In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • John Eliot's Playing Indian
  • Joshua David Bellin (bio)

There is no more an "Ur-performance" than there is an "Ur-text." Only the systematic study of performances can disclose the true structure.

—Dell Hymes, "Breakthrough into Performance" (1975)

The scene is inescapable in the mission literature of puritan New England: a man stands before an audience, and performs.1 The player may be either Indian or white; the audience likewise. The stage upon which the performance is set may take many forms: an Indian settlement, a puritan meeting-house, the banks of a river. The performance itself, too, may vary: a sermon, a fast-day exhortation, a confession of sins. At times—as when the minister (white or not) opens a biblical text for his hearers—the performance may be scripted; at others—as when the Indians hurl questions at their missionary interlocutors, or the authorities hurl questions at their Indian catechists—it may be impromptu. But whatever its details, the goal of the performance is set: to secure through physical tokens the genuineness of Indian conversions. As Thomas Shepard put it in an early mission tract, The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth among the Indians in New-England (1648), performance proves that the conversions are not "a coyned feigned thing, but a reall matter" (129). As the sign of their reformation, performance manifests the power of the Gospel to claim Praying Indian identity.

At the same time, as recent scholarship has shown, the acts of performance memorialized in the "Eliot Tracts" seek to secure not only Indian but English identity. In the fullest formulation of this argument, Kristina Bross writes that the mission and its products—Indian converts as well as the texts that advertised them—served multiple purposes for English subjects: as "markers of God's blessings on English colonialism" (2), as a "means by which English readers—whether in Boston or London—could gauge their personal saintliness" (2), and as portents heralding "the true role of New England" (3), the acts of the Praying Indians, particularly during the troubled period of the Civil War and Interregnum, were "used to fix English identities on both sides of an Atlantic 'frontier'" (7). The mission [End Page 1] and its literature, one might say, articulate a vision of colonial and metropolitan identity not as a "coyned feigned thing" but as a "reall matter"; like the Indians to whose souls they ministered, British subjects, cultures, and empires are formulated by means of performance.2

Yet herein lies a difficulty that will have profound implications for the mission, its participants, and its literature: the performances on which mission identities were built were deeply problematic for those who sought to build on them. For puritan missionary-authors, the troubling questions raised by performance—questions of stagecraft, dissembling, deceit—were compounded by the nature of the mission, which was rooted in intercultural contexts of translation, mediation, and exchange. Performance scholar Joseph Roach considers the process whereby "local cultural productions have been hybridized" by "collectively created forms," fostering "identities that have endured—and can continue to endure—only as relationships" (Cities xii), to be the foundational paradox of early American culture; through acts of "surrogation" or performative appropriation, Roach argues, diverse peoples construct an ostensibly untrammeled "origin" that is in reality suffused with the presence of their others. And "that is why," Roach continues, "performances . . . are so rich in revealing contradictions: because they make publicly visible through symbolic action both the tangible existence of social boundaries and, at the same time, the contingency of those boundaries on fictions of identity, their shoddy construction out of inchoate otherness, and, consequently, their anxiety-inducing instability" (39). In the case of the mission, this model suggests both the necessity and the impossibility of solidifying through performance a "real" identity for Old and New England's various peoples: the conditions of their production mandated that the "real" Indian emerge by "feigning" puritanism, while the "real" puritan emerged by "feigning" Indianness. Or to put this another way: however John Eliot may have sought to control Indian play, he ended up playing Indian.

In this essay, then, I envision the mission and its literature in the manner...

pdf