Was the pre-contact Religion of Algonquian-speaking Indians Similar to Christianity?

When I first started blogging in the fall of 2008 I published a post called "The Mohican Ten Commandments." While there appears to be only nine of them and they weren't actually called "commandments," Captain Hendrick Aupaumut's teachings bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Calvinist Christianity of his time. And I think that the first person to make that observation was Captain Hendrick himself. Captain Hendrick also said that the Mohicans were once more "civilized" and they had some kind of a holy book like the Christian Bible, but when hard times came they lost their ability to read it and buried it with a chief. (The source for that is somewhere in Electa Jones' Stockbridge Past and Present.)

Captain Hendrick's way of looking at things is that Christian missions were giving Indians a chance to get their old, "civilized" ways back - after they had been corrupted by the fur trade.

I buy into that viewpoint myself. I mean I agree with the sequence: 1) Indians were doing alright prior to white contact, 2) the fur trade sent eastern seaboard Indians into a horrible downward spiral in which they lost much of their population and much of their culture, and 3) many of the Indians who survived the disasters of the fur trade became receptive to Christian missions which offered them "something."

I don't claim that sequence applies to all Native Americans, but it is an accepted reality among those who study the eastern seaboard Indians.

Of course, Captain Hendrick took it farther. In a scholarly article that is not available on the free web, Rachel Wheeler went into a lot of detail about Captain Hendrick's work to revitalize his people through participation in Christian missions and "civilization" programs. (The title of that article, if you want to try to access it, is "Hendrick Auapumut: Christian Mahican Prophet.")

However, after reading Wheeler's article a few times, I don't think she buys into the idea that the religions of Algonquian-speaking peoples were a lot like Christianity. Instead, I think Wheeler's understanding of Captain Hendrick is that he masterfully employed rhetoric to motivate his people. He knew there would be more energy in accepting Christianity and "civilization" if he could present it in a "back to traditional ways" package. And that is what he did.

 

Of course it goes without saying that Indians who took on Christianity  and "civilization" didn't give up all of their "Indian-ness." Of course their understanding of their new religion was influenced by whatever was left of their Native culture. In that sense, there likely were some similarities.

To my way of thinking, Captain Hendrick Aupaumut was not a sellout. Far from it. Instead, he promoted Christian missions and the "arts of civilized life" because he thought they were the best thing for his people. Probably the most effective way to do that was to make it seem like Christianity was rather similar to traditional Mohican religion.


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