The Study of Children in Religions: A Methods Handbook

15 The Baptism of a Cheyenne Girl

236 | 15 The Baptism of a Cheyenne Girl Ann Braude This chapter approaches the rite of Christian baptism through the eyes of a Cheyenne child.1 The eight-year-old girl was baptized into the Episcopal Church in a gold mining town in Colorado in 1866. Baptism is intended as a signal event in the life of an individual, as well as for his or her family and church community. This baptism was all those things, but its meaning also extended beyond its immediate environs. Delicate treaty negotiations between the United States and the Cheyenne nation felt the effect of this baptism during a particularly violent period of the military conquest of the West. This child’s religious outlook concerned the federal government, influencing its response to the Cheyennes’ demand that she be returned before they would be willing to sign a treaty with the United States. This particular child had enormous symbolic importance for all the parties involved in Indian-U.S. relations during the Civil War period because she had been taken captive by Union forces in the notorious Sand Creek Massacre. One of the few massacres of Native people officially condemned by Congress, the event still resonates today. It is a particularly sensitive issue for the many Cheyenne and Arapaho people descended from survivors, who keep the memory of Sand Creek alive through tribal scholarship, oral knowledge , and family traditions. From the moment of her capture, this little girl’s fate had as much to do with the symbolic status of the massacre in which she was orphaned as it had to do with her as an individual. Yet an exploration of her religious choices suggests that the seemingly intractable political forces shaping her experience framed, but did not subsume, her individuality. The question of where her perspective leaves off and those of the adults around her begins is both complicated and intensified by constraints placed on all religious expressions entangled with the contest for land during the westward expansion of the United States. Because not one word exists in her own hand, the effort to reconstruct her experience is speculative. This chapter explores what fruit such speculation may bear. It proceeds by attempting to stand in her shoes wherever the docu- The Baptism of a Cheyenne Girl | 237 ments tell us her location. The resulting fragments of experience suggest a somewhat obvious conclusion that nevertheless bears repeating because it pulls against adult pieties about the young: childhood provides no exemption from the political contexts of religiosity. While this child’s story intersects with one of the major political developments of American history, the conquest of Native America, all children who engage religion do so in some political context. Though they may be presented as props in adult political negotiations, elements of children’s religiosity come into focus as we look across the historical record. In this case, exploring the political context of a ritual helps to distinguish the perspective of one child from that of others who participated. Perhaps the most important lesson of this story for students of children ’s religiosity is a reminder that context is only one piece of the puzzle. Faith sits at the intersection of internal and external experience, of self and other. The ritual of baptism illustrates the joining of internal transformation to membership in a community. At this intersection children, like adults, are capable of making the same religious motions either as concessions to conformity or as heroic personal commitments, or, most likely, at some indefinable point in between. This story suggests that historians are poorly served by assuming they know exactly where a child’s piety sits on this continuum. To begin, we retrace the steps that led to the baptismal font. On the chilly morning of November 29, 1864, the Third Regiment of Colorado Volunteers under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village camped under government protection on land assigned them as a reservation on a dry wash called Sand Creek. Following instructions to take no prisoners, soldiers killed over one hundred women and children, and fifty or so warriors and old men. After the massacre they turned over the bodies searching for survivors, shooting or stabbing any who were not already dead. They mutilated the bodies, cutting off scalps, fingers and toes, and sometimes genitals as trophies to take home, along with buffalo robes and buckskin dresses.2 A few children they chose not to kill—instead they took them...