Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape

Joel W. Martin, Mark A. Nicholas, Joel W. Martin, Mark A. Nicholas

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807899663
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas gather emerging and leading voices in the study of Native American religion to reconsider the complex and often misunderstood history of Native peoples' engagement with Christianity and with Euro-American missionaries. Surveying mission encounters from contact through the mid-nineteenth century, the volume alters and enriches our understanding of both American Christianity and indigenous religion. The essays here explore a variety of postcontact identities, including indigenous Christians, "mission friendly" non-Christians, and ex-Christians, thereby exploring the shifting world of Native-white cultural and religious exchange. Rather than questioning the authenticity of Native Christian experiences, these scholars reveal how indigenous peoples negotiated change with regard to missions, missionaries, and Christianity. This collection challenges the pervasive stereotype of Native Americans as culturally static and ill-equipped to navigate the roiling currents associated with colonialism and missionization. The contributors are Emma Anderson, Joanna Brooks, Steven W. Hackel, Tracy Neal Leavelle, Daniel Mandell, Joel W. Martin, Michael D. McNally, Mark A. Nicholas, Michelene Pesantubbee, David J. Silverman, Laura M. Stevens, Rachel Wheeler, Douglas L. Winiarski, and Hilary E. Wyss.

PART I Negotiating Conversion

HARD FEELINGS
SAMSON OCCOM CONTEMPLATES HIS CHRISTIAN MENTORS

Joanna Brooks

How did it feel to be Samson Occom (1723–92), Mohegan, ordained Presbyterian minister, itinerant spiritual leader to Native New England communities, and one of the founders of the pantribal Native Christian Brotherton? How did it feel to grow up a diligent young Mohegan man, on the banks of the Thames River in Connecticut, at a time when English colonialism had already made devastating incursions into every dimension of Mohegan life? When the colony-appointed Christian schoolmaster Jonathan Barber came after Mohegan children, chasing them from their play, catching ten-year-old Samson by the shoulders to “make [him] Say over [his] letters,” did Samson laugh at the menace? Did he quietly absorb the rude handling? Did he grow resentful? What hungers, hurts, or curiosities impelled him down the road at eighteen years old to hear the preaching of the infamous New Light revivalist James Davenport? How did Occom experience Davenport's words of exhortation, surrounded in the summer night by swooning crowds of white, black, and Native seekers? What feelings did he shoulder one year later when he was invited to take a seat alongside his father on the Mohegan tribal council? A sense of duty, a sense of responsibility, a sense of loss, a sense of longing—these feelings shaped Occom's choices as a convert, a student of the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, a recruiter and fund-raiser for Wheelock's Moor's Indian Charity School, a husband, a father, an ordained Presbyterian minister, a leader of tribal faith communities, and a founder of the pantribal Brotherton movement, which resettled hundreds of southern New England Native Christians in upstate New York in the 1780s.

The history of Native North American Christianity is made up of many stories of deep feelings: love, commitment, and hope as well as disappointment, anger, and hunger. For more than a century, scholars avoided these feeling stories by framing mission history as missionary hagiography. An ethnohistorical turn in the 1970s and 1980s resituated North American mission history within the power contests of European imperialism; a social-historical turn in the 1990s attempted to map out how the forces of empire impacted the day-to-day lives of North American Indian communities. The newest wave of American mission scholarship maintains this focus on indigenous lived experience with a new emphasis on the recovery of Native-authored and Native-inscribed manuscript texts, Native consciousness, and Native spirituality. This scholarship tends to imbue Native historical subjects with a greater capacity for criticism, dissent, and theological innovation. No longer do we chronicle Native Christian histories as uniform narratives of assimilation into a monolithic Christian colonial culture; we now view them as a discontinuous series of conversions, declensions, revivals, apostasies, schisms, joinings, and separations. No longer do we uncritically assume that Native Christians universally, entirely, or inevitably accepted colonialist or racist Christian teachings as presented by their Euro-American preceptors. Viewing Native Christianity in this way neither excuses the damage Euro-colonial religions and their agents have done in Native communities nor romanticizes Native Christian communities as singular outposts of resistance against colonial Christendom. Rather, it presents the history of Christianity in indigenous communities as a tumultuous, variegated, highly differentiated field of activity fraught both with zones of soul-harming subjugation, coercion, and indoctrination and with opportunities for vision, innovation, imagination, and articulation. In short, the microhistorical scale and close-textual methodologies characteristic of this new wave of mission history bring us face to face with indigenous feelings about colonialism.

What kind of feelings did American Indians have after the first two centuries of Euro-American colonization? How did they come to terms with these feelings? My emphasis on feelings here reflects a renewed interest within literary and cultural studies in how feelings (also discussed in terms of “affect,” “interiority,” or “inwardness”), their expression, and their management relate to the making and unmaking of power. Theorist Ann Cvetkovich has explored the political potential of feelings that arise in connection with trauma. She argues that “shock and injury are made socially meaningful, paradigmatic even, within cultural experience,” that “traumatic events refract outward to produce all kinds of affective responses and not just clinical symptoms,” and that “trauma [is] a collective experience that generates collective response.”¹ Building upon the work of Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Stoler, and other scholars of sexuality, I would argue that, like sexuality, religion and spirituality also constitute intimate domains of feeling where “traumatic events” are collectively processed and made meaningful, especially in colonial contexts.²

It is to be celebrated that historians participating in this wave of mission history are willing to treat religion and spirituality on their own terms, rather than view them transparently as “weak languages” to be translated into the supposedly “stronger languages” of politics and economics.³ There is in this willingness an implicit assent to the materiality of religion and spiritual life: its capacity for working out difficult political questions on its own terms, through the articulation and processing of powerful feelings, through acts of exegesis, performance, and narration. The histories of colonial missions and related Native religious movements constitute what is probably the largest and most legible written archive of early American indigenous feelings.⁴ If we pay close attention to these church and mission archives, we can develop a more humanizing appreciation of religion as a site where Native people have articulated, grappled with, and theorized the intense feelings they have experienced in connection with colonization and its multiple impacts on their communities. It is this domain of feelings—Native experiences of grief, bewilderment, and rage as well as joy, confidence, and hope—that has generated social and cultural formations that in turn shape the lives of succeeding generations of indigenous peoples. Attention to feelings reveals in greater relief how empire is experienced internally and intergenerationally; avoiding matters of feeling impoverishes mission histories.

In this essay, I will pursue the question “How did it feel to be Samson Occom?” taking as my point of departure a difficult episode in Occom's life, when he appeared drunk in public in the winter of 1769. Reading this incident as a manifestation of Occom's frustration and despair over his extremely straitened economic and political circumstances, I will attempt to reconstruct how Occom's hard feelings and personal shortcomings were processed by Occom's non-Native mentors in the ministry, then by Occom himself, and finally by the Native Christians he served. I hope to show how theologies can determine the way traumas are collectively processed and particularly how Native Christian communities in New England developed religious beliefs and practices that facilitated the processing of trauma. In so doing, I hope to help generate under the auspices of this new mission history project a more feeling-oriented approach to the history of Native North American Christianity, one that does not shy away from engaging with the hard feelings colonialism has engendered in Native communities.

One day in January or February 1769, somewhere in Connecticut, Samson Occom sat down for a drink. That day would shadow Occom's life for months to come, but its particulars are now lost to us. Perhaps, we may imagine, he sat down at a large kitchen table in his family home in Mohegan. Perhaps he sat down at a tavern in New London, the nearby Connecticut port town known for its intense religious revivals, the place where young Mohegan men severed their home ties and put themselves to sea as working sailors, and where local judges and bankers schemed over the lands, laws, and debts of the Mohegan tribe. Occom spent much of the winter of 1768–69 attending to the debts his family had accrued during his two-year preaching tour of Great Britain as a fund-raiser for Moor's Indian Charity School. Eleazar Wheelock promised but failed to look after the Occom family in Samson's absence. Mary Fowler Occom, plagued by a series of debilitating illnesses, had enough to do to see to the survival of herself and seven children, let alone maintain their planting fields. With the farm in disrepair, the Occom family faced the onset of winter 1768–69 with scanty food stores. A crippling shoulder injury, its pain sharpened by the winter cold, hampered Samson Occom's efforts to get food in by hunting and fishing. And to add to the concerns of that hard wintering season, Mary Fowler Occom was pregnant with the family's eighth child: a girl, to be named Theodosia. All these pressures weighed heavily on Samson Occom that February afternoon.

Occom must have recognized the irony of his situation: in England, he raised more than £13,000 for Moor's Indian Charity School, while in Mohegan his own family struggled to survive. Did his dedicated efforts amount to any good for his family and his tribe? From the time he began his course of studies with Eleazar Wheelock in 1743 through the time he left for England in 1765, Occom believed that the classical education Wheelock offered would build a strong new generation of leaders for Native New England. Facility with the English language and the Anglo-American cultural forms that increasingly governed their fortunes were, he believed, crucial to the future of tribal communities. Occom recognized that both Wheelock and his Moor's Indian Charity School curriculum had their shortcomings, but he had faith in the prospects of an exceptional young cohort of Moor's students—among them David Fowler (Montaukett), Jacob Fowler (Montaukett), Joseph Johnson (Mohegan), Samuel Ashpo (Mohegan), Hezekiah Calvin (Lenape), and Joseph Brant (Mohawk). These young men might have capably replaced a generation of puppet sachems installed by colonial agents in tribal governments across the Northeast. But Occom's hopes foundered when he returned from England in 1768 to find the Moor's Indian Charity School mission in trouble. There was evidence to suggest that Wheelock was growing tired of his Native students, and the abuses of the boarding school environment had impelled some tribal leaders to call their students home. What good were those £13,000 doing Native people in this winter of injury, illness, debt, cold, hunger, and disagreement?

Was Samson Occom hungry when he sat down to drink that cold February day? Had he eaten anything at all when he opened the bottle or sat down at the tavern table? Were his family food supplies running perilously low? Was he too proud or ashamed to admit to his drinking companions that he could not afford to buy himself any dinner? Besides hunger, what other hard feelings did he shoulder? Was he sad? Was he angry? The neglect of his family; the embarrassment of Moor's failed relationship with tribes; the sniping of rival white missionaries and schoolteachers at Mohegan; the continuing disarray of Mohegan tribal affairs; the continual encroachment on and legal poaching of traditional tribal territory; the petty treachery, predictable corruption, and utter powerlessness of colony-backed tribal leaders like Ben Uncas III, who had ceded precious tribal lands; the grinding poverty of his people; their bewilderment; the illnesses of his wife, Mary; the hunger and cold of his own children, Mary, Aaron, Tabitha, Olive, Christiana, Talitha, Benoni, and now baby Theodosia—there was so much to be angry about.

Occom drank enough that day to become intoxicated, and he was discovered in public in this condition. If he was drinking at home, perhaps he had an argument with a family member and wandered out into the dark and snow and was discovered by travelers on the post road to Norwich. Perhaps he fell asleep at the table in the warmth of the tavern or found himself in a disagreement with an unfriendly patron. However he was discovered in his condition, news of the incident spread quickly throughout Mohegan territory and in neighboring towns. Word soon reached Eleazar Wheelock, who wrote to castigate his former pupil on March 9. Occom immediately replied:

I don't remember that I have been overtaken with strong drink this winter, but many White people make no bones of it to call me a drunkard, and I expected it, as I have many enemies round about here, yea they call me a lyar and rogue and what not, and they curse and they curse & damn me to the lower Hell…. Them pretended Christians are seven times worse than the Savage Indians; and yet I think I take more heed to myself than ever. I do take some strong drink sometimes, but I don't tip a quarter so much as I used to do, yea I don't keep any in my house only in extraordinary cases…. P.S. I never was so discouraged as I am now.⁵

Discouragement soon softened Occom's initial defensiveness into regret. In early April, he drafted a letter of confession to the Long Island Presbytery, the body of ministers that oversaw his ordination: “I find it my Indispensible Duty to make my open faults known unto you—I have been Shamefully over taken with Strong Drink, by Which I have greatly wounded the Cause of God, and Blemishd the Pure Religion of Jesus Christ, and Blacken my own Character & function, and Hurt my sown Soul.”⁶ Meeting on April 12 on Long Island, across the sound from Wheelock territory, the officers of the presbytery, including Occom's dear friend Samuel Buell, found Occom to be of a “very gloomy and desponding Frame of mind.”⁷ He was not alone in his gloom and despondency. Other Moor's Indian Charity School alumni, including Joseph Johnson and Hezekiah Calvin, were also seen drunk in public that winter. And in May, when the Mohegan puppet sachem Ben Uncas III died, Occom joined with other pallbearers in a gesture of protest and disgust by dropping Uncas's casket on the ground and refusing to carry it to the tribe's royal burial grounds.

How did Eleazar Wheelock respond to his former pupils in this season of despair and disillusionment? In a 1769 letter to a colleague, he described Occom, Johnson, and others as “Drunkards & Apostates.”⁸ Their backsliding intensified Wheelock's dissatisfaction with the progress of the Moor's Indian Charity School project. He hastened his plans to terminate the original Moor's mission to train Native missionaries, refocus on the recruitment and education of white missionaries, and move his campus away from southern New England. In August 1770, he relocated to Hanover, New Hampshire. When he explained his decision in a 1771 report to his donors and supporters, he referenced the public failings of his Native pupils such as Occom and Johnson: “The most melancholy part of the account which I have here to relate, and which has occasioned me the greatest weight of sorrow, has been the bad conduct and behaviour of such as have been educated here, after they have left the school … and it is that from which, I think, I had the fullest evidence that a greater proportion of English youths must be fitted for missionaries.”⁹ According to Wheelock, most of the forty or so Native students he had trained failed to live up to his vision. This he seemed to blame on a constitutional Indian susceptibility to vice. “Nothing has prevented their being imployed usefully, and reputably in various capacities till this day,” he wrote, “but their want of fortitude to resist the power of those fashionable vices which were rampant among all their tribes. The current is too strong … and by this means the progress of this design has been retarded, and the raised hopes of many, which were founded on those encouraging projects have been disappointed.” Wheelock reviewed the fat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I: Negotiating Conversion
• PART II: Practicing Religion
• PART III: Circulating Texts
• PART IV: Creating Communities