The Indian Great Awakening

Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

Linford D. Fisher

Provides a new framework for understanding religious conversion.
Brings together strands of Native history that are not often considered together: religion, land, use of the court system, and local intratribal politics.
Argues that the Great Awakening was not as formative in the lives of Natives (or as widely embraced) as previously assumed.

The Indian Great Awakening

Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

Linford D. Fisher

Description

The First Great Awakening was a time of heightened religious activity in the colonial New England. Among those whom the English settlers tried to convert to Christianity were the region's native peoples. In this book, Linford Fisher tells the gripping story of American Indians' attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of colonialism between the 1670s and 1820. In particular, he looks at how some members of previously unevangelized Indian communities in Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island adopted Christian practices, often joining local Congregational churches and receiving baptism. Far from passively sliding into the cultural and physical landscape after King Philip's War, he argues, Native individuals and communities actively tapped into transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and joined local white churches. Religion repeatedly stood at the center of these points of cultural engagement, often in hotly contested ways. Although these Native groups had successfully resisted evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century they showed an increasing interest in education and religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More surprisingly, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native individuals and sub-groups asserted their religious and cultural autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements. But the majority of New England Natives-even those who affiliated with Christianity-chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert their own autonomous existence through leasing land, farming, and working on and off the reservations.

While Indian involvement in the Great Awakening has often been seen as total and complete conversion, Fisher's analysis of church records, court documents, and correspondence reveals a more complex reality. Placing the Awakening in context of land loss and the ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy in the eighteenth century casts it as another step in the ongoing, tentative engagement of native peoples with Christian ideas and institutions in the colonial world. Charting this untold story of the Great Awakening and the resultant rise of an Indian Separatism and its effects on Indian cultures as a whole, this gracefully written book challenges long-held notions about religion and Native-Anglo-American interaction

The Indian Great Awakening

Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

Linford D. Fisher

The Indian Great Awakening

Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

Linford D. Fisher

Author Information

Linford D. Fisher is Assistant Professor of History, Brown University.

The Indian Great Awakening

Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

Linford D. Fisher

Reviews and Awards

"The Indian Great Awakening is a helpful foray into the realm of Colonial social history. Readers will gain new insight and perspective that will challenge Whiggish predispositions." -- Joseph T. Cochran , Themelios

"The history of religious engagement and the spectrum of religious responses presented in The Indian Great Awakening suggest a way to explore Native American perseverance and actions during a period of American history where Indian actors have largely been omitted. Fisher offers evidence of Native presence and elucidates public contestations over Native rights and religions, highlighting the exclusion of Native Americans from earlier national histories. It is my hope that his re-engagement with the history of the Great Awakening from the perspective of Native Americans will serve as an inspiring model and challenge other contemporary scholars to address similar oversights in the historical record."--Michael Guéno, Marginalia Review of Books

"Thoroughly researched, clearly written, and convincingly argued....[T]his book helps us to see more clearly a host of vital dimensions of Native religious engagement with Christianity including the Indian impulses to decide for themselves if how, when, where, and why the claims of Christ would bear on their lives, to control if possible the churches and schools they frequented, and to maintain substantial elements of their cultural heritage when they chose to make Christianity their own. Together those points underscore Native agency, hopes for cultural sovereignty, and quests for community survival, all themes well worth further consideration as other scholars continue to explore the history of Indian Christianization in early America."--Richard W. Pointer, Fides et Historia

"[A] fine exemplar of the maturation of the 'new Indian history,' which places Native peoples at the center of the American past."--Nick Griffiths, William and Mary Quarterly

"The Indian Great Awakening reminds us that religious engagement is both complex and personal. By examining the varied lived experiences of many Native Americans throughout southeastern New England, Fisher has reshaped our understanding of the ways in which these complex people navigated the intersections of race and religion in early America, showing clearly that their varied awakenings are no interpretive ficitions."--Common-Place

"Fisher presents significantly more sophisticated interpretations of religious change that emphasize process, contingency, and lived experience over simple notions of conversion."--Tracy Neal Leavelle, Early American Literature

"Questions about the extent to which the indigenous peoples of the Americas accepted and adopted the religious life and world views of European colonizers have plagued scholars since the earliest moments of contact....Scholars of the various cultures of Europeans and Native Americans have continuously wrestled with such questions. In his The Indian Great Awakening, Linford Fisher assumes a place alongside some of the best of these scholars." --Richard A. Bailey, Common-Place

"In this meticulously researched and lucidly fashioned study of colonial Indians' encounters with European Christians, Fisher presses historians to move beyond idealized narratives of Indians undergoing blue-sky irreversible conversions. With great persuasive power, he details the ambiguities and paradoxes, affiliations and disaffiliations that marked the lives of real people caught in the maw of colliding worldviews, land grabs and racial barriers."--The Christian Century

"Accessible, well written, and founded on thorough research. Recommended."--CHOICE

"This fine book reconstructs Native encounters with Christianity in southeastern New England from 1700 to 1820. Rather like the Indian Great Awakening itself, decades of important, pathfinding, and innovative work have preceded it, shaped it, and made it possible. A worthy and admirable contribution to that."--Joel W. Martin, American Historical Review

"A nuanced reading of the Native American experience of Christianity during the eighteenth century. The Indian Great Awakening does an impressive job of capturing the complexity of Native American 'religious engagement.' Gracefully written, the book should attract a broad range of readers interested in Native America, early America, and religious history."--R. Todd Romero, Journal of American History

"Linford D. Fisher's...study of Indigenous Christianity makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both colonial approaches to Indigenous peoples and their own repurposing of them. Fisher challenges historians to deconstruct colonial religion by questioning whether conversion is the most important indicator for understanding Indigenous engagement with Christian cultures. Rather than focusing on conversion, he suggests seeing religion as a lived and elastic experience, placing greater attention on religious affiliation and engagement with colonial institutions." --Thomas Peace, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

"Largely convincing and highly intriguing."--Gregory Evans Dowd, New England Quarterly

"Linford Fisher's reexamination of New England Native Americans' encounters with Christianity during the eighteenth century shifts us away from sterile old debates. Abandoning either-or categories of 'conversion' and 'resistance,' he discovers people who negotiated the treacherous waters of colonialism by selectively borrowing, adapting, and making their own what missionaries and their government sponsors attempted to force upon them."--Daniel K. Richter, author of Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts

"Linford Fisher's masterful narrative demonstrates Christianity's importance for Native Americans in eighteenth-century New England. Showing how Native Americans maintained their identity and ongoing presence through religion, this lucid and thorough study makes a real contribution to historical studies of early New England."--Amanda Porterfield, author of Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation

"A superb book. The revival known as the Indian Great Awakening may not have been as dramatic as historians have assumed, but The Indian Great Awakening is as insightful as historians could have hoped."--Erik R. Seeman, Church History

"By putting Indians at the center of the Great Awakening, provincial America's quintessential cultural event, Linford Fisher shatters the divisions that have separated American Indian, colonial, and religious history. His deep research and vivid authorial voice capture the depth of New England Indians' engagement with Christian revivalism as they confronted a hostile colonial world. Our understanding of the Awakening and the Indian experience reaches new heights in Fisher's able hands."--David J. Silverman, George Washington University

"Linford Fisher offers a compelling account of how Indian people in south-central New England and eastern Long Island embraced Christianity during the eighteenth century, not in hopes of becoming integrated into Anglo-American society and culture but rather of ensuring their survival and strengthening their distinct identities as Indians. Fisher's most important revelation is the extent of Indian Christians' separation from-and their criticism and even defiance of-Anglo-American Christians. No longer will we be able to write off Native American Christians as brainwashed traitors to their people and cultures."--Neal Salisbury, Smith College

"Brilliant....Fisher argues that we would better describe most Native American 'conversions' as 'engagement' or 'affiliation' with Christianity , emphasizing pragmatism and contingency rather than total spiritual (or cultural) transformation."--Thomas S. Kidd, Books and Culture

"Fisher's broad scope and nuanced readings of his materials draw historians away from unproductive arguments over 'conversion' or 'belief' and make a stand for a new conversation about issues of religious attachment."--Christopher J. Bilodeau, Massachusetts Historical Review