Reading Saving Paradise: Chapter 13

Weeping encounters: 
Re-reading American history

Language families in North America (Algic = Algonquin)

The Algonquin peoples of the north-eastern woodlands used the word manitou to convey their sense of life-giving powers everywhere – powers they found and respected in every living thing.  Religious rituals – including dance, trance, dreams, and ecstatic experiences – grounded their daily lives, as well as their trade relationships and political alliances. 

Tribes came together for the annual Feast of the Dead.  These rituals lamenting their dead were followed by the exchange of gifts, feasting, and dancing. These feasts sustained inter-tribal treaties, and were also used to incorporate new members into the tribe. 

Lamentation for the dead also played a role in how tribes reacted to strangers.  Adoption rituals welcomed newcomers as replacements for the tribe’s dead, and sealed bonds of mutual assistance.  Friendship feasts and dancing followed the ritual. 

So when they first encountered Europeans, Natives responded with rituals from their own tradition.  For instance, in 1607 Chief Wahunsenaca, leader of the Powhatan confederacy, wanted to make the English settlers his allies against the Spanish.  And so, when John Smith was ‘captured’ by the Powhatans, he was actually being ‘welcomed’ in the Powhatan ritual. (Understanding this helps us see Pocahontas’ story in a new light.  When she ‘saved’ Smith, she was performing an element in the traditional adoption ritual, not a spontaneous act of pity.  See Pocahontas’ story according to the Powhatans, p. 345)

But the opportunity for mutual alliance was lost on the Jamestown English. Wahunsenaca expected the English to behave as members of the Powhatan confederacy, but the colonists were there to gain land and take goods. 

A lamentation welcome

Algonquian territory

Between 1616-1619, European traders brought the plague to the Northeast coast, killing up to 90% of four Algonquin tribes.   After the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, the remnants of the Wampanoag tribe kept out of sight for months, observing the newcomers. 

The Pilgrims lived in hope of help and fear of attack from the ‘savages,’ whose stores of corn helped to keep them alive. Finally, during the winter and early spring, the Wampanoag began their traditional ritual of approaching a new people: they built bonfires near enough for the pilgrims to see the smoke.  But the Pilgrims interpreted the several days of Wampanoag rituals behind the hill as a demonic effort to drive them away. Believing they were about to be attacked, they prepared for battle. 

While the Pilgrims were planning their defense, Samoset (an adopted member of the Wampanoag tribe who spoke English) came to their meeting.  Samoset told the Pilgrims about the various tribes in the area and their concerns about the English. The great Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, arrived a few days later.  The meeting produced a peace treaty.

The relationship between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims held for nearly half a century, as long as Massasoit lived.  As the Pilgrims’ community grew, however, their behavior increasingly baffled and outraged the Natives: the Pilgrims interpreted the kinship agreement as a sign that they could impose their religion and laws on the Wampanoag.  From the very start, the Pilgrims could not picture the Wampanoag as their kin.  

Paradise through Puritan eyes

In the English Puritans’ religious imagination, the ‘wilderness’ was a place of trial and opportunity. Entering into it would become a contest against evil, a process of purification, and a pathway to the apocalyptic recovery of paradise.  They came to ‘raise Eden in the wilderness’, not to form alliances with the Natives. 

Inheritors of Calvinist iconoclasm, the Puritans distrusted their senses. They believed the world was filled with deceptive images, and that life was a test of faith that could earn them a future paradise as the covenanted elect.   While the Algonquins believed that careful observation was the key to understanding whether manitou were sinister or friendly, the Puritans believed that scripture was the most reliable guide to truth.  Hence they could not relate to the New World without ever-vigilant suspicion that called every new thing into question.  Thus ‘sealed up’ within their covenantal community, whose source of peace was outside of time and place, the Puritans were ill equipped to engage with the inhabitants of the New World. 

Puritan theology also included war as a way to destroy evil and fulfill God’s purposes.  Their myth of regeneration through violence taught them that this present world is only a means to the end; to establish the next world of paradise, evil must be identified and destroyed. (see pages 351 and 504)

In  1636, a Puritan militia massacred more than 400 Pequots; back at Plymouth Plantation, the English regarded the massacre as occasion for thanksgiving.   

Waves of colonists then began arriving from England.  As the new settlers chopped down forests and expanded farmland, they crowded Native towns and farms.  (Within 100 years, the eastern landscape would be denuded of its forests, and wildlife was depleted or extinct.)

Conquest through conversion

Nashabo, a 'Praying Village' - today's Littleton, Massachusetts

After the Pequot massacre, the Puritans turned to converting the Algonquin peoples.  John Eliot, an English missionary, found similarities between Native religion and Christianity, and recognized the sacredness imbued in certain Native rituals and prayers. From the Native perspective, Christians had no dances, images, or spiritual presences; neither did Christians seem to understand their own moral teachings. 

But eventually a small number of Natives became 'Praying Indians'.  By 1675 there were 14 “Praying Villages” near the Massachusetts Bay Colony; these towns gave them legal land rights but also isolated them from non-Christian Natives. The English expected the Praying Indians to farm the land rather than hunt and gather, and to give up their egalitarian gender roles.  But the Natives did preserve elements of their own heritage, creating hybrid expressions of Christianity.  (The Massachusetts Bible, translated by their efforts as well as Puritans, taught them Christianity and preserved their language.)

But the Puritans relegated Praying Indians to an inferior status among the elect, and they ostracized Indian sympathizers among themselves.  The Praying Towns were the first racially segregated communities in north America – beginning the practice of Indian reservations, and the Indian boarding schools that continue to this day. 

Prelude to war

John Sassamon, a Praying Indian who was bilingual and bicultural, worked as an interpreter for the Puritans during the Pequot war.  He taught John Eliot the Massachusetts language and helped him translate the Bible.  When  Eliot sent Sassamon to Rhode Island to start a mission  among the Wampanoag, Sassamon developed deep ties with chief Metacom (whom the English settlers named King Philip).  This made Sassomon suspect in the eyes of the English and some of the Praying Indians.   The peace broke down when Sassamon was murdered in 1675.  It has never been determined whether Natives or colonists were responsible for his death; but three Wampanoag were convicted and hanged. 

With the Sassamon trial, the English had asserted dominion over the law – a development some have termed “legal imperialism.”  Sixteen days after the execution of the convicted Natives, Wampanoag warriors attached a village, killing nine colonists.  King Philip’s War had begun. 

In the end, all the Wampanoags were defeated.  By the time the war was over, nearly half of New England’s 95 settlements had been laid waste, many burned to the ground.  Approximately 17% of the English – and nearly 50% of the Natives – had died from disease, starvation, or warfare.  The Boston Puritans hastily rounded up residents of the Praying Towns and interned them on Deer Island.  John Eliot strenuously objected, but his pleas went unheeded and most of the Natives starved or froze to death.  At the war’s end, the Puritans sold the few survivors into slavery. 

Roger Williams, long a friend of the Wampanoags, thought his own community would be spared.  But the Wampanoag burned it to the ground – telling Williams that the English had forced them to it.  They described the settlers’ way of war as outside their own cultural system: Puritans conceived of a God capable of total destruction. (see p. 358)  

War as cleansing

Even before the war was over, Puritan preachers began to interpret its meaning.  Increase Mather (1639-1723) accused the Puritans of incurring divine wrath (demonstrated by the Indian attacks) because of their  apostasy and leniency toward ‘liberal’ preachers.  Mather led a reforming Synod to examine the Puritan sins that had led God to unleash King Philip’s War against them. 

The most popular Puritan interpretation of the war emerged in the ‘captivity narratives.’ Though some Puritan captives ‘went Native,’ others escaped and wrote stories of their experiences.  These captivity narratives were highly popular in the colonies.

Mary Rowlandson's Narrative of Captivity and Restoration

At Mather’s urging, Mary Rowlandson published a detailed account of her experiences with King Philip’s tribe.  Throughout her ordeal, Rowlandson read her Bible and found comforting words of promise: God afflicts those he loves, to make them understand they must depend solely on him for their hope and salvation (Rowlandson’s narrative was so popular that the10th edition was published in 1773). 

The captivity narratives translated a large-scale drama of conquest and colonization into a highly personal, internal struggle to be faithful to Puritan spiritual practices. How a society treated others or the land was not examined; what mattered was inner trust in God’s love in the midst of personal pain.  This spirituality bore traces of the crusading spirit in its willingness to endure even death for God, because such punishing pain brought glory.   (see p. 362)

Brock and Parker write,  Trapped  between horror and hope, they were unable to peer at the ghostly images at the edges of their consciousness, or grapple with doubts about their mission and their feelings of loss.  Puritan religious sensibilities denied them access to lamentation, whose other side is resurrection, whose power is love, and whose fruit is peace. (see p. 363)

‘A thousand years in horror, 
if it be God’s will’

Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

In the aftermath of King Philip’s War, repeated battles with Natives brought forth more Puritan self-examination. After decades of anxiety, the Great Awakening began.  From 1735-1745, an intense revival movement took hold in the Connecticut Valley and spread across New England.   

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) became one of the movement’s most compelling and influential leaders.  Implicit in Edwards’ preaching was an assumption about how to see the world.  His famous sermon is filled with biblical images that reflect Puritan life.  The terror of an Indian attack, a great flood, or a fire was more than analogy to hell – it was an actual experience of God’s wrath. 

Like many who preached the Great Awakening, Edwards spent his career as a minister on the edge of the frontier.  Revival preachers used the captivity narratives as models of how to understand God and respond in faith.  The world was either a foretaste of heaven, or a foretaste of hell.  For the sinner, this world tasted of hell; for the saint, it had the taste of heaven – even when circumstances were hellish.  The state of one’s soul determined the way a person experienced the world. 

Edwards’ most frequent examples of Christian piety were women.  In his own household, he may have preached to his wife Sarah Edwards.  Records show that when Sarah experienced her own intense awakening, she was prescribed special herbs for the treatment of her ‘hysteria’.  But her ecstasy, though tied to pain and humiliation, did give her a new spiritual authority in her community. 

Conflicts over the Great Awakening fell along class and regional lines.  The old Puritan families, led by Harvard-educated clergy, were comfortable with the social order and the economic system.  The revival preachers, often poor or working class, offered sinners an ecstatic transformation that rejected the educated and economically powerful elite, and their mildly rational, spiritless clergy.  

Jonathan Edward’s theology of beauty

Like Calvin, Edwards affirmed this world as a place of divine presence and a medium of God’s communication.  Regenerated souls, filled with love for God and obedient to the scriptures, could see the ‘beauty of holiness’.  These faithful souls could learn to distinguish between primary and secondary beauty:  Primary beauty was God, the highest order of being, ‘the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.’  God’s perfect beauty was marked by love, and in human life all true holy affection was the direct gift of God. But Edward’s understanding of human emotions offered little comfort for traumatic loss; even in traumatic events, the saints should not mourn but should see God’s majesty and mercy.  

 Rather than engaging people more deeply in this present world, the Great Awakening lifted the soul beyond earthly life.  Edward’s idea of beauty did not encourage his listeners to engage with this world; he pointed people beyond this world, asking them to dwell with one foot always in another, better, world – not here, not now.  

One final escape: communing with extinction

By the beginning of the 19th century, most people believed the Natives were virtually extinct in New England.  In 1829 one of the most successful plays in U.S. history, Metamora: or the Last of the Wampanoags turned King Philip into a sympathetic model of patriotism.  

As the fictional Metamora, Philip died to give the audience – new American citizens – an authentic, non-British identity; Philip’s dying curse of the English colonists became their own curse of the defeated British oppressors.  Few rapturous audiences appear to have seen the fundamental contradiction in this reconstruction of American identity, or to have noticed that Metamora had cursed their own very existence. 

But Metamora’s story did not alter U.S. policies towards Natives; the play opened a week before Andrew Jackson announced his plan for ‘Indian removal.’  Eventually, Natives would use Metamora to appeal to whites to take responsibility for their own history.  

Brock and Parker conclude,

The Puritans' drive to build paradise, and their focus on their own piety and redemption, still remain in white supremacist culture in the United States.  Locked within a biblically-based master narrative, this culture sees African, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Native Americans as instruments of judgment and as agents of absolution.   However, those shaped by such a culture tend to be primarily concerned with the state of their own souls – their personal sinfulness, their longing to be restored to innocence, and their need to believe in their own goodness.   (see p. 376)

Do you agree that some Americans are still ‘locked within a biblically-based master narrative’? 

Are there other ‘biblically-based master narratives’ that do not condone violence?