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  • To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast
  • Linford D. Fisher
To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast. By Rachel Wheeler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xiii plus 250 pp. $45.00).

This book is a tale of two cities. Or, more precisely, two Indian villages on the outskirts of the British North American empire. And, like the opening lines of Dickens's famous novel, these two little towns seem to represent the best of times and worst of times with regard to English Indian evangelistic efforts in the eighteenth century. The tragedy is that these best and worst beginnings have rather similarly unfortunate endings (by some measures), as most histories of Native America do. But along the way, Rachel Wheeler, associate professor of religion at Indiana University-Purdue University—Indianapolis, provides an impressive amount of texture, detail, and contingency as she traces the outline of these two very different and intriguing missions towns. Throughout, Wheeler's emphasis is on how Indians "adapted Christianity to preserve and construct community" (82).

The first of these two villages, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was carved out of Mohican land by English magistrates, missionaries, and ministers who wanted to solve multiple problems at once, including securing the alliances of important Housatonic River Indians (and eventually the Iroquois) and paying off—in Wheeler's estimation—some vague sort of obligation they had before God to the unevangelized Indians of western Massachusetts. In many ways, it represented the classic English approach to Indian nations, with its emphases on political subjugation, civilization, English-language training, and religious conversion. Wheeler narrates the Stockbridge story from the founding of the town in 1734 through the end of the Revolutionary War, helpfully detailing the ways in which Mohicans attempted to shape their own futures by collaborating with English officials and missionaries in an attempt to redefine their own cultural traditions and exert influence among a broader group of Indian nations in the region. Wheeler's analysis [End Page 275] also includes the well-known but little-examined missionary tenure of the famous and ousted Congregational minister, Jonathan Edwards, among the Stock-bridge Mohicans from 1751 to 1757 (whom Wheeler uses to illustrate a secondary argument, namely, that both Indians and English were changed by their long-term exposures to the other).

But Stockbridge is only half of the story, literally. Forty-five miles southwest lay the second of these mission towns, Shekomeko, New York, a Mohican town that a few Moravian missionaries found their way to through New York City in 1740. It is Wheeler's narration and analysis of the Moravians and their Mohican converts that is the strongest and most interesting contribution of this book. The Mohican adoption of Moravian Christianity, according to Wheeler, challenges "the conventional wisdom about the role of missions in colonial American society," since "Moravian missionaries did not serve as agents of colonial power," the Mohicans of Shekomeko "did not feel compelled to adopt Christianity," and the adoption of Christian practices by Mohicans at Shekomeko "signaled neither a wholesale rejection of traditional ways nor a full embrace of Moravian piety or cultural norms" but rather the incorporative construction of an indigenous Christianity (88).

These two towns serve two very different purposes for Wheeler. If Stockbridge allows her to illuminate the layers of political, social, and religious motivations and machinations in the English evangelization project (all of which is very helpful), the Shekomeko sources seem starkly apolitical (in that sense, at least) and almost acontextual as they pull back the curtain to reveal a complex eighteenth century Indian Christianity not unlike the more familiar Connecticut Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson. A central underlying concern for Wheeler is the development of an indigenous Christianity as evidenced in two different Indian contexts in Stockbridge and Shekomeko. Her interest is in the "shape of Mohican identity" as it adopted two different forms of Christianity, as well as in "the shape of Christianity as it was interpreted through the lens of Mohican tradition and Mohican experiences of colonialism." "Identity" is a sometimes too-often recurring and unexamined trope, and frames her analysis of the English as well, particularly with...

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