British Missions, Native Missionaries

John Eliot, of course, was “The Apostle to the Indians”—the founder of Puritan New England’s Indian missions, the guiding light behind the Christian Indian “praying towns,” and the leader of Massachusetts Bay’s project to publish Christian texts in Algonquian. From the early 1640s through King Philip’s War, Eliot’s apostolic mission was at the center of the New England colonists’ engagement with their Indian neighbors. By choosing Native Apostles as his book’s title, Edward Andrews at once gestures toward Eliot and pushes him into the background. Andrews focuses on the people who brought Christianity to “natives,” a topic that would traditionally lead him to put “The Apostle to the Indians” somewhere near the center of his project. Andrews, though, is convinced that the key actors were the natives themselves. Thus, when discussing Eliot’s New England, Andrews foregrounds Indian “apostles to other Indians” (p. 53), the Indian apostles, that is, who were ordained ministers, lay preachers, teachers, and informal role models, and who staffed the missions and schools on a day-to-day basis, lived in the praying towns, traveled the roads that linked those communities, and sought to blend Christian teachings and Indian ways of life. The “more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the ‘Eliot missions’” that Andrews calls for “demands,” he believes, that “we take celebrated missionary John Eliot out of the picture” (p. 53). It is a provocative argument.

And to make that argument more provocative still, Andrews means it to apply not simply to seventeenth-century New England but also to the entirety of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. His book tells the story of American Indians and Africans “attempting to Christianize their communities” (p. 4). He traces the activities of “Native Apostles”—and the Britons who sponsored, thought, and wrote about them—on mainland North America and in the Caribbean, as well as at British slaving stations on the west coast of Africa. The end-result is a challenging book, one that aims to change the way that we write about British missions and their impact on both the missionized and the missionizers.

As the above no doubt suggests, Andrews is insistent that we need to “rethink missionaries from the inside out” (p. 7). British mission efforts were, he argues, dominated by non-Britons, hundreds and hundreds of Africans and American Indians who were working to evangelize their families and friends, neighbors and allies. Historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have not entirely ignored these people, but Andrews believes that the occasional biographical treatment of, say, Philip Quaque or Samson Occom has not truly shown us the Native Apostles’ numerical dominance of, and ideological centrality to, the British missionary project. In fact, Andrews is willing to go further than that, arguing that the “development of black and Indian missionaries fundamentally shaped cultural interactions between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans” (p. 19). He suggests that a focus on native missionaries will put on the table topics such as “how colonized peoples responded to, and rejected, shaped, and appropriated Christianity” (p. 4), and he firmly believes that these missionaries played an important role in “the larger debate over race and the future of Indians and Africans in Western Christiandom” (p. 4). Add in an insistence on considering all of this within the context of “a transatlantic approach” (p. 4) that includes the occasional reference to India, and it becomes apparent that Andrews set out to fry some very big fish.

From a British perspective, Andrews makes clear, deploying native missionaries made a great deal of practical sense. They had the necessary linguistic skills and social contacts, were “more cost-effective” (p. 9), and were assumed to possess both the willingness and the capacity to endure the physical hardships that mission life entailed. Of perhaps greater importance, Britons believed that “the cultivation of native preachers was part of God’s divine plan” (p. 12), a plan that would not only...