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.