with Native Americans, 95–96, 110–12; and religious exchange, 97–98; and religious practice, 103, 111; and “middle way,” 107; fasting and thanksgiving days of, 108; tensions within, 111; and morality, 259 Puritan tribalism, 102 Quakers, 105 Quaquaquid, Henry, 33, 34 Quinney, Austin E., 266 Quinney, John W., 265, 266 Race: and Native American identity, 228, 251, 264, 267, 268, 283 Racism: and David Brown, 4, 79; religious discourse countering, 9–10; of Christian teachings, 24; and justice system, 32; and Native American Christians, 39, 41, 58, 61 (n. 16); Baylies’s rejection of racial dogma, 54; and blood ratio in census reports, 54; and Indian Removal, 84 Ragueneau, Paul: on Brébeuf’s martyrdom, 133–34, 137–38, 147, 153–54 (n. 31); on Douart’s murder, 153 (n. 27); on exWendat Christians, 156–57 (n. 52) Randall, Thomas, 194 Rawson, Grindal, 99–100 Raymond, Stetson, 46 Regnault, Christophe, 157–58 (n. 64) Religion: materiality of, 25; and education, 52; state support for, 57, 66 (n. 71); popular religion, 95, 97–98, 100–101, 103, 105, 108–9; literacy’s relationship to, 201. See also Catholic Church; Christianity; Native

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American Christians and Christianity; Protestantism Religious Crimes Code, 294, 301 Religious exchange: and colonialism, 10, 94–98, 111, 115, 277; and cultural capital, 278 Religious practice: and colonialism, 8–9, 277; and Native American Christians, 9, 95, 103, 110, 253, 279; traditional religious practices, 42, 44, 73, 75, 96, 100, 110, 111, 115–16, 161–62, 165, 170–71, 174, 227, 229, 236, 237, 242, 243, 277, 278, 279, 281, 294, 297, 298, 299, 300; eclectic religious practice of whites, 100–101, 103, 105, 110–11; and Puritans, 103, 111; and rosaries, 161; gendered religious practice, 161, 168–74; and cultural capital, 277 Religious symbols: multiple meanings of, 9 Removal Act: Evarts’s work against, 84–85 Republican culture, 44–45, 57, 226, 239, 240, 241–42, 243, 267, 282 Revitalization movements, 227, 228, 232, 236, 239–41, 251, 262, 285 Revolutionary War: and Native American communities, 42, 250, 255; effect on Native Americans, 73, 251; political fragmentation of, 182; and Stockbridge Indians, 230, 255; and Native American lands, 232, 254 Rhode Island: and Native American Christians, 41, 42–43, 58; and witchcraft, 113, 114 Richards, Eric, 183 Richter, Daniel, 18–19 (n. 6), 136, 154 (n. 35) Ridge, John, 77–78 Ridge, Major, 79 Ripoll, Antonio, 206 Robin, Daniel, 99, 102–3 Rodgers, John, 256 Rogerenes, 105 Ronda, James, 101, 110 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 294 Rosaries: and Native American women, 159–60, 169, 170, 173–74, 278; adaptation to traditional worldviews, 160, 162, 164, 165, 170, 281; and religious practice, 161; and red color, 164, 165; and spiritual healing, 166–67, 174 Ross, John, 79, 80 Rouensa, Marie, 168–73, 174

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Roy, Suzanna Wright, 298 Rush, Benjamin, 179 Sabbath schools, 52 Sac people, 266 Sacrifice Rocks, 111–12 Saffin, John, 112 Sagimomatsse, Andrés, 206 St. Louis (Jesuit mission), 125, 132, 156 (n. 46) St. Mary’s, Treaty of, 263 Saints: multicultural origins of, 97; and Rouensa, 169, 174; and naming, 292 Salem witch hunt, 114 Sanneh, Lamin, 227 Santos, Juan, 207, 211 Scotland: evangelicals of, 180–81; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 181, 182, 183, 184; and British identity, 181, 183, 185, 189–90, 195; and Highlanders’ connections to Native Americans, 182, 183, 184–85, 186, 188, 190; missions to, 184; and Catholic Church, 185. See also Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands and Foreign Parts Scottish Enlightenment, 187, 191 Second Great Awakening, 39, 51, 54, 55, 56–57, 283, 285, 286 Secuter, Mary, 216 Seneca people, 251 Sensbach, Jon, 6 Sequoyah (Cherokee), 81 Sergeant, John, Jr., 202, 203, 225–26, 232, 237, 253, 259, 261, 263, 264–65 Serra, Junípero, 202, 290 Seven Years’ War, 182, 186, 192 Sewall, Samuel, 108 Sexual ethics: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 68, 96. See also Marriage Shattock, John, 179–80, 181, 195 (nn. 1, 2), 196 (n. 3) Shattock, Tobias, 179–80, 181, 182, 183, 195 (nn. 1, 2), 196 (n. 8) Shawnee people, 229, 231, 234, 235, 238, 242 Shores, Silas, 45–46, 54 Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, 29 Silverman, David J., 13, 212, 282, 283, 284, 285–86

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Silvy, Antoine, 161–62 Simon, Sarah, 216, 217 Sioui, Georges, 13, 154 (n. 35) Skiff, Abigail, 49 Skiff, Joseph, 48–49 Slavery, 111, 115, 191 Smith, Adam, 187 Smith, James, 185 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 288 (n. 8) Social class, 57, 68 Societies for the Reformation of Manners, 186, 189 Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG): and Baylies, 38, 47, 48–51, 53, 54, 55–56, 57, 58; and Native American Christians, 38–39, 41; history of, 40, 44, 45, 59 (n. 2), 186; elitist prejudices of ministers, 46; and Chappaquiddick people, 46–47; tracts published by, 203 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 186 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 186 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands and Foreign Parts (SSPCK): and British identity, 11, 185, 198 (n. 32); anniversary sermons of, 181, 182, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189, 191–94, 197–98 (n. 22); and education, 181–82, 184–86; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 181–83, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190–95, 198 (n. 26); textual self-presentation of, 182, 183, 184, 185–86, 188–89, 192, 194–95; and prayers, 183, 193, 194–95, 199 (n. 44); charter of, 184; support for, 184, 193, 195; and Highlanders’ connections to Native Americans, 184–85, 186, 188, 190–91; domestic missions in context of foreign missions, 184–85, 189–90, 195; and cultural assimilation of Highlanders, 185–86, 189–90; and international Protestant movement, 186, 193, 194–95, 199 (n. 39); theological worldview of, 188–89; narrative of salvation history, 189 Soldiers: literacy of, 205 Sophia, Electress of Hanover, 181 Spain: British condemnation of, 39, 184; Spanish privateers in New England, 93; and religious exchange, 98; role of literacy

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in colonization, 202, 203, 205–11, 213–14, 219, 220–21 (n. 12); Spanish as language of empire, 205 Spanish Inquisition, 220–21 (n. 12) Spanish language: and literacy, 205, 206, 210, 211 Spirituality: materiality of, 25; spiritual healing, 94, 95, 107–8, 109, 115, 159–60, 165, 166–68; spiritual power of Native American women, 159, 160, 161, 164–65, 168–74, 278 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 279 Stafford, Joseph, 114 Stanton, Moses, 56 Starkloff, Carl, 299 Stevens, Laura, 11, 280, 281, 284, 286 Stiles, Ezra, 111–12, 113, 114–15 Stockbridge Indians: community created by, 13; and Sergeant, 202, 203, 225–26; Aupaumut as leader of, 226, 230; and fictive kinship, 229, 230, 231, 234, 237, 241–42, 243, 244; history of community, 229, 230–32; and European husbandry, 229, 236, 260; and Muhheakunnuk legacy, 230, 231; and Native American lands, 230, 231, 236, 238, 243, 244 (n. 1), 254, 255, 260, 262–64, 265, 266, 267, 268; and agriculture, 230, 236–37, 239, 260, 265; relations with whites, 230, 241, 251, 255, 262; and Revolutionary War, 230, 255; permanent home of, 243; councils of, 250, 252; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 252, 253, 258, 259, 261–66; U.S. citizenship granted to, 266 Stoddard, Solomon, 192 Stoler, Ann, 25 Stone, Timothy, 77 Storrs, Miriam, 216, 218–19 Sum’Camiol, Pacifico, 207–9, 211 Suñer, Francisco, 208, 209 Supernatural lore, 42, 93–94, 95, 98, 110–15 Syncretism: authenticity of, 15 Szasz, Margaret Connell, 182 Tac, Pablo, 206, 209, 211 Taylor, William, 9, 20 (n. 30) Tekakwitha, Saint, 13 Temperance, 52, 100, 237 Tenskwatawa (Shawnee prophet), 13, 239–41, 242, 249 (n. 29), 251

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Tertullian, 130 Tetepachsit (Delaware chief), 238 Thacher, Peter, 45 Thaxter, Joseph, 46, 47, 49, 56 Thomas, Nicholas, 10–11, 70 Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 143, 156 (n. 46), 156–57 (n. 52) Tinker, George, 2, 35, 290, 299, 300, 301 Tourism, 57 Treat, James, 298–99 Tribal governments, 294 Trigger, Bruce, 144–45, 154 (n. 35) Troy-Watuppa reservation, 47, 48, 50 Tunxis people, 250 Tuscarora people, 261 Two Bulls, Robert, 298 Uhhaunauwaunmut, Solomon, 230 Uncas, Ben, III, 27, 28 Unitarian churches, 46, 55 U.S. government: and Native American lands, 232–33, 238, 239, 244 (n. 1), 252, 263–64, 266, 267; Indian policy of, 232–33, 293–94, 298; and Aupaumut, 233–35, 236, 240, 241, 263–64; and Native American resistance movements, 251 U.S. War Department: and education, 66 (n. 68) Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe, 207 Vaughan, Alden, 185, 196 (n. 8) Virginia, 248 (n. 22) Virgin Mary, 160, 163, 169–70, 171, 174 Vizenor, Gerald, 13 Voluntary associations, 46, 54, 186–87 Wabanaki people, 39 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 227 Wallace, Robert, 191–92, 193 Walls, Andrew, 227 Wampanoag language, 43 Wampanoag people: and Christian missions to Native peoples, 39–40, 97, 98, 99; and supernatural lore, 93, 94, 111–12, 113, 115; religious practices of, 95, 96–97, 100, 101, 103–6, 111; and spiritual healing, 108; and afterlife, 109–10; and mortuary practices, 110; and literacy, 212 Wamsley, Jane, 51 Wanna, 103

index

Wanna, John, 109 Wannoo, Benjamin, 103 Wannoo, Esther, 103 Wannoo, Isaac, 103 Wannoo, John, 103 Wannoo, Joseph, 103 Wappinger people, 229, 252 Warrior, Robert Allen, 13, 35, 300 Wayne, Anthony, 233 Weaver, Jace, 12–13, 18 (n. 3), 87 (n. 13), 227, 283, 300 Weber, Walter, 80 Webster, Alexander, 189 Wendat Christians: and Brébeuf, 127, 132–33, 151 (n. 4); abandonment of faith, 134, 140–43, 145, 146, 157 (n. 61); Haudenosaunee capture and torture of, 138; relations with traditionalists, 142, 143–45, 149, 157 (n. 55); exclusivistic interpretation of Christian allegiance, 143–44, 149; and baptism, 145–46, 147 Wendat people: and Haudenosaunee people, 125, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135–38, 141, 144–45, 154 (nn. 32, 35), 286; opposition to missionization, 128, 129, 130, 142, 143; and Christian missions to Native peoples, 128–30, 142, 144, 149, 157 (n. 53); aboriginal traditions of, 129, 135; traditionalists of, 130, 131, 140, 141, 142, 143–45, 146, 149, 153 (n. 27), 156 (n. 47), 157 (nn. 53, 55); French alliance with, 133, 145, 153 (n. 27), 155 (n. 36), 157 (n. 55); and responsibility for epidemics, 144, 146; self-designatory term, 150 (n. 1); reconstituting nation of, 154 (n. 32); postwar torture rituals of, 157 Westminster Confession, 29–30 Wheeler, Rachel, 13, 282, 283, 284, 285 Wheelock, Eleazar: Occom as student of, 23, 27; dissatisfaction with Moor’s Indian Charity School, 27, 28, 29, 218; reaction to Occom’s drunken episode, 28–29, 31; as reformed Calvinist, 36 (n. 12); and Mowbray, 179, 180, 196 (n. 3); narratives published by, 203, 214; and Native

index

American literacy, 213–17, 218, 219; on Moor’s Indian Charity School environment, 214–15. See also Moor’s Indian Charity School Wheelock, Ralph, 215 Whig Party, 57 Whipple, Henry Benjamin, 290, 295 White, Richard, 107 Whitefield, Henry, 199 (n. 44) White Indians, 45 White River settlements, Indiana, 233, 237–39, 243, 262–64, 285 Whites: images of Native American converts, 13–15, 68, 71–72, 82; as missionaries, 28; and Society for Propagating the Gospel, 38; and New Light worship, 41; and Native American communities, 41, 260, 283; hostility toward Native American Christians, 42, 61 (n. 16); desire to remove Native Americans from their lands, 68; David Brown’s cultivation of allies among, 69, 71, 76, 79, 82; misrecognition of Native Americans, 71–72; and morality of David Brown’s speech, 72–73; reaction to David Brown, 76–77, 87 (n. 21); and supernatural lore, 95, 100, 110, 111, 112, 113–14; eclectic religious practices of, 100–101, 103, 105, 110–11; and spiritual healing, 108, 109; Aupaumut’s perceptions of white-Indian relations, 230, 237, 240, 241–44, 246 (n. 8); and Native American lands, 240, 266 White women: as teachers, 48, 49–50, 51, 53; opposition to removal, 84, 89 (n. 46) Wilkinson, Charles, 16 Williams, Daniel, 198 (n. 26) Williams, Eleazar, 264 Williams, Roger, 113 Wilson, Waziyatawin Angela, 35 Winiarski, Douglas, 9, 278, 284, 285 Witchcraft, 42, 93–94, 98, 113–14 Witherspoon, John, 192, 194 Wozencraft, O. M., 211 Wyss, Hilary, 11, 280–81, 284, 286

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