Red Brethren by David J. Silverman

Author:David J. Silverman [Silverman, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies, Religion, Ethnic & Tribal, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9781501704796
Google: W0qGCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-06-21T22:26:05+00:00

“Wo, Wo, Wo”

From the very start, the Christian Indians had seen their communities as fragile experiments. The Oneidas recruited Kirkland back to his missionary post after the Revolution with the promise that they would make “one trial more” of Christianity and that “if there be no encouragement after this that we shall be built up as a people and embrace the religion of jesus he may leave us & we shall expect nothing but ruin.”47 A group of Montauketts visiting Brothertown in the spring of 1790 thought similarly. They told Kirkland that “their whole Nation have it in contemplation to move up into this wilderness” because they saw “a probability that God may build up their Nation.” They admitted being “afraid Indians would not work like white people,” but “they farther observed that if they thought they could all be united with regard to religion, they would move up and make one eff ort to live like white people, and leave the issue with that God who governed all the Nations of the Earth.”48 The Indians’ assumption was that God rewarded his faithful and punished his enemies in the here and now, not only in the afterlife. The question that plagued Indians in the 1790s was how to account for whites becoming “strong & great” through their low avarice and Indians degenerating into “nothing but a wreck of bones” despite their Christian efforts.49

Most Indians agreed that the root cause of their troubles was whites’ greedy scheming, something they attributed to whites’ basic character. “Indians have been so often deceived by white people,” observed Timothy Pickering after several visits to Oneida country, “that White Man is, among many of them, but another name for Liar.”50 This opinion was so widespread as to be shared by the Oneidas’ Pagan Peter (as he was called with no hint of irony), leader of that tribe’s Nativist faction, and Samson Occom. Pagan Peter railed that “The White skin race as a body have become proud. And some of you too proud. You glory in your riches, your great & commodious houses, your large fields & your abundance. You wear a white shirt & sometimes it is ruffled. And you despise us Indians for our indigence, our poor huts, our scanty food, & our dirty shirts.” Whites touted themselves as Christians, but Pagan Peter found them to be anything but Christ-like. “Brother Whiteskin Man,” he asked rhetorically, “do you think that God our Maker . . . will make such a discrimination by & by or in the end. . . . A foul spirit may be concealed in a body richly clothed & a pure heart may reside unseen in another covered only in rags. God our maker will judge right in respect to the worth of souls, whatever complexion the bodies wear.”51 His words were barely distinguishable from Occom’s, whose sermons after the Revolution shifted from the themes of universal Christian fellowship and the need for Indians to reform to a critique of whites in which Indians were the Christian standard bearers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.