How the Housatonic Mohicans Opened the Door to the Stockbridge Mission

Two of my recent posts, spirituality and Reactions to the Hard Times Brought on by White Contact and Death of the Spirit: How did the Eastern Woodland Indians Lose their Traditional Religion? were written in general or abstract terms. But even as I was writing them, I was trying to locate a quote that describes the Mohicans on the Housatonic River in 1734 as having a variety of religious beliefs. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find that quote.

The title of one of my two recent posts borrowed the phrase "Death of the Spirit" from a chapter title in Patrick Frazier's The Mohicans of Stockbridge. The phrase is simply a poetic way of saying that the Mohican religion was no longer intact after 125 years of white contact.

Maybe this should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: the disasters of the fur trade didn't damage the Mohicans' need for spirituality. (Otherwise why would they have ever accepted a new religion?) Instead, the fur trade irreparably damaged the Mohicans' orally transmitted system of rituals and beliefs.

Konkapot and Umpachenee, the chiefs of the two Housatonic villages, were approached by the British with the offer of a Christian mission. The proposal was discussed and debated in council in July of 1734.

It was not a decision that the residents of the two villages took lightly. The council lasted four days! And the winning argument - coming down on the side in favor of Christianity - was made by Poohpoonuc. When translated into English (by Nathaniel Appleton, see bibliography below), Poohpoonuc's argument sounded like this:

Since my remembrance, there were ten Indians where now there is one. But the Christians greatly increase and multiply and spread across the land. Let us therefore leave our former courses and become Christians.

Does that sound like a religious statement to you? Maybe not, but it is a religious statement in the context of the things Gregory Evans Dowd wrote about on page 19 of A Spirited Resistance. Dowd said that Indians were trying to understand the disasters they endured in the context of sacred power. And some Indians decided that there was more sacred power in Christianity. This explains why the Housatonic Mohicans accepted a Christian mission. But it also explains more. A lot more.

By 1737 the Mohicans had a missionary that was preaching in their own language and, according to Patrick Frazier (page 37), Indians came "from near and far" to listen to the sermons and "witness the new Indian life." Some of those visiting Indians permanently joined the tribe. For that reason, (and others) I continue to believe that Christianity was an essential element in the history of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

 

Printed Sources:

Appleton, Nathaniel. Gospel ministers Must be Fit for the Master's Use. (An ordination sermon, printed by S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1735.)

Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

 
[mc4wp_form]

Quanah Parker: A Leader in Changing Times

[caption id="attachment_1953" align="aligncenter" width="346"] This photo of Quanah Parker was recently shared by somebody over the Google+ network.[/caption]

A good article about Comanche Chief Quanah Parker appeared in the February 2014 issue of American History magazine. I cannot give you a link to that particular article, but this short biography is also a good read.

Like Little Turtle and other chiefs described in Algonkian Church History, Quanah Parker succeeded in straddling two different worlds. He led the Comanches both in war and in peace.

Parker took his last name from his mother who - as a nine-year-old white girl - was captured by the Comanches and eventually grew to love them and their way of life.

He was also a shrewd businessman, striking deals with cattle ranchers that would bring over $200,000 a year to the Comanche, Kiowa and Apache Indians by 1900 (page 32 of the article, see citation at the bottom of this post).

My favorite part of the American History article is a paragraph that pithily describes the middle road that Quanah Parker took. On one hand, it mentions he sent his children to "Carlisle and other Indian schools in Comanche territory." On the other hand, "when asked by one official to end the parctice of polygamy by choosing among his seven wives, Quanah teased that he was willing to pick one, 'but you must tell the others'" (page 34).

 

Source: Frankel, Glenn. "Between Two Worlds: Quanah Parker, Son of a Comanche Warrior and a White Woman, Gracefully Bridged a Cultural Divide," in American History, vol 48, no. 6 (February, 2014), pages 30-35.

 

[mc4wp_form]

Answers to Questions about Stock-Mo-History

Instead of being about history, this blogpost is about the website itself.  The first four questions are about the name of this website.

 

Q1: In a comment to the post prior to this one, Molly Miller, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee, wrote "many elders do not like being referred to as stockmo." Please respond to that.

A: Let us not confuse the name of this website with the name of a proud and determined tribe of Indians, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. If we take Molly's complaint - as quoted above - literally, it sounds like the elders are accusing me of trying to change the name of the tribe to the "Stock-Mo's," which seems kind of silly. But I'll say one more thing: It was never my intent to offend anybody.

 

Q2: But people still want to know why you call your website "Stock-Mo-History"?

A: According to web-building experts,  the name of a website and its url should be short and catchy, something that people will find easy to remember. I'd had a blog since 2008 called Algonkian Church History and I had to admit to myself that it was not a catchy name and would not be easy for people to remember.

 

Q3: But you're still using the name "Algonkian Church History" as the title of the blog, which makes up most of the content of this site?

A: That's right. I like that name for a number of reasons, including the fact that it encompasses the history of Indians from many tribes.

 

Q4: So when will you consider getting rid of the name "Stock-Mo-History"?

A: I've paid for that domain name for the minimum three-year term. So, after a total of three years.

 

Q5: Who is the intended audience of "Stock-Mo-History"?

A: Anybody who is interested in the subject matter of any of the pages or posts. I'm proud that one set of regular visitors to my blog since 2008 has been teachers and students of K-12 school districts in Wisconsin.  I also can tell you that a lot of  Mohican descendants (who aren't necessarily enrolled members of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community) not only read my blogposts, but they also contact me.

 

Q6: Are any changes in store for the blog?

A: Yes, I've said and written in a number of places that I don't want the blog to be about me or about my viewpoints only. There will be video interviews on upcoming posts. (In other words, I will be interviewing some Indians). I'm excited about that.

 

Q7: How do comments work on this site?

A: Anybody can submit comments to any page or blogpost - I filter the comments for spam, but I won't filter out negative or critical comments, within reason.

 

Q8: What do I do if I want to contribute content to the site?

A: If you have more than just a comment, please contact me at siemerscreek at yahoo dot com. There are other ways to get in touch with me if you go to the "Stockbridge Mohican History" tab and scroll down.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Death of the Spirit: How did the Eastern Woodland Indians Lose their Traditional Religion?

[caption id="attachment_1367" align="aligncenter" width="403"] Oral historians, storytellers and other leaders (including African griots) in oral cultures transmited the knowledge that most of us now get from films, books, and websites. Photo credit[/caption]

Yesterday's post was about how Native Americans reacted to the disasters of colonialism - in terms of their spirituality and/or religion. It brought up a fair amount of discussion on Facebook and I'll get to that later in this post.


From time to time I like to remind readers that in the 1700's religion wasn't separate from everything else. I suppose there was some separation for Christians who had a Sabbath Day that was different from the other six "ordinary" days, but for Indians prior to white contact, religion - or "spirituality," if that is the term you prefer - was simply part of the fabric of their lives.

When game was still plentiful, Indians would say a prayer for the spirit of an animal after they killed it. So religion and the hunting economy were intertwined.

But - as we know - things changed. They changed for the worse. With the coming of the fur trade, Indians exchanged furs for the things they needed - and sometimes they exchanged the furs for firewater instead of for what they needed. Either way, the demand for furs that came from whites resulted in forests with less game. Hunting became more difficult and the practice of praying for the spirit of an animal after you killed it became extinct. Economics started to become separate from religion/spirituality.

That is one partial explanation for the erosion of traditional Native religion. But what follows is another, more comprehensive explanation.

After reading my post yesterday, a Native Facebook friend of mine made another point. (By the way, what he wrote on Facebook is also an agreed-upon reality amongst scholarly historians.) Anyway, my friend Shawn Stevens pointed out that diseases that came from Europe, like smallpox and measles, killed so many Indians from the Algonquian language family, and killed them off so fast, that it - indirectly - pretty much destroyed traditional Native religion. Not having a paper trail, traditional beliefs and rituals only survived when they were passed along orally from one generation to the next. The epidemics made that impossible.
[mc4wp_form]

Sprituality and Reactions to the Hard Times Brought on by White Contact

[caption id="attachment_1324" align="aligncenter" width="231"] The front cover of Gregory Evans Dowd's book.[/caption]

The first decades of white contact were very difficult for Native Americans for a number of reasons. But the disasters of colonialism are not the subject of this post, only the introduction. What I really want to address now  is that there were a variety of ways that Native Americans "reacted" to their most difficult and changing times.

In A Spirited Resistance, Gregory Evans Dowd (page 19) says that the troubles that resulted from white contact "brought about... a debate over the efficacy of sacred power."

Dowd's discussion of Indians' reactions to the hard times of colonialism gets more complicated from there. Nevertheless, I'm going to quote him at length.  As you read his quote, try to put yourself in the mocassins of a Native person trying to explain the disasters that followed white contact. How might you interpret the sufferings of your people?

For some, it was apparent that the Anglo-Americans were simply more powerful and that the Indians' sacred powers had failed them. These Indians sought survival and even gain in cooperation, at least of a limited kind, with the Anglo-American or European powers. Others, in a more moderate stance, sought to decipher the secrets of Ango-American strength, and made efforts to incorporate those secrets into their own way of living. Then there were those who understood that they had failed in their committments to the sacred powers, particularly the Great Spirit, the remote Creator who became increasingly important, probably under the influence of Christiainity (19).

Then Dowd tells us that it was that last belief, the mindset of some Indians that they themselves had somehow "failed in their committments to the sacred powers," that was the "central premise of the militant, pan-religious movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries"(19)

As I think back over some of the various visions of Native prophets that launched their movements, and as I also review in my mind the reasons other Indians gave for becoming Christians, I have to agree wholeheartedly with Dowd. What do you think?

[mc4wp_form]

What Were the Long-Term Effects of the Gnadenhutten Massacre?

This is the fifth in a series of five posts. If you haven't already read the post in which the Gnadenhutten Massacre of 1782 is described, please read it here.

 

When the Pennsylvania militia managed to kill ninety-six innocent Indians, only two boys were lucky to survive. But, like any village, the Indians at Gnadenhutten had family and friends that lived in other communities and this post is about how the massacre affected those other survivors.

[caption id="attachment_1288" align="alignleft" width="225"] Clinton A. Weslager (1909-1994) wrote several books about the Delaware Indians. In this photo he is [obviously] thinking about something very different from the Gnadenhutten Massacre.[/caption]

In addition to the normal emotional process of mourning that friends and family go through, the Gnadenhutten Massacre had a strong effect on the thinking or the mindset of Delaware Indians from other villages. On page 35 of my book, Proud and Determined, I quote historian Clinton A. Weslager who wrote

The belief was widely held that the Moravian missionaries at Gnadenhutten made the Indians "tame" in order to soften them for destruction and, after taming them, summoned the American soldiers to kill them.

Roughly twenty years later, this belief or mindset was still evident when the Moravians tried to get another mission going.

Weslager continues:

When the Moravian mission was established on [Indiana's] White River, news went from one Delaware village to another that these missionaries were also under orders from the United States government to tame the Delawares and that those foolish enough to accept Christianity would soon be "knocked in the head."

For that (and other reasons) it really shouldn't surprise us that the Moravians' White River mission never succeeded.

Source: Weslager, Clinton A. The Delaware Indians: A History, New Brunswick , New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1972, page 342.

Read more about Clinton Weslager and his books at John P. Reid's Collecting Delaware Books site.
[mc4wp_form]

What was the American Indian Population in 1492?

What was the population of Turtle Island (North America) in 1492?

The answer is.... We don't know.

But that isn't for a lack of trying. No doubt learned scholars have made estimates.

And they vary widely.

 

Russell Thornton, a professor of Anthropology, includes a chapter called "American Indian Population in 1492," in his book,  American Indian Holocaust and Survival. According to Thornton

Overall, there seems little relationship between the types of data and methodologies used in estimating American Indian population sizes and the resulting estimates. Competent scholars have used the same basic data and the same basic techniques to yield very high or very low estimated populations (page 34).

Thornton's research led him to conclude that it wasn't the sets of data nor the statistical research methods used that determined a population estimate, but rather, as he put it, "the psychologies of the scholars themselves." He determined that scholars "holding the idea of elaborate and extensive societies will...generally hold the idea also of large numbers of people"(35).

Another factor had to do with the scholars' view of history after contact with whites. Thornton says that "if we consider history to have been especially destructive to aboriginal people of the Western Hemisphere, then we assume larger aboriginal numbers than if we consider subsequent history to have been "kinder"(35).

Another aspect of the researchers' "psychology" is simply that they were aware of the numbers coming from other researchers and so the population estimates also correspond - at least to some extent - with changing trends, for a decade or two they might tend toward high numbers and for the next ten or twenty years following that, the estimates would tend to be low.

So I'm not going to bother to give you any numbers at all (not in this post, at least). The best answer still is that we simply don't know how many Indians lived on Turtle Island in 1492.

[mc4wp_form]