One might think that a book called The Indian Great Awakening would argue for the greatness of the title's religious revival. But Linford D. Fisher takes an altogether subtler approach. Bucking historiographical consensus, which insists that the Indians of southern New England “converted” to Christianity in large numbers during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s, Fisher argues that Native engagement with Christianity started earlier yet proceeded more unevenly than conventional wisdom suggests. The result is a nuanced and powerful account of Native Christians in the long eighteenth century.

Most historians who explore this topic write from the perspective of Anglo-American missionaries. Given that missionaries left behind troves of written sources, the impulse is understandable. But Fisher performs the hard labor of recreating the story from Native perspectives. In addition to missionary sources, he mines land deeds, church records, archaeological findings, and the writings of Indian preachers and teachers. His account of religious interaction is therefore deeply contextualized within a framework of colonialism, land dispossession, and hardening racial attitudes.

Fisher begins by interrogating the concept of “conversion” to Christianity. Following the best recent scholarship, he argues that unlike Paul's road-to-Damascus epiphany, a new religious affiliation is usually experienced ambivalently, as a slow accretion of beliefs and practices. Many Indians in southern New England found aspects of Christianity “interesting and useful,” but this engagement was “always filtered through the realities of colonialism and a deep and abiding concern with retaining Native land and preserving community sovereignty and autonomy” (7).

Whereas some scholars see King Philip's War of 1675–1676 as the end of New England's missionary efforts, Fisher takes the war's conclusion as his starting point. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, Indians in Connecticut and Rhode Island began to show interest in what missionaries had to offer. Some were attracted to teachings about Christianity; more were interested in acquiring literacy and trade goods.

By the time the Great Awakening began in 1740, Indians had decades of exposure to Christian teachings and Anglo-American material culture. Therefore, it is not surprising that many were attracted to the revival's emotional sermons and ecstatic practices. This is the picture of the Indian Great Awakening with which scholars are familiar: Mohegans and Pequots flocking to the sermons of James Davenport and George Whitefield. But, based on a careful examination of church records, Fisher finds “patterns of Native affiliation that involved fewer Indians and for a shorter period of time than has been previously acknowledged, and for reasons that are far more complicated than appear on the surface” (87).

Fisher's concept of “affiliation” is worth lingering over because a lack of written records makes it difficult to know what Indian Christians believed; Fisher opts instead to analyze what they did. They attended sermons, received and presented their children for baptism, and sometimes became full church members. But they did so in relatively small numbers, and even those numbers declined after the Awakening's fervor wore off. Thus Fisher rejects the term “conversion” and prefers instead “affiliation,” which he defines as “one element of religious engagement” that “reflects an elasticity in religious association as lived, which was often provisional and changeable” (86). It is a convincing point.

For those Natives who did retain an interest in Christianity after the Awakening, many of them participated in a movement Fisher labels “Indian Separatism,” in which adherents “conducted religious services on their own lands, run by Indians and primarily for Indians” (108). This movement, not to be confused with the nativism of Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes visionaries such as Neolin and Tenskwatawa, produced powerful Indian preachers such as Samuel Niles and Samuel Ashpo.

The book's last three chapters move away from a discussion of Native Christian belief and practice, which may disappoint some readers of this journal. But the story remains engaging. After the Awakening Indians focused their efforts on acquiring literacy, which held a powerful allure in a colonial world. Some of these literate Indians led a pan-tribal movement to migrate out of New England, to the settlement at Brothertown in Oneida country. In contrast to recent books on Brothertown, Fisher downplays the movement's importance, focusing instead on the much larger number of Christian Indians who stayed on their ancestral lands. Fisher ends his story with a fascinating glimpse of Native Christianity today on three reservations in southern New England.

Throughout the book, Fisher remains attentive to the broader context of colonialism. Indians did not encounter Christianity in a vacuum, and Fisher does an excellent job of paying attention to the many variables that shaped Indians' decisions about whether to affiliate with Christian churches. Yet Fisher's attention to issues such as land dispossession sometimes lead him to downplay the ineffable experience of religion. Fisher reasonably enough wants to see Native Christian affiliation as “meaningful and useful” (106), that is, ineffable and practical. But perhaps because there are more sources on land dispossession and literacy acquisition than on the texture of Native Christian beliefs, Fisher's discussion sometimes veers too much toward the instrumental. Fisher insists that “Native modes of religious engagement” tended to be “practical and provisional” (8). This statement ignores many Indian religious experiences—in New England and elsewhere—that were ecstatic, visionary, painful, and corporeal: not at all practical. In his attention to the broader context of Native Christian affiliation, Fisher sometimes slights the power of Christian belief as he searches for the reasons why many Indians were drawn to Christianity.

But this is a minor critique of a superb book. The revival known as the Indian Great Awakening may not have been as dramatic as historians have assumed, but The Indian Great Awakening is as insightful as historians could have hoped.