Dorothy Ripley's Mission to the New York Indians (part 2)

[caption id="attachment_9025" align="alignright" width="231"] Independent missionary Dorothy Ripley self-published her journal as "The Bank of Faith and Works United."[/caption]

As we saw in part 1, Englishwoman Dorothy Ripley's 1805 mission to the New York Indians included preaching to the Stockbridge Mohicans and the Oneidas.

After being put up in the home of a white Quaker, Ms. Ripley went on to minister to the Brothertown Indians. She found these Christian Indians - like Christian whites of that time - to be divided on the question of who can be saved.

I went to Brothertown to collect the Indians there together, in the school-house.... Those Indians were Baptists, divided into two classes, one part believed in election, and the other in free salvation. Where I was, they had refused their minister, because they said "They would not worship such a cruel God as he served, as He only took care of a part of his creatures," and drew this comparison, by asking a question concerning their women: "Would not she be a cruel mother, who having two children, took one and nursed it; and left the other to perish? So we will worship a God who takes care of all His children;" which I think was an excellent conclusion and a sound argument was advanced to show how far an Indian is capable of believing in the Living and True God.

A couple days later Dorothy Ripley was back in New Stockbridge, New York.

A meeting was held again in Stockbridge, for the instruction of the poor Natives, who are dear to me. There are some of the [Delaware] Jersey Indians among this tribe, and the whole number here, are rising three hundred... This day two of the missionaries, and a young clergyman were present, while my soul was earnestly engaged for the good of the Indians; but I verily believe by their proceedings it was their opinion that a woman ought not to preach: for one of them said afterwards, had I "come to teach them to knit and sew it would be very well."

At the moment of her departure, the women of the tribe presented Dorothy Ripley with an address, which had actually been written by Captain Hendrick, the Mohican chief that was serving as her interpreter:

Dear Sister,
We the poor women of the Muhheconnuk nation, wish to speak [a] few words to you to inform you that while our forefathers were sitting by the side of their ancient fireplace, about eighty years ago, our father, Rev. Mr. Sergeant's father, came amongst them with the message of the Great and Good Spirit, which he then began to deliver to them. He was the first minister of the gospel that ever preached to our fathers, and the Great and Good Spirit blessed his labors, by which means many of our poor natives were turned from darkness to light....

You can continue reading this on page 111 of The Bank of Faith and Works United.

Dorothy Ripley's Mission to the New York Indians in 1805 (part 1)

[caption id="attachment_9014" align="aligncenter" width="672"] Known as "New Stockbridge" in 1805, the present-day village of Stockbridge, New York has retained it's rural character for more than 200 years.[/caption]

 

Born in 1767 in the quaint seaside town of Whitby, in Yorkshire, England, Dorothy Ripley felt called to the ministry as a teenager (or perhaps sooner). Since she did not work under the auspices of an organized church or mission society, her remarkable career is not particularly well-documented. We know that she made at least ten and possibly as many as nineteen mission trips across the Atlantic. Perhaps her specialty was slaves and free blacks in the south. But she ministered to other Americans, including  prisoners, and, the New York Indians.

Ripley's journal, published by her as The Bank of Faith and Works United is worth reading for anybody trying to understand what it meant to be a Christian Indian in 1805. Here she tells of her meeting with the Stockbridge Mohicans.

I went to their church, which is distinguished by a steeple, that you can see some distance off. It is a neat, clean wood building, with glass windows and a handsome entrance, having a gallery some distance off. It is a neat, clean, wood building, with glass windows and a handsome entrance, having a gallery all round excepting where the minister sits. The minister took his seat in the pulpit, desiring me to sit in a pew underneath, where three of his daughters sat alongside of me, dressed as fashionable as any women in middle rank, although there were but few to see them, except the Indians who all came with a blanket round them, unless it were the young men and women who were foolishly hung with feathers, and head tires of bright tin mettle. The Indians fantastically dressed, sung a psalm feelingly which moved my passion of love, so that I wept all the time tears of joy. After this [Rev. John Sergeant] prayed in Indian and then in English, and gave out a second psalm, which was sung as the other admirably. The minister then read part of the fourteenth chapter of Mark, which Captain Hendrick, a Chief, also read in Indian; and I was at liberty to preach to them as long as I thought proper, or in other words, while my master furnished me with matter for the occasion, having desired Him to be both Mouth and Wisdom to me..... (100-101)

Ripley may have spent more time writing about her preaching and how she felt about it than about the Indians she was preaching to. After she was done preaching

Many of the Indians gladly took my by the hand, which affectionately I saluted after the same manner, knowing One God was our Father, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of all (102).

Later that week, Dorothy Ripley was with the Oneidas. She confirmed something that male missionaries had previously noted. Only one of the Oneida men, an old chief named Skanando, was an active Christian. The way Ripley says this sounds judgmental to my modern ears:

The women are much better than the men and have a greater knowledge of God before their eyes, which preserves them from intoxication, and other evils, that the men are liable to be overtaken with, when they are deprived of their reason by strong drink.

Stay tuned. Later that week we'll see what happens when Dorothy Ripley visits the Brothertown Indians.

Causes and Consequences of King Philip's War

 

[caption id="attachment_9004" align="aligncenter" width="461"] "Early American Conflict" is by an unknown artist who was not a witness to King Philip's War.[/caption]

In my previous post, we saw that the New England Indians in the 1600's were selective at first in what aspects of white culture and Christianity they would take on.

But, as often happens, one thing led to another and the once tentative converts gradually became the praying Indians, taking on more white ways than before. So missionaries like John Eliot and other influential English people helped the converted Indians gain status outside of traditional Native social systems. And that created tensions - or intensified existing tensions - between the praying Indians and the Indians who were still trying to walk a traditional path.

 

Exactly why King Philip (aka Metacomet, a Wampanoag chief) decided to attack the English is a complex question, but his intention of doing so didn't start the war. As word spread among that Natives that King Philip was preparing to fight, John Eliot's scribe, a Natick Indian named John Sassamon, warned his white friends. Sassamon was murdered. Three Indians were accused and tried based on the testimony of only one witness. Maybe a war over race and culture would have happened anyway, but the murder of Sassamon and the trial that came after it made war a sure thing.

And, as I stated in an earlier post, King Philip's War was one of the bloodiest in American history. It was devastating to the "traditional" Indians, devastating to the praying Indians and devastating to the English. Harold Van Lonkhuyzen tells us that King Philip's War:

changed the context of English-Indian relations and terminated the special relationship that had allowed the two communities to derive mutual benefits from each other. Engendering a wave of vicious anti-Indian feeling, the war encouraged the English to believe that all Indians were 'fiendish sons of Satan' and threats to God's people.

And the hard feelings were mutual. The Christian Indians never regained the trust they had for the English.

How the Natick Indians Became Christians

[caption id="attachment_8984" align="aligncenter" width="753"] Native Christianity reached a peak in 1674. King Philip's War proved to be disastrous for the praying Indians. Many of them died or were forced into servitude or even slavery.[/caption]

John Eliot started preaching to Indians in the 1640's, but he didn't get his first convert until 1652. That convert was Waban. Waban himself was quoted in an award-winning scholarly article published in 1990.

After the great sickness [an epidemic in 1633-34], I considered what the English do; and I had some desire to do as they do; and  after that I began to work as they work; and then I wondered how the English came to be so strong to labor.

At the same time, one of the first things that the women of Waban's band wanted to learn from John Eliot was how to spin wool into cloth.

Taking that and other data that had been recorded prior to 1730, the historian, Harold Van Lonkhuyzen, comes to the conclusion that "Indians' individual motivations in first adopting Christianity... appear to have been highly specific, rather modest, and perhaps not at all what the missionaries might have wished."

This, of course, doesn't mean that the praying Indians of New England didn't gradually learn about the religion that was brought to them from across the Atlantic. But they didn't become complete Christians quickly. Van Lonkhuyzen puts it this way:

These Indians were eager to make use of European goods and technologies as a means not of abandoning, but of fulfilling their traditional way of life.

To put it simply, the Indians were selective. Aspects of Christianity that they came to embrace tended to have some kind of function in their traditional mindset. One example that Van Lonkhuyzen gives is the "considerable evidence that one of the major attractions of praying to God was the protection it offered from the sorcery of the powwows [that is, the shamans or medicine men]."

According to Van Lonkhuyzen, the Indian converts were "trying to enhance rather than abandon their traditional order [and] tried to take only what they wanted of the missionary program."

 

The Praying Indians: The Unlikely and Tenuous Survival of John Eliot's Converts

As of about 1670, about one-fourth of New England's Natives were Christians. They lived in fourteen towns, the first and most important being Natick, Massachusetts.

Like Christian Indians that would come generations after them, the so-called praying Indians were "neither fish nor foul." It is hard to put them in a category. Although they had adopted some white ways, they weren't actually trying to be white. And although they were genuine Natives, they were living in "towns" instead of villages, so they weren't recognized as political units in any larger Native nation.



So the uniquely vulnerable praying Indians became refugees - or maybe it would be more accurate to say they were prisoners of war. Here's how the praying Indians website describes it.

In the winter of 1675, fueled by fears of King Phillip (Metacom), [the] mighty Wampanoag Chief, the colonists removed the Natick Praying Indians to Deer Island. At midnight in the month of October, holding their Bibles and with [their missionary, John] Eliot seeking to comfort them, they were taken to Deer Island in Boston Harbor where they were confined. The first Praying Indian Village of Natick suffered severely. Abandoned by their colonial Christian brethren, the Natick Praying Indians were left unprotected on the frigid Island. A month later the Praying Indian Villages of Ponkapoag (Stoughton, MA) and Nashoba (Littleton, MA) were added to the tragic confinement from 1675-1676. By this time the other villages received news of the imprisonment and either fled or joined Metacom, the Wompanoag Chief also known as King Phillip by the colonists for his military prowess. Natives captured were also placed on Long Island in Boston Harbor. However [due to factors such as] little clothing, starvation and enforced deprivation including being forbidden to light fires, hunt game or build shelters, most lives were lost. The young, the old, the pregnant and the weak could not survive. Most of the Indians died of cold and starvation. The sad story is documented of the elderly Eliot going by boat to bring supplies to the Natives and being capsized by angered colonists. During the Island imprisonment some of the praying Indians were coerced into spying and fighting for the colonist. History would eventually misconstrue this bid for the freedom of death and suffering...as weakness and dishonorable betrayal to their Native heritage.

It was long believed that King Philip's War wiped out the praying Indians. Instead, their loss in numbers weakened them to the point that they became invisible. But they lived on, remaining in the east, and they arguably still exist, at least to the point of having a website.

Without a doubt, the praying Indians stayed together at least until 1790, as the subtitle of a book about them makes clear. The Amazon page for Jean M. O'Brien's Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 was used as a source for this post.