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Native Americans

American Eras

Native Americans

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Uneducated Pagans. The Spanish, English, Dutch, and French all professed their desire to teach Native Americans the gospel of Jesus Christ. Indeed, spreading Christianity to the benighted peoples of the New World was a prime rationale for European colonization. However, propagating the faith always took place within a broader cultural context peculiar to the nationality of the colonists involved. Both the Spanish and the English thought in terms of transforming the Indians’ way of life, but only the Spanish pursued that goal rigorously and made it the foundation upon which much of Spanish American culture was based. Of course it was arguably much more the result of European and Indian sexual intermingling than the monumental educational efforts jointly undertaken by the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown. Moreover, in the borderlands of Florida, Texas, and New Mexico, Spanish success at acculturating the Indians was limited at best. The British too aimed at civilizing as well as Christianizing the Indians, but compared to the Spanish, whose mighty missionary efforts were driven by the powerful Catholic Church, the British commitment to propagating their faith and culture among Native Americans was desultory. Also bringing together the resources of their Catholic Church and Crown, the French missionary adventure in North America was extensively pursued through the Saint Lawrence River valley, the Illinois country, and down the Mississippi River valley to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. Less intrusive and generally more accommodating than Spanish clerics, French priests nevertheless garnered thousands of converts and played a crucial role in forging a Franco-Indian alliance that dominated much of North America. The European missions to the Indians aside, the most fascinating educational story regarding the Indians concerned their adjustments to the European invasion of America that began with Columbus’s arrival in 1492.

Florida. During their war against the Aztec empire in the 1520s, Spaniards developed attitudes toward the Indians that would shape their policy in the borderlands. Before the Aztecs could be taught the gospel, the Spanish conquerors believed, their old religion, which sanctioned human sacrifice and idolatry, had to be crushed. The Franciscan priests carried this conquest mentality into the borderlands, bound and determined not just to convert the natives but to civilize them. Because of its location near the Bahamas channel used by Spanish treasure ships, Florida was of strategic importance. After the French established a Huguenot settlement there in 1564, Spain struck back. The French fort was destroyed; Saint Augustine was established in 1565; and presidios and missions gradually multiplied through central and northern Florida. Numbering perhaps as many as five hundred thousand in 1500, the Indians in Florida—the Calusa, Tequesta, Tocobaga, Timuca, and Apalachee—declined rapidly in response to disease, warfare, and enslavement. By 1650 Franciscan friars had disrupted traditional tribal life and established thirty-eight missions, to which were attached twenty-six thousand Indian converts. Intent upon advancing both Christianity and Spanish culture, the Franciscans tightly regulated mission life, teaching not only religious doctrine but handicrafts and farming skills. Several tribes such as the Guales and Westos never accepted Spanish domination and resisted fiercely the expansion of Franciscan missions. The Creek Indians and English settlers from the Carolinas raided the Florida missions, seizing the Indian converts and selling them into slavery in the Caribbean.

Eighteenth Century. By 1750 Florida was garrisoned by four hundred soldiers, but the Indian population may well have declined to no more than a few thousand, and the civilian population remained slight. Deerskins were the chief export, and Saint Augustine had to be continuously supplied from Cuba. Threatened by growing English populations in South Carolina and Georgia, Spanish officials in Florida granted freedom to runaway slaves from Carolina and Georgia, who joined with friendly Indians and Spanish troops in defending the province. In 1763, when Florida was surrendered to the English at the end of the French and Indian War, the Spanish government evacuated some thirty-one hundred settlers and Indians to Cuba and New Spain.

New Mexico. As in Florida, demographic catastrophe reduced the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico from eighty thousand in 1598 to seventeen thousand in 1679. Some twenty-four Pueblo towns survived the conquest, and they were divided into seven districts by the Franciscans, who were determined to root out the idolatrous religion they believed the Indians practiced. Everything about Pueblo life had religious significance, from irrigating the fields and working the corn crops to annual hunting trips. The gods were collectively known as the kachinas, and many voluntary associations, dedicated to one of the kachinas, were formed to pass along crucial knowledge about daily life and work which this or that particular god had supposedly passed along to the people once upon a time. Just as parents taught their young basic skills and kinship traditions, so did the associations initiate the young into the myriad of rules and regulations that governed the village. Taught to obey and conform, Pueblo Indians appeared to take the teaching of the Franciscans to heart, increasing numbers accepting Christianity and working at the missions, where they practiced their traditional arts and also those Spanish handicrafts introduced by the friars. Although the Franciscans confiscated ceremonial masks, prohibited the traditional rituals which took place in the kiva (underground religious chambers), and punished native religious leaders who dared to defy them openly, the Pueblo accepted Christian baptism but continued to keep their customs.

Revolt and Aftermath. The uncompromising stand of the Franciscans, coupled with several years of drought and rising persecution of native religious leaders, led to the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, during which the Spanish colonists were driven from the northern Rio Grande, including Sante Fe, and the old religious ways were fully revived. A dozen years later the Spanish began to reconquer the Pueblo, taking a frightful vengeance upon the Indians. However, the Franciscans who returned with the soldiers did not try to dominate the Pueblo as before the 1680 revolt. The Pueblo continued to become more Hispanized, incorporating more and more Catholic doctrine

into their lives, but it was increasingly upon their own terms. As for the friars, they concentrated increasingly upon the general population, catechizing and nurturing the faith among the settlers and their children as well as the Indians. By 1750 the settlers numbered about four thousand and the Indians about ten thousand. As Pueblos and settlers alike banded together to resist marauding Apache and Comanche, cultural and religious compromise became more acceptable for the Pueblo and their Hispanic neighbors alike.

Arizona and Texas. The work of Father Eusebio Francisco Kino and two other Jesuit priests among the Indians of northern Mexico and southern Arizona proved a salutary contrast to the Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico. Unlike the Franciscans, who generally thought that Indian culture was incorrigible and must be totally transformed, the Jesuits believed that they could engraft Christianity upon the religious views of the Indians. Ministering among the Pimas and their northern neighbors, the Papagos, the Jesuits were much more gentle and positive in their missionary approach than the Franciscans. Father Kino established some twenty enclaves of Christian Indians, introduced wheat and other European cereals, and brought cattle and other livestock into the region. Carefully catechizing and preparing the Indians for baptism, Father Kino also utilized other Christian Indians to spread the gospel. Altogether, despite their cautious approach to proselyting, Kino and his Jesuit cohorts baptized more than thirty thousand Indians between 1687 and 1711. However, following his death his missions among the peoples of the Pimeria Alta were neglected and failed. Fear of French expansion into Texas in 1714 shifted Spanish attention, both civil and ecclesiastical, toward the region northeast of Mexico which had been declared a frontier province in 1691. Between 1717 and 1724 the Franciscans established ten missions and the Viceroyalty of New Spain established four presidios in Texas, with San Antonio de Bejar as its capital. In the mission communities converts were not only instructed in Catholicism but also taught various trades that would enhance the self-sufficiency of the mission itself. Mission work among the nomadic and warlike Apache, Comanche, and various Indian bands known collectively as Norteños was challenging and dangerous. The Spanish settlements were vulnerable to marauding Indians and the French, both of whom came well armed. As late as 1742 there were only eighteen hundred Spaniards and thirteen hundred Native Americans in Texas.

Early French Missions. As Samuel de Champlain, the entrepreneur who founded Quebec in 1609, made trade agreements with the Indians of Canada, he obtained their approval to send missionaries among them. The Recollects and the Capuchins, both reform branches of the Franciscans, were the first French missionaries in Canada. However, the Franciscans thought in terms of root-and-branch reformation of the Indians, that is, transforming them into good Christian Frenchmen, something that was quite impossible to do as long as French colonists remained few in number in the province. In short, the Indians had to be civilized before they would become good candidates for Christianity. So the Recollect and Capuchins encouraged the Huron and Montagnais to give up nomadic habits and settle near European villages, become farmers, and send their children to Catholic schools. They educated some Indian boys themselves in Canada and sent others to France for schooling. However, they had little success. Between 1615 and 1627 the Recollects reportedly baptized only fifty-four Indians, forty-one of whom had stopped coming to church services.

French Jesuits. Clerics of the Society of Jesus were better equipped to preach and teach among the Indians of New France. In 1625 the Jesuit mission to the Huron began in earnest with the arrival of Fathers Charles Lalemand, Jean de Brebeuf, and Ennemond Masse. In 1639, thanks largely to the encouragement of the Jesuits, the Ursulines and the Soeurs Hospitalières of Dieppes founded a school for girls and a hospital in Quebec. The school was initially intended for Indian girls, but their parents were resistant. Rather than simply dismissing Indian culture as worthless paganism, the Jesuits learned to build upon certain traditional elements in Indian religion to bring them around to Christianity. So the Jesuits traveled and lived with the Indians and accepted much of Native American culture as legitimate. They generally found it did little good to complain about the lack of sexual inhibitions of young girls, easy divorce practices of adults, or ritualistic torture and cannibalism. Unlike the Franciscans, who were usually rotated around every five years, the French Jesuits would spend many years—often the remainder of their lives—ministering to the same Indians. Such methods won not only converts but respect for the “blackrobes,” whose gentle ways and strange dress had initially led the Indians to ridicule them. Altogether, 115 Jesuit fathers came to New France during the seventeenth century.

Later Mission Efforts. The Jesuits early on concentrated their efforts among the Hurons, who dominated the fur trade in Canada and who lived in a vast area bounded by Georgian Bay and lakes Huron, Erie, Ontario, and Simcoe. They learned their language, nursed them through illnesses, assisted them with farming, and began to gain a following among the thirty thousand Hurons by discrediting native religious leaders. However, between 1648 and 1650 the Iroquois from the Finger Lakes region of western New York invaded Huronia and either killed or dispersed all its people, including some Jesuit priests, who claimed twelve thousand Huron converts before the Iroquois massacres. After gathering together the remnants of the Huron people, the Jesuits continued their ministry among the Indians in the east and the west, often traveling with explorers and furtraders to tribes who had not heard the gospel. As with the Huron, the Jesuits learned the languages of other tribes; translated the Catholic catechism, creeds, and set prayers into the local Indian dialect; and exercised native catechumens orally in the doctrines of the faith. Indian languages, though wonderfully suited to the style of life of their speakers, were ill equipped to convey the often abstract meaning of European Christianity. Sin, for example, as an offense before God, was simply not in their vocabulary. Jesuits overcame this linguistic obstacle by living with the Indians, by learning many of the nuances of their oral cultures, by the use of ritual and singing, and by using familiar occurrences to convey Christian principles. Images, especially ornamental crucifixes, vessels, vestments, pictures in Bibles, and token figures of Mary and the baby Jesus given to the Indians, were important instruments of propagating the faith.

A JESUIT SPEAKS OUT

In 1647 Jesuit priest Paul Rogueneau, ministering I among the Hurons, expressed more tolerance and patience than many other clergymen attempting to educate the “heathens”:

One must be very careful before condemning a thousand things and customs, which greatly offend minds brought up and nourished in another world. It is easy to call irreligious what is merely stupidity, and to take for diabolical workings something that is nothing more than human; and then, one thinks he is obliged to forbid as impious certain things that are done in all innocence, or, at most, are silly but not criminal customs.... Ï have no hesitation in saying that we have been too severe in this point.

Source: W. J. Eecles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760, revised edition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), p. 48.

Mississippi Valley Missions. As the Jesuits moved west into the Illinois country and down the Mississippi River, they taught not only Catholic doctrine but also French and on occasion would send a bright Indian boy

back to Quebec or Montreal for study. A few of these young men continued to be transported to France to attend a grammar school or college. However, the results of such a French education were not encouraging, for when the educated young Indians returned, they found themselves creatures torn between two worlds, neither of which fully accepted them. Those who learned French and remained with their respective tribes, however, often became important cultural mediators. Jesuit missions were established among the Ojibwes at Keweenaw Bay on Lake Superior in 1660 and on the western shore of Lake Superior at La Pointe du Saint Esprit in 1665. Opposition of the warlike Lakota forced Father Jacques Marquette to abandon La Pointe and establish another mission on Michilimackinac Island in the straits between Lakes Michigan and Huron in 1671. Having explored the Mississippi River with Louis Jolliet in 1673, Father Marquette established a mission he called Immaculate Conception among the Illinois Indians at Kaskaskia in 1674, the year before his death. Other Catholic missions were established at Detroit, Vincennes, and Saint Louis, with Christian Indians always congregating nearby. However, despite the French colonization along the Gulf Coast in the eighteenth century, French missions among the Muskogean Indians of the area never flourished, in part because ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the region was disputed for decades by the bishop of Quebec, the Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome, and the Society for Foreign Missions.

New Netherland. Dutch traders and Iroquois chiefs early on formed a military and economic alliance that proved mutually beneficial. The Iroquois served as the middlemen in the fur trade between the Dutch and the western Indians, performing much the same role as their traditional enemies, the Huron, did for the French. The Provisional Articles for New Netherland, promulgated by the Dutch West India Company in 1624, expected the colonists to lead the Indians to Christ. “By the example of godliness and outward discipline on the part of the Christians,” wrote the commissioners of the company, “the heathen may sooner be brought to a knowledge of the same.” The first Dutch Reformed preacher in the colony, Jonas Michaelius, who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1628, found ministering to the Indians especially frustrating. Domine Michelius stated that they were “entirely savage and wild, strangers to all decency, yea, uncivil and stupid as garden poles, proficient in all wickedness and godlessness; devilish men, who served the Devil.” The only way to Christianize the Indians, Michelius believed, was to separate the young from their parents and teach them both the Dutch language and Christian principles before they learned “the heathenish tricks and deviltries” of their elders. But the domine doubted that such a plan could ever be implemented, given the reluctance of Indian parents to be separated from their offspring. In 1642 Domine Johannes Megapolensis became the minister for Rensselaerswyck, the patroonship located up the Hudson surrounding Fort Orange. Megapolensis learned the Mohawk tongue and wrote a small book about them, but he apparently had little success converting them to the Christian faith. In 1649 Megapolensis was called to New Amsterdam, where he was joined shortly by another preacher, Domine Samuel Drisius. In 1657, having worked for two years instructing their single Indian convert in the Christian doctrine, the two domines sadly reported that their once prized neophyte had become a drunk, sold his Bible, and “turned into a regular beast, doing more harm than good among the Indians.” Domine Gideon Schaets, who had replaced Megalpolensis at Rensselaerswyck in 1652, was asked to “use all Christian zeal there to bring up both the Heathen and their children in the Christian religion,” but his success was negligible.

Virginia. The English mission to the Indians in Virginia began promisingly enough as the Reverend Alexander Whitaker converted the Indian princess Pocahontas to Christianity. The latter’s visit to England, which ended tragically with her death, built public support for the establishment of an Indian college at Henrico, a project that collapsed with the massacre of settlers around Jamestown in 1622. “The way of conquering them is much more easy than of civilizing them by fair means,” reported officials of the Virginia Company after suppressing the Indian uprising, “for they are a rude, barbarious, and naked people, scattered in small companies, which are helps to victory, but hindrance to civility: Besides that, a conquest may be of many and at once; but civility is in particular, and, slow, the effect of long time, and great industry.” Despite such sentiments, the charter granted the College of William and Mary in 1693 called for the establishment of a school with one professor to teach Indian boys reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. The latter provision qualified the college for funds from the legacy of Robert Boyle, and an Indian school was established.

Mayhew and Eliot. In New England, given their rigorous theology with its emphasis upon the conversion experience, biblical knowledge, and disciplined living, the Puritans found proselytizing the Indians especially challenging. Few were converted before the 1640s when Thomas Mayhew Jr. of Martha’s Vineyard and John Eliot of Roxbury began their respective ministries to the local Indians in Massachusetts. By 1652 Mayhew had 283 Indian converts. Convinced that it was “absolutely necessary to carry on civility with religion,” John Eliot established the first town for his “praying Indians” in 1651. Over the next fourteen years thirteen towns of praying Indians were established, but only two of them had churches with covenants that fully met the approval of neighboring Puritan congregations. Eliot also established English schools in the towns of the praying Indians. Both Mayhew and Eliot were assisted by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, chartered by Parliament in 1649 and having collected almost £16,000 by 1660. Rechartered after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy as the “Company for Propagation of the Gospell in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America,” under the leadership of the scientist Robert Boyle, this organization underwrote the publication of several books in the Algonquian language, including Eliot’s Algonquian edition of the Bible. By the early 1670s approximately twenty-five hundred Christian Indians lived in New England, roughly 20 percent of the remaining Indians in the region. During King Philip’s War perhaps a third of the praying Indians joined in and attacked New Englanders. Although the assistance of the other two-thirds of the praying Indians was crucial in the death of King Philip and the defeat of his forces, wartime hostilities destroyed most of their towns and brought the praying Indians under considerable suspicion. Even before King Philip’s War, Eliot and other New England mission leaders had come to doubt the wisdom of relying upon native teachers and made plans for establishing English schools. Given what they perceived as the “idle ways” of the Indians, New Englanders generally had decided that Indians would have to be Anglicized before there was hope for them to be truly civilized and Christianized.

Missions in the South. In 1714, to curry favor with the Siouan-speaking tribes along Virginia’s vulnerable southwestern frontier, Gov. Alexander Spotswood of Virginia established Fort Christina, where reportedly as many as seventy-seven Indian children were also taught English and exercised in the Anglican catechism. After political feuding in 1717 led the Virginia Burgesses to refuse further funding of the frontier outpost, the teacher at Fort Christina, Charles Griffin, became master of the Indian school at the College of William and Mary. Over the years Indian attendance varied, from a reported high of twenty-four in one year to one in another. In fact, well into the 1730s William and Mary itself was not much of a college, hardly more than a grammar school for planters’ sons. In 1721 there were no Indian students, but money allotted by the Boyle fund for Indian education in Virginia kept accumulating, so President Blair took £500 from the Boyle fund in 1723 to build Brafferton Hall, the fine two-story structure designated to house the Indians. In 1732 Blair tapped the Boyle account again, this time for the purchase of books to upgrade William and Mary’s small library, where Indians as well as white students would presumably use them. However, relatively few Indians were housed in Brafferton until intercolonial warfare in the 1740s and 1750s brought young Cherokee and Shawnee hostages there to be taught reading, writing, and religion. Many of them died there, victims of the unfamiliar and deadly disease environment despite considerable effort to give them the best medical care. Others simply ran away. As Gov. Robert Dinwiddie wrote in 1756 of some Cherokee boys, they had “no Inclination to Learning” and “could not be reconciled to their books.” William Byrd II complained of the Indian schoolboys that once back with their people they “immediately Relapt into Infidelity and Barbarism themselves.” Indeed, Byrd believed, “since they unhappily forget all the good they learn, and remember the III, they are apt to be more vicious and disorderly than the rest of their Countrymen.” In the rest of the colonial South, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) encouraged its missionaries to teach God’s Word to the Indians, and some surely did, though most stayed along the coastal settlements where relatively few Indians lived. In the late colonial period the Presbyterians in Virginia especially and the Moravians in North Carolina and Georgia also engaged in missions to the Indians, though their impact was probably even slighter than that of the S.P.G. in the South.

New England Missions. Few of Eliot’s Indian-language translations were published after 1700. There was little enthusiasm even for reprinting Eliot’s Indian Bible. “It is a very sure, the best thing we can do for our Indians is to Anglicize them in all agreeable Instances,” wrote Cotton Mather, “and in that of Language, as well as others.” The Indians could not retain their language, Mather insisted, “without a Tincture of other Salvage Inclinations, which do but ill suit, either with the Honor, or with the design of Christianity.” Although much diminished, the work that Eliot had begun continued

among the declining praying Indians as English-language instruction became the order of the day. During the seventeenth century, while Indian missions were flourishing in Massachusetts, they were largely nonexistent in Connecticut. At the behest of Cotton Mather, whose influence with the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England was significant, the Connecticut General Assembly founded a school on the Mohegan reserve in 1726. Shortly thereafter another English school for Indians was funded by the Company at New London.

The Godly. However, Mather and Connecticut governor Joseph Talcott believed the best method of “civilizing and Christianizing” the Indians would be putting native children as apprentices in “English and Godly Families.” Their respective masters would be required to educate them. When the reluctance of the Indians to part with their children killed the apprenticeship scheme, those pushing the Connecticut missions next advocated boarding schools that separated Indian youth from their primitive, heathen habits. Not only Indian boys but Indian girls too were to be educated at boarding schools because male graduates needed civilized mates or else they would likely leave the faith and return to their native ways. Not only John Mason’s school at New London but also the Reverend Samuel Whitman’s school at Farmington took Indian boarders. A few of their Indian students, like John Mettawan of Whitman’s school, became teachers themselves. The Stockbridge mission in Massachusetts Housatonic River valley, under the leadership of the Reverend John Sergeant and Timothy Woodbridge, the Indian schoolmasters, made plans for an Indian boarding school which opened in 1749, shortly after Sergeant’s death. Jonathan Edwards, who succeeded Sergeant as missionary, had to do battle with relatives of Sergeant’s widow to take control of the boarding school, which in 1752 was directed by Gideon Hawley, whose students included several Mohawk children from New York. The school was burned under mysterious circumstances in early 1753, ending its educational mission to the Mohawk. That same year the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, a New Light Congregationalist, opened his Indian free school in Lebanon, Connecticut. Among his early students was Samson Occom, easily the most famous Indian preacher in colonial America, who established Presbyterian congregations among the Montauk Indians on Long Island. Wheelock’s school was later endowed by Col. Joshua More and became known as “Moor’s Charity School,” where ten Indian students were studying in 1761. After the French and Indian War, Wheelright convinced Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs, to send him several Mohawk boys, including Joseph Brant, later famed as an Indian leader during the American Revolution. With the money that Occom and others collected for him during a successful fund-raising trip to England, Wheelock, who was growing weary with his Indian school, turned his efforts toward the founding of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Middle Colonies. Following the conquest of New Netherland in 1664, the British governors of New York encouraged the Dutch Reformed clergy of Albany and its environs to cultivate the faith among the nearby Mohawk and other Iroquois nations, for diplomatic as well as religious reasons. The Iroquois had been crucial political and commercial allies of the Dutch against the French. In the 1680s Gov. Thomas Dogan, himself a Catholic, considered introducing English Jesuits among the Iroquois to counter the influence of French priests. However, the overthrow of James II in 1688 in the Glorious Revolution ended any thought about English Jesuits, though King William’s War made it all the more important to the English to cultivate the Iroquois. In the 1690s Gov. Benjamin Fletcher encouraged Domine Godfriedus Dellius, the Dutch Reformed minister at Albany, to preach to the Mohawk. Dellius baptized more than a hundred; admitted sixteen to communion; and translated the Ten Commandments, creeds, and psalms into the Mohawk language. After 1700 Domine Bernardus Freeman of Schenectady and Domine Johannes Lydius of Albany were likewise encouraged by New York governors to minister to the Indians. The Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.), founded in 1701, sent Thoroughgood Moore as its first missionary to the Iroquois in 1705. Moore left his post after one frustrating year. “Tis from the behavior of the Christians here that they [the Indians] have had and still have their notions of Christianity, which God knows has been and generally is such that I can’t but think has made the Indian hate Christianity.” After Peter Schuyler brought four Mohawk chiefs to London in 1710, the S.P.G. responded to popular enthusiasm for the Indians and in 1712 sent missionary William Andrews to Fort Hunter, in the Mohawk Valley, where a handsomely outfitted chapel had been built for the Indians, thanks to Queen Anne. Andrews established a school for Indian youth, shortly reporting more than forty students, and made good progress for a couple of years in preaching and teaching to the Mohawk. But the school began to fail, and as the gifts Andrews brought began to run out, so did attendance at his church services. The failure of the Christian Indians to give up such heathen ways as torturing captives and getting drunk angered the young cleric. “Heathen they are,” wrote the exasperated Andrews as he left in 1718, “and Heathen they shall be.” In the other Middle Colonies there was little organized effort to Christianize the Indians before 1740, though the Quakers, who preferred to influence by example, did establish good relations early on with Indians in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and there is evidence that a few Indians, mostly orphans or indentured servants, received some schooling in the other Middle Colonies as well as New York.

Later Efforts. The religious revivalism known as the Great Awakening reinvigorated Indian missions and the educational efforts directed toward Indian youth which usually accompanied them. In the 1740s the Moravians, whose missionary work among the Indians in many ways resembled that of the French Jesuits, taught both the young and the old. Moravian missionaries were active in New York and Pennsylvania. Accused of being Catholics in disguise, the Moravians aroused quite a stir in New York, especially because of their work among the dispirited Shakomeko Indians in Dutchess County between 1740 and 1744. In Pennsylvania the Moravians established several Christian Indian towns along the western frontier and beyond into the Ohio Territory, several of which survived until the American Revolution. In 1741 the Presbytery of New York, acting on behalf of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (S.S.P.C.K.), appointed Azariah Horton, a recent Yale graduate, as minister to the four hundred or so remaining Indians on the southern shore of Long Island. The next year David Brainerd, another Yale alumnus, gained the sponsorship of the S.S.P.C.K. and began his ministry in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, working primarily among the Delaware Indians. Upon his death in 1747 his younger brother, John, became pastor to the Christian Delaware, whose primary reservation was named Brothertown in Burlington, New Jersey. The Anglican mission to the Indians in New York was picking up even before the Great Awakening. At Fort Hunter, after William Andrews left in 1718, various Anglican clerics from Albany had preached and exercised Indians young and old in the catechism. However, in 1735 another Yale graduate, Henry Barclay, whose father had earlier been Anglican minister to Albany, was named catechist to Fort Hunter. After eighteen months on the job he reported that he taught more than forty students to read and write their own language. Barclay continued to visit Fort Hunter after he became the Anglican missionary to Albany, where served from 1738 to 1746. Between 1736 and 1777 John Jacob Oel, a German minister with Anglican ordination, assisted significantly in the Mohawk mission. Taking charge of Indian affairs in New York in 1746, William Johnson worked hard to get both missionaries and schoolmasters for the Iroquois. Johnson and Henry Barclay secured the publication of a Mohawk Prayer Book in 1769, and despite his suspicions of New England Congregationalists, Johnson initially encouraged the work of Eleazar Wheelock among the Iroquois, including that of his protégé, Samuel Kirkland. The Reverend Kirkland began his ministry among the Oneidas near Brothertown, New York, in 1766, and due in no small measure to his missionary labors, the Oneidas generally sided with the Americans during the Revolution. Similarly, John Stuart, an Anglican priest, began his labors among the Mohawk Indians in 1770, and his ministry played a major role in keeping the other nations of the Iroquois Confederations generally loyal to Great Britain after the Americans declared their independence.

Sources

James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);

Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981);

John Calam, Parsons and Pedagogues: The S.P.G. Adventure in American Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971);

Henry F. Dobyns, “Indians in the Colonial Spanish Borderlands,” in Indian American History: An Introduction, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie (Arlington Heights, III.: Harlan Davidson, 1988), pp. 67-93;

W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760, revised edition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983);

Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976);

James McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock: Founder of Dartmouth College (New York: Arno, 1969);

Edgar Mclnnis, Canada: A Political and Social History (New York: Rinehart, 1947);

Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962);

Margaret C. Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1763 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988).

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