Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king's son in Matthew 22:1—4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.Footnote 1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town's praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”Footnote 2
On this particular visit, after the sermon, the meeting ended without incident, and everyone returned to their respective residences except the two Englishmen, who stayed overnight in Wamesit. The next day, however, in another, perhaps more informal, gathering, the Englishmen pressed Wannalancet to “give his answer concerning praying to God.” After some “serious deliberation and serious pause,” he stood up and made the following speech recorded by Daniel Gookin, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Massachusetts Colony:
Sirs, you have been pleased for four years last past, in your abundant love, to apply yourselves particularly unto me and my people, to exhort, press, and persuade us to pray to God. I am very thankful to you for your pains. I must acknowledge I have, all my days, used to pass in an old canoe [alluding to his frequent custom to pass in a canoe upon the river] and now you exhort me to change and leave my old canoe, and embark in a new canoe, to which I have hitherto been unwilling; but now I yield up myself to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and do engage to pray to God hereafter.Footnote 3
This somewhat surprising turn of events was “well pleasing to all that were present,” both Indians and English. Eliot and Gookin followed up, encouraging Wannalancet and his people to “sanctify the sabbath, to hear the word, and use the means that God hath appointed, and encourage their hearts in the Lord their God.” For Wannalancet, at least, the practices that he found meaningful before his “conversion” continued to be so afterward; Gookin reported that Wannalancet “doth persevere, and is a constant and diligent hearer of God's word, and sanctifeth the sabbath, though he doth travel to Wamesit meeting every sabbath, which is above two miles.”Footnote 4
This little vignette invites us to consider the rich, overlapping worlds of Native spirituality and Christian practice, one in which the rituals, symbols, and beliefs of European Christianity were adopted by Indians over time, either voluntarily or in response to the overtures of English missionaries. In the end, Wannalancet apparently did embrace Christianity in a way that was satisfying to the Anglo-Americans, but it happened in his own way, in his own time, and on his own terms. And when the time came for that crowning Puritan religious practice, the public confession, Wannalancet described the event with symbols familiar and meaningful to him and his lifeworld; he spoke of leaving his old canoe for a new one—a metaphor hardly English or biblical in origin. Ironically enough, the pre- and post-conversion descriptions of Wannalancet's Christian practices by Daniel Gookin sound strikingly similar: Wannalancet attended sermons and kept the Sabbath. The only added practice was the one mentioned by Wannalancet, to “engage to pray to God hereafter.” Such identification must have surely had significant social consequences, however, for Gookin noted that “sundry of his people deserted him, since he subjected himself to the gospel.”Footnote 5
Scholars of early America have described the complex process normally referred to as the “colonization” of North America in a variety of ways, variously preferring to emphasize the one-sided nature of things (an “invasion”), the long-term co-created world of shared symbols and cooperation (a “middle ground”), or a variety of possible combinations of the two at various times.Footnote 6 In most accounts of early New England, religion and missions play a fairly prominent role, with interpretations of that role ranging from nefarious to benign. Historians often—and, sometimes, rightly—fault the Puritans for their cultural insensitivity, political complicity, and financial impropriety. Indians—even those who did convert—are often faulted for not grasping the finer points of Christian theology or for persisting in their traditional practices. Ultimately, seventeenth-century missionary projects are deemed failures, in part because of the traumatic rupture to Indian—colonist relations caused by King Philip's War (1675—1676), but also partially because of the perceived illegitimacy of the religious hybridization that resulted from the evangelization attempts.Footnote 7 Historians often quote Eliot's famously pessimistic deathbed lament in 1690 that “There is a Cloud, a dark Cloud, upon the Work of the Gospel among the poor Indians”; less cited, however, is the more optimistic last half of his statement, which reads: “the Lord Revive and prosper that Work and grant it may live when I am dead.”Footnote 8
However, to focus on the failure of either the missionaries or the Indians, especially using missionary standards, ignores an important line of investigation that reveals a world of religious practices that somewhat obviates the question of success or failure. In recent years some scholars of religion have advocated a “lived religion” approach to the history of religion in America, one that focuses on, in the words of David D. Hall, the “everyday thinking and doing of lay men and women,” in short, on “religion as practiced.”Footnote 9 In this context, the idea of “practice” encompasses “the tensions, the ongoing struggle of definition, which are constituted within every religious tradition and that are always present in how people choose to act. Practice thus suggests that any synthesis is but provisional. Moreover, practice always bears the mark of both regulation and what, for want of a better word, we may term resistance.”Footnote 10 Such a focus moves beyond questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy to discover the formation of meaning within the lifeworld of particular individuals in a particular community in a particular time and space using religious symbols and idioms from a variety of sources that hold meaning for them. Religion as “practice” assumes that religion is not fixed, either in a society or in an individual; it allows for the messy confluence of ideas and beliefs that constituted the religious lives of men and women throughout history. Religion as practice assumes a fuidity within that practice in response to various social and personal conditions, as Robert Orsi has argued: “People appropriate religious idioms as they need them, in response to particular circumstances. All religious ideas and impulses are of the moment, invented, taken, borrowed, and improvised at the intersections of life.”Footnote 11
In the field of Native American history, several scholars have fruitfully applied this methodology to various geographic areas. Michael McNally, Rachel Wheeler, David Silverman, and Christopher Bilodeau have explored Christian ritual and practice among the Ojibwe, Mahican, Wampanoag, and Illinois Indians.Footnote 12 Central to much of this scholarship is an exploration of the meaning of “conversion” in the American Indian context—even as theorizing about the nature and meaning of conversion has garnered much recent attention in many other fields of religious history.Footnote 13 Too often, historians, working primarily within an Eurocentric framework, conceive of religion as fixed, knowable, and singular, and imagine religious conversion to be total and complete.Footnote 14 In this model, as Michael McNally has described it, contact between the Europeans and the Native peoples becomes a “ ‘collision' of two ostensibly well-bounded systems of belief: Protestant or Catholic ‘Christianity' on the one hand and tribe-specific traditions on the other,” where “Christianity's gains were unequivocally the losses of traditional religions,” or the “persistence of traditional religions signaled a lack of inroads on the part of Christianity.”Footnote 15
Instead, there is a growing recognition that the bipolar framing of the question of conversion itself might be misleading. If it is the case, as Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton have argued, that “complete religious conversion—prescribed change or pure transmission, if you prefer—was and is impossible to achieve,” then Native “converts” will always fail to live up to historical and theological scrutiny, at least as presently framed.Footnote 16 Furthermore, to gaze into the past with such lenses ultimately obfuscates a much more interesting and complicated world that the Natives actually inhabited and experienced—one that involved a confrontation with the divine, to be sure, but also multiple identities, shifting allegiances, changing economic and spiritual factors, and a multiplicity of kinship ties—all of which Neal Salisbury has summed up in the term “ambiguity.” Salisbury contends that simplistic, Eurocentric words like “conversion” and “convert” are unhelpful when trying to understand the world of Indians and their very ambiguous, ongoing relationships to Christianity and their European neighbors, and therefore historians should drop the words completely.Footnote 17 One possible replacement suggested by Kenneth Morrison is the more ambiguous phrase “religious change,” which avoids the totalizing, triumphalistic notions implicitly embedded in the word “conversion,” while recognizing changes over time that did occur—including the partial, selective adoption of European cultural and religious practices.Footnote 18
A focus on religious practice can meaningfully broaden our understanding of Natives and their relationship to European ideas about religion, a relationship that might have included, but was not limited to, concepts such as religious “conversion.” The sources upon which we are forced to rely usually come from the missionaries or their exemplary Native converts—Christian Indians who seemingly repudiated particular elements of their traditional religious practice but who were not representative of a majority of Indians whose experience occupied a more middle, gray ground of practice and belief. Even when using these exemplary accounts, however, a fragmented, partial picture emerges from the texts that suggests a complex world of religious practice in which the Indians responded to their changing social, cultural, economic, and religious conditions in a variety of ways, drawing from both Native and Christian practices and taking on both Christian and Native identities. The end result, as the missionaries were sometimes loath to admit, was a bricolage of indigenous and Christian ideas and practices that was not an exact representation of the imagined static orthodoxy professed by Anglo-Americans. Scholars have various words for this—“syncretism,” “hybridity,” “dimorphism”—but arguably these potentially pejorative words apply equally to European and Indian Christianity in this time period. To focus on practice is merely to recognize the diversity of belief, practice, and meaning-making among Indians and their Anglo-American counterparts, and to acknowledge the construction of an indigenous Christianity without making facile pronouncements of whether the result is good or bad.Footnote 19
A practice-centered interpretation, then, redirects the focus away from normative measurement—away from quests to find out if the Indians were “bona fde” Christians or not, or whether the missionaries or their Indian “converts” had failed. To focus on practice also recognizes the range of responses that emerge from a close reading of the sources, which ultimately requires a redefinition of what “conversion” is—what it meant to Anglo-Americans and Indians, and how present-day conceptions of it might obscure seventeenth-century realities.Footnote 20 In an attempt to draw out these parallel themes over a longer stretch of time, this essay draws upon the experiences of the very varied Indian communities in New England from the 1640s through the 1720s, without intending to ignore the very real differences between the various eras and geographies under consideration. The fact that the social and political contexts of Massachusett Indians prior to 1675 and Wampanoags on Martha's Vineyard in the 1720s were so different actually strengthens the argument of this essay, since it gives evidence that, to a certain extent, some themes and experiences transcend the usual influences of contextual and temporal factors.
This essay, then, is a synchronic exploration of the Christian practices of the Native Americans who did, in some fashion, choose to adopt certain forms, rituals, and beliefs of European Christianity—including all the ambiguity, mixed elements, surprising Native appropriation, and range of responses that their practice of Christianity entailed. These appropriations eventuated in the formation of a hybridized indigenous Indian Christianity that remained simultaneously Native and Christian but tended to satisfy neither seventeenth-century colonists nor later generations of American historians.Footnote 21
Praying as Practice
Central to Indian Christian spirituality in the seventeenth century, regardless of geography, was the practice of praying. Although in the case of Wannalancet given above, “praying to God” was a practice added after his public confession, for many Indians “praying” was the first, not last, step of identification with European Christianity. Many Indians seemed to adopt praying as a preliminary practice after initial contact with the English missionaries, most likely because the English commanded the practice in even the earliest non-missionary phases of contact. Totherswamp, one of the first Massachusett Indians to attempt to provide a public narration of his conversion, implied that even before John Eliot and the others first preached to the Indians in 1646, praying to God was urged upon him by his English neighbors: “Before I prayed to God, the English, when I came into their houses, often said unto me, Pray to God; but … I did not… . Then you came unto us, and taught us, and said unto us, Pray unto God; and after that, my heart grew strong, and I was no more ashamed to pray, but I did take up praying to God.”Footnote 22 In a meeting with many Indians in the wigwam of the Indian leader Waban on 28 October 1646, after the sermon and a prayer, an Indian relayed how, since the first time he heard the Englishmen talking about praying to God, he had tried to pray in his wigwam, but “that while he was praying, one of his fellow Indians interrupted him, and told him, that hee prayed in vaine, because Jesus Christ understood not what Indians speake in prayer, he had bin used to heare English man pray and so could well enough understand them, but Indian language in prayer hee thought he was not acquainted with it, but was a stranger to it, and there for could not understand it.” His question was “whether Jesus Christ did understand, or God did understand Indian prayers.”Footnote 23 Eliot assured the man that God does in fact understand Indian prayers since he made Indians and English alike.
Even for those who persisted to the point of making a public confession, however, praying surfaced early in their confessions as a practice they adopted for a variety of reasons. John Speene, another Massachusett to make an early profession, testified that when he first prayed to God, he did so to maintain already established networks of kinship and friendship: “When I first prayed to God, I did not pray for my soul but only I did as my friends did, because I loved them; and though I prayed to God, yet I did not fear sin, nor was I troubled at it.”Footnote 24 Similarly, Anthony, a Natick praying Indian, says in his conversion narrative that he decided to pray to God because of his love for his brothers, who were already praying: “If any Warrs were, I would go with my brothers; only I thought of my love to my brothers: and then that, if my brother make Warr, I would go with him, to kill men. Now he prayes, shall not I go with my brother? And my brothers love me, and they both pray to God, why should not I? They prayed morning and evening; and when they eat, and on Sabbath dayes, then I thought I would do so: but it was not for love of God, or fear of God, but because I loved my brothers.”Footnote 25 In their conversion narrations, other Indians gave different reasons, such as conviction of sin or truth, or sometimes gave no reason at all for giving into the English injunctions that they pray to God. Either way, praying was one of the first Christian practices that many Indians incorporated into their already complex spiritual lifeworld for social and spiritual reasons.
“Praying to God” was not merely a perfunctory point of identification, serving as some sort of initiatory rite allowing access into the larger praying community, however. Evidence abounds that the practice of prayer remained central to Native American Christian experience throughout the Massachusetts Bay and over the long span of Native Christian lives. When the wife of Momonequem, the first Indian preacher at Nashauohkamuk (Chilmark) on Martha's Vineyard, fell ill, Momonequem “waited patiently on God” for three days “till they obtained a merciful Deliverance by Prayer.”Footnote 26 Margaret Osooit, who Experience Mayhew memorialized in 1727 as a veritable Indian saint, “constantly prayed with her children” and “frequently went into secret places to call upon the Name of the Lord: at which devotion she was sometimes accidentally surprised, by her relations and neighbors.”Footnote 27 Samuel Coomes, the son of Hiacoomes, the first Indian to fully commit to Christianity on Martha's Vineyard, prayed “Morning and Evening in his Family as long as he lived.”Footnote 28
Additional Practices: Collective and Individual
Praying, however, was not the only Christian practice adopted by Indians. Two related but separate practices emerge around the Sabbath day exercises, which were undoubtedly the centerpiece of formal Native Christian practices, at least in terms of communal activity: attending sermons and observing the Sabbath (obeying strictures on various kinds of work). The day was seemingly full of events: the service “consisted of an opening prayer, scriptural reading and exegesis, the singing of psalms, the sermon, another psalm, and a final prayer. The celebration of the Lord's Supper was often part of the morning service, along with catechism, while the conduct of church business, baptism, and ‘any act of publick discipline' took place in the afternoon of the same day.”Footnote 29 Even in Indian communities before and after King Philip's War where there was not a formal, Anglo-sanctioned church, indigenous leadership in each praying town, supplemented by visits from itinerant English ministers and missionaries, ensured that each Sunday the majority of these communities had some sort of Sabbath celebration.
Aside from these formal, communal practices, however, Indian Christianity was infused with a plethora of individual and family practices, including family prayers, catechisms, scripture-readings, and hymns. Margaret Osooit took great care with her children by “teaching them their catechisms, and also reading the Scriptures to them, and pressing them to the duties mentioned to them, and warning them against the sins therein forbidden.”Footnote 30 Wunnanauhkomun, an Indian minister in Christiantown who passed away in 1676, “constantly read the Scriptures in his Family, and usually sang Part of a Psalm before Morning and Evening Prayer; and did very frequently and diligently instruct his Children and Household in the Things of God, and his Kingdom.”Footnote 31 Samuel Coomes, in the later years of his life, “set up the worship of God in his House,” praying twice daily with his family. He also “read the Scriptures,” and “frequently sung Psalms in his House,” and was “careful to instruct his Children in their Catechisms, and bring them up in the Nurture and Admonition of the Lord.”Footnote 32
The practice of reading the Bible and other devotional literature, for Indians who had acquired the skills to do so, seems to have become a meaningful Christian practice for many literate Indians. Abigail Sekitchahkomun, who made a “publick Profesion of Religion while she was but a young Maid,” was taught to read while she was young, and “made a good use of the Advantage, reading abundantly in the Bible, and such other good Books as our Indians have among them.”Footnote 33 Margaret Osooit, when contemplating her own shortcomings, “used to take her Bible, to which she was no stranger, and turn to and read such places in it as she apprehended to intimate what holiness was required to be in such as so drew nigh to God.” Similarly, Margaret “mightily delighted” in Lewis Bayly's The Practice of Piety “and would scarce pass a day without reading something in it.”Footnote 34
Tantalizing evidence of intense Bible reading practices emerges from the extant copies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies of the so-called Eliot Bible, first translated by John Eliot into Massachusett in 1663. Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon have transcribed, translated, and published copies of the sometimes barely intelligible but numerous Indian-language marginalia that fill the blank spaces of the Indian Bibles. The marginal notes reveal not only a close reading of the biblical text and, variously, identification with and distance from it, but also signs of personalization and decades of use and interaction. Some of the pages contain the owner's name, along with a date, where it was purchased, and sometimes, even for what price. The last page in Malachi in one Bible reads “In Boston the 17th of the 5th month, 1670,” while on a page in the book of Romans the owner wrote: “I Mantooekit this is my hand.” Across the title page of the New Testament in one Bible is written, “I Laben Hossuit own this bible, June 11, 1747. Solomon Pinnon sold it to me. It cost four pounds.”Footnote 35
More than just personalization, however, the Bibles' marginalia evidence a range of interaction with the text: identification, alienation, and, at some points, expressions of sorrow, and mini-sermons of warning. In a blank page following the metrical psalms, someone wrote: “There is much of this word of God, this bible, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the one who believes in him shall find eternal life.” In another Bible, the pages after the metrical psalms contain the words: “All this we believe in the name of Jesus Christ, who (is) our savior, whom you [possibly he] sent to me.” Among the pages of the book of Isaiah is written, “Josiah Ned meditates about savior.” The word “meditate,” in fact, appears in the margin beside passages in Amos, and several times in the gospel according to Mark—indicating the appropriation and use of another Christian practice with a long history.Footnote 36
Some of the marginalia contain warnings and messages to future readers. The book of Acts contains the marginal exhortation, “My brothers, remember love for God and all people, always.” In the margin of the book of Exodus we find: “Forever are happy all who believe, forever. I say it you say it I say it I say it you say it you say it This truly is so among all of us. It was the truth in former times.” Simon Papenau seems to have especially interacted with his Bible. In the book of Numbers he reminded himself, “This is your book, you Papenau. Read it with c[oncentr]atrion. Your God [will] bless you.” In the book of Nahum he pleaded with his friends: “I Simon Papen[au] say this to you, my f[ri]ends, all (of you) pray hard.” In an unfortunately incomplete marginal note Simon set out to distill the personal application of 1 Samuel: “1 Samuel say this to you Papenau: if you pray hard to your God … .”Footnote 37
Other moments of painful, comparative Indian self-scrutiny surface, however. A mysterious note in 1 Samuel laments, “We are poor people. We are unable to do that.” Written notes in Numbers include, “Pitiful people (are) we. It is not good. Always falsehood among us all”; “I am forever a pitiful person in this world. I am not able clearly to read this book.” In 1 Kings we read, “I am not able to defend myself from the happenings in the world.” Over and over again “pitiful” recurs as the descriptor of choice. In Malachi: “I am a pitiful man”; in John: “I Isak Papenau am a pitiful person. It is so.”Footnote 38
Such statements, however, are not entirely unlike the extreme yet routine expressions of contrition expected in the normal rhythm of Puritan spirituality, as evidenced in the conversion narratives of English men and women and in the Indian conversion narratives recorded by John Eliot and published by the New England Company in 1653. The fact that such sentiments were voluntarily recorded as marginal notes in personal Bibles by Indian Christians merely confirms the depth of internalization and appropriation of various Puritan and Protestant practices by some of the Native proselytes. Heartfelt abasement, awareness of sin, and appropriate contrition were learned behaviors, and ones that the Indians did not learn quickly, as Charles Cohen and Kristina Bross have argued. But biblical marginalia demonstrate that more abstract Christian practices such as spiritual journaling and scriptural cross-referencing were also adopted over time by literate Christian Indians.
Relations of Grace and Church Membership
From the perspective of the Puritan missionaries and ministers and their sponsors in Old England, however, the most important religious practice for the Indians to perfect was the public narration of their conversion. Interestingly, Daniel Gookin reported in 1674 that in Natick it was not uncommon for Indians to incorporate a wide variety of Christian practices into their normal lives without making an official profession of faith in Christ. Many of the Natick Indians, Gookin reported, “have subjected to the gospel, that are catechized, do attend publick worship, read the scriptures, pray in their family morning and evening; but being not yet come so far, as to be able or willing to profess their faith in Christ, and yield obedience and subjection unto him in his church, are not admitted to partake in the ordinances of God, proper and peculiar to the church of Christ; which is a garden enclosed, as the scripture saith.”Footnote 39 As noted above, Wannalancet observed the Sabbath and attended sermons for four years before confessing Christ. Nishohkou, a Natick praying Indian, noted that he prayed to God “about three years” and attended services during that time but “understood nothing at all,” especially since he attended the services primarily to “look upon women.”Footnote 40
Many examples undoubtedly exist of praying Indians who practiced Christianity devoutly without embracing the covenant community of visible saints through formal church membership; a few such examples survived the censorial selection of the missionaries in their publications. Samuel Coomes, who Experience Mayhew otherwise describes as an exemplary Christian, laments that “he was guilty of one Fault, which I must mention, and a Fault it is which I believe many other good Men are guilty of: he never asked an Admission to the Table of the Lord, tho none that knew him would have scrupled to admit him to it.” The only reason Mayhew gives is because Samuel “feared that he was not well qualified for the Enjoyment of so high a Privilege.” Margaret Osooit was one of many Indians who received instruction under the ministry of the Mayhews and the Indian Christian leaders on Martha's Vineyard. As mentioned above, if her devotional practices are any indication, her life of faith was robust: she “constantly prayed with her children;” “frequently went into secret places to call upon the name of the Lord,” often picked up and read her Bible, “to which she was no stranger.” According to Experience Mayhew, “She was looked upon as a person so well qualified for communion with the church of Christ, that many wondered that she did not ask admission thereunto; and some discoursed with her about the matter, but she had such apprehensions concerning the holiness required of those who are admitted to fellowship with God in his ordinances, that she could not be persuaded that she was herself qualified for so high privilege.”Footnote 41
This seemingly distanced (but not necessarily insincere) practice of Christianity as described by Gookin and Mayhew appears to be the norm, however, not the exception. According to the numbers provided by Gookin's estimates for the colony of Massachusetts alone, in 1674 there were 1,100 Penacook/Pawtucket, Nipmuc, and Massachusett Indians associated with the fourteen praying towns in Massachusetts, including seven “older” towns in the eastern part of the state and seven “newer” towns in Nipmuc country. Of those fourteen towns, however, there were only two established churches—in Natick and in Hassanamesitt. Of the 1,100 praying Indians, only between sixty-four and seventy-four were in communion, or members, of any church, and only forty-five are listed as having been baptized. At most, then, only 119 out of 1,100 praying Indians in Massachusetts saw the need to move their practice of Christianity beyond the realm of meaning-making that made sense to them, despite the continual proddings of the English missionaries.Footnote 42 It is significant to note, however, that Gookin's numbers did not include the Wampanoag in Plymouth Colony, on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket, whose praying Indian population in 1674 numbered close to 3,500, according to recent estimates by David Silverman.Footnote 43 Although more churches had been established among the Wompanoag in 1674 than among Massachusett and Nipmuc, the evidence suggests that practices among the Wampanoag in this same time period differed only slightly from their mainland counterparts with regard to actual church membership.
Interestingly enough, scholars of New England have long recognized that the same statistical phenomenon existed among the Puritans. From very early on, the Puritan church in New England was more closed than open, with church membership limited to those who could give testimony to their experience of faith. With the formalization of the practice of the public confession of one's faith in 1636 as a major part of church membership, the bar was raised so high that many Anglo-Americans in New England society, like many praying Indians, contented themselves with the rituals of Protestantism, such as Bible reading, prayer, and church attendance, without taking the final, formal step of church membership. Although steps were taken later in the seventeenth century to broaden the possibility of membership for later generations in the form of the so-called Halfway Covenant in 1662, even by 1700 the number of full church members as a percentage of the total population was undoubtedly small.Footnote 44 It should come as little surprise, then, that the same might be true in Indian circles.
Hybridity and Religious Negotiation among Indians and Anglo-Americans
Somewhat more surprising, however, is the degree to which the Native Americans shaped their Christian practices and doctrines, either in seeking to continue traditional religious and cultural practices alongside of the newly adopted Christian ones, or else in choosing to focus upon the Christian practices and themes that most resonated with traditional practices, teachings, and beliefs. Many of the conversion narratives and descriptions of the “Indian converts” by Eliot and Mayhew contain examples of the incorporation of various Christian practices alongside the simultaneous retention of Native ones. Nishohkou related that
After wee pray'd to God about three years, my heart was not yet right, but I desired to run wilde, as also sundry others did… . And I went to Pawwauing among others, and these things I loved thoroughly, and they grew in my heart, and had nourishment there, especially lust… . When the Minister came to teach us, hee taught, and I came to meeting; but I came to look upon women, I understood not what he taught; sometimes I came, and understood nothing at all… . Then I desired my heart might be made strong by Church-covenant, Baptism, and the Lords Supper, which might be as a Fort to keep me from enemies, as a Fort keepeth us from outward enemies. ”Footnote 45
Of course in the context of the conversion narrative, the “old life” is contrasted with the “new life,” but what is supplied for us rather incidentally is how easily Christian practices like praying and church attendance coexisted with traditional ones (here interpreted as running “wilde”), such as “Pawwauing,” and healing remedies, and traditional, promiscuous sexual mores.Footnote 46
The reliance on powwows (Native religious leaders) for medicinal relief was apparently not uncommon, even on Martha's Vineyard, where Experience Mayhew, perhaps somewhat facetiously, reported in 1704 that of 180 families on the island, only two people were pagan.Footnote 47 Matthew Mayhew obviously believed in the efficacy of the powwows, given that they did their arts by “Diabolick Skill,” and gave two examples of “bewitched” or “Tormented” individuals going to a “Powaw” and finding relief, and Matthew said he could give “many instances” beyond just these two.Footnote 48 The first one involved an Indian, later called Simon, whose friends, since he had been for some time “greatly Tormented,” “advise[d] him to the Powaw's, concluding him to be Bewitched; they being met, and dancing around a great Fire” with the bewitched Indian lying nearby. Some of his neighbors and friends, however, began to suspect that the powwow to whom they came for a cure was the one who bewitched their friend in the first place, so “they threaten[ed] him that as he had Bewitched, unless he would Cure the Sick man, they would burn him in that fire.” In the end, the sick man's friends and neighbors picked up the powwow, “resolving at least to singe him; who no sooner felt the heat of the fire near him, but the Sick immediately recovered.”Footnote 49 In the other instance Mayhew specifically names two English observers, Capt. Thomas Dagget, Esq., and Richard Sarson, Esq., both justices of the peace. Apparently they were on an island close to Martha's Vineyard with a “Bewitched Woman” who “lay in great Extremity.” Since the powwows on that island were unable to cure the woman, the Englishmen “sent to Martha's Vineyard, for more famoused Powaw's.” While the Englishmen watched, these more famous powwows danced and used “certain Ceremonies usual in such cases, Praying to [their] god with such ardent desires and fervency.” In the end, the rituals were effective: the powwows chased the troubling spirit, “the Spirit of an Englishman drowned in the Adjacent Sound,” out of the woman and caught it in a deerskin, but they recommended that the woman leave the island since the powwow who bewitched her was still close by and, furthermore, the captured spirit was an “English Spirit,” and they “could not long confine it.”Footnote 50
Although historians have normally understood European-Native missions in terms of “power encounters” or show-downs between the spiritual leaders of the Natives and those of the European Christians, at times powwows allowed and even encouraged Christian practice and allegiance. One unnamed “Powaw” on Martha's Vineyard “could precisely inform such who desired his Assistance, from whence Goods Stolen from them were taken, and whither carried.” Strangely enough, this “Powaw” had a wife who “was accounted a Godly Woman, and lived in the practice and profession of the Christian Religion, not only by the approbation, but incouragement of her Husband; She constantly Prayed in the Family, and attended the Publick Worship on the Lords Day's: he declared that he could not blame her, for that she Served a God that was above his; but that as to himself, his gods continued kindness, obliged him not to forsake his Service.”Footnote 51
As many scholars of Native New England have pointed out, such continuities with Native traditions and practices even after the explicit adoption of Christian practices was possibly more common than the missionaries liked to admit to their sponsors in Old England.Footnote 52 In addition to the covert practice of powwowing, James Axtell asserts that “Native social values, dress, housing, work patterns, language, and religious rituals survived and even flourished in many ‘praying towns.'”Footnote 53 Richard Cogley notes that in the praying towns, the Indians continued to live in wigwams and continued to fish and take part in traditional forms of recreation. Proselytes in most praying towns elected traditional sachems and Native leaders into positions of authority, thereby maintaining previous, familiar hierarchies of leadership, kinship, and spiritual oversight. Some elements of Native burial practices coexisted with Christian ones, too. On Martha's Vineyard, according to David Silverman, although many Wampanoag abandoned some ritual practices like coloring their corpses red, coloring their own faces black, mangling their face and hair, and screeching; funerary objects such as kaolin pipes, metal pots, glass bottles, and shell beads continued to be interred with the deceased. Christian Indians still “avoided mentioning the names of the deceased” in order to not disturb their ghosts, and they “continued to point their graves westward toward Kiethtan's House, a practice based on the idea that the soul exited the body through the skull and should begin its journey to the afterlife traveling in the proper direction.”Footnote 54 Similarly, on the mainland, excavations of Indian cemeteries at the three praying towns of Natick, Punkapoag, and Hassanamesit, arguably “the three most Anglicized communities,” have shown that “material objects were sometimes interred with the bodies,” a traditional practice that “violated the Puritan prohibition of grave goods.” Richard Cogley concludes that although there is no evidence that leading Christian Indians were buried in this way, “they were surely aware that the practice continued in the settlements and, at the very least, condoned it.”Footnote 55 Hints of continuity in social practices surface from time to time, too. David Silverman's description of a mid-eighteenth-century Wampanoag church meeting renders the rituals and functions of the service in the Native community as indistinguishable from the role of other pre-Christian meetings of the past.Footnote 56 Even as late as 1792 the traditional peace pipe was passed after the Christian church service in some congregations.Footnote 57
It was, perhaps, the continuities between Native religion and culture and Christianity that allowed Native Christians to “convert” to any degree in the first place. As Charles Cohen, Richard Cogley, and David Silverman have argued, American Indians in the northeast demonstrated an admirable capacity for apprehending the fine points of Reformed theology, but on the whole they showed preference for some concepts and slight aversion to others. Original sin and the bodily resurrection never quite took root as much as the English missionaries had hoped, while concepts of doing good works, punishment for sin, and heaven all resonated with traditional beliefs already existing within Native religion and culture.Footnote 58
It is interesting to note, however, that if the imaginative religious space between European Christianity and Native religious traditions was minimized by the Indians, the English ministers and missionaries themselves contributed to this process in small ways. English sermons to Natives, for example, seemed to resonate with already-existing ideas and mores within Indian culture and religion, such as the need for general good-will and morality. Gideon Hawley, an eighteenth-century missionary, once noted that when Jonathan Edwards, known by later generations of theologians for his abstruse treatises on God, original sin, and true virtue, preached to the Mahican Indians at Stockbridge he was a “plain and practical preacher: upon no occasion did he display any metaphysical knowledge in the pulpit.”Footnote 59
In general, English sermons were on “family love and the importance of family worship” and the importance of “good behaviour on earth to ensure eternal life,” all with “continual reference to the brotherhood of Christians, using generalized Massachusett kinship terminology such as nemat (‘brother, friend').’Footnote 60
To highlight the continuity of Indian Christianity with traditional Native culture or the coexistence of traditional and Christian practice, however, is not to argue for the superficiality of the praying Indians or to rule out genuine belief or knowledgeable Christian Indians.Footnote 61 It is an attempt to understand the complex process of conversion that is much more than simply replacing one set of beliefs with another, and one that involves the process of making the “new” religion of Christianity something meaningful and truly indigenous in the process. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the rituals of Christianity became for many Indians a source of meaning-making and comfort, even as they did for the English.Footnote 62 If scholars insist on endlessly scrutinizing Indian conversions to see whether they were “bona fde,” to use a phrase popularized by James Axtell in this context, however, it is only reasonable that the same should be done for their English counterparts.
A more helpful direction, however, might be to simply recognize the ambiguity and open-endedness of religious practice among both English and Native Christians. As David Hall has demonstrated in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, even the religious culture of the most biblically literate, pietistic of all of the American colonies was infused with a surprising amount of so-called “popular religion” and rather unorthodox belief and practice—by the laity and clergy alike, to a certain extent. The Puritans, no less than the Indians, relied upon extra-biblical explanations, home-cures, and rituals to make meaning in their universe. In short, at times they both used whatever worked. “Yet it may surprise some readers (as I myself was surprised),” Hall writes, “to discover how much ‘magic' circulated in New England—the magic of ‘murder will out,' prophetic dreams and visions, pins hammered into buildings, shape-shifting dogs, and much more besides. The religion of the colonists was infused with ancient attitudes and practices, some indeed so old as to antedate the rise of Christianity.”Footnote 63 One English colonist visited the unnamed powwow on Martha's Vineyard known for his ability to divine the location of lost or stolen items (mentioned above) and requested his assistance in locating an item that was stolen, “having formerly been an eyewitness of his ability”; at first the powwow said he could not help the colonist “since himself served another God,” but later decided, “If you believe that my god will help you, I will try what I can do,” at which point the Englishman desisted from “further inquiry.”Footnote 64 John Winthrop, the pious, orthodox first governor of Massachusetts, is on record as participating in the rather superstitious (but apparently efficacious) rituals associated with the popular belief that “murder will out” in two cases: to determine the guilt of a murderer in 1644 and the mother of an illegitimate baby in 1647. In both cases, when the accused either touched the deceased or was in his or her presence, fresh blood flowed from the body or through the veins of the corpse.Footnote 65 Even many “orthodox” Puritans mixed superstition with Christian belief and just as a large percentage of English men and women found the practice of Christianity apart from the official entrance into church membership meaningful, so, too, Indians accepted many Christian practices without abandoning their traditional beliefs or joining official Christian churches.
Indian Leaders and Religious Regulation
The presence of such mixed, unorthodox belief, however, did not always guarantee ongoing acceptance; historians of “popular religion” often speak of the “reform of popular culture” as magistrates and clergy cracked down on various elements of popular practice and piety outside the cope of official approbation.Footnote 66 In New England, the situation among the Indians was not much different. The towns that Eliot and the Massachusetts Bay Colony set aside for Christian Indians were called “praying towns,” starting with Natick in 1660; Indians who lived in these towns were called “praying Indians.” Terms like “praying towns” and “praying Indians” connote a uniformity of belief and practice that was almost completely lacking in most cases, however. Affiliation with the praying towns required only a willingness to listen to the missionaries, and although pressure was undoubtedly placed on the Indians to conform to some English cultural and religious standards such as Sabbath observance, men cutting their hair, etc., in reality English were in no position to impose uniformity on the Indians, even those within the praying towns. Furthermore, the “imposition” narrative of European-Native contact history obscures another important aspect—the willing appropriation of Christianity by the Natives, and, even more interestingly, the leadership given by the Native tribal leaders themselves. Although it is more comfortable to blame the missionaries for the supposed strict moral and social codes in the praying towns, in reality the leadership was largely in the hands of the Indians who themselves undertook various levels of moral reform (or lack thereof, sometimes to the missionaries' chagrin).
Missions among the Massachusett and Nipmuc Indians are often viewed as the sole enterprise of John Eliot, as if Eliot himself was omnipresent, capable of simultaneously and continuously exerting his presence in the fourteen scattered towns of the Christian Indians in Massachusetts. In fact, Eliot throughout his life remained the fulltime pastor of the church in Roxbury, and although he was absent from his home church for months at a time, his primary duties were arguably still in Roxbury. The main responsibility for the direction and leadership of the Christian Indian communities fell upon Native Christian leaders, who in many cases were traditional sachems who adopted the practices and beliefs of Christianity. Although the Native leaders no doubt in some cases provided more latitude than Eliot might have, in other cases they upheld similar standards, to the point that if “blame” is assigned for the imposition of Christianity upon Native religion, the Native Christian leaders themselves played a large role, much larger than is usually admitted. In some cases, in fact, Indian Christian leaders adopted Puritan standards, such as the requirement for conversion narratives for church membership, and then continued them well into the eighteenth century, even though by this time many Puritan congregations had adopted less rigorous tests for membership.Footnote 67
Examples of Native leaders, many as reformers of their own people, abound. Wunnanauhkomun, an Indian minister on Martha's Vineyard, “would neither drink to Excess himself, nor keep Company with such as did.”Footnote 68 Indian ministers were not the only source of such sentiments, however. Abel Wauwompuhque, Sr., although he “was not a minister … he was a zealous Reprover of the Sins of the times in which he lived, especially the Sin of Drunkenness he did abhor, and earnestly testify'd against it. He could no endure Contention among the Brethren, but earnestly endeavoured to promote Peace and Unity among them”; he would call for peace at church meetings, and as a magistrate among his own people he “used to be a Terror to Evil Doers when he was in that Place of Trust, by inficting deserved Punishments on them.”Footnote 69 Similarly, James Nashcompait, also a layman, “feared God and eschewed Evil, and was a sharp Reprover of Sin in his Brethren and Neighbors, and would tell them plainly that they sinned against God when they did so.”Footnote 70
The point here is that in many cases the leadership for “European” type reform largely came from the Indian leaders and Indian Christians; their effectiveness, as well as that of the English ministers and missionaries, is of course another issue. Richard Cogley and others have pointed out that over time John Eliot had to learn to tolerate a certain degree of co-mingling of Indian and English culture in the praying towns. In a sense, Eliot was forced to do so, given the diversity of responses and various “levels” of practice contained within each praying town.
Generational Dimensions of Religious Practice
The experience of Indians and English was not always an ongoing, first-contact, frontier situation, however. In most situations in New England, a small proportion of Natives did adopt various aspects of Christianity and its practices and, with the help of English missionaries and ministers, gathered churches and educational organizations that were largely run by Indians. Furthermore, at some point, Indian children were born into more or less Christian Indian households, or perhaps, more accurately, households that were simultaneously practicing and preserving elements of Christian culture and Indian culture. Samuel Coomes was sent by his father Hiacoomes at a young age to live with Thomas Mayhew, Sr., one of the main English missionaries on Martha's Vineyard, where Samuel “was very well instructed. He could read well, both in Indian and in English, and well understood the Principles of the Christian Religion. He had no doubt also many good Instructions, and Counsels from his own Father, who listened and preached about two Miles from his Master's House.”Footnote 71 Abigail Sekitchahkomun “made a publick Profesion of Religion while she was but a young Maid”; she read the Bible and other books translated into the local Indian dialect and in general it was reported that “she ordered her Conversation as did become the Gospel.”Footnote 72 Martha Coomes was a “Daughter of religious Parents” and was “solemnly devoted to God in her Infancy, and had a religious Education.”Footnote 73
Before long, the religious experiences of second and third generation Natives immersed in the religious culture of seventeenth-century Puritanism mirrored at points the experiences of their English counterparts. Mary Coshomon, who died in Chilmark, in March 1721/22, was “a Daughter of pious Parents,” namely, the Deacon Jonathan Amos and his wife, who “taught her to read, and instructed her well in the Principles of the true Religion: and she, so far as I can learn, was of a sober conversation from her Youth up.”Footnote 74 After she married, she encouraged her husband to “constantly uphold the Worship of God in his House”; after two years of marriage she experienced a deep desire to be a full member of the church, lest she be “excluded from [God's] Presence in the World to come.” After a time of thoughts and “many Tears,” and “seeking earnestly to God to prepare her for the Privileges which she earnestly desired to enjoy,” one night after the church service she met with the Indian ministers and made a profession of faith and was “readily admitted to a Participation of all the Ordinances of the Gospel.”Footnote 75
Examples of second and third generation Christian Indians illuminate even more the “ambiguity” outlined by Neal Salisbury in attempting to define Native identity, but they also confirm the degree to which Christianity “went Native”—how it was adapted and adopted by the Indians to the point that the rituals of the faith not only allowed them to deal with the present in a meaningful way but also allowed them to preserve the future of their own traditions and community. Indians occasionally even spoke of Christianity as a return to what their forefathers knew.Footnote 76 The irony of the Native Christian church communities, as Daniel Mandell has pointed out, is that although they were arguably institutions designed by some of the missionaries and English sponsors to eradicate various aspects of Native religion and culture, in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth century they were vital to the preservation of that same Native culture, practice, and identity.Footnote 77 On Martha's Vineyard, especially, in the eighteenth century the Christian churches “played a multivalent and principal role in offshore Wampanoag community life, reinforcing the Indians' village, tribal, and colonial ties, and providing an institutional framework in which to address issues often unrelated to religion,” leading David Silverman to conclude that if anything, the importance of the churches in Wampanoag country expanded over time.Footnote 78
Conclusion
The important point here is that the Christian practices and beliefs that were adopted, even by second and third generation Indian Christians, were done so alongside other, more traditional elements of Native culture and religion. Native Americans responded to English missionaries across a spectrum that included rejection, embracement, and a variety of positions in between. For some, like Wannalancet in the praying town of Wamesit, Christian practices and belief were incorporated slowly, over time, as Christianity, and even Puritanism, was learned gradually. For others, the process happened more quickly. A select few made a formal confession and joined the church; others continued to make meaning of their lives through avenues of Christian practice besides formal church membership, at times very intensely, as in the case of Margaret Osooit. For none of the Indians involved, however, was the process ever total or complete as the word “conversion” implies. If this is what is meant by the pronouncement of the “failure” of missions to the Indians, than perhaps the indictment is correct. But, in fact, if we take the testimony of the Indians who decided to make Christianity their own, the story is different. Indians, no matter how Christianized and Anglicized they became, rightfully still remained Indian, and the Christianity they fashioned contained as many traces of their indigenous culture as the Protestant version of Christianity did of the English culture brought to the New World by the Puritan missionaries.
