The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens

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СКАЧАТЬ he revised the trope of the “poor Indian” to expose the hypocrisy of his would-be benefactors, Occom revealed the processes by which pity, under the auspices of the word poor, can be linked to the very sorts of treatment that would seem to inspire it in the first place. While I argue that missionary writings often were more about their readers than their Indian subjects, the understandings of benevolence that they developed had an immense impact on the indigenous peoples of America. The U.S. policy of Indian removal could not have been established as easily as it was without the conflicted sentiment with which the British came to regard Indians. Although this sentiment eventually shed its religious origins, it could not have developed as quickly as it did outside of a missionary context, with its concern for the fate of heathen souls. When, in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe passively witnessed and then mourned the death of Friday, he was imitating the missionaries as much as he had done when he first converted his fantastically loyal servant.⁷⁰

      The final chapter of this book comments on the history of American Indians’ erasure—in British minds if not in reality—through religious pity and ineffectual benevolence. One of my goals in writing this book has been to prevent the continued repetition of this sentimental erasure in our contemporary culture. I have worked from the conviction that we will never be able truly to hear Indians within texts authored by colonizers until we understand how it is that colonial discourse silenced them. Precisely because they often expressed sincere pity for Indians, and because they protested their own culture’s treatment of Indians even as they gave their culture the rhetorical tools to support that treatment, missionary writings present an important area for analysis. My hope is that studies like this one will complement the work of other scholars to illuminate imperial history from the perspective of Indians and other conquered peoples. Only by understanding the mechanics by which benevolence can erase its object, especially in a sentimental and a colonial framework, can we then see those pitied objects more accurately as real people who actively sought to resist or mitigate the effects of colonization on their own cultures.

      What Is a Missionary Writing?

      Because I am more concerned with portrayals of mission than with the events of missionary work, I use the term missionary writing loosely. It denotes the journals, letters, and reports written by ministers trying to covert American Indians and other non-Christian peoples, but it also includes sermons, letters, and genres usually marked as literary, written by people raising money for, or merely thinking about, missionary work. My concerns with transatlantic reception and the culture of sensibility as well as my footing in literary study often steer me to focus on the latter group of texts. I make some references to the earliest Indian converts in English colonies and to the first organized English attempt to convert Indians, the establishment of Henrico College in Jamestown from 1620 until the Powhatan massacre of 1622. I also occasionally draw upon promotional writings of the Virginia Company.⁷¹ For the most part, however, my study ranges from the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642 to the beginning of the American Revolution in 1776.

      I chose these dates because they coincide roughly with the beginnings and ends of sustained, as opposed to extremely short-lived, missionary efforts in the parts of America that would become the United States. I also chose them because they bracket an era when missionaries would rely on the transatlantic circulation of print to generate an English and then British identity through shared feeling for America’s Indians. The parish collection authorized by James I in 1616 would seem to provide the only English missionary writings that precede this era.⁷² While the few letters printed for this project may have provided a model for later writings, they did not have to demand their audience’s attention within the larger and less regulated print culture that developed during the English Civil War.⁷³ They also did not have to construct English cohesion against the background of domestic conflict, a factor that enhanced the unifying force of later missionary projects. While sharing much with their predecessors, English-language missionary writings produced after the American Revolution were markedly different in their imaginative range, their audience, and their tone. Emerging from evangelical movements and from the dynamic leadership of figures such as William Carey, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionary writings reflected a new global consciousness, an altered sense of national and imperial identity, and an enlarged audience that openly included women.⁷⁴

      Although most of the texts I study were composed in English and for a transatlantic British audience, it is important also to understand their place within an international framework. Many writers of English missionary texts were aware of missions launched from other European countries. Sometimes these dealt with Protestant projects, such as August Hermann Francke’s Missionsnachrichten, an account of Danish and German efforts in India and then in other lands that he began to publish serially in 1710.⁷⁵ More often British missionaries worked under the shadow of Roman Catholic missionary orders, especially the Jesuits, whose Relations had been distributed throughout Europe since the early seventeenth century. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism, John Dryden dedicated his translation of Dominick Bohours’s Life of St. Francis Xavier to Queen Mary of Modena shortly after the birth of her son. This text constituted a celebration of a Catholic successor to the throne as well as an implicit critique of the Church of England’s failure to show substantial concern for heathen souls.⁷⁶ English writings displayed defensiveness about Protestant projects, which revealed some acquaintance with Catholic successes. In their refutation of Catholic mission, these texts were central to the forging of a modern Protestant and British identity against the foil of Catholicism.

      The missionary writings divide into five basic groups connected with the main denominations active in North America before the American Revolution.⁷⁷ The first group includes texts connected with The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Established by the Long Parliament in 1649 and rechartered after the Restoration as the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the parts adjacent in America, the New England Company (as it was commonly called and as I shall refer to it) was at first a corporation of sixteen persons, merchants and Independent or Presbyterian clergymen, who publicized the cause of converting Indians, collected funds in England, and sent money across the Atlantic to be distributed by the Commissioners of the United Colonies.⁷⁸ Robert Boyle, better known for his scientific work, became the company’s president after the Restoration. From the Restoration until Boyle’s death in 1691 the group’s membership covered a moderately wide range of religious and class positions.⁷⁹ On the whole, however, the group retained a Dissenting majority. The missionaries it supported emphasized a Calvinist, mostly Congregational creed.

      These missionaries included John Eliot, who established the praying Indian towns that housed more than one thousand Massachusett and Narragansett converts in New England, several generations of the Mayhew family (who converted the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket), and a handful of ministers scattered throughout the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. In the eighteenth century this group helped fund Jonathan Sergeant’s work with the Housatonic Indians of Stockbridge, the work of Gideon Hawley among the Mashpees of Cape Cod, and Joseph Fish’s efforts among the Narragansetts of Rhode Island.⁸⁰ When the American Revolution began, the company abandoned its efforts in New England to focus on Canada. Although several figures were connected with both groups, the New England Company is different from the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge among the Indians in North America, which was established by the Massachusetts General Assembly in 1762. This organization failed to obtain royal confirmation for its founding, but it was reestablished in 1787 as the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and others in North America.⁸¹

      The New England Company printed some of the eleven “Indian tracts” during the seventeenth century, which contain reports from missionaries, testimonials from Indian converts, letters from supporters, and pleas for money, prayers, and supplies.⁸² It also subsidized the publishing of Algonquian translations of the Bible, an Indian primer, and several religious tracts, which John Eliot completed with the help of Nesuton and James Printer, two native assistants.⁸³ Eliot published СКАЧАТЬ