"Come Over and Help Us": Reading Mission Literature

Struck in 1629, the Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is emblematic of colonial hubris and dependence alike. It depicts a figure-an "Indian"-dressed in a leafy loincloth, holding a huge bow, and pleading "come over and help us" in a cartoon ribbon that wreaths his head. His plea is an echo of the Pauline dream of the welcoming Other, taken from Acts 16: 9-10. It signals the arrogance of an invading people who could make themselves believe that they were being invited to occupy a land inhabited by another, self-sufficient people. With the scriptural allusion, they assume a typological identity; as a colony, they inhabit the role of Apostle. Yet the seal also signals the reliance of these colonists on the goodwill and patronage of those they left behind in their English homeland. The figure is not speaking to colonists in America, but directly to an audience "over there" in England. In fact, at least initially, the seal had little to say to the settlers themselves-for the first 15 years of a permanent English presence in New England, almost nothing was done to "help" Indians to Christianity, despite the colonists' repeated assurances to interested parties in England that evangelism was the root and cause of their migration.

However disregarded in the early years, the fantasy of the seal was replicated in the mission literature that began to be published in the 1640s, and it retained the colonial and metropolitan valences of the seal. We see these transatlantic forces especially in the works considered by the three essays in this special section: Roger Williams's A Key Into the Language of America, and the so-called Eliot tracts, nearly a dozen pamphlets written in New England, but edited and published in London. Yet if we were to assume that all that is to be perceived in the mission discourse is a colony mirroring its metropolitan patrons, we would miss the aspect of the mission writings that has proven most challenging in recent studies. What the mission literature inscribes that the seal does not is the interaction of real people in a religious contact zone. No matter how fantastic or how ventriloquized the "Praying Indian" in mission writings, who replaced the "Indian" on the seal, the figure was constructed in response to the interaction of English missionaries with Algonquian peoples who were interested in, hostile to, or manipulative of the Christian messages missionaries sought to impart. Thus, mission literature describes a triangle of influences-colonial, metropolitan, and indigenous. The complex of influence and interest (and the triangle, however useful a model, is surely too simple to adequately suggest the range of participants in the colonial mission discourse, even if we limit ourselves to New England; more on this point later) has sparked a cottage industry of new and interesting analysis to which this special section ably contributes.

Until quite recently, early American studies have unquestionably accepted the Great Seal's message and that of other mission literature at its face. From the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, antiquarians, historians, and biographers believed that missionaries truly "helped" Indians, if only by mitigating some of the depredations of their countrymen. John Eliot, minister of the church at Roxbury and the most visible Puritan missionary, was the "apostle," the saintly Puritan whose beneficence was lauded in histories of New England beginning immediately after his death and fictionalized in novels from Hope Leslie to The Scarlet Letter.¹ The revisionist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s challenged such notions, most notably in the works of Francis Jennings and Neal Salisbury. These scholars pointed out that the missionaries' work was made possible by and in turn shored up the more obviously brutal aspects of colonialism, that missionaries followed fast on the heels of English conquistadores, and their writings were a tool of that empire. While welcome, such revisions often kept the focus on the poles of empire-Boston and London. Other studies, such as those by James Axtell and James Ronda, demanded that we turn our attention to the Indian experience of Christian evangelism...