Transcript: "Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America" with Linford Fisher.
Chris: When European Christians arrived in this vast territory we now call the Americas over four hundred years ago, they found indigenous people here with their own meaningful and personal and sacred religious beliefs. The contact and conflict between Europeans and natives sparked a long-term series of religious encounters that intertwined with other settler colonial processes such as commerce, government, enslavement, warfare, and evangelization.
The taking of Native Americans' land and their lives have been called one of America's two original sins. The legacies of colonialism swirl all about us still including broken treaties, reservations, alcoholism, poverty, despair, misunderstandings, and questions of sovereignty alongside of survival, persistence, cultural and linguistic revitalization, and a return to traditional practices.
Because religion was central to these processes in colonial America and continues to play an important role today, taking a look at the religious interactions between European colonists and Native Americans will help us all better understand these issues and help each other flourish in the American 21st century.
Linford Fisher is a Professor of History at Brown University. He received his Doctorate from Harvard University in two thousand-eight. Professor Fisher's research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude. He is the co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father. Additionally, he has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters and is currently finishing a history of Native American enslavement in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and the American Civil War.
He is the Principal Investigator of the Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas project which seeks to create a public, centralized database of native slavery throughout the Americas and across time.
We are very happy to have Linford here to help us understand a particular part of America's religious history, religion, and the shaping of native cultures in early America by discussing his book, The Indian Great Awakening, published in 2012.
Also, as with each episode in our podcast series, Religion in the American Experience, we hope listeners come away with a better comprehension of what religion, growing in the soil of the ideal of religious freedom as a governing principle, has done to America and what America has done to religion and, thus, be better equipped as citizens to ensure that the American experiment in self-government endures.
Said Abraham Lincoln, "We cannot escape history."
Thank you, Lin, for being with us.
Linford: Sure. Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris: First, Lin, I want to make clear that your book covers a specific time periodand a specific location.
Linford: Yeah, you are right in a sense. It does focus on New England. Uh, New York is in their different places. Um, and there are gestures, other parts of the country. It also spans really from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century.
The core of the book is about a century, uh, in terms of its purview. But yes. So this cannot stand in for all Native American history everywhere. Um, the Americas are a vast vast area and its history is rich and diverse.
But this little corner of the Americas, I think, represents a process that, uh, can lead to productive conversations about other parts of-- of, this area as well.
Lin, can you tell us about the little, leather pouch found at a Pequot girl's gravesite who died sometime in the late seventeenth century or early eighteenth century and what it means in the framing of your story?
Linford: Yeah. So this is the story I open up with in the introduction to the book, because it represents, uh some of the themes that the book tackles overall. And, it is a challenging thing to talk about and mentioned, maybe, because it has to do with the, um, accidental unearthing of, uh, human remains. And so I want to acknowledge that up front that, um, I, share this story, very respectfully, um, but knowing that it is-- it is actually, uh, not my place and my role, in a way, to talk about human remains in Native communities.
But, this particular instance happened, because, uh, there was a-- a homeowner in Connecticut who was trying to make way for an underground gun range. And so he had a bulldozer come in and plow this whole section of his yard up. And as they were bulldozing the land, they realized that the dirt was really dark in regular sort of intervals as they were plowing stuff away.
And so they brought in the archaeologist from the state. Fortunately, the bulldozer, um, o-- operator did the right thing. And they began to look. And they realized, they just bulldozed through a Pequot grave. The Pequots are these, you know, large in the seventeenth century-- extraordinarily large, native group in the south eastern Connecticut-- southern Connecticut.
And, what they found, in working with the present-day Mashantucket Pequots, who authorized archaeologist to go in and to begin to, to reinter them, but also, in the process, to do some sort of analysis as well.
And, what they found is in one of these graves, the remains of a young Pequot woman, probably, in her teens. And buried with her was this bear-skin pouch, that contains, or actually I mentioned it was bear skin but it is-- it is this pouch, this medicine bundle, that within it was, uh, the remains of a bear paw and also a fragment of a Bible page.
And these two things, you do not often see together in terms of New England, in terms of the archaeological record. And so it got people wondering how can we interpret this? And it is also unusual, as you probably know, for Christians, more generally, to tear Bible pages out and use them separately from the Bible.
And so here we have this, you know, young Pequot woman, who dies, early. She is not, you know, fully grown and not an adult woman.
As we are trying to understand-- not we, but people were trying to understand this, um, you need to realize that maybe there was something about the way in which, um, these two religious influences and backgrounds came together in this medicine bundle.
Uh, so the Bible representing some sort of Christian presence, maybe, Christianization, but also maybe just using the Bible page as like a talisman, like almost a way of you know, bringing on or-- or producing power and the bear paw on the same way.
So these two things are together. They are wielded by a native person, maybe added to her grave, you know? She might have not made that choice. But it meant something in terms of the coming together of two different religious kind of traditions and backgrounds.
The bear paw also represents power as well. So the idea is this that-- that when we think about native religious lives in this time period, it is not always so clear the meanings they assigned. And for too long, we have sort of listened to missionaries and preachers and ministers, especially European ministers and preachers, in terms of trying to understand, conversion and the meaning of the religious engagement.
So I started with that as a way to sort of introduce some larger questions and themes
Chris: Great. Thank you. Right. We will get to some of those themes later. You also write - and this is, I think, foundational to our discussion - that the Native [(16:00)] Americans believed they were given the land by the Great Spirit. How did European colonists see Native American land?
Linford: Yeah. It is a really as you say, foundational piece of the settler colonial process, which is to say that there is a-- a vastly different, way of understanding land and its meaning between Europeans and natives.
As you say, natives, believe that they have been, you know, created on this, land and had been given it to them. It had been given to them to-- to use in different kinds of ways. And they had specific ways that they use it, um, whether it is hunting and fishing or gardens, or whatever else.
But Europeans had a different way of understanding this and the English, in particular, in terms of claiming a plot of land and building a wall or a fence and putting a house on it that is there year-round and using the land in different kinds of ways, cultivating specific kinds of gardens that, you know, are there year-round and so forth.
And, I think Europeans also, generally, saw the land as something that is exploitable in-- in very specific kinds of ways. So the English come over. They see this amazing area and New England that is, just bursting with, you know, naturally, produced kinds of things that they are lacking in England like trees and … the British Isles are, basically, you know, devoid of trees by this point. They have just cannot grow them fast enough.
And they see in their eyes, um, you know, only - tens of thousands of natives. But in their eyes, they see a lot of land that is not used, that is unimproved, the same language I used.
And so within their frame of reference kind of based [(18:00)] on this Biblical mandates of the early, uh, chapters of Genesis to kind of go out and-- and do stuff with the land, to work the land. They believe that they can just sort of come in and take land that is not actively being used. And sometimes they can take land that is actively being used as well.
So it is not only this idea of-- of land, uh, whether there is no one on it. But they have these phrases. And they talk about, yeah, uh, unimproved land or the emptiness of the land. Um, and in doing so overlooked the presence of Native Americans and also how natives understand land, how natives are using land, how natives, are actively cultivating, and are actively growing gardens and so forth.
Chris: Thank you. That is very helpful. Can you tell us, Lin, about the Propagation of the Gospel in New England Company or what is called the New England Company which is featured prominently in your book, why it was formed, what it became, and some of its early work?
Linford: So this company is formed by people for the most part in London, who see, this sort of colonization process as a great opportunity. And so there has been talk from the beginning even with the sort of founding in Virginia in 1607 but also in 1620 up in Plymouth.
The idea is that the English, uh, have said for a long time they want to evangelize natives. That is part of their justification for colonization. But when push comes to shove, they realized pretty quickly it is hard. It is really really hard, in part, because natives are, incredibly vibrant in terms of their culture and religion and their own sort of systems of understanding the world and the way that they organize their lives and so forth. And so it is not evident to them at all that they should adopt Christianity. And so natives, you know, listen. They are very patient often. And then they sort of, [(20:00)], move on.
And so it takes several decades for something that is sort of a viable missionary movement to take root. And when it does begin to take root, it is around a few individuals who begin to learn the native languages like John Eliot with the Mayhews, on Martha's Vineyard. Generally, it is in Massachusetts.
And when these stories, and Eliot-- John Eliot is very good at self-promotion. So he actually publishes a few tracts describing his successes among the natives in the 1640s. And they get published in London. And when they get published, people began to have interest in supporting this sort of, active evangelization that is going on.
And so they formed this company around 1649. It actually, uh-- with the Restoration in sixteen-sixty, the charter gets revoked. And so they have to reorganize in the 1660s. And this persists up through, uh, the eighteenth century, um, as-- as one of the main ways that specific outreach and evangelization of natives gets funded within the New England context.
Chris: Okay. You write that in the 1720s, native communities began inviting Anglo-American ministers and missionaries to reside on their lands. Can you explain why they did this and what it looked like?
Linford: Yes. You have to realize that 1720s, 1730s, uh, the settler colonial process has been in place for a hundred years. It has been ongoing for a hundred years. It is a century of English people living in this area, um, sometimes on land that they have bought in certain kinds of ways with deeds and paper trails no matter how complicated those transactions are. Sometimes it is on land that was forcibly taken. Sometimes it is on conquered lands, so-called, uh, through several wars that were fought.
And, uh, if you think about, how natives looked at themselves and how they perceived what was happening in the 1720s, they have been through a century of-- of that. They have been through two major wars, uh, one, the first Pequot War in the 1630s. That was essentially a genocidal war against the Pequot nation [sighs]. And then King Philip's War in 1675-1676, in which, uh, a whole collection of natives actually tried to kick out the English from New England after decades of, you know, different kinds of broken promises and, uh, infringement on native sovereignty and land and religious infringement as well through evangelization [sighs].
And it was not successful. But the response by-- by the colonists was to essentially try to crush all of that, um, what they termed rebellion and uprising. And, so that resistance movement was put down militarily. And, after King Philip's War in the 1670s, there is really no viable military push back from natives in New England against colonization.
So essentially in 1720, these native peoples are living as defeated people, uh, militarily speaking, um, and subjugated people. Maybe defeated is a wrong word-- subjugated people within this colonial context. They have been pushed back to certain reserve lands, uh, universally in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Uh, Plymouth gets incorporated into Massachusetts. So it is a single entity in the enti-- in the 18th century.
And, uh, natives, I think, um, having been multiple generations into colonization, began to look around and say, "We have to find a way to form alliances and to get some of the tools, in terms of language and writing, that will help us preserve our communities."
And so that is why they invite teachers in, primarily at first, and not missionaries [(24:00)] or evangelists or preachers, because, literacy and the ability to write was critical to defending yourself in court, to providing a paper trail of the transactions that were taking place, to be able to read the documents that were put in front of you asking you to sign if you are like selling land or something.
So literacy was seen as a really important tool. And natives are very savvy about this and invite in educators to accomplish that in the 1720s.
Chris: You also wrote this in the same section of the book. And I am quoting here, "Although civilization had long been part of the New England Company's evangelization strategy, it received greater emphasis particularly with reference to Indian children." Can you elaborate?
Linford: Yes. On the history of Christian missions, I think there has always been this lurking kind of duality in terms of what is being offered or demanded. And this is definitely true in the seventeenth century and eighteenth century in terms of English missions, meaning that missionaries and ministers might have seen themselves as kind of offering the pure gospel, the pure Christian gospel, its ideas, its, you know, theology, its-- the Bible, its the Bible verses, its salvation, all the sort of metaphysical stuff, right? The reality is to be a really good Christian, to be a-- an authentic Christian, required you to also adopt different kinds of cultural habits not only of your mind but of your body.
And so even in the seventeenth century, when John Eliot had these praying towns, um, that were established in Connecticut and Massachusetts and there is some, also in Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard - often, natives, that they wanted to join a praying town, had to adopt English dress. They had to, so they had to change their-- their clothing, that they cut their hair. Indian men, especially, had long long hair, and they had to cut them off-- cut that off and use the English language.
So, um, the same kind of trend continues on into the 17th, uh, excuse me, the 18th century in the 1720s when these evangelists and missionaries and-- and educators come, uh, to native communities.
They are also looking to effect a physical change and a cultural change among natives as well. And the easiest way to be-- to plant the seeds of-- of a cultural change and to "civilized native communities" was to start with the children. So if you get the children to speak English, you get the children to wear English clothes, get the children to embrace what it means to be Christian, and that is gonna sort of, overtime, change the whole community. That is the idea of-- of focusing on children.
Chris: Okay. The Great Awakening took place in the 1730s and 1740s throughout the colonies and were quite different in the form of worship the Puritans and other traditional churches practiced. The new form included extemporaneous sermons, personal and experiential redemption including being born again, shaking, fainting, crying, et cetera. Lin, what effect did the Great Awakening have on Native Americans and why?
Linford: I think the Great Awakening was a point of curiosity for natives, uh, initially. So if you can imagine these educators and missionaries coming to your land in like the 1720s and trying to talk to you about the Christian God and trying to read the Bible to you and it is all very dull and boring and, you know, there is no concepts necessarily in native tradition and native, sort of theology that it exists, such that it exists, anyway, like religious worlds, for stuff like “hell”, for ideas even like “sin” are these deeply Christian theological concepts that do not have analogues, um, in-- in native societies, in native culture, in native language, even.
And so John Eliot, again, to return to him, in the 17th century, when he translated the entire Christian Bible or the New Testaments into the Wampanoag or Massachusetts language as they called it back then, too he had to invent phrases, to try to communicate certain kind of concepts to natives in this-- this Bible translation.
So you have this sort of very staid kind of Puritan way of doing church. It is-- it is super boring, I think, for contemporary Americans probably today as well as for natives back then. Two-hour-long services, an hour-and-a-half-long sermon, right, like monotone singing or not-- not monotone, but, you have kind of lined out the songs, in common response.
And what happens in the First Great Awakening - which is why it is also popular for other demographics, uh, you know, in the United-- in colonial America - is to have changes to all those kinds of -- uh, rituals and traditions and how church is done. So [sighs] instead of a spoken out, very dull, long sermon, you have people up front who are dancing around and giving very kind of, uh, enthusiastic, um, deliveries of sermons. Not everyone did this. But some people did this.
You had a multi-part singing. A new hymn is being produced. You had people who, as you described as well, who had what they called the jerks like these-- these, uh, ecstatic experiences where they fall down and be like “slaying the spirit” as what we call them in the 20th century.
Um, you had people who were-- said they were healed. You had people who, you know, spoken strange languages. And you had people who had dreams and visions. And you had women who got up front and preached. And you had African-Americans who were sort of felt free to speak about their own experiences. You had natives who had the same thing happening to them, too.
So again, no matter how you sort of say or how you describe this or how you, understand what was really happening or whether it was the Holy Spirit as they said or whether that there were some sort of other social psychology we could point to, the point is church changed and how church was conducted changed pretty dramatically.
And so natives were part of that group of people who came to kind of see the spectacle. And in some cases, they were drawn in by this sort of more emotive and, revelation-based and also personal, experiential-based, way of doing church. And so, we have natives who kind of are self-conscious about this who kind of say, "I-- I came-- I used to come here, because it was really different. And it was exciting." And-- then they end up-- some of them leave, because it ends up being less exciting and also for other reasons as well. So that initial draw, I think, can partly be explained just by the Great Awakening itself and how different it was.
There’s other reasons. I think they were attracted to the revivalist preachers which has the revivalist preachers often-- not always, but often were advocates for native communities, at least, initially. And I think natives saw this as another possible way to leverage support for their own communities, so just like learning the English language, learning how to write as a tool for native to, um, protect their sovereignty and to, you know, protect their land.
So to, participation in the first Great Awakening, in some cases, was a way to, potentially leverage some sort of favor with certain kinds of White ministers and people they thought could advocate for them.
Chris: We are talking with Linford Fisher about his book, The Indian Great Awakening, published in two thousand-twelve. Dr. Fisher is a Professor of History at Brown University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in two thousand-eight.
Lin, in your chapter about affiliating, you discussed the term conversion and quote Wonalancet, a Pennacook tribal leader, who said that "he was willing to leave my old canoe and embark in a new canoe". Will you tell us how Native Americans mentally reacted to the concept of Christian conversion?
Linford: Yeah. You know, when I wrote this book, I think I was thinking about how unique this sort of native way of, um, embracing multiple things at once was. So the Wonalancet quote is really interesting. But also Samson Occom - who was a minister in the mid-eighteenth century as well, a Mohegan minister - told a story where he, um, said that there was a guy who had a knife. And when the blade broke, he just attached another handle and another knife to that existing handle. And when that blade broke, he did the same thing. And soon, he had a knife that had like six handles but only one blade. And he said this was kind of a way to understand how, uh, natives might interact with different religious ideas, right, that-- that you can bring on, uh, you know, mentally, spiritually in terms of rituals, uh, adopts additional kinds of practices without giving up the ones that you had done before. James Axtell, and other historians, have called this an “incorporative approach” to religion that Native Americans incorporated multiple modes and multiple rituals and multiple ideas into their life-world.
I do think there is, different meaning for this, when you have a population that has been colonized and then evangelized. The decisions you make to adopt or not adopt are very very different than for you or I or, humans are complex and how we piece our lives together are also complex. And that complexity, I think, had been flattened for natives in terms of conversion, um, and I think are flattened in terms of a lot of missionary contexts.
And so trying to find a way to express the really, I think real and gritty reality which is that natives kind of sampled and dabbled and went to church and then did not go to church and pray and then did not pray and sing some songs and then did not sing songs, you know? And then they went back and went to a powwow in their, you know, reserve lands.
And so how do we talk about that? Um, what does conversion looks like for people? How did they describe it? So Wonalancet has this great imagery of changing canoes which is pretty interesting. But I do not know that that is how everyone would have described it, right? Um, this idea of the knife and the stacking of the handles is a different way to think about it as well. So just trying to complicate this static and very, uh, black-and-white, um, tsk, notion of what conversion might be and what it does and what it looks like in the long term as well.
Chris: I think, the fact that they were colonized and then evangelized, that, had to-- that changes the paradigm quite a bit if you were colonized and the decisions that go into what you do with the colonizers' religion that they are inviting you to look at? So thank you for that.
Some Native Americans had seemingly sincere conversions to [(38:00)] Christianity that looked and felt how European Christianity looked and felt, and some did not, I noticed in your book. Can you talk to us about that a little bit? And maybe give us a quick description of Samson Occom.
Linford: Sure. So one of the things that I am not trying to do in the book is to rule out the possibilities of what you might call like a more typical Christian conversion, right? So surely, even though we had some natives who kind of dabbled and - and there is clear evidence of this and I have this in a section of the book - they dabbled, they attend, and then they-- they do not attend, right? They go off and do their own thing where they do not believe.
You also have examples of people who embraced this, who embraced European Christianity and even indigenize it in certain kinds of ways, and who embraced revivalism, who embraced Christian concepts that are foreign to natives in terms of sin and hell and all this other stuff.
So Occom, Samson Occom, is one of these people who, comes to some sort of awareness of his own sort of - I guess, in-- in the Christian terminology and as he says himself - his own sinfulness. And he does profess, uh, belief and faith in, uh, the Christian God and in Jesus, specifically, in the First Great Awakening as a youth. And then he goes on to become a-- a minister, unofficially, at first, and an educator and then gets ordained by the Presbyterians and is an ordained Presbyterian-Mohegan-Christian-Indian Minister and all these sort of stacking on of his different identities in a way.
He actually goes to, the United Kingdom and, um, does a fundraising tour for Moor's Indian, Charity School which then becomes, later on, Dartmouth College, where the funds are used to fund Dartmouth College. And so he is a really interesting complex individual, um, who I think has not really been fully appreciated in terms of that complexity. He is just seen as someone who represents a good Christian convert, you know in the way, he is a minister. He seems to fully embrace this. He is-- he dresses like, uh, English person. He speaks really, and he speaks English very well.
But, you know, you start to scratch the surface a little bit. And he has got all kinds of concerns as well. And-- and he really does indigenize, Christianity in a certain kind of way. Um, and I think people like him also need to be part of the story. It is not just a story of rejection. It is not just a story of murkiness, and sampling, but there is also stories of people who really embraced European Christianity. And Occom, I think, is one of them.
Chris: Lin, you write of a new Indian education effort in the seventeen-fifties and seventeen-sixties this way. And I am quoting, "In the face of prior failure, through evangelism and education, English educators were not simply seeking to hand out the rudiments of literacy. They sought nothing less than a totalizing, civilizing transformation which they felt was best done away from the interference of native families and communities." What led to this new approach? And what were its ramifications?
Linford: So if you imagine yourself in the seventeen-fifties as a White English minister or missionary and you, maybe you have been around for thirty years trying to do this, right, and so you might have been involved in the nineteen-twenty-- or excuse me, the seventeen-twenties trying to educate, uh, native children, you have lived through the First Great Awakening, you saw natives join local White churches.
But then within a couple of years, you saw the same natives, who profess Christianity, uh, leave those churches and maybe start their own churches on their reservations. And you are sitting here saying to yourself, "We failed somehow. We did not effect the kind of change among native communities we thought we were going to effect."
And so that is what prompts this sort of, next wave of education and evangelization. And you-- you know, the point of all of these, I think, for many of the missionaries and educators was, as you said in that quote, to, produce a more durable cultural change as well as a religious change.
And so-- and that is-- that had been the case since the seventeenth century. That civilizing component had always been there. But it gets more intense and radical in the seventeen-fifties, because, there is this idea that the way to really, effect this change permanently is to extract children out of their home context, which had not been done, in large numbers previously and to basically re-educate them. I mean it is a re-education camp, essentially. You are, really trying to get them to speak English, all the things I mentioned before. You are getting to wear English clothes. You are getting into, you know, convert to Christianity, to learn about Christianity. And you are essentially trying to get them to then go back to their home communities as Christian missionaries to spread that same sort of sensibility about culture and about language and about religion in their own way to their own people.
So that is the origin of Moor's Indian Charity School, um, that is, uh-- it brings native children far ways-- far away as, New Jersey and to New York, but also Rhode Island, Connecticut to, uh, Lebanon in Connecticut and really tries to-- to educate them in a specifically English Christian model.
Chris: Thank you. Lin, you wrote about a 1778 Indian tribe statement to the Connecticut Assembly that they, the Native Americans, "do not want Negroes or mulattoes to inhabit their lands", and that they wished to keep them out of their tribe. How did Native Americans view African Americans?
Linford: The long history of natives and Africans, maybe in some ways, is not getting along, in other ways, getting along. But if you think about them, in the context of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, they really do not often have a lot in common, at least, at the beginning. The one thing they shared was the, experience of displacements and colonization or colonialism, more generally. And sometimes they shared the experience of slavery, enslavement, because Native Americans were enslaved and sometimes right alongside of Africans as well.
But in other ways, there was a big difference, Natives who were not enslaved and who had their own land and their own sovereignty and their own nation still intact, saw themselves, pridefully, in a way, vis-a-vis enslaved Africans who were brought across the Atlantic to North America. And so there was a little bit of, at least, early on, an attempt to distinguish themselves from Africans.
And so that statement that you read, there is a little bit of that. And then I think there is a longer history of that sort of differentiation that they are trying to make. But there is also something more specific in that statement. This sort of, petition to not allow Africans and African-Americans onto their land is, in part, because of the intermarriage that have been taking place between Africans and Indians, in part, because of the shared experiences of slavery, in part, because sometimes they end up working on, - maybe for wages as well or living together or, occupying the lower social strata in colonial society, in other ways, coming into contact and-- and marrying and-- and intermarrying.
And, uh, the way in which the colonial society viewed the children of these marriages or the children of these, um, these couples and so forth, was that they did not view mixed-race people as being legitimately native.
And so the fear for natives in New England is that as people of mixed race are increasingly on their reservations that the White society would see them as less and less legitimate. And eventually, it would remove their claims for lands, because they are no longer seen as actually, "authentic natives".
So that is a really powerful fear and idea that begins to take root. And so this, petition is-- is so sad in some ways, because you know that if they are barring natives-- excuse me, uh, mixed race and African- Americans from their lands, in some cases, they are barring their [(50:00)] own flesh and blood, their own relatives.
But that impulse to preserve their land was so strong that at times, that was what, they thought needed to be done. And there is other cases though of outsider, Africans, African-Americans coming onto their land and just squatting and claiming land, too. And that also, was a problem.
So there is multiple reasons, I think, why that petition comes into play. But there is something-- if you can understand the core of it, as a concern for land and protecting land and the way in which race is being coded and read in certain ways by the White or White society, I think that helps understand, uh, but, otherwise, might be a somewhat confusing petition.
Chris: In the period after the Revolutionary War, the so-called National Period in American history, how are the interactions between Native Americans and Americans different? And how were they the same?
Linford: Yeah. So it is a huge topic and question. It is a really good one, because a lot of changes very, very quickly. And I would even go back to think about seventeen-fifty compared to seventeen-eighty, for example. So you have, the French and Indian War, the Seven Years' War, internationally, that is the result of that in seventeen-sixty three is the French are kicked out of North America. And even for natives in New England, the idea that the French are just counterbalance to the English is really powerful and really important.
And so that is one of the changes that takes place. And then in the American Revolution, the British and the British Crown are essentially removed from the equation within what becomes the United States. And that is important, because there was always this tension between what the colonies and colonial rulers and legislators said and did regarding natives and then what the Crown back in England might say or do.
And so natives were constantly petitioning the Crown - the English Crown, the English King or Queen - asking for redress, asking for help, asking for aid, asking to return their rights in the face of colonial governments. And with the American Revolution the English Crown is out of the picture. There is no more possibility of having this like other party to counterbalance the American colonists.
And in its place, it is not George Washington that is not who is sort of structurally put at the sort of center of Indian diplomacy, although I think he plays that role in some ways but, instead, the Congress. So the US Congress is now the arbiter of all things Indian.
And the US Congress is not a favorable entity. They look very hungrily just like, you know, Americans do at lands out to the west of what had been Proclamation Line of 1763, this imaginary line that ran up to the Appalachian Mountains. And previously, um, speculation and land purchasing and expansion was-- was prohibited by the British government after the American Revolution, uh, passed that line, that is. After the American Revolution, um, essentially, that line goes away. There is a lot of very fast westward expansion. And natives really have nowhere to turn in terms of advocacy.
And so it is a-- it is a pretty massively different political environment, cultural environment, and even religiously. Most of the Anglican and English missionary societies pulled out as well. So, um, it is a whole new-- a whole new world, literally, for a lot of natives.
Chris: So the-- the New England Company, as you say, pulled out. And that was, a large player in the religious interactions between European colonists and the Native [(54:00)] Americans. It was gone. What took its place? Specifically or just generally, what-- what were the changes in their religious interactions?
Linford: Yeah. There is a missionary society that is formed in the seventeen-eighties, a kind of New England. And it has replaced the New England Company, basically. And it has a very long name which I will certainly not get right. It is the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and Parts Adjacent, I think it is, something to that effect.
Anyway, the point is that there is another missionary society that-- that emerges in this time period. And then in eighteen-ten, a more important missionary society is formed, again, in New England. But that has, um, a broader reach. So if the-- this society I just mentioned from the seventeen-eighties that was formed after the American Revolution is founded really to-- to evangelize natives in New England, um, the-- what is called the ABCFM, the American, um, Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, excuse me. Uh, they, have a global vision. And natives are part of that. So they are sending missionaries to India. They are sending missionaries to Hawaii. They are sending missionaries everywhere as well as to the Cherokees, for example, right?
So there are missionary movements and bodies and entities that end up playing some of those same roles, but, again, within the sort of new national context, um, that feels different in some ways.
Chris: Lin, towards the end of your book - and this is the last question - you write that distinct echoes of these various threads of Christianization, affiliation, and the appropriation of Christian forms, and surprising in nominal ways, can be found in the form of church buildings. Can you describe one of these Church buildings you have in the book and emphasize the visible religious and cultural legacies of the time period covered in your book?
Linford: Yeah. I think the most striking one for me is the Mohegan Church on the Mohegan land in Connecticut today. These churches play really important roles. And I will get to the religious, symbolism in a second. But, these churches are often what anchors native communities through the really dark periods of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. And by that, I mean that, starting even in the eighteen-twenties and eighteen-thirties, there is this idea that natives are disappearing, that they are not authentically native unless they are a hundred percent native in terms of their blood and heritage.
And, the removal ideology even comes in New England. People have not written about this very much. But there’s some federal agents that come to different New England native nations. And they suggest to them like, "Hey, if you would just move, you know, out west, we could give you more land. And you could be happier and everything else. You want to fight with the local people here." And, to a tribe, they turn that offer down. And there is no forced removal here like there is elsewhere.
But through all of these different kinds of trials, the Narragansetts were detribalized, in the eighteen-eighties, for example. They were bought out, person by person, of their Narragansett identity for about thirteen dollars. I mean it is kind of this amazing story and super sad story.
So there is this ideology of disappearance. There is this ideology of removal. There is this ideology of detribalization. There is this notion that, again, authentic natives cannot be of a mixed, multiple races.
And so, as their land base gets stripped away, as, people are [(58:00)]-- are moving and dispersing for various reasons, often, the only piece of land that has a paper trail back to the colonial period is the land on which these churches sit. And these churches become vitally important in the late twentieth century and the seventies and eighties when these same native nations are trying to apply for federal recognition. And sometimes the only paper trail in terms of the consistent land use they can point to are these churches.
And so the Mohegan Church is one of those examples. The Mohegans had been asked by federal agents if they wanted to move out west to Mississippi. They were like, "No. Thank you." And quickly build a church, like you know, in a way to stave off removal, because they believe if they would sort of visibly show that they were Christian in some ways, and have this sort of visible sign of being Americanized and Christianized that it would help them to retain their sovereignty.
So the church was built. It is not super well attended in any meaningful way. The minister for a long time was White. But it is a visible, important presence on Mohegan lands.
And today, when you go there there is a way in which it still operates in this sort of murky way, uh, culturally speaking. So you go in. And, at the very front of the church is this, you know, impressive wooden cross on the wall. And above it, hanging above it, is an eagle feather.
And you know, native life-world in the way they understand, assigned meaning and-- and value in terms of spiritual power, eagles are-- and eagle feathers are immensely important. They had been, historically and traditionally, way before the American bald eagle became protected by the federal government. So this eagle feather represents native and indigenous spiritual power. And it is hanging above the cross, right? It is on the wall with the cross, but it is above the cross.
And so somehow this just symbolizes for me, again, this complexity of the way in which the natives historically been on, also, up to the present have thought about the relationships between their own lives and spiritual, investments and involvements, the way it is tied to notions of sovereignty and protecting land and protecting even language and their own physical bodies, and the way in which, these things have coexisted. And it is not like-- there is only an eagle feather. It is not that it is only across but-- together.
And so the book cover actually tries to put those things side by side to illustrate, in a way, the complexity of these kinds of relationships over time that we can still see today and still hear-- hear people narrating today as well. I mean, one of the things that was the most meaningful to me is in the conclusion for the book is getting out and actually talking with people, having conversations with present-day tribal members who have, you know, become friends and people that I turn to for questions about, native history in this current book project that I am working on.
And the idea, I think, I hope my readers get when they finish the book is that this is not just a story about the past but actually native communities are here. They are alive and well and, despite some centuries of, uh, settler colonialism, are thriving and are working on reclaiming their language. They are working on reclaiming their traditional ways of living and being. And, they are diverse. And-- and they are just really vibrant and wonderful.
And so to find a way to communicate that as well to the reader and also to listeners of this podcast, I think, is actually maybe one of the most important takeaways is that this history as well as this current colonizing process, I would add, is not done. My native friends will remind me that the colonial period for them does not end with American Revolution. It is still ongoing. And that is a really important perspective, I think, for, White Americans to have.
Chris: Thank you, Lin. We have been talking with Linford Fisher about his book, The Indian Great Awakening, published in two thousand-twelve. He is a Professor of History at Brown University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in two thousand-eight.
Thank you so much, Lin, for taking time to participate and for all your efforts in studying the religious interactions between the Native Americans and the European settlers which undergird America's relationship and interactions with Native Americans today, as you so well said.
Linford: No problem, Chris. Thanks for having me. It is really a delight to have this conversation.
The taking of Native Americans' land and their lives have been called one of America's two original sins. The legacies of colonialism swirl all about us still including broken treaties, reservations, alcoholism, poverty, despair, misunderstandings, and questions of sovereignty alongside of survival, persistence, cultural and linguistic revitalization, and a return to traditional practices.
Because religion was central to these processes in colonial America and continues to play an important role today, taking a look at the religious interactions between European colonists and Native Americans will help us all better understand these issues and help each other flourish in the American 21st century.
Linford Fisher is a Professor of History at Brown University. He received his Doctorate from Harvard University in two thousand-eight. Professor Fisher's research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude. He is the co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father. Additionally, he has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters and is currently finishing a history of Native American enslavement in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and the American Civil War.
He is the Principal Investigator of the Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas project which seeks to create a public, centralized database of native slavery throughout the Americas and across time.
We are very happy to have Linford here to help us understand a particular part of America's religious history, religion, and the shaping of native cultures in early America by discussing his book, The Indian Great Awakening, published in 2012.
Also, as with each episode in our podcast series, Religion in the American Experience, we hope listeners come away with a better comprehension of what religion, growing in the soil of the ideal of religious freedom as a governing principle, has done to America and what America has done to religion and, thus, be better equipped as citizens to ensure that the American experiment in self-government endures.
Said Abraham Lincoln, "We cannot escape history."
Thank you, Lin, for being with us.
Linford: Sure. Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris: First, Lin, I want to make clear that your book covers a specific time periodand a specific location.
Linford: Yeah, you are right in a sense. It does focus on New England. Uh, New York is in their different places. Um, and there are gestures, other parts of the country. It also spans really from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century.
The core of the book is about a century, uh, in terms of its purview. But yes. So this cannot stand in for all Native American history everywhere. Um, the Americas are a vast vast area and its history is rich and diverse.
But this little corner of the Americas, I think, represents a process that, uh, can lead to productive conversations about other parts of-- of, this area as well.
Lin, can you tell us about the little, leather pouch found at a Pequot girl's gravesite who died sometime in the late seventeenth century or early eighteenth century and what it means in the framing of your story?
Linford: Yeah. So this is the story I open up with in the introduction to the book, because it represents, uh some of the themes that the book tackles overall. And, it is a challenging thing to talk about and mentioned, maybe, because it has to do with the, um, accidental unearthing of, uh, human remains. And so I want to acknowledge that up front that, um, I, share this story, very respectfully, um, but knowing that it is-- it is actually, uh, not my place and my role, in a way, to talk about human remains in Native communities.
But, this particular instance happened, because, uh, there was a-- a homeowner in Connecticut who was trying to make way for an underground gun range. And so he had a bulldozer come in and plow this whole section of his yard up. And as they were bulldozing the land, they realized that the dirt was really dark in regular sort of intervals as they were plowing stuff away.
And so they brought in the archaeologist from the state. Fortunately, the bulldozer, um, o-- operator did the right thing. And they began to look. And they realized, they just bulldozed through a Pequot grave. The Pequots are these, you know, large in the seventeenth century-- extraordinarily large, native group in the south eastern Connecticut-- southern Connecticut.
And, what they found, in working with the present-day Mashantucket Pequots, who authorized archaeologist to go in and to begin to, to reinter them, but also, in the process, to do some sort of analysis as well.
And, what they found is in one of these graves, the remains of a young Pequot woman, probably, in her teens. And buried with her was this bear-skin pouch, that contains, or actually I mentioned it was bear skin but it is-- it is this pouch, this medicine bundle, that within it was, uh, the remains of a bear paw and also a fragment of a Bible page.
And these two things, you do not often see together in terms of New England, in terms of the archaeological record. And so it got people wondering how can we interpret this? And it is also unusual, as you probably know, for Christians, more generally, to tear Bible pages out and use them separately from the Bible.
And so here we have this, you know, young Pequot woman, who dies, early. She is not, you know, fully grown and not an adult woman.
As we are trying to understand-- not we, but people were trying to understand this, um, you need to realize that maybe there was something about the way in which, um, these two religious influences and backgrounds came together in this medicine bundle.
Uh, so the Bible representing some sort of Christian presence, maybe, Christianization, but also maybe just using the Bible page as like a talisman, like almost a way of you know, bringing on or-- or producing power and the bear paw on the same way.
So these two things are together. They are wielded by a native person, maybe added to her grave, you know? She might have not made that choice. But it meant something in terms of the coming together of two different religious kind of traditions and backgrounds.
The bear paw also represents power as well. So the idea is this that-- that when we think about native religious lives in this time period, it is not always so clear the meanings they assigned. And for too long, we have sort of listened to missionaries and preachers and ministers, especially European ministers and preachers, in terms of trying to understand, conversion and the meaning of the religious engagement.
So I started with that as a way to sort of introduce some larger questions and themes
Chris: Great. Thank you. Right. We will get to some of those themes later. You also write - and this is, I think, foundational to our discussion - that the Native [(16:00)] Americans believed they were given the land by the Great Spirit. How did European colonists see Native American land?
Linford: Yeah. It is a really as you say, foundational piece of the settler colonial process, which is to say that there is a-- a vastly different, way of understanding land and its meaning between Europeans and natives.
As you say, natives, believe that they have been, you know, created on this, land and had been given it to them. It had been given to them to-- to use in different kinds of ways. And they had specific ways that they use it, um, whether it is hunting and fishing or gardens, or whatever else.
But Europeans had a different way of understanding this and the English, in particular, in terms of claiming a plot of land and building a wall or a fence and putting a house on it that is there year-round and using the land in different kinds of ways, cultivating specific kinds of gardens that, you know, are there year-round and so forth.
And, I think Europeans also, generally, saw the land as something that is exploitable in-- in very specific kinds of ways. So the English come over. They see this amazing area and New England that is, just bursting with, you know, naturally, produced kinds of things that they are lacking in England like trees and … the British Isles are, basically, you know, devoid of trees by this point. They have just cannot grow them fast enough.
And they see in their eyes, um, you know, only - tens of thousands of natives. But in their eyes, they see a lot of land that is not used, that is unimproved, the same language I used.
And so within their frame of reference kind of based [(18:00)] on this Biblical mandates of the early, uh, chapters of Genesis to kind of go out and-- and do stuff with the land, to work the land. They believe that they can just sort of come in and take land that is not actively being used. And sometimes they can take land that is actively being used as well.
So it is not only this idea of-- of land, uh, whether there is no one on it. But they have these phrases. And they talk about, yeah, uh, unimproved land or the emptiness of the land. Um, and in doing so overlooked the presence of Native Americans and also how natives understand land, how natives are using land, how natives, are actively cultivating, and are actively growing gardens and so forth.
Chris: Thank you. That is very helpful. Can you tell us, Lin, about the Propagation of the Gospel in New England Company or what is called the New England Company which is featured prominently in your book, why it was formed, what it became, and some of its early work?
Linford: So this company is formed by people for the most part in London, who see, this sort of colonization process as a great opportunity. And so there has been talk from the beginning even with the sort of founding in Virginia in 1607 but also in 1620 up in Plymouth.
The idea is that the English, uh, have said for a long time they want to evangelize natives. That is part of their justification for colonization. But when push comes to shove, they realized pretty quickly it is hard. It is really really hard, in part, because natives are, incredibly vibrant in terms of their culture and religion and their own sort of systems of understanding the world and the way that they organize their lives and so forth. And so it is not evident to them at all that they should adopt Christianity. And so natives, you know, listen. They are very patient often. And then they sort of, [(20:00)], move on.
And so it takes several decades for something that is sort of a viable missionary movement to take root. And when it does begin to take root, it is around a few individuals who begin to learn the native languages like John Eliot with the Mayhews, on Martha's Vineyard. Generally, it is in Massachusetts.
And when these stories, and Eliot-- John Eliot is very good at self-promotion. So he actually publishes a few tracts describing his successes among the natives in the 1640s. And they get published in London. And when they get published, people began to have interest in supporting this sort of, active evangelization that is going on.
And so they formed this company around 1649. It actually, uh-- with the Restoration in sixteen-sixty, the charter gets revoked. And so they have to reorganize in the 1660s. And this persists up through, uh, the eighteenth century, um, as-- as one of the main ways that specific outreach and evangelization of natives gets funded within the New England context.
Chris: Okay. You write that in the 1720s, native communities began inviting Anglo-American ministers and missionaries to reside on their lands. Can you explain why they did this and what it looked like?
Linford: Yes. You have to realize that 1720s, 1730s, uh, the settler colonial process has been in place for a hundred years. It has been ongoing for a hundred years. It is a century of English people living in this area, um, sometimes on land that they have bought in certain kinds of ways with deeds and paper trails no matter how complicated those transactions are. Sometimes it is on land that was forcibly taken. Sometimes it is on conquered lands, so-called, uh, through several wars that were fought.
And, uh, if you think about, how natives looked at themselves and how they perceived what was happening in the 1720s, they have been through a century of-- of that. They have been through two major wars, uh, one, the first Pequot War in the 1630s. That was essentially a genocidal war against the Pequot nation [sighs]. And then King Philip's War in 1675-1676, in which, uh, a whole collection of natives actually tried to kick out the English from New England after decades of, you know, different kinds of broken promises and, uh, infringement on native sovereignty and land and religious infringement as well through evangelization [sighs].
And it was not successful. But the response by-- by the colonists was to essentially try to crush all of that, um, what they termed rebellion and uprising. And, so that resistance movement was put down militarily. And, after King Philip's War in the 1670s, there is really no viable military push back from natives in New England against colonization.
So essentially in 1720, these native peoples are living as defeated people, uh, militarily speaking, um, and subjugated people. Maybe defeated is a wrong word-- subjugated people within this colonial context. They have been pushed back to certain reserve lands, uh, universally in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Uh, Plymouth gets incorporated into Massachusetts. So it is a single entity in the enti-- in the 18th century.
And, uh, natives, I think, um, having been multiple generations into colonization, began to look around and say, "We have to find a way to form alliances and to get some of the tools, in terms of language and writing, that will help us preserve our communities."
And so that is why they invite teachers in, primarily at first, and not missionaries [(24:00)] or evangelists or preachers, because, literacy and the ability to write was critical to defending yourself in court, to providing a paper trail of the transactions that were taking place, to be able to read the documents that were put in front of you asking you to sign if you are like selling land or something.
So literacy was seen as a really important tool. And natives are very savvy about this and invite in educators to accomplish that in the 1720s.
Chris: You also wrote this in the same section of the book. And I am quoting here, "Although civilization had long been part of the New England Company's evangelization strategy, it received greater emphasis particularly with reference to Indian children." Can you elaborate?
Linford: Yes. On the history of Christian missions, I think there has always been this lurking kind of duality in terms of what is being offered or demanded. And this is definitely true in the seventeenth century and eighteenth century in terms of English missions, meaning that missionaries and ministers might have seen themselves as kind of offering the pure gospel, the pure Christian gospel, its ideas, its, you know, theology, its-- the Bible, its the Bible verses, its salvation, all the sort of metaphysical stuff, right? The reality is to be a really good Christian, to be a-- an authentic Christian, required you to also adopt different kinds of cultural habits not only of your mind but of your body.
And so even in the seventeenth century, when John Eliot had these praying towns, um, that were established in Connecticut and Massachusetts and there is some, also in Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard - often, natives, that they wanted to join a praying town, had to adopt English dress. They had to, so they had to change their-- their clothing, that they cut their hair. Indian men, especially, had long long hair, and they had to cut them off-- cut that off and use the English language.
So, um, the same kind of trend continues on into the 17th, uh, excuse me, the 18th century in the 1720s when these evangelists and missionaries and-- and educators come, uh, to native communities.
They are also looking to effect a physical change and a cultural change among natives as well. And the easiest way to be-- to plant the seeds of-- of a cultural change and to "civilized native communities" was to start with the children. So if you get the children to speak English, you get the children to wear English clothes, get the children to embrace what it means to be Christian, and that is gonna sort of, overtime, change the whole community. That is the idea of-- of focusing on children.
Chris: Okay. The Great Awakening took place in the 1730s and 1740s throughout the colonies and were quite different in the form of worship the Puritans and other traditional churches practiced. The new form included extemporaneous sermons, personal and experiential redemption including being born again, shaking, fainting, crying, et cetera. Lin, what effect did the Great Awakening have on Native Americans and why?
Linford: I think the Great Awakening was a point of curiosity for natives, uh, initially. So if you can imagine these educators and missionaries coming to your land in like the 1720s and trying to talk to you about the Christian God and trying to read the Bible to you and it is all very dull and boring and, you know, there is no concepts necessarily in native tradition and native, sort of theology that it exists, such that it exists, anyway, like religious worlds, for stuff like “hell”, for ideas even like “sin” are these deeply Christian theological concepts that do not have analogues, um, in-- in native societies, in native culture, in native language, even.
And so John Eliot, again, to return to him, in the 17th century, when he translated the entire Christian Bible or the New Testaments into the Wampanoag or Massachusetts language as they called it back then, too he had to invent phrases, to try to communicate certain kind of concepts to natives in this-- this Bible translation.
So you have this sort of very staid kind of Puritan way of doing church. It is-- it is super boring, I think, for contemporary Americans probably today as well as for natives back then. Two-hour-long services, an hour-and-a-half-long sermon, right, like monotone singing or not-- not monotone, but, you have kind of lined out the songs, in common response.
And what happens in the First Great Awakening - which is why it is also popular for other demographics, uh, you know, in the United-- in colonial America - is to have changes to all those kinds of -- uh, rituals and traditions and how church is done. So [sighs] instead of a spoken out, very dull, long sermon, you have people up front who are dancing around and giving very kind of, uh, enthusiastic, um, deliveries of sermons. Not everyone did this. But some people did this.
You had a multi-part singing. A new hymn is being produced. You had people who, as you described as well, who had what they called the jerks like these-- these, uh, ecstatic experiences where they fall down and be like “slaying the spirit” as what we call them in the 20th century.
Um, you had people who were-- said they were healed. You had people who, you know, spoken strange languages. And you had people who had dreams and visions. And you had women who got up front and preached. And you had African-Americans who were sort of felt free to speak about their own experiences. You had natives who had the same thing happening to them, too.
So again, no matter how you sort of say or how you describe this or how you, understand what was really happening or whether it was the Holy Spirit as they said or whether that there were some sort of other social psychology we could point to, the point is church changed and how church was conducted changed pretty dramatically.
And so natives were part of that group of people who came to kind of see the spectacle. And in some cases, they were drawn in by this sort of more emotive and, revelation-based and also personal, experiential-based, way of doing church. And so, we have natives who kind of are self-conscious about this who kind of say, "I-- I came-- I used to come here, because it was really different. And it was exciting." And-- then they end up-- some of them leave, because it ends up being less exciting and also for other reasons as well. So that initial draw, I think, can partly be explained just by the Great Awakening itself and how different it was.
There’s other reasons. I think they were attracted to the revivalist preachers which has the revivalist preachers often-- not always, but often were advocates for native communities, at least, initially. And I think natives saw this as another possible way to leverage support for their own communities, so just like learning the English language, learning how to write as a tool for native to, um, protect their sovereignty and to, you know, protect their land.
So to, participation in the first Great Awakening, in some cases, was a way to, potentially leverage some sort of favor with certain kinds of White ministers and people they thought could advocate for them.
Chris: We are talking with Linford Fisher about his book, The Indian Great Awakening, published in two thousand-twelve. Dr. Fisher is a Professor of History at Brown University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in two thousand-eight.
Lin, in your chapter about affiliating, you discussed the term conversion and quote Wonalancet, a Pennacook tribal leader, who said that "he was willing to leave my old canoe and embark in a new canoe". Will you tell us how Native Americans mentally reacted to the concept of Christian conversion?
Linford: Yeah. You know, when I wrote this book, I think I was thinking about how unique this sort of native way of, um, embracing multiple things at once was. So the Wonalancet quote is really interesting. But also Samson Occom - who was a minister in the mid-eighteenth century as well, a Mohegan minister - told a story where he, um, said that there was a guy who had a knife. And when the blade broke, he just attached another handle and another knife to that existing handle. And when that blade broke, he did the same thing. And soon, he had a knife that had like six handles but only one blade. And he said this was kind of a way to understand how, uh, natives might interact with different religious ideas, right, that-- that you can bring on, uh, you know, mentally, spiritually in terms of rituals, uh, adopts additional kinds of practices without giving up the ones that you had done before. James Axtell, and other historians, have called this an “incorporative approach” to religion that Native Americans incorporated multiple modes and multiple rituals and multiple ideas into their life-world.
I do think there is, different meaning for this, when you have a population that has been colonized and then evangelized. The decisions you make to adopt or not adopt are very very different than for you or I or, humans are complex and how we piece our lives together are also complex. And that complexity, I think, had been flattened for natives in terms of conversion, um, and I think are flattened in terms of a lot of missionary contexts.
And so trying to find a way to express the really, I think real and gritty reality which is that natives kind of sampled and dabbled and went to church and then did not go to church and pray and then did not pray and sing some songs and then did not sing songs, you know? And then they went back and went to a powwow in their, you know, reserve lands.
And so how do we talk about that? Um, what does conversion looks like for people? How did they describe it? So Wonalancet has this great imagery of changing canoes which is pretty interesting. But I do not know that that is how everyone would have described it, right? Um, this idea of the knife and the stacking of the handles is a different way to think about it as well. So just trying to complicate this static and very, uh, black-and-white, um, tsk, notion of what conversion might be and what it does and what it looks like in the long term as well.
Chris: I think, the fact that they were colonized and then evangelized, that, had to-- that changes the paradigm quite a bit if you were colonized and the decisions that go into what you do with the colonizers' religion that they are inviting you to look at? So thank you for that.
Some Native Americans had seemingly sincere conversions to [(38:00)] Christianity that looked and felt how European Christianity looked and felt, and some did not, I noticed in your book. Can you talk to us about that a little bit? And maybe give us a quick description of Samson Occom.
Linford: Sure. So one of the things that I am not trying to do in the book is to rule out the possibilities of what you might call like a more typical Christian conversion, right? So surely, even though we had some natives who kind of dabbled and - and there is clear evidence of this and I have this in a section of the book - they dabbled, they attend, and then they-- they do not attend, right? They go off and do their own thing where they do not believe.
You also have examples of people who embraced this, who embraced European Christianity and even indigenize it in certain kinds of ways, and who embraced revivalism, who embraced Christian concepts that are foreign to natives in terms of sin and hell and all this other stuff.
So Occom, Samson Occom, is one of these people who, comes to some sort of awareness of his own sort of - I guess, in-- in the Christian terminology and as he says himself - his own sinfulness. And he does profess, uh, belief and faith in, uh, the Christian God and in Jesus, specifically, in the First Great Awakening as a youth. And then he goes on to become a-- a minister, unofficially, at first, and an educator and then gets ordained by the Presbyterians and is an ordained Presbyterian-Mohegan-Christian-Indian Minister and all these sort of stacking on of his different identities in a way.
He actually goes to, the United Kingdom and, um, does a fundraising tour for Moor's Indian, Charity School which then becomes, later on, Dartmouth College, where the funds are used to fund Dartmouth College. And so he is a really interesting complex individual, um, who I think has not really been fully appreciated in terms of that complexity. He is just seen as someone who represents a good Christian convert, you know in the way, he is a minister. He seems to fully embrace this. He is-- he dresses like, uh, English person. He speaks really, and he speaks English very well.
But, you know, you start to scratch the surface a little bit. And he has got all kinds of concerns as well. And-- and he really does indigenize, Christianity in a certain kind of way. Um, and I think people like him also need to be part of the story. It is not just a story of rejection. It is not just a story of murkiness, and sampling, but there is also stories of people who really embraced European Christianity. And Occom, I think, is one of them.
Chris: Lin, you write of a new Indian education effort in the seventeen-fifties and seventeen-sixties this way. And I am quoting, "In the face of prior failure, through evangelism and education, English educators were not simply seeking to hand out the rudiments of literacy. They sought nothing less than a totalizing, civilizing transformation which they felt was best done away from the interference of native families and communities." What led to this new approach? And what were its ramifications?
Linford: So if you imagine yourself in the seventeen-fifties as a White English minister or missionary and you, maybe you have been around for thirty years trying to do this, right, and so you might have been involved in the nineteen-twenty-- or excuse me, the seventeen-twenties trying to educate, uh, native children, you have lived through the First Great Awakening, you saw natives join local White churches.
But then within a couple of years, you saw the same natives, who profess Christianity, uh, leave those churches and maybe start their own churches on their reservations. And you are sitting here saying to yourself, "We failed somehow. We did not effect the kind of change among native communities we thought we were going to effect."
And so that is what prompts this sort of, next wave of education and evangelization. And you-- you know, the point of all of these, I think, for many of the missionaries and educators was, as you said in that quote, to, produce a more durable cultural change as well as a religious change.
And so-- and that is-- that had been the case since the seventeenth century. That civilizing component had always been there. But it gets more intense and radical in the seventeen-fifties, because, there is this idea that the way to really, effect this change permanently is to extract children out of their home context, which had not been done, in large numbers previously and to basically re-educate them. I mean it is a re-education camp, essentially. You are, really trying to get them to speak English, all the things I mentioned before. You are getting to wear English clothes. You are getting into, you know, convert to Christianity, to learn about Christianity. And you are essentially trying to get them to then go back to their home communities as Christian missionaries to spread that same sort of sensibility about culture and about language and about religion in their own way to their own people.
So that is the origin of Moor's Indian Charity School, um, that is, uh-- it brings native children far ways-- far away as, New Jersey and to New York, but also Rhode Island, Connecticut to, uh, Lebanon in Connecticut and really tries to-- to educate them in a specifically English Christian model.
Chris: Thank you. Lin, you wrote about a 1778 Indian tribe statement to the Connecticut Assembly that they, the Native Americans, "do not want Negroes or mulattoes to inhabit their lands", and that they wished to keep them out of their tribe. How did Native Americans view African Americans?
Linford: The long history of natives and Africans, maybe in some ways, is not getting along, in other ways, getting along. But if you think about them, in the context of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, they really do not often have a lot in common, at least, at the beginning. The one thing they shared was the, experience of displacements and colonization or colonialism, more generally. And sometimes they shared the experience of slavery, enslavement, because Native Americans were enslaved and sometimes right alongside of Africans as well.
But in other ways, there was a big difference, Natives who were not enslaved and who had their own land and their own sovereignty and their own nation still intact, saw themselves, pridefully, in a way, vis-a-vis enslaved Africans who were brought across the Atlantic to North America. And so there was a little bit of, at least, early on, an attempt to distinguish themselves from Africans.
And so that statement that you read, there is a little bit of that. And then I think there is a longer history of that sort of differentiation that they are trying to make. But there is also something more specific in that statement. This sort of, petition to not allow Africans and African-Americans onto their land is, in part, because of the intermarriage that have been taking place between Africans and Indians, in part, because of the shared experiences of slavery, in part, because sometimes they end up working on, - maybe for wages as well or living together or, occupying the lower social strata in colonial society, in other ways, coming into contact and-- and marrying and-- and intermarrying.
And, uh, the way in which the colonial society viewed the children of these marriages or the children of these, um, these couples and so forth, was that they did not view mixed-race people as being legitimately native.
And so the fear for natives in New England is that as people of mixed race are increasingly on their reservations that the White society would see them as less and less legitimate. And eventually, it would remove their claims for lands, because they are no longer seen as actually, "authentic natives".
So that is a really powerful fear and idea that begins to take root. And so this, petition is-- is so sad in some ways, because you know that if they are barring natives-- excuse me, uh, mixed race and African- Americans from their lands, in some cases, they are barring their [(50:00)] own flesh and blood, their own relatives.
But that impulse to preserve their land was so strong that at times, that was what, they thought needed to be done. And there is other cases though of outsider, Africans, African-Americans coming onto their land and just squatting and claiming land, too. And that also, was a problem.
So there is multiple reasons, I think, why that petition comes into play. But there is something-- if you can understand the core of it, as a concern for land and protecting land and the way in which race is being coded and read in certain ways by the White or White society, I think that helps understand, uh, but, otherwise, might be a somewhat confusing petition.
Chris: In the period after the Revolutionary War, the so-called National Period in American history, how are the interactions between Native Americans and Americans different? And how were they the same?
Linford: Yeah. So it is a huge topic and question. It is a really good one, because a lot of changes very, very quickly. And I would even go back to think about seventeen-fifty compared to seventeen-eighty, for example. So you have, the French and Indian War, the Seven Years' War, internationally, that is the result of that in seventeen-sixty three is the French are kicked out of North America. And even for natives in New England, the idea that the French are just counterbalance to the English is really powerful and really important.
And so that is one of the changes that takes place. And then in the American Revolution, the British and the British Crown are essentially removed from the equation within what becomes the United States. And that is important, because there was always this tension between what the colonies and colonial rulers and legislators said and did regarding natives and then what the Crown back in England might say or do.
And so natives were constantly petitioning the Crown - the English Crown, the English King or Queen - asking for redress, asking for help, asking for aid, asking to return their rights in the face of colonial governments. And with the American Revolution the English Crown is out of the picture. There is no more possibility of having this like other party to counterbalance the American colonists.
And in its place, it is not George Washington that is not who is sort of structurally put at the sort of center of Indian diplomacy, although I think he plays that role in some ways but, instead, the Congress. So the US Congress is now the arbiter of all things Indian.
And the US Congress is not a favorable entity. They look very hungrily just like, you know, Americans do at lands out to the west of what had been Proclamation Line of 1763, this imaginary line that ran up to the Appalachian Mountains. And previously, um, speculation and land purchasing and expansion was-- was prohibited by the British government after the American Revolution, uh, passed that line, that is. After the American Revolution, um, essentially, that line goes away. There is a lot of very fast westward expansion. And natives really have nowhere to turn in terms of advocacy.
And so it is a-- it is a pretty massively different political environment, cultural environment, and even religiously. Most of the Anglican and English missionary societies pulled out as well. So, um, it is a whole new-- a whole new world, literally, for a lot of natives.
Chris: So the-- the New England Company, as you say, pulled out. And that was, a large player in the religious interactions between European colonists and the Native [(54:00)] Americans. It was gone. What took its place? Specifically or just generally, what-- what were the changes in their religious interactions?
Linford: Yeah. There is a missionary society that is formed in the seventeen-eighties, a kind of New England. And it has replaced the New England Company, basically. And it has a very long name which I will certainly not get right. It is the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and Parts Adjacent, I think it is, something to that effect.
Anyway, the point is that there is another missionary society that-- that emerges in this time period. And then in eighteen-ten, a more important missionary society is formed, again, in New England. But that has, um, a broader reach. So if the-- this society I just mentioned from the seventeen-eighties that was formed after the American Revolution is founded really to-- to evangelize natives in New England, um, the-- what is called the ABCFM, the American, um, Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, excuse me. Uh, they, have a global vision. And natives are part of that. So they are sending missionaries to India. They are sending missionaries to Hawaii. They are sending missionaries everywhere as well as to the Cherokees, for example, right?
So there are missionary movements and bodies and entities that end up playing some of those same roles, but, again, within the sort of new national context, um, that feels different in some ways.
Chris: Lin, towards the end of your book - and this is the last question - you write that distinct echoes of these various threads of Christianization, affiliation, and the appropriation of Christian forms, and surprising in nominal ways, can be found in the form of church buildings. Can you describe one of these Church buildings you have in the book and emphasize the visible religious and cultural legacies of the time period covered in your book?
Linford: Yeah. I think the most striking one for me is the Mohegan Church on the Mohegan land in Connecticut today. These churches play really important roles. And I will get to the religious, symbolism in a second. But, these churches are often what anchors native communities through the really dark periods of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. And by that, I mean that, starting even in the eighteen-twenties and eighteen-thirties, there is this idea that natives are disappearing, that they are not authentically native unless they are a hundred percent native in terms of their blood and heritage.
And, the removal ideology even comes in New England. People have not written about this very much. But there’s some federal agents that come to different New England native nations. And they suggest to them like, "Hey, if you would just move, you know, out west, we could give you more land. And you could be happier and everything else. You want to fight with the local people here." And, to a tribe, they turn that offer down. And there is no forced removal here like there is elsewhere.
But through all of these different kinds of trials, the Narragansetts were detribalized, in the eighteen-eighties, for example. They were bought out, person by person, of their Narragansett identity for about thirteen dollars. I mean it is kind of this amazing story and super sad story.
So there is this ideology of disappearance. There is this ideology of removal. There is this ideology of detribalization. There is this notion that, again, authentic natives cannot be of a mixed, multiple races.
And so, as their land base gets stripped away, as, people are [(58:00)]-- are moving and dispersing for various reasons, often, the only piece of land that has a paper trail back to the colonial period is the land on which these churches sit. And these churches become vitally important in the late twentieth century and the seventies and eighties when these same native nations are trying to apply for federal recognition. And sometimes the only paper trail in terms of the consistent land use they can point to are these churches.
And so the Mohegan Church is one of those examples. The Mohegans had been asked by federal agents if they wanted to move out west to Mississippi. They were like, "No. Thank you." And quickly build a church, like you know, in a way to stave off removal, because they believe if they would sort of visibly show that they were Christian in some ways, and have this sort of visible sign of being Americanized and Christianized that it would help them to retain their sovereignty.
So the church was built. It is not super well attended in any meaningful way. The minister for a long time was White. But it is a visible, important presence on Mohegan lands.
And today, when you go there there is a way in which it still operates in this sort of murky way, uh, culturally speaking. So you go in. And, at the very front of the church is this, you know, impressive wooden cross on the wall. And above it, hanging above it, is an eagle feather.
And you know, native life-world in the way they understand, assigned meaning and-- and value in terms of spiritual power, eagles are-- and eagle feathers are immensely important. They had been, historically and traditionally, way before the American bald eagle became protected by the federal government. So this eagle feather represents native and indigenous spiritual power. And it is hanging above the cross, right? It is on the wall with the cross, but it is above the cross.
And so somehow this just symbolizes for me, again, this complexity of the way in which the natives historically been on, also, up to the present have thought about the relationships between their own lives and spiritual, investments and involvements, the way it is tied to notions of sovereignty and protecting land and protecting even language and their own physical bodies, and the way in which, these things have coexisted. And it is not like-- there is only an eagle feather. It is not that it is only across but-- together.
And so the book cover actually tries to put those things side by side to illustrate, in a way, the complexity of these kinds of relationships over time that we can still see today and still hear-- hear people narrating today as well. I mean, one of the things that was the most meaningful to me is in the conclusion for the book is getting out and actually talking with people, having conversations with present-day tribal members who have, you know, become friends and people that I turn to for questions about, native history in this current book project that I am working on.
And the idea, I think, I hope my readers get when they finish the book is that this is not just a story about the past but actually native communities are here. They are alive and well and, despite some centuries of, uh, settler colonialism, are thriving and are working on reclaiming their language. They are working on reclaiming their traditional ways of living and being. And, they are diverse. And-- and they are just really vibrant and wonderful.
And so to find a way to communicate that as well to the reader and also to listeners of this podcast, I think, is actually maybe one of the most important takeaways is that this history as well as this current colonizing process, I would add, is not done. My native friends will remind me that the colonial period for them does not end with American Revolution. It is still ongoing. And that is a really important perspective, I think, for, White Americans to have.
Chris: Thank you, Lin. We have been talking with Linford Fisher about his book, The Indian Great Awakening, published in two thousand-twelve. He is a Professor of History at Brown University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in two thousand-eight.
Thank you so much, Lin, for taking time to participate and for all your efforts in studying the religious interactions between the Native Americans and the European settlers which undergird America's relationship and interactions with Native Americans today, as you so well said.
Linford: No problem, Chris. Thanks for having me. It is really a delight to have this conversation.
