'What Change Hath God Wrought?': How Gender and the Environment
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‘WHAT CHANGE HATH GOD WROUGHT?’: HOW GENDER AND THE ENVIRONMENT SHAPED NEW ENGLAND PRAYING TOWN IDENTITY AND CREATED A CHRISTIAN INDIAN ELECT by KALLIE KOSC Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2011 Copyright © by Kallie Kosc 2011 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without guidance and help from a number of individuals and institutions, both professional and personal. First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee, Dr. David Narrett, Dr. Stephanie Cole, and Dr. Christopher Morris for trusting me to undertake such a complex research topic within a short time frame. Each member spent many hours meticulously reading and responding to my drafts, advising and guiding my research, and challenging me to consider and embrace the ambiguities inherent in historical research. They helped to improve the research, argumentation, and style of this thesis, and for that, I cannot thank them enough. Conducting research on eighteenth-century Northeastern Native peoples while living in Texas would have been impossible without the generous support of the UT Arlington College of Liberal Arts and Trudy and Ben Termini. The Termini Research Travel Grant allowed me to gain access to archival material that enhanced my research beyond measure. The archivists and support staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Public Library helped me to make efficient use of my time. Barbara Allen and Chief Rick Wilcox of Stockbridge offered me invaluable information about the town and kept their doors open late for a young scholar. I was lucky enough to have been born into and acquired the world’s most supportive family. Thank you to my New England family for couches and beds on which to sleep, and to everyone for showing genuine interest in all of all of my endeavors. Thank you to Dad, Mom, and Dustin for always supporting me in everything I do. Finally, to Greg: I never would have started or finished this project without his never ending encouragement, optimism, and humor. April 13, 2011 iii ABSTRACT ‘WHAT CHANGE HATH GOD WROUGHT?’: HOW GENDER AND THE ENVIRONMENT SHAPED NEW ENGLAND PRAYING TOWN IDENTITY AND CREATED A CHRISTIAN INDIAN ELECT Kallie Kosc M.A. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2011 Supervising Professor: David Narrett By the 1780s, Christian Indians from praying towns throughout Southern New England accepted an invitation to reside amongst fellow Christianized Oneida in upstate New York. While all parties agreed to live as one “body” with “one head, one heart, one blood,” tensions quickly arose between these Christian Indians. While the joint communities of Brothertown, New Stockbridge, and Oneida were intended by the inhabitants to be a place where Christianized natives could form a strong unifying force against Anglo land encroachment, conflict emerged over how to live the proper Christian Indian existence. The two most prominent sources of disagreement between these groups centered on differing notions of gender roles within the communities and each groups’ relationship to the environment. This thesis investigates the evolution of these communities’ gender and environmental relations in order to understand their individual claims to Christian Indian superiority. Travel accounts and correspondence of Indian and white missionaries, writings from Christian Indians themselves, and diaries of colonists are analyzed along with land records, maps of environs, and secondary anthropological and environmental studies in order to arrive a more clear understanding of the ramifications of iv conversion for native culture, inter-tribal relations, and natives’ environments. It is the goal of this thesis to bring to light the gender and environmental complexities inherent in the construction of eighteenth-century Christian Indian identity. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................iii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... iv Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………..………..….. .....................................1 1.1 A Note on Methodology and Organization .....................................................14 2. CHRISTIAN INDIANS AT HOME: CULTIVATING THE SAVAGE AND CREATING “WILDERNESS” IN NEW ENGLAND PRAYING TOWNS...............................................................................................18 3. MAIDENS, HELPMEETS, AND WIDOWS: UNCOVERING CHRISTIAN INDIAN FEMALES AND NATIVE SPIRITUALITY IN PRAYING TOWNS OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND.........................................................38 4. RELEASING THE SAVAGE AND BINDING THE FEMALE: CHIRSTIAN INDIANS IN WAR AND DIPLOMACY..................................................................62 5. “ONE HEAD, ONE HEART, AND ONE BLOOD”: BREAKING CULTURAL TIES AND CREATING A CHRISTIAN INDIAN ELECT .......................................82 6. CONCLUSION: NATIVE AND CHRISTIAN ...............................................................102 REFERENCES.............................................................................................................................105 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ................................................................................................111 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION On May 22, 1793, a young pagan man from the primarily Christianized Native village of Brothertown, New York committed suicide because he was denied access to his Oneida lover by her Christianized father. The young Native man chose to end his life in a rather conspicuous way by removing into the forest, taking a known poisonous substance (muskrat root), and returning to the village to die in front of his Christianized Native neighbors. This “horrid act” of suicide, as white missionary Samuel Kirkland called it, would have been understood by many self-professed Christian Indians as a sinful performance by a proud man who did not “love his own life, or soul.” 1 Less acculturated Iroquoian Natives, however, may have understood the self-poisoning as a form of resistance against Christianity and white life ways as well as a typical act performed by a scorned lover whose soul could still potentially reach the afterlife. 2 The situation which led the young man to take such drastic measures escalated when the girl’s father (a Christianized Oneida chief), demanded that the man live with his daughter in the Christian fashion by first marrying her within the church. The confrontation between the young pagan man and the Christian father nearly became violent before other members of the community stepped in to break up the fight. The conditions which the girl’s father proposed were apparently too great a sacrifice for the young man, as this confrontation led him to submit his soul to what his Christian neighbors believed would be an eternity in hell. The situation devolved from there as the pagan man’s brothers declared revenge on the girl’s father for killing their brother. A scene of traditional Native politics emerged as the brothers of both men argued over whether or not a revenge killing 1 For a complete recounting of this story by missionary Samuel Kirkland, see Walter Pilkington, ed. The Journals of Samuel Kirkland: 18 th -century Missionary to the Iroquois, Government Agent, Father of Hamilton College (Clinton: Hamilton College, 1980), 255-256. 2 Most known Iroquoian suicides fall under two categories: poison by muskrat root ( cicuta maculate ) due to love or jealousy and hanging or stabbing due to failure or shame. William N. Fenton, “A Further Note on Iroquois Suicide,” Ethnohistory 33, No. 4 (Autumn, 1986), 448, 452-453, 455. 1 was in order. Ultimately, the brothers of the Oneida chief sought the opinion of Kirkland who sided with the Christian Natives, blaming the pagan man’s “wicked heart” for his own death. 3 This suicide and subsequent fighting reveal a number of fissures within the Christianized Native communities of Brothertown, New Stockbridge, and the surrounding Oneida settlements. The hard-line stance the girl’s family took against the young man may have been a product of the growing antipathy between and amongst Christianized and non-Christianized Natives within these New York communities. But these fissures were more complex than simply a Christian versus non-Christian conflict. The pagan man’s spiritual beliefs and environmental knowledge of Native herbal remedies and uses were not uncommon among some self-professed Oneida Christians and attest to the continued presence of Native practices within Christianized Native communities and praying towns. Additionally, the Oneida girl may well have understood her father’s actions to regulate her sexual and marital relations as a repudiation of traditional Native practice which typically allowed individual women or the community’s elder women to play matchmaker. Therefore, the incident is emblematic of larger issues concerning the role of gender, environmental practices, and Native spirituality in the eighteenth-century conversion and acculturation process. Indeed, the divergence in Native acculturation was at the center of the growing animosity between these Native peoples, which forced Kirkland to observe that “discordant passions, seem to be alive and well” among