In To Live Upon Hope, Wheeler makes expert use of missionary records in providing a coherent account and a convincing analysis of Native agency in the context of eighteenth-century Mohican interactions with Christianity. In this study, which is comparative in nature, Wheeler juxtaposes the experiences of the Housatonic Valley Mohicans of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with the experiences of Hudson Valley Mohicans of Shekomeko, New York. In so doing, she explores the differing ways in which these two groups of Mohican peoples shaped their own experiences with Christian missions. The Housatonic Valley Mohicans embraced Congregationalist forms of Protestant Christianity, emphasizing the necessity of education in Euro-American culture and practice. Pragmatically, they concluded that conversion to Christianity might best enable them to preserve their own central cultural values, particularly that of maintaining harmonious alliance through selective appropriation. The Hudson Valley Mohicans initially resisted Christian proselytization, even from their Massachusetts relatives, but after carefully scrutinizing and comparing missionary behavior toward Native peoples and attitudes toward the sacred, they eventually agreed to host Moravian missionaries. Because defense against disease and depopulation was paramount for them, the Hudson Valley Mohicans wished to share in the protective relationships with sacred power that the Moravians appeared to enjoy. Ultimately, To Live Upon Hope is an investigation of two Mohican variations on the indigenization of Christianity, although it has implications beyond these two groups, and its insights have application to any study of the introduction of Christianity into the Americas.

Wheeler certainly succeeds in her desire “to humanize what has too often appeared in history books as a faceless ‘clash of cultures’” (13). She expertly uses missionary records to extract and present three-dimensional Native and Euro-American actors, and while she certainly acknowledges the constraints that colonialism placed upon Native peoples, she rejects deterministic narratives, and directs attention to the spaces in which Native peoples made clear choices for themselves. The author contextualizes the two Mohican communities with close attention to geography, economics, politics, social structure, and history, and to the alterations of these dimensions of life brought about by colonial encounters.

Chapters 7 and 8 (“The Village Matriarch and the Young Mother” and “Mohican Women and the Community of the Blood”) contain especially strong analyses of the role of women in Mohican encounters with and interpretations of Moravian theology and Moravian gender practices. Wheeler proffers salient insights about Mohican women's incorporation of the “blood and wounds” theology with which Moravians are most closely associated. Wheeler illustrates the ways in which Mohican women, whose families were devastated by the disease and death that came along with colonial incursion, reshaped this theology so that it directly addressed their own suffering and mourning, contributed to their empowerment, and assisted in the rebuilding of their families and communities.

This book keeps good company with other recent works on the development of indigenous Christianities, particularly those that are either explicitly or implicitly in conversation with Richard White's notion of the “middle ground.” Wheeler employs a “new historicist” methodology, and skillfully “reads against” missionary texts when warranted. The author draws upon both Moravian and Congregationalist missionary materials (Zinzendorf, Heckewelder, and Jonathan Edwards all make appearances here). The level of her engagement with a wealth of archived Moravian materials is particularly strong.

To Live Upon Hope is recommended without reservation for all academic libraries, and for use in graduate and upper-level undergraduate classes. However, Wheeler's prose is sufficiently clear and engaging for this book (or a selection from its thirteen chapters) to be quite suitable for use in lower-level undergraduate classes as well.