The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

by Linford D. Fisher

The First Great Awakening was a time of heightened religious activity in the colonial New England. Among those whom the English settlers tried to convert to Christianity were the region's native peoples. In this book, Linford Fisher tells the gripping story of American Indians' attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of colonialism between the 1670s and 1820. In particular, he looks at how some members of previously unevangelized Indian communities in Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island adopted Christian practices, often joining local Congregational churches and receiving baptism. Far from passively sliding into the cultural and physical landscape after King Philip's War, he argues, Native individuals and communities actively tapped into transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and joined local white churches. Religion repeatedly stood at the center of these points of cultural engagement, often in hotly contested ways. Although these Native groups had successfully resisted evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century they showed an increasing interest in education and religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More surprisingly, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native individuals and sub-groups asserted their religious and cultural autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements. But the majority of New England Natives-even those who affiliated with Christianity-chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert their own autonomous existence through leasing land, farming, and working on and off the reservations.

While Indian involvement in the Great Awakening has often been seen as total and complete conversion, Fisher's analysis of church records, court documents, and correspondence reveals a more complex reality. Placing the Awakening in context of land loss and the ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy in the eighteenth century casts it as another step in the ongoing, tentative engagement of native peoples with Christian ideas and institutions in the colonial world. Charting this untold story of the Great Awakening and the resultant rise of an Indian Separatism and its effects on Indian cultures as a whole, this gracefully written book challenges long-held notions about religion and Native-Anglo-American interaction

Genres: History, Religion, American History, Academic

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Professor Fisher grew up in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008 and joined the Department of History at Brown in the summer of 2009. 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 author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America and 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. He is currently finishing a history of Native American enslavement in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and the American Civil War, tentatively titled America Enslaved: The Rise and Fall of Indian Slavery in the English Atlantic and the United States. He is also 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.

Reviews

[Cam's Corner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening is an examination of Native American engagement with Christianity in the colonial era. Set in what is now known as southeastern New England, Fisher looks at the years 1700-1820 to understand “the fullest possible context of local colonial interactions and the broader, transatlantic tugs of imperial power” (8). Fisher argues that the First Great Awakening (1730s-1770s) was NOT the first (nor last) attempt to universally convert Native Americans to Christianity. Instead, Fisher points out that between King Philip’s War (1675-1678) and the First Great Awakening, missionary work by the English/Americans continued at a slow pace. While the revivals from the Awakening did indeed prompt an increase in predominantly white church affiliation among Indigenous groups, it was not consistently sustained. As the revivals eventually came to a close, many either created their own ‘Separate Indian’ congregations or disaffiliated from Christianity entirely.

Native American sovereignty is a major theme of this book. Despite efforts of colonizers to erase traditional practices of Indigenous peoples' culture, Indigenous peoples still attempted to continue such practices. For example, Fisher explores the ways in which Native Americans took on Christianity in the promptly named Chapter 5 “Separating”. This chapter addresses Samuel Ashpo, Samson Occom and Samuel Niles, each Indian Separatist ministers who created churches out of the broader colonial Separate Churches, New Light Baptist. Their churches acted as a sanctuary for Christian Natives who needed to not only escape discrimination still prevalent amongst white churches, but also wanted worship God their own way. These churches offered “a more free-flowing, spirit-led worship experience” (110). By spotlighting these autonomous developments, Fisher creates a more Indigenous approach to their use of Christianity.

As religion and education go hand in hand, conversations at the pulpit sometimes shifted to the schooling of young Indigenous children. Parents were in favor of Native school teachers because they demonstrated suspicion towards white instructors. For example, in 1765 the Narragansetts from Rhode Island grew suspicious of Edward Deake, a white teacher sent to ‘educate’ the tribe. They felt that Deake planned to use his position as a ploy to steal their land (153). Suspicions by Natives of whites were often justified, as colonizers tried to acculturate Natives. John Sergeant and Eleazar Wheelock, for example, wanted to remove Native children from their families and educate them miles away. However, some students did not receive education. Instead, they were sent out to be servants of the white families in the towns they lived in. Others would escape their mistreatment and return home.

Although the author covers a lot of ground, this book is not without a few flaws. He indicates under the assumption that “Native interactions with Christian practices and ideas… tended to be more practical and provisional” (8). What about the Native Americans who had a genuine epiphanic experience with Christianity and connected with it? It feels like he is underestimating the power of Christian belief. For all, working with missionaries wasn't a quid pro quo. Furthermore, it would’ve been interesting if Fisher dedicated a page or two on how views and practices of intermarriage, specifically with Black individuals, possibly evolved across generational lines throughout the eighteenth century. As indicated on page 167, intermarriage between Black and Native communities was generally accepted in the seventeenth century “because of the relative isolation of many Indian communities [and] the small numbers of blacks in New England.” This became a major issue in the eighteenth, but is not expanded upon by Fisher.

Despite these few shortcomings, Fisher accomplishes his overall purpose of explaining how Native Americans did not fully convert into Christianity and those that did often blended their own traditions into Christian beliefs establishing their own churches. By doing so, Fisher highlights Native American agency as impetus for historical change, a paradigm which is often left out from many histories. This book is a great contribution to the study of religion, colonial history, and New England Native Americans.

[Jouelzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful read. Lindford Fisher contends that the idea of religious conversion is more powerful than the reality of conversion in his study of how Native Americans engaged with European Christians in southeastern New England from 1700 to 1820.

In distilling the belief that Natives had a sudden conversion during the Great Awakening, Fisher takes considerable time laying the foundation for his argument. While in an initial reading of his book, one might wonder why he spends so much time outside his stated time period of research, 1700-1820, highlighting the sustained attempts at evangelizing Natives by the missionary groups such as NEC in the late 17th century, helps us to understand later interactions and inactions by Native groups with white colonial Christians.

I appreciated the deep dive because it gives a much needed context to the autonomy that needs to be considered while analyzing the history of Native Americans. Especially helpful was the distinguishing between “affiliated” with the Christian church vs a full conversion that has regularly been reported in historical research.

[Roger Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot from this book and am thankful to Fisher for the bibliography. Fisher gives a concentrated look at New England tribal engagement during "the long 18th century." I was, however, a bit put off by the opening anecdote about the contents of an excavated native grave in the early 1990s without any explicit attention to the spiritual issues persistent among Native Americans that make excavations like that deeply offensive. Fisher does end on native persistence, though, and that is still a major corrective to how many Americans think of indigenous peoples.

[Ryan Shelton]

An excellent study of the complexity of New England missions to the Native Americans that pays especially close attention to the ways that indigenous peoples had their own reasons for occasionally accepting, though often on their own terms, the religion brought by the European settlers.

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basic argument is similar to that in Du Val's The Native Ground - that rather than being acted upon and dominated by colonists, American Indians incorporated colonists into their lives. In this case, they incorporated colonists' religious views into their own, and while some did turn Christian, it was Christianity on their own terms. I think he goes too far in repeatedly suggesting that Indians' lives were much the same after colonists arrived as before - this clearly isn't the case. He's trying to refute the argument that Indians weren't dominated and just disappeared, but goes too far in the other direction. Perhaps too much dwelling on individuals and not the bigger picture.

[Andee Nero · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great perspective on the Great Awakening but sometimes Fisher could be more concise. For example, in one spot, he lists all of the Indian groups who were targeted for evangelism, when he could have more simply just said that it was everyone but the elderly.

[Thomas Kidd · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of The Indian Great Awakening, at Books and Culture http://www.booksandculture.com/articl...