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.
[…] we saw in part 1, Englishwoman Dorothy Ripley’s 1805 mission to the New York Indians included preaching to the […]
ReplyDelete