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

Native Americans, Christianity, AND THE RESHAPING OF the American Religious Landscape

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 970.004'97 — 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

Contents

Foreword Michelene Pesantubbee

Introduction Joel W. Martin

PART I: NEGOTIATING CONVERSION

Hard Feelings Samson Occom Contemplates His Christian Mentors Joanna Brooks

Eager Partners in Reform Indians and Frederick Baylies in Southern New England, 1780–1840 Daniel Mandell

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

PART II: PRACTICING RELIGION

Native American Popular Religion in New England's Old Colony, 1670–1770 Douglas L. Winiarski

Blood, Fire, and Baptism Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Martyr Emma Anderson

The Catholic Rosary, Gendered Practice, and Female Power in French-Indian Spiritual Encounters Tracy Neal Leavelle

PART III: CIRCULATING TEXTS

The Souls of Highlanders, the Salvation of Indians Scottish Mission and Eighteenth-Century British Empire Laura M. Stevens

Print Culture and the Power of Native Literacy in California and New England Missions Steven W. Hackel and Hilary E. Wyss

PART IV: CREATING COMMUNITIES

Hendrick Aupaumut Christian-Mahican Prophet Rachel Wheeler

To Become a Chosen People The Missionary Work and Missionary Spirit of the Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians, 1775–1835 David J. Silverman

Conclusion Turns and Common Grounds Mark A. Nicholas

Coda Naming the Legacy of Native Christian Missionary Encounters Michael D. McNally

Contributors

Index

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 Euro-American 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, polyreligious 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.

Native Americans, Christianity, AND THE RESHAPING OF the American Religious Landscape

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

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

Introduction

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 destructive 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 Cherokee-initiated 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 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 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 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 wider-angle 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 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 micro-congress.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:

Does disciplinary training/location/professionalization influence how we understand/execute/communicate the project?

How can cross-disciplinary approaches be developed and encouraged and what benefits will they bring to the study?

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 historians, 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 demonstrate 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 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 non-Native 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 nineteenth-century 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 post-colonial 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 articulations 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 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 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).

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 post-romantic, 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, 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?