Planting and sustaining Anglo-American communities in an alien New England was a test of English manhood. Preserving and renewing Native communities in the face of colonialism was a test of Indian manhood. That much Englishmen and Native Americans in seventeenth-century southern New England had in common. So, too, did they each believe that the success of their endeavors as men depended largely upon their access to spiritual power. Inhabitants of “enchanted worlds” (7), they conceived of all aspects of life, including what it meant to be a man, through distinctly religious lenses. Religious beliefs and practices profoundly colored notions of masculinity on both sides of the cultural divide. It makes sense, then, that any effort to understand gender identities, and particularly ideas of manliness, in early New England place Native and English religions at the center of their study. To his credit, this is precisely what Todd Romero does in his analysis of the ways in which the links between religion and gender played out within the interactions between Natives and newcomers in the first century of colonial New England history. The result is an important and welcome contribution to our understanding of the Indian-Anglo-American encounter in early New England.
Romero organizes his investigation into a straightforward, three-part structure. Part 1 explores Native and English conceptions of manhood. The other two sections examine the impact differences in those conceptions had upon cross-cultural religious interactions (and more specifically, Anglo-American Christian missionary efforts) and on Indian-English warfare in the region. Drawing on Puritan written sources, material objects from the period, and Native oral traditions, Romero asserts that “Native and Anglo-American understandings of masculinity constituted a sort of counterpoint in the seventeenth century” (20). While elements of similarity or harmony existed, such as the view that manhood was something one had to grow into from boyhood and was to be achieved not simply assumed, differences in their views stuck out to area Indians and Englishmen more often. And where there was difference, there was typically a presumption of inadequacy on the other's part; in settler eyes, when Indian men gambled, hunted, or fought in the Native manner, or when they let their women do their agricultural work, they were acting in a decidedly unmanly and even savage fashion. In response, considerable colonial energies were spent trying to get Natives to change their minds and their ways where men were concerned.
Nowhere were such concerted efforts more evident than in Puritan evangelism of Indians. Scholars have long emphasized the New English conviction that to Christianize Natives, they had to first civilize them. What Romero adds to that argument is greater clarity about how central notions of masculinity were to the civilizing/Christianizing project and to Indian responses to it. The progress of the gospel was measured in part by how far and how well Indian men had exchanged their old garb, old speech, and old comportment for English styles that embodied how a true, Christian man looked, sounded, and behaved. Praying Indians occasionally managed to reflect what Puritans hoped for, but the ideals of Christian manhood set out for them were typically too tough for even the English to achieve. For their part, Native Christians cared less about conforming to Anglo-American desires and more about finding spiritual resources within the new faith that could help them navigate the changed realities brought on by the colonial presence. Romero concludes that some of those Native men and women proved adept at incorporating Puritan definitions of gender and sacred power into their traditional understandings and constructed their own models of Christian Indian manhood and womanhood.
The close interplay between religion and gender for Anglo-Americans and Native Americans shaped other dimensions of their contact with one another, especially warfare. Recent historians have analyzed the gendered aspects of Anglo-Indian contests, as well as the links between religion and violence in colonial America. Romero enhances that conversation by connecting all three—gender, religion, and warfare. Within each culture the meaning and practice of war was inextricably tied up with both the spiritual and the masculine. That fact was only reinforced when the two sides violently engaged one another. As their martial cultures clashed, Indians and Englishmen borrowed strategic and tactical elements from one another but generally held on to divergent views of what constituted manliness in war, how the supernatural could be accessed in battle, and why spiritual power was crucial for military success. The extraordinary violence of King Philip's War in the 1670s brought all these issues to the forefront and left Natives and colonists of all types wondering about the character of their manhood and the efficacy of their faith.
Making War and Minting Christians succeeds so well at revealing the critical ties between religion and notions of masculinity in those two arenas of Indian-English contact that it seems curious the argument was not applied to other spheres of interaction. For example, though Romero devotes considerable attention to the importance of gift-giving and material exchange for cross-cultural relations, he does not provide any sustained discussion of the trading and diplomatic relationships that were essential components of Anglo-American-Native contacts. New England Indians invested those activities with considerable spiritual and manly significance. These were likewise highly gendered domains for the New English, some of whom also spent considerable time reflecting on the proper Christian ways to conduct commerce and diplomacy. Extending the analysis to these and other aspects of cross-cultural relations seems a logical next step for Romero and other historians interested in how gender and religion intersected to influence the character of early New England.
