Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England

Introduction

introduction In this study I retell the now-familiar stories of the intercultural encountersbetweenProtestantmissionariesandNativepeoplesinsouthernNew England from the seventeenth century through the early national period. These encounters include John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew Jr., and others who established the first “praying towns” in southeastern Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard among the Wampanoags. From the eighteenth century we consider John Sergeant’s work among the Mahicans in Stockbridge , Gideon Hawley’s mission among the Mashpees, David Brainerd’s evangelical mission to the Lenapes in New Jersey at Crossweeksung and Bethel, the Moravian mission at Pachgatgoch, and Samson Occom’s ministry to the Montauketts. Finally, from the early national period, I retell the migration to Oneida lands of the Stockbridge tribe to create New Stockbridge, and the formation of the Brothertown community—an amalgamationofemigrantsfromtheNarragansetts/Niantics,Montauketts, Farmingtons, Mohegans, Pequots, and Paucatuck Eastern Pequots from New England. Retellingthesestoriesofinterculturalencounterspresentsaccountsofthe ideals, purposes, and goals of the Protestant missionaries juxtaposed with accounts of the lived religion, religious experience, and religious practice of Indians in these unique village communities. Natives are not depicted as either the “culturally demoralized victims of European aggression or as theself-actualizingresistersofWhiteimperialism.”1 IfNativesmustnotbe viewed as one-dimensional caricatures—passive victims or scheming politicaloperatives —thenalternatively,weneedtoimaginethemascomplex human actors enmeshed in their village worlds, bound together through kinship and the noncoercive political and religious authority of sachems andpowwows.Theysharedacommoncultureandlanguage,andpursued 2 Introduction trade, diplomacy, and warfare and the seasonal migrations that were their traditional lifeways. By examining the distinctive features of social relations in Indian village worlds in a colonial context, we can identify patterns of thought and cognition (eidos), and the cultural construction of emotions and lived experiences(ethos),2 toelucidatethedistinguishingcharacteristicsof“being Indian in colonial New England.” The evidence from more than fifty IndiantownsinsoutheasternMassachusetts,CapeCod,Martha’sVineyard, Nantucket,RhodeIsland,andConnecticut—locallinguisticcommunities intheeighteenthcentury—suggeststhatdespiteEnglishinterference,Natives continually recreated and revitalized their languages, identities, oral traditions, cultures, and lifeways. The family household, clusters of extended families, and large multigenerational kin groups formed the basis for village social organization. Kinship bonds of blood, marriage, and intermarriage across Indian towns createdlocalandregionalnetworksofaffiliation,status,andsachemshipthat tied Natives to one another and to their ancestral lands. Villagers reunited for traditional calendrical rituals and sacred Christian holidays in church grounds, dances, weddings, funerals, and “frolics.” Their ceremonies attemptedtomaintainbalanceandreciprocitywithmanyother -than-human persons: God, Jesus, traditional gods,cultureheroes,guardianspirits,and shapeshifters.Theycontinuedtobelieveinportentsanddreams,consulted powwowsandherbalists,anddefendedthemselvesagainstwitchcraft.The textures of village life show how Indians selectively made choices about incorporatingEnglishcultureastheystruggledtopreservetheircommunities and recreate themselves and their traditions.3 We will investigate how Native peoples adapted to their new worlds in the colonial encounter and pose several questions. First, how and why did Reformed Protestantism appeal to so many Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Second, how did they selectively appropriate, embrace, and institutionalize Protestant theology, piety, and morality, blending Christianity with traditional lifeways to create unique and hybrid Christian Indian identities and communities? When ethnographers or historians recount stories of intercultural Introduction 3 encounters, they impose a narrative structure to explain continuity and change.Forexample,influencedbythesalvageethnographyofFranzBoas, anthropologists working in the 1930s and 1940s created the master narrative of Native American cultural changes by conceiving of “the present as disorganization, the past as glorious, and the future as assimilation.”4 This interpretive framework imagined the Native as a romantic and exotic other,alienatedfromanidealizedprecontactpast,languishinginapresent marked by pathology and social disintegration, and destined to disappear orassimilateinthefuture.RecurrentthemesinAmericanliterature,poetry, and the arts, as well as collective representations of our national identity from King Philip’s War through the early national period to the present, envision Natives as the vanishing American.5 Alexis de Tocqueville embracedthistropethatstructuredhisperceptionofraceinAmerica .Writing in the margin of the manuscript of Democracy in America, he describes an encounter with a young Creek women and a slave woman who were left to care for the child of a member of the planter elite in the 1830s. He asks: “Why is it that of these three races, one was born to perish, one to rule, and one to serve?”6 Jean M. O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England examines six hundred local commemorative histories in the period 1820–1880, in the context of emerging American nationalism, to reveal the ideological project that elaborated a master narrative of Indian extinction. Doomed by perceived racial inferiority, Native groups and cultures steadily declined as intermarriage diluted “blood purity” and undermined the “authenticity” of aboriginal peoples. Central to New Englanders’ perception of “real” Indians...