In Colonial Times, Native Americans Looked at Things in Two Different Ways

It might be a hard concept for some of us modern people to grasp (or at least hard for some to accept), nevertheless, it explains everything in terms of the belief systems of Natives in early America.

Bear with me for a few moments here and just forget all the things that you already know about Indians. Now we are going to place all the Indians from early America in one of two categories. If you understand those categories well enough, you should be able to explain why some Indians became Christians and others pursued forms of revitalization of traditional systems of belief and action.

The two groups are nativists and accommodationists.

Katy Chiles describes the Nativists on page 13 of her book, Transformable Race..

[They believed] that Natives, whites, and Africans were created separately. They also became aware that they should practice entirely discrete religions: Christianity was for Europeans exclusively, since God did not give the Bible to the Indian or to the black man.

The Nativists, of course, are the type that us moderns readily understand, because we are aware of the importance of one's own culture. It is healthy to observe your own culture and be proud of it, right, I mean, isn't that just obvious?

It is obvious to most of us now, but there is another group of Native Americans in early America. Just because they are known as accommodationists does not mean that they didn't have integrity. They just looked at things in a different way. As Samson Occom, one of the leaders of the Brothertown Indians once put it (quoted by Chiles on page 14):

[There is] but one, Great ^good^ Supream and Indepentent Spirit above, he is the only Living and True God [who created] this World.

Chiles also brings Captain Hendrick Aupaumut of the Stockbridge Mohicans into her discussion, noting that

Both Occom and Aupaumut endorsed the biblical creation story, the idea that all races descended...from this single creation, and that, therefore, Indians should be seen as equals and "brothers" with the white man.

So the case is made that becoming a Christian did not mean that one stopped being an Indian. If one God created all people, then all races could practice the same religion.
 

 

Lion Miles Rips on of William Starna's "From Homeland to New Land"

When I was putting the finishing touches on my own book about the Stockbridge Mohicans (it covers the years 1734 to 2014), I became aware of another book that deals with essentially the same people. The author prefers to call them Mahicans (more on that later) and his book covers the tribe from 1600 until their removal to present-day Wisconsin.

Admittedly, I myself have yet to read From Homeland to New Land, A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600-1830, by anthropologist William Starna. But - believe me - enough information is available on the book to justify a  blogpost.

In particular, I'm referring to a rather nasty review of Starna's book that Lion Miles posted on Amazon a few months ago. This is one of those critiques that, when you first read it, you are impressed and almost ready to dismiss the book which is being criticized. But William Starna wisely disregarded the advice that authors should always ignore bad reviews. Starna fought back, responding to every detailed criticism coming from Miles. And he adds a somewhat personal criticism: "Readers may be interested to learn that this is not the first time that Miles has taken wild swings at my work."

On specific points, I doubt that either scholar is completely correct. Both are experts on a tribe that is undergoing rapid change, first with the fur trade and later with missionization, not to mention a series of wars and other tensions. The result of that change - and the fact that much of the data is secondhand -means that the surviving data on these Indians and their neighbors has inconsistencies. I believe that the identifying and disentangling of these inconsistencies is a very important skill in historical scholarship.

In a perfect world, Starna and Miles would have gotten together as friends and disentangled the inconsistencies they found in the data they gathered. Instead, they butted heads and future scholars will be left to follow their bread crumbs to historical truth. I am interested in giving William Starna's book a chance. I'll probably want to give it more than the two stars it got from Lion Miles.

( By the way, Proud and Determined, the book I wrote about the Stockbridge Mohicans, has been favorably reviewed, both on Amazon and Goodreads. )

One of the things that Miles and Starna clashed on is the name of the people they were dealing with. Starna uses the term "Mahicans," while Miles insists on "Mohicans." Let's find out their reasons.

According to Lion Miles:

The first error is the use of the spelling “Mahican” in the title. That spelling was used almost exclusively by Europeans in the 17th century. When members of the tribe learned to write, they adopted the spelling “Mohican” and that has been the accepted usage for the past 200 years.

Starna responds:

On the "error" Miles claims was committed in using "Mahican" in the title: The etymology and historical application of "Mahican" is fully discussed in the book's introduction, including the reasons for employing the term throughout as a linguistic rather than a cultural designation. Miles either didn't read or chose to ignore that discussion.

The argument, of course, is entirely academic. The descendants of the Indians in question - the real people that are living and breathing today - use "Mohican," not "Mahican."

 

 

 

Sedgwick & Marquand Misunderstand the Significance of the Stockbridge Bible

 

I reviewed some rather outrageous biases from the first chapter of Stockbridge, 1739-1974 in a previous post. There really is no point in going over the rest of the book, except for Sedgwick and Marquand's coverage of one important topic: The Stockbridge Bible.

Gradually the years were erasing all the traces of their remarkable history from the Stockbridge Indians, and they became more uniform with the other remnants of the great Indian tribes, who drag out a half-civilized existence on a reservation somewhere in the west. The wonderful Bible, that high-water mark of the Christian experiment, was mislaid and finally found by an enterprising Indian - in the rubbish heap! He pulled it out and dusted it off and it became his most cherished possession. Finally he consented to have it kept in the church in a safe, of which he alone knew the combination (page 97).

It is true that the Stockbridge Mohicans went through tough times. But lost on Sedgwick and Marquand is how much the tribal church appreciated their own special Bible. It is true that the missionary Cutting Marsh left in frustration - but let's not blame anybody for that, Marsh later wrote that he was "ashamed of my country" for how they (the federal government) treated the so-called New York Indians in Wisconsin. Looked at from one very valid angle, the tribe's mission society (the ABCFM) abandoned them as the result of the "Citizen" vs. "Indian" controversy which, in turn, was the result of the federal government's Indian policy.

The Stockbridge Bible was not found on a rubbish heap. Rather it was found in an abandoned house and then taken to Jameson "Sote" Quinney, a leader of the tribe and grandson of Austin E. Quinney. This reappearance of the Stockbridge Bible, as Richard North, a white minister from neighboring Shawano put it, "stirred" some of the leading men of the tribe on the subject of religion. In addition to Sote Quinney, Rev. North speaks of his great respect for William C. Davids and William Dick. This "stirring" on the subject of religion, according to Rev. North, was the impetus for the founding of the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian Church.

First Speakers: An Online Video about Preserving the Ojibwe Language

Recently we observed the success of Navajo leaders who gave their traditions a boost by getting the original Star Wars movie dubbed into Dine', their traditional language.

A video that came to my attention this week was actually produced four years ago, but it represents up-to-date information and I'd like to recommend it now to anybody who wants to understand how a living language can be kept from dying and also why a people would take the trouble to save their dying language.

A few weeks ago, I embedded a rather short video in a blogpost about the Ojibwe Language Nest, a preschool in Upper Michigan. In the longer film that you can view below, First Speakers: Restoring the Ojibwe Language, a Minnesota Ojibwe community creates a language immersion school - not a preschool, but an actual accredited Pre-K through 8th grade school aimed at saving their language.

Phonetically, Ojibwe is pronounced "O-jib-way."

A shout-out to enrolled Stockbridge Mohican, Brent Michael Davids, whose flute provides the main title music of this ground-breaking documentary.

 

Norman Rockwell's Unfinished Painting of Konkapot and John Sergeant

[caption id="attachment_7325" align="aligncenter" width="604"] Norman Rockwell referred to this painting informally as his "Reverend and Indian picture." It was never finished.[/caption]

Deborah Solomon, the art critic and author of Norman Rockwell's most recent (2013) biography, discusses the subjects of his paintings and whatever else might be behind them.

In a previous post about Rockwell, I noted that he never finished a painting that featured John Sergeant and Konkapot. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Rockwell began the project several years before he died. What kind roadblock kept the painting from being finished? The explanation has a lot to do with Rockwell's inner life and relationship with his brother.

As Solomon (432) tells it, Rockwell "had never been nostalgic for his own childhood." He had no sisters and was not at all close to his only brother, Jarvis. Although he traveled a lot, Rockwell "did not go down to Florida for his brother's last illness or funeral" and when Jarvis died in 1973, "the brothers had not spoken for a long time."

Solomon continues (432-433):

Although Rockwell declined to articulate his feelings over his brother's death, he did make a painting during this period that seems to hint at their complicated relationship. He referred to it as his Reverend and Indian picture. It would consume him for many years and might be seen as a symbolic portrait of Rockwell (the prissy Reverend) and his brother (the strapping Indian).

Rockwell began the painting in 1972, but a year later, had made almost no progress on it.

On May 12, 1973, just three days after he learned of his brother's death, Rockwell wrote on his calendar "Very mixed up today but I will work it out. Tomorrow I get to work on Reverend and Indian picture. Bewildered"(quoted in Solomon 433).

In historical reality, Konkapot might not have been a lot taller than John Sergeant - but in the picture Konkapot is a lot taller than Sergeant. In historical reality, Konkapot was eighteen years older than Sergeant which is another thing that doesn't appear to be reflected in the artist's work. Instead of basing their work on rigorous historical research, artists often fall back on themes existing in their own psyches. Solomon notes that a familiar theme in Rockwell's work is to show "two men, one disproportionately larger than the other"(433).

In the end, Rockwell's "Reverend and Indian picture" says more about the artist himself than it does about Rev. Sergeant or Konkapot.

 

Sedgwick & Marquand's "Stockbridge 1739-1974": Biases in Chapter One

[caption id="attachment_7297" align="alignright" width="153"] An early printing of Stockbridge 1739-1974: A Chronicle, as it appeared on ebay recently[/caption]

There is quite a bit of racial bias in Sarah Cabot Sedgwick and Christina Sedgwick Marquand's Stockbridge, 1734-1974: A Chronicle. So I've ignored it until now. However, Stock-Mo-History wishes to leave no stone unturned. Let's see what this book says and if there are unfair biases, let's call the authors out on them.

 

Page 2: Konkapot was "a man of stalwart character, but limited brain power."

Certainly an undeserved insult. An assumption that is not backed up.

 

Page 4:

Questioned more specifically about the Indians' religious beliefs, Ebenezer was vague. Some believed God to be the sun; some that the sun was the habitation of God; others were professed atheists, believing that all things began, continued and ceased, according to the laws of their natures without any direction from an outside power.

That was paraphrased from somewhere. I've been trying to locate the original quote myself in recent months. The bias in that statement is not racial, but in the original quote, it was emphasized that some of the Indians believed in one God, just like the whites.

 

Page 14: I'm not an anthropologist, so I cannot claim to know exactly how nomadic the Indians were prior to 1734, but the authors seem to think they know, and it sounds overly romantic to me:

They [the Mohicans] roamed as naturally as deer through the forest. A wigwam was taken down in ten minutes and they were gone, leaving no trace behind them.

 

Page 17: In describing the ordination of John Sergeant, we get this:

All the protagonists in the struggle between the Indians and English were represented in the meetinghouse at Deerfield that day and the hopeless division between the two races was shown up in a series of dramatic contrasts. some of these contrasts were quite deliberate. The showy paint and feathers and gay blankets of the Six Nations [Mohawks and other Iroquois had their own reasons for being present] were a definite indication to the English of the arrogance of the Indians in the wily game they were playing between the English and the French. The English, on their side, were doing everything in the way of full regimentals in scarlet and gold to impress the Six Nations with what a powerful hand they held in thins game.

I think I'd re-frame that and emphasize that there was a big struggle between the English and the French for world domination back then. The Indians "wily game" was, understandably, the things they had to do to maintain trading partnerships with European powers, while, at the same time, working on their own survival, something that isn't arrogant in my opinion.

 

Page 18: Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh, a Dutch trader, is known to have been a very good friend of Konkapot. but he was a trader. And we know what traders did, right? Most of them cheated the Indians. Alcohol was one of their tools. But for Van Valkenburgh to have been a good friend of Konkapot, I'd suspect that he was one of the few ethically-minded traders.

Sedgwick and Marquand lump Van Valkenburgh with the other unscrupulous traders. Their conclusion that Van Valkenburgh controlled the Housatonic Mohicans with alcohol, rests on their assumption that Konkapot had "limited brainpower" (see above). (In other words, Konkapot needs to be lacking in brains for our authors, otherwise, he'd have been able to see how evil his friend Van Valkenburgh was.)

On page 22, Van Valkenburgh is described as "a veritable Satan."

 

So, if, as Sedgwick and Marquand have it, Van Valkenburg, the close friend of Konkapot, is the bad white man, guess who their white hero is in the first chapter? Not John Sergeant. Although they have nothing bad to say about Sergeant, their story about Stockbridge, Massachusetts only moves forward when the focus of the mission town changes. It was Ephraim Williams who made the changes in a way that those with a capitalist mindset could find admirable.

Their description of Ephraim Williams is on pages 22-23:

Williams was the typical, hard-headed pioneer who carves his way through forests, builds roads, throws out bridges and in the process rolls up for himself a handsome fortune.... [He] arrived in 1737, with...various schemes in his head for becoming a large frog in a small pond.

They don't mention that none of Williams' schemes had anything to do with the town's original mission. (To not condemn Williams comes across to me as something like approval.)

To Sedgwick and Marquand, Ephraim Williams had the support of the English ministers who had set up the mission. This may have been true at the beginning, after all Ephraim Williams' daughter Abigail married John Sergeant.

But the thing that moved the town forward into chapter two of the book was Ephraim Williams' decision to get Van Valkenburgh, the Dutch trader, out of the way. Acting on Williams' proposal, the English bought out Van Valkenburgh and his 290 acres (page 23).

I doubt that any legitimate historian claims to know much about Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh. On the other hand, historians like Lion Miles and Patrick Frazier have shown us conclusively that Ephraim Williams was a real villain. Maybe it isn't a good idea to put all the blame for the Indians getting dispossessed of their mission town on one person. But there is no question who that one person would be.

 

Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Arlo Guthire

[caption id="attachment_7237" align="aligncenter" width="426"] Arlo Guthrie, 1969[/caption]

Arlo Guthrie went to high school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Stockbridge School, a boarding school, was unique in its time because it promoted racial and ethnic diversity from its inception in the 1940's. Students were also "required to assemble after breakfast and listen to 20 minutes of recorded music...chosen by a very limited number of faculty, who provided brief commentary" according to Wikipedia.

Ray Brock, an architect by training, and his wife Alice, who had been thrown out of Sarah Lawrence College for 'supporting unpopular political causes,' started working at the Stockbridge School in 1962 (New York Times, July 30, 1969). Ray taught shop classes and Alice was the school librarian. Ray and Alice befriended some of the creative students at the school, one being Arlo Guthrie.

Arlo graduated from the Stockbridge School in 1965.  After a short attempt at college, Arlo returned to western Massachusetts and may have been one of the fifteen young friends of Ray and Alice's who were staying with them in an old church that had been purchased by Alice's mother. The series of events that would follow is well-known, having been made into an eighteen-and-a-half-minute song which was the basis of Alice's Restaurant, the movie.

If you haven't seen the movie or heard the song, the best place to get the gist of Alice's Restaurant is this npr interview from 2005.

Hollywood classified the movie as a comedy - and for good reason: it was funny.  But there was certainly something about Alice's Restaurant that spoke volumes against the Vietnam War. The song became a hippie anthem. (When Guthrie heard that President Richard Nixon owned a copy of his eighteen-and-a-half-minute song and remembered that Nixon's famous tapes had an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, he joked that there was silence on the Nixon tapes because the president was listening to his song.)

Using the internet, it isn't hard these days to find information about Alice Brock. But one thing that I read in a tribal newsletter (it was one of those papers I can no longer find, maybe I threw it away) is that the same Alice gave a tour to the Stockbridge Mohicans during one of their historical trips to the homeland in the 1970's.

 

So the musical artist who represented the young anti-establishment generation and the visual artist whose work most clearly represented the older generation were both living in the same small town: Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Norman Rockwell's most recent biographer, Deborah Solomon (American Mirror, 2013), tells us how the two men got along.

[Guthrie] and Rockwell met at least a few times. Guthrie said the introduction was made by his physician, Dr. Campbell...a longtime friend (and onetime model) of Rockwell. "All of the people Norman used as models were friends of mine," Guthrie remarked years later (396).

When touring as a solo act in either Norway or Sweden, Arlo Guthrie felt lonely. Solomon quotes his description of how he cheered up.

"I walk in to just get a beer and a sandwich somewhere and I'm sitting there and I look up on the wall and there was a picture of Dr. Campbell and the kid and a couple of other Rockwell paintings. I suddenly looked around and I thought, 'you know what, I know all of these people' and it made it so freaking nice"(397).

 

Arlo Guthrie's own site is Arlonet.

Alice Brock also has a website.

Read more about Arlo, Alice and Alice's Restaurant at The Food Timeline.

Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Norman Rockwell

As one of America's most famous painters ever, the criticism against Norman Rockwell was that he was more of an illustrator than an artist. Not only did he understand that criticism, but he struggled with it.

Rockwell began his career before television and even before color photography. At that time, magazines were the dominant visual entertainment medium and talented people like Norman Rockwell were in demand as illustrators. For many years, Rockwell - a native of New York City - was employed by the Boy Scouts and their magazine Boys' Life and by The Saturday Evening Post, for which he illustrated 321 covers.

While living in Arlington, Vermont, Rockwell's second wife, Mary, had a rather strange episode of "screaming and crying" that, according to Rockwell's most recent biographer, Deborah Solomon (2013, 269-270), had something to do with feelings she had for the family doctor. It was that same doctor, Solomon tells us, who thought Mrs. Rockwell "needed to spend some time drying out at a retreat, and he referred her to the Austen Riggs Center, a small psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts"(270).



Norman Rockwell sorely missed his wife - not just as a wife, but she also informally managed his studio - and he also worried about the gossip going around town that his wife had a crush on the doctor. To make a long story short, Norman and his sons moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to be with their wife and mother. They bought a house near the hospital campus in 1954.

The artist himself suffered from depression. In researching her book, Deborah Solomon gained access to some of Mr. Rockwell's medical records, including a letter that his psychotherapist, Erik Erikson, wrote to a colleague who was treating Mrs. Rockwell. Norman had been invited on a trip to Europe over the summer and Erikson tried to tell Mary Rockwell's doctor to let him make the trip without her. As Solomon puts it "Rockwell was tethered to an alcoholic whose drinking made her petulant and critical of his work." He couldn't take it.

In addition to the emotional toll, the therapy and hospitalizations were expensive. So - in order to pay the bills - the famous artist grudgingly took on advertising work, Solomon says, "including a campaign for Kellogg's Corn Flakes"(291). The more that money was an issue for him, the less art there was in Rockwell's work.

As much as Mary Rockwell's death in 1959 was painful for her husband, he married again. And his third wife, Molly, was more supportive of his work, encouraging him to leave the constricting Saturday Evening Post to work for Look magazine, where he had the opportunity to deal with topics like civil rights and space exploration.

In 1972 several Stockbridge Indians from Wisconsin - led by Dorothy Davids and her sister, Bernice Miller - made the trip to Stockbridge, Massachusetts where they were invited to a party at the Rockwells' house. In an e-mail sent to me about ten years ago, Dot Davids reported that they really liked Molly Rockwell a lot. It seems their impression of the artist himself was that he was sincere but not very outgoing. Nevertheless, at the time he had started a painting that depicted Konkapot and John Sergeant sitting in Sergeant's study. So you can imagine how excited Norman Rockwell was to learn that one of his Native guests, Tina Williams, was a direct descendant of Konkapot!

With many accomplishments and honors, Norman Rockwell died in 1978. However, the painting of Konkapot and John Sergeant was never finished.

 

Printed Source:

Solomon, Deborah. American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. 2013.

 

Links:

The Norman Rockwell Museum (at Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

The Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont

Norman Rockwell page on Biography.com

Norman Rockwell archives at the Saturday Evening Post

Online Smithsonian article about Rockwell