Overview

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

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9780199376445

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Reviews

In this meticulously researched and lucidly fashioned study of colonial Indians' encounters with European Christians, Fisher presses historians to move beyond idealized narratives of Indians undergoing blue-sky irreversible conversions. With great persuasive power, he details the ambiguities and paradoxes, affiliations and disaffiliations that marked the lives of real people caught in the maw of colliding worldviews, land grabs and racial barriers. --The Christian Century Accessible, well written, and founded on thorough research. Recommended. --CHOICE This fine book reconstructs Native encounters with Christianity in southeastern New England from 1700 to 1820. Rather like the Indian Great Awakening itself, decades of important, pathfinding, and innovative work have preceded it, shaped it, and made it possible. A worthy and admirable contribution to that. --Joel W. Martin, American Historical Review A nuanced reading of the Native American experience of Christianity during the eighteenth century . The Indian Great Awakening does an impressive job of capturing the complexity of Native American 'religious engagement.' Gracefully written, the book should attract a broad range of readers interested in Native America, early America, and religious history. --R. Todd Romero, Journal of American History Linford D. Fisher's... study of Indigenous Christianity makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both colonial approaches to Indigenous peoples and their own repurposing of them. Fisher challenges historians to deconstruct colonial religion by questioning whether conversion is the most important indicator for understanding Indigenous engagement with Christian cultures. Rather than focusing on conversion, he suggests seeing religion as a lived and elastic experience, placing greater attention on religious affiliation and engagement with colonial institutions. --Thomas Peace, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

Author Information

Linford D. Fisher is Assistant Professor of History, Brown University.

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