Of Tea Parties, Historical Fundamentalism, and Antihistory

Linford D. Fisher

It’s always nice when academic and pleasure reading coincide. Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, 2010) is a bit like that—fun to read, informative, insanely timely, and likely to generate excitement in certain circles for a variety of reasons.

The book is essentially a commentary on the twenty-first century Tea Party by way of the 1970s and the 1770s and is—by Lepore’s own admission—a strong argument against “historical fundamentalism,” which, as she describes it, is "marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past—'the founding'—is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts—'the founding documents'—are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; that the academic study of history (whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism) is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible."

The Tea Party folks, she contends, promote not just “kooky history” in their appropriation of Revolutionary themes and employment of Founding rhetoric; they practice antihistory, that is, they conflate the then and the now. The Founders are not just in the eighteenth century, they are here with us now; their struggles are our struggles. “In antihistory,” Lepore muses, “time is an illusion.”

The core of the book is a lively retelling of the Revolutionary Era from the 1760s through the late 1790s. The 1773 Boston Tea Party, ironically, gets precious little play; ditto for the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill (invoked in her title; for the Tea Party proper, you’d have to turn to Ben Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America [Yale, 2010]). Juxtaposing the messy, contested, exhilarating world of the late eighteenth century with the projection of an idealized past created by the Tea Party is both jarring and effective. Framed this way, the story almost tells itself, or so it seems. Regular readers of Lepore’s New Yorker essays will find familiar discussions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Phillis Wheatley, although there is loads of new material, too, like the delightful sections on Jane (Franklin) Mecom (on whom a biography is forthcoming at some point). Along the way, the reader learns a great deal about the rise of the present Tea Party and how its antihistory came to be in the first place, namely, the historical profession's failure in the wake of the bicentennial of the 1970s to craft a responsible and satisfying historical narrative for the American populace to call their own. Into this lacuna, the Tea Party gladly stepped. In a sense, then, the Tea Party’s (mis)use of history is partially our fault.

As is the case with most books like this, those who should read it, won’t. The book is clearly pitched toward the reading “public”—however defined—who may, in the end, be convinced by the pleasant mix of first-person narrative, historical storytelling, and trenchant analysis, all while hopscotching Lepore-ishly between the eighteenth century and the present. Most obviously, the book is bound be dismissed by the Tea Partiers and their sympathizers as yet another blathering rant by the liberal elites who not only drink the Kool-Aid but help to mix it as they conspire against the American people. The Whites of Their Eyes, however, is hardly that. In many ways it is rather a plea for a particular kind of public discourse and a more accurate use of history. And—in surprising ways—Lepore has spent far more time than you or I with Tea Party folks, trying to understand their rhetoric, concerns, and use of history. Each chapter opens with a fascinating first-person account of attending a Tea Party meeting or rally, before zipping to the eighteenth century and back again.

This book provoked all kinds of questions for me: about the use of history; the decision to write a book like this; and—most of all—what it was like hanging with Tea Party folks. I had to know. And so, over steak salads by the open windows of the Grafton Street Pub perched on the corner of the unseasonably humid Harvard Square, I hijacked the final minutes of a previously-scheduled luncheon with Jill to talk about her book.

LF: In a sense, portions of this book read like an ethnography of the Tea Party. How did—if at all—the experience of attending rallies and meetings in pubs affect your perspective (positively or negatively) of the Tea Party folks and their aims?

JL: My ideas definitely shifted as a result of spending time with the Tea Party people. From the beginning, I always outed myself as a Harvard historian who was writing an article (for The New Yorker; the book idea grew over time) and that I was interested in how people view the Revolution. Most people at the Tea Party meetings didn’t ask more about me. They wanted to talk about themselves. So I listened. Most people felt misrepresented by the mainstream media; everyone I talked to said this. Everyone in the left-wing press was saying the Tea Party was all about race; but for these people I talked to it was not about race. People were upset about that. Austin Hess was offended at being called a racist; he said we lived in a post-racial world. I took him at his word and wanted to be sympathetic with him. I’m not saying it has nothing to do with race. But that’s why they love the American Revolution, because they see it as a white, pre-racial movement, which of course it wasn’t. But that’s sort of the point of the book, and why I gave it the title it has [The Whites of Their Eyes].

LF: This must have taken a lot of intellectual discipline to go and only listen.

JL: I had a lot of fun, actually. Like with the Egan brothers; they were hilarious—exactly like my family. Being at the meetings was pretty much like every family dinner I’ve had since I was eight—was never a Thanksgiving dinner without a pitched political battle. We were family and yet we disagreed. So rather than these meetings being a foreign experience, it was familiar. I never tried to persuade people; I always wanted them to persuade me. People called me “Jane Goodall” because I took notes furiously and furrowed my brow. It’s not a move that a lot of scholars would make, to go and just listen. I did come to think that I understood better, but I still disagreed. For example, I was really trying to figure out people’s position on healthcare. I pressed George Egan on this point, and he told me this heartbreaking story of his three-year-old daughter who was sick and hospitalized and the hospital sent him a bill for ten thousand dollars. He had no insurance, but he got a second job and paid it off over time. And then—this is what surprised me—at the end he said something like, “That’s why I’m against Obamacare. Because I had to pay for it and others should, too.” The same story could be used as an argument for universal healthcare, but that’s not how he was using it. In the end, I think I did become more sympathetic to what they were about. I got to know them. I found myself in the position of defending the Tea Party to my colleagues and friends. I grew to like these people; I didn’t think they were crazy, even though I still disagree with them.

LF: What do you hope that people take away from this book? And have you felt that people are “getting” what you are trying to do?

JL: I’d like people to have a different vision for what political discourse could be like in this country, one that is based on historical evidence and respectful dialog. Argument and evidence are important. Often I need to preface my talks around the country with a plea for restraining emotions and practicing a more evidence-based, measured discourse that is generally lacking in political life today.

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback from various people—schoolteachers, politicians. My colleagues have been uniformly supportive. Same with people I see at events. I was at an event in Washington D.C., on a panel at the National Press Club with Dick Armey (Freedom Works), someone from Fox News, and a person from the New York Times. And a whole group of Freedom Works folks walked in holding—to a man, each woman—color photocopies of my New Yorker essay on the Tea Party. They came to fight. But after the session, a lot of the Freedom Works people came up and said they appreciated what I said. These people really wanted to talk to a real history professor who was taking them seriously. I met a guy in Texas who told me: “You’re the first liberal I’ve talked to that made any sense.” After one talk, a conservative Christian couple approached me and wanted to convince me that the Constitution grants only god-given rights. Neither of us convinced the other, but they appreciated that I was willing to talk. I’m not sure those people “get” me or will like the book, but they are willing to talk to me.

LF: Is this a new direction for you—tackling present issues, arguing for a particular kind of public engagement in the historical profession?

JL: I’ve always thought there should be places to talk about shared concerns, which is why I started Common-Place with Jane Kamensky. It is a place where academics, librarians, teachers, can all share ideas. I appreciate all kinds of historians—we need both Gary Nash and Gordon Wood, for example. I think debate is important; recently in my seminars I’ve set up a series of debates where students read historical speeches and essays and spend time making the case for the historical person they have been assigned. And it works. Students get all animated and put on southern accents or whatever. But of course the next day they are slouched back in their chairs. But it is still worth it.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a Franciscan

Linford D. Fisher

It used to be a bad word. “Franciscan.” Well, for colonial historians, at least. I mean, really, with a full-out colonial missions program to American Indians that was inescapably ethnocentric at best (even if well intended) or disturbingly malevolent at worst, Franciscans have usually been at the religious center of the so-called Black Legend with their forced labor and corporeal punishment of Natives in Florida, New Mexico, and California. This is particularly true vis-à-vis the typical scholarly praise concerning the relatively tolerant, culturally sensitive missionizing undertaken by the Jesuits in the colonial period. The classic, “recent” touchstone on the depredations of the Franciscans in the New Mexico context is, of course, Ramon Gutierrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991). Despite the various criticisms that have subsequently emerged, this text is seemingly here to stay. It is a gripping narrative, to be sure. Who couldn’t help but cringe at his lengthy recounting of the eighty years of Franciscan evangelization prior to the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 that included overt sexual exploitation and humiliation?

When David J. Weber—the leading scholar in borderland studies—sadly passed away earlier this week, I pulled out his classic, The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) to remind myself of what Weber contributed to all of this. Surprisingly, his account is comparatively even-keeled, even though he did label Franciscan missions as “but one of the oppressive frontier institutions of the Spanish state” (121).

But is this view changing? Of course. It has to. This is the historical profession, after all, and many tenure cases are hanging on the successful revisioning of the minutiae of every field. A book I just finished while on a research vacation (an oxy-moron if there ever was one) with the family reminds me that the historical view of Franciscans is slowly changing: Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (2009). To be sure, the book is really about the importance of Native conceptions of exchange in trumping and shaping European notions of commercial trade well into the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the Franciscans take center stage in at least one chapter, since their missions among the Apalachees in the 1600s open up avenues for Spanish exchange and trade with inland Natives. Hall seems to almost minimize the effect of the Franciscans, essentially arguing that the missionaries had little control over the Timicuan and Guales as a whole: “The simple fact remained that Indians in and beyond the missions remained in control of the region. Although missionaries introduced a host of new coercive forms into Guale and Timicuan life during the early seventeenth century, including restrictions on their movements, a greater regimentation of diet, and more frequent corporal punishment, such impositions weighed relatively lightly on most of their charges” (61). This was in part due to the enormous numerical differential that often gets overlooked: in 1630 there were 27 missionaries for 50,000 Timicuans and Guales. For myself, I wonder if his assessment does not take into account the practical, on the ground imperial weight and presence the missionaries and their regional military and trade counterparts represented. In the end, however, Hall still agrees with archaeologist Jerald Milanich that “missions were colonization” (53).

Nonetheless, Hall is not alone. Franciscan pacification/colonization is looking far different in various geographical regions. Steven W. Hackel in Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis (2005) was surprised to find that Indians in southern California had far more autonomy in Franciscan mission towns than he expected—even producing surplus crops for their own economic benefit. Another study that will be soon forthcoming by my colleague at Brown, Amy Remensnyder, on the various uses of the Madonna in late medieval and early modern conquests in the Old World and New, also highlights the Franciscans in the New World context. And, somewhat similarly, she is more interested in what Franciscans and the Spanish do and how they operate than she is in taking them to task, once again, for the many injustices that historians have rightly pointed out.

Then again, perhaps the Jesuits’ fortunes are changing, too, but for the worse. Emma Anderson’s The Betrayal of Faith (featured here on this blog) turns historiographical wisdom concerning the Jesuits on its head. In her retelling, the Jesuits (and Paul LeJeune in particular) come across as just as intolerant and demanding as their Franciscan/Recollet counterparts.

These developments, of course, are part of a much larger re-casting of missionaries among Native Americans in the wake of earlier and important ethnohistorians like Francis Jennings and James Axtell. David Silverman, Rachel Wheeler, and Richard Cogley are just a few examples of the ways in which historians have increasingly asked different, native-centered questions to provide a more nuanced emphasis on Natives’ creative agency instead of cataloguing the sins of the European evangelists. A terrific-looking book that is due out in a month will likely add to this ongoing conversation: Joel Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (UNC, Sept. 2010).

All of this simply serves as a reminder that history is, first and foremost, an interpretive enterprise, and that how we view things, people, movements, and events can—and must—change over time. In the meantime, thanks for a terrific corpus of scholarship, David J. Weber. RIP.

King Philip’s Board Game: Trivializing or Educating?

Linford D. Fisher

I really have no excuse for blogging about an upcoming board game titled “King Philip’s War,” since it has nothing to do with religion in America. Or does it? A board game that allows players to take sides and reenact one of the most horrific clashes between Natives and English colonists in the colonial period must certainly have something to do with religion.

John Poniske, a middle school social studies teacher from Maryland, claims he designed the game to educate the wider public about the war itself, since he was surprised to read about it in a military magazine (his surprise surprised me, to be frank; which textbook published in the last twenty years does not mention King Philip’s War?).

The company behind the game, MultiManPublishing, is known for its militaristic-historical games. One can purchase board games that reenact the major battles of the Civil War, for example, or a board game that might be my personal favorite, called “Warriors of God,” which allows players to participate in the wars between England and France between 1135-1453.

Am I being too cynical here? Maybe a generation of young people will be educated by this board game. But I would hope that, in the future, people might turn to less-trivializing and more nuanced and culturally sensitive ways to learn about King Philip’s War. For middle-schoolers, Dan Mandell has an age-appropriate text on the war and has recently completed a forthcoming book on the same topic for a more general adult audience. Really hardy non-specialists might even consider tackling classics like Jill Lepore’s The Name of War. Or, as a last resort, interested media- and entertainment-starved folks could even learn a lot from watching Episode One of PBS’s “We Shall Remain.” But a board game? My only consolation is that it has not (yet?) been turned into a game for the Wii.

The View from Pachgatgoch (or, Why Moravians are Still Sexy)

Linford D. Fisher

Moravians are about as exotic as early American history can ever hope to be. And, seemingly, I cannot stop writing about them. Officially, they are not part of my research agenda, but books about them mysteriously appear on my shelves, squeeze their way onto my course reading lists, and land in my mailbox for possible review. This past January, once again, I found myself immersed in the world of early American Moravians as I picked my way through the 1300 hundred pages that comprise one of the most recent publications related to Moravians in early America: an enormous two-volume translation of the German diaries of the Moravian mission in Pachgatgoch, Connecticut, translated and edited by husband and wife team William A. Starna and Corinna Dally-Starna, titled, Gideon’s People: Being a Chronicle of an American Indian Community in Colonial Connecticut and the Moravian Missionaries Who Served There (2009). The diaries span from 1747 through 1763, even though the mission officially started in 1743 and was maintained on and off until 1770. My official evaluation of the volumes will be forthcoming in the New England Quarterly later this year, but the diaries themselves prompted more reflection that I could possibly fit into a book review, so I thought I’d share some of the overflow here.

First and foremost, reading through these diaries reminded me of the surprising religious and ethnic diversity of western Connecticut. Pachgatgoch was in many ways at the crossroads of empire and a place of multiple, overlapping religious regions and ethnicities. Runaway Africans and Indians along with Indian preachers from other parts of the colony drift in and out of Pachgatgoch. EuroAmericans (mostly English and Dutch), likewise, surface in the diaries as inquisitive visitors: Presbyterians, Anglicans, New Lights, Old Lights, Baptists, Separates, Quakers, seekers, and even the occasional Jew or two come to figure out the Moravians and—at times, even try to join them. Peering into the Pachgatgoch records is almost like peeking behind the curtain at a show or performance, or into the basement or attic of a host's house: you find some unexpected things that belie the official presentation. Whatever we might take to be the “center” of religious history in the colonies, these records serve as a warning against privileging too much the urban coastal centers.

Secondly, I was deeply impressed with the intensely intertwinedness of Indian and non-Native lives. Labor is of course the most familiar point of overlap (discussed below), but Indians also routinely cleared out of Pachgatgoch to party all night with their Anglo neighbors. The most frequently recurring (and railed against) example of this is the annual day of post-harvest thanksgiving in the colony. It was an “old custom” of the Indians, according to the Moravians, to go and celebrate late into the night with their “good friends” the white people. Joachim Sensemann let the Pachgatgoch know in no uncertain terms that he “would be pleased if they stayed nicely at home”—to no effect, of course. Not only were Indians out in colonial homes working (and boozing it up), in towns selling brooms, baskets, bowls, and spoons, but colonists were also constantly visiting the small Indian town. In addition to almost daily, more mundane visits by colonial neighbors, on at least two occasions the Anglo congregants of local English minister Cyrus Marsh came to the Moravians’ Sunday services at Pachgatgoch when Marsh was sick or out of town. By the late 1750s, non-Indian attendance at Moravian Indian services was so frequent that it prompted exasperation on the part of Moravian missionaries, who worked hard to shield the Pachgatgoch from outside influences. So ubiquitous were the colonists even on most weekdays that Moravian missionary Johann Mack reported with surprise in 1761 that he had not seen a “white” person for almost four days.

Thirdly, in reading these records, I was reminded of the politicized nature of Indian evangelism at the edges of empire. Not only were the Moravian missionaries arrested and placed on trial in Milford, Connecticut, in 1743 under deep suspicion of being Catholic spies trying to woo local Indians into a military alliance against New England Protestants, but they were subsequently banned from Connecticut for a full six years. Even after they returned, rumors circulated for the next decade that they were supplying the French with powder and shot. (I grappled with some of these issues in an NEQ essay from Sept. 2009.) Over time local colonists grew to accept the Moravians more and more, and even the minister of nearby Kent, Connecticut, cannot seem to forgive himself for not defending the Moravians when they were placed on trial (his excuse was that he had been temporarily swayed against the Moravians by Gilbert Tennent’s 1743 anti-Moravian tract, Some Account of the Principles of the Moravians).

Fourthly, I’ll admit to receiving new insight into the way that drunkenness actually functioned in Native communities. Everyone knows that the drunken Indian quickly became a colonial Indian stereotype; less often discussed are the ways in which drunken men (usually) not only offended EuroAmerican religious sensibilities but also brought tangible fear and physical danger to Indian families and communities. According to the Moravians, at least, drunken Indian men routinely got abusive enough that women and children fled into the woods overnight or to the Moravians’ houses to escape the violent outrages of their husbands, brothers, and sons. In short, drunkenness was a very real social threat for Indians themselves in this period; it was not just something missionaries denounced in fits of cultural arrogance. I knew this, of course, but somehow these records made this more tangible.

Fifthly, the centrality of free and unfree labor for Indians and Africans alike in this period cannot be overstated. My suspicions that debt and labor profoundly shaped much of Indian-African-colonist relations were confirmed by the stories in these volumes. Just one example of this was a colonist who was owed money by a Moravian Indian, marched into Pachgatgoch and, when he couldn’t find the Indian who owed him money, instead randomly kidnapped two Indian children and sold them for profit as servants/slaves.

Sixthly, and lastly, these records confirm, once again, the difficulty of any single group in bringing about the desired religious and cultural transformation in Indian communities. The last few years of the diaries drip with a familiar declension narrative in which the drinking, sexual promiscuity, and religious indifference of Natives spins out of control. The harder the Moravians try to reform specific cultural habits (not clothing Native children, for example), the less the Pachgatgoch respond. The curious thing is, of course, that many Pachgatgoch do continue as Moravian Indian Christians well past the official closing of the mission. Some move to Pennsylvania and some remain in New York and/or Connecticut, but the perceived failure of the Moravians does not always translate into a total abandonment of Christianity by the Pachgatgoch.

In short, the Moravians are still sexy for a reason. These volumes are well worth the hefty price you pay either by purchasing them or lugging them home from the library (plus, you’ll look cool and cutting-edge carrying anything with “Moravian” in the title). The issues raised are numerous and enlightening, and for that we owe Starna and Dally-Starna a big thanks.

Seminars, Young Scholars, and Conference Proceedings at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

Paul Harvey

One report and two upcoming seminars/opportunities at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI for you to be aware of.

First, as noted here before, the next (and, for now, final) round of the Young Scholars in American Religion Program is upcoming, and applications to participate are due by February 15. Here is information on the program and how to apply; you can click also on the "young scholars program" label on the right of this blog to see all of our various entries about this in the past.

Next, the Center is hosting a NEH Summer Institute for teachers, July 12-30 2010, on "The Many and the One: Religion, Pluralism, and American History." Click on the link for full information, the schedule, and information on how to apply (applications due March 2, 2010); here is a brief description:

Thank you for taking an interest in The Many and the One: Religion, Pluralism, and American History, a Summer Institute for School Teachers to be held at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) from July 12 to July 30, 2010. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this three-week institute for teachers focuses on religion in American history and culture. Our Institute is part of the NEH’s “We the People” initiative, a program designed to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles.

This institute will support the studies of twenty-five talented teachers from across the nation as they join with nationally renowned scholars to explore how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, the American experience. The Institute directors, Philip Goff, Arthur Farnsley, and Rachel Wheeler, are all noted scholars in their field, whose work encompasses a wide range of subject matter and methodologies.

Finally, a posting of great interest: last summer the Center ran the 1st Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture; our contributor Linford Fisher attended and blogged about it here, and so did our contributor Seth Dowland, whose thoughts are here. The proceedings from the conference have now been published and can be accessed (as a pdf file) here. Comments and presentations comes from many of the stars of the field, including Jon Butler, Amanda Porterfield, Robert Orsi, Daniel Walker Howe, and many others. I plan to blog about this further once I have a chance to read over more of these contributions carefully.

Doctrine of Christian Discovery

Linford D. Fisher

I’ve just returned from Montreal and the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. As with most conferences recently, I found myself spending more time connecting with old and new colleagues in the field and exploring the host city than I did actually attending sessions (although in the future, I may try Randall’s time-passing exercise during dull sessions). Montreal, after all, is an amazing city with scads of culture, a cool topography, and a fascinating history. Best of all, it is saturated with pseudo-French/European culture. (Since my wife is a Francophile, traveling to Quebec is the next best thing to flying to France. And, at 5.5 hours away by car, it is a heck of a lot cheaper, too, especially if you are crazy enough to have four kids in tow.)

Most of the sessions I attended were—unsurprisingly—focused on issues related to North America’s indigenous populations, past and present. Two presentations stuck out to me. The first was by Steve Newcomb of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, titled “The Myth of Christian Discovery in Federal Indian Law,” which I took to be a summary of his 2008 book, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum).

Newcomb laid out how the “Doctrine of Discovery”—essentially the European notion that first “discovery” of new lands meant they held exclusive and transferrable rights to and dominion over the land, resources, and people that inhabited those lands—has a longer, specifically Christian history that is rooted in Old Testament notions of divinely-sanctioned conquest and a pervasive belief in the “chosen-ness” of a particular nation. More importantly, these ill-founded European beliefs, Newcomb argued, formed the ideological and intellectual rational for what is undoubtedly the watershed nineteenth century legal case regarding Native American land in the U.S.: Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), which proclaimed that the U.S. had acquired a free title to its lands through widely recognized standards of European colonization, thereby establishing the legal basis for U.S. occupation of lands and limiting the sale and purchase of additional Indians lands to the U.S. government, not to individuals. (Although, as Stuart Banner points out in How the Indians Lost Their Land, this process of centralizing land sales had been in motion since early colonial times.)

As I often do in some of these contexts, I found myself feeling like an outsider for all the reasons you might suspect. After all, there are (at least) two worlds of discourse regarding American Indians and their past and present role in American culture. The first is the more academic (read: distanced) discourse of people like myself who study these issues with care and concern, but who are also interested in presenting a “responsible,” balanced narrative of the past, often with only secondary interest in the present. The second is an often-sidelined world of Natives themselves who, for very good reasons, can no longer tolerate the even-handedness of the academy in the face of the simply scandalous and hypocritical treatment of natives, past and present, and who, indeed, often suspect that academics themselves have merely served to perpetuate the complacency and ignorance of non-Native Americans. (Non-Native, non-academic Americans possibly constitute a third world of discourse about Natives, namely one that operates in the realm of stereotypes, indifference, and blithe ignorance, although in truth, this is perhaps more a world of non-discourse discourse, since not much is usually said.)

I’ve increasingly been in conversation with this second world, this realm of discourse, this window into the lived reality of present-day Natives, for quite some time now. Nonetheless, I am always a bit taken aback by it. What struck me once again is the level of passion exhibited by the Native presenters, and, at times, what feels like over-the-top, sweeping rhetoric regarding the intentionality of the U.S. government and the average American relating to Indian mistreatment, past and present. Although I’d like to think that my classes on Native history and the colonial period are progressive and argue for a Native perspective on these issues, in comparison to this world, my reading lists seem tame, almost irrelevant.

A second paper presentation reminded me of the similar and, often, parallel experiences Canada’s indigenous populations have had and continue to have. Jennifer Reid of the University of Maine, Farmington, presented on “The Doctrine of Discovery in Canadian Law.” One of the examples she used was of the 1950s semi-forced removal of several hundred Inuit from Inukjuak in northern Quebec to a desolate tip of land in present-day Nunavut, deep into the Arctic Circle. Resolute, as the town is now known, is the second northern-most town in all of Canada, and has an annual average temperature of 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (July highs are a balmy 35 F). In 1953, the Canadian government, in a Cold War attempt to assert sovereignty over and occupation in the extreme northern parts of Canada, decided that the best way to prove possession was to send someone to this dark and desolate part of the world. But who would go? No one, as it turns out, at least not willingly. So the government turned to the very indigent Inuit population who they mistakenly assumed would easily adapt to an even more difficult environment than the one they called home on the edge of the Hudson Bay. To make it more attractive, the Canadian government promised the Inuit all kinds of government assistance if they would kindly move north. As it turns out, those that did go immediately realized their mistake when they were dropped off in the middle of nowhere with none of the promised governmental support. To make things worse, the option of returning after two years never manifested. Instead, the group was essentially abandoned. In her presentation, Reid tied governmental policies in this case to the Doctrine of Discovery (and, in part, the precedent set by Johnson v. McIntosh), particularly to ideas about occupation and possession (along with the idea that native populations have often been seen as pawns of European governments).

Amazingly, this band of Inuit survived, although they are understandably a bitter bunch. The morning after this presentation, I opened up Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, and found on page three an essay on the arrival of the Olympic torch to this very town in Nunavut (current population around 300). And—even more shockingly, it was in a whole section called “Indigenous Issues.” Hmmm. I’m not trying to idealize Canada here, but every time I travel north, I get the sense that aboriginal issues are far more mainstream in Canadian culture and legislation than in the U.S. I imagine there is a variety of reasons for this—population differentials (Canadian Natives make up approximately 4% of the population in Canada, compared to 1.5% in the U.S.), strength of advocacy groups, etc., but there seems to be something more, too. To be fair to the U.S., cultural awareness of Native communities and issues varies from region to region, usually related, again, to how numerous or vocal local Natives are. But still, something tells me that things are different when the U.S. President meeting with American Indian leaders causes such a stir in the national headlines, as happened on Nov. 5 of this year.

Either way, the problem is still this: How do we get these two worlds (Native and academic) to connect, and how can we find a middle ground to talk about issues like the role of religion in these past and present atrocities? Francis Jennings’s passionate The Invasion of America (1975) is passé for most historians of early America; his vitriol seems odd and out of place, as does Vine Deloria, Jr.’s admirable and timeless Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). But it is that passion, that seemingly over-the-top expose of European ruthlessness that is precisely at the center of most of the present-day rhetoric I hear heard time and again from Native activists and scholars. Does this feel uncomfortable to some of us because academics are trained to view things in a more nuanced, “balanced” way? Or is it in part because non-Indian academics have so little at stake in this conversation?

I am grateful that there are many excellent Native scholars who are either in Ph.D. programs or who are already teaching in universities around the country. Perhaps it is these individuals who can do the most to bring these various worlds together. (I’ve appreciated, for example, Ned Blackhawk’s prize-winning Violence Over the Land [Harvard, 2006]; there are many other great examples out there as well). I am also grateful for the chance to have two Navajo students in my seminar this semester on Indian and European encounters in early America. Their presence reminds all of us that the past is not really past, even when we are talking about the colonial period.

Then again, every now and then you meet non-Natives with that same passion. Last week I presented a rather critical re-contextualization of Henry Hudson at a Brown alumni event in New York City (given that NYC has been celebrating the 400^th anniversary of Hudson’s “discovery” of Manhattan Island and of the river that now bears his name). Afterward, one alum strongly hinted that I should be doing something “real” with my time by getting involved in ongoing Native legal claims against the U.S. government regarding broken nineteenth century land treaties. Quoting an executive of Apple who was trying to recruit the head of Pepsi-cola in the 1980s, he told me: “Sir, you can either make sugar water for the rest of your life, or you can choose to do something real.” On some days, I agree; on others, I hope that we all are doing something “real” by teaching the next generation of leaders and lending our support in local situations as we have opportunity.

Conversation with Rachel Wheeler

Linford D. Fisher

Recently I caught up (via phone) with Rachel Wheeler, Associate Professor of Religion at Indiana University-Purdue University—Indianapolis, to talk about her 2008 Cornell University Press book, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-century Northeast (which, by the way, was a recent finalist for the American Academy of Religion Best First Book Award). In addition to being a first-rate contribution to the field of Native American history, it also tackles directly issues relating to religion in American history, particularly evangelization, indigenization, and religious and cultural hybridity.

LF: How did you first get interested in this project? What are the intellectual origins of the way it is framed, conceived, and executed?

RW: This project started when I was at Yale fishing around for a dissertation topic. I wanted to do something with Indians, and I was also interested in intellectual history, and so Skip Stout said, “Well, you know, nobody’s ever really looked at [Jonathan] Edwards’ time in Stockbridge.” So I started looking at that, and then discovered that there was also this Moravian mission nearby and I thought “Oh, a perfect comparison: they start within five years of each other, to the same group of Indians, what could be better?” But as you know, working with the Moravian sources is tough, and I didn’t know German at the time, didn’t know how to read the handwriting, but somehow I convinced my advisors to let me go ahead using the English that is in the sources and the [Fliegal] index. But it was clear that if I was really going to do a book on it I had to do the German to be able to use those sources. With regard to the larger issues, I was interested in this intersection of Indians and whites and just felt like some of the previous accounts didn’t make sense of the human component of that interaction. The [James] Axtell “contest of cultures” approach just couldn’t account for all those experiences of colonialism.

LF: Can you give a cocktail version of the book for blog readers who might not have read it (yet)?

RW: Basically, this is a comparative community study looking at two Mohican groups and how they encountered and adapted Christianity [through Congregationalists in Stockbridge, MA, and Moravians in Shekomeko, NY]. The Mohicans are a group who have had over a century of contact with Europeans, so this was not a new thing, which means it is different from the perhaps more familiar stories of missionary encounter. Moravians and Congregationalists obviously are very different in their missionizing and they inhabit very different places in the political and social structure of colonial America, and that shapes their respective Christianities. So I’m interested, rather than assuming as many previous studies have done that Christianity often just serves as one arm of colonialism, in just how different these two forms of missionary Christianity were and how various Indian peoples responded differently to them. And I wanted to ask a different question that I think isn’t asked in many studies, that is, “What does Christianity become in the hands of Native peoples?” (rather than “Did they understand Christianity?” or “Were their conversions authentic?”). I see that as the central question of the book. So in the case of the Moravians, because of the similarities between Mohican and Moravian religion—which centers around what I call “spiritual efficacy,” that is, how do you engage the spirits for distinct purposes in your life—the Moravians’ god becomes the new spiritual tool that is similar to other Mohican spiritual tools, but one that can be used to address the new problems that come with colonialism.

LF: That reminds me that one of the things that stuck out to me in your book is this question of functionalist or instrumentalist approaches to Indian religion. In the broader field of religious history, there is a lot of discomfort with seeing religious decisions as being tied to practical concerns. In your book, you are careful to say that you do not have an instrumentalist approach to religion, and yet so much of what you describe seems to center on Native practicality and their view of efficacy as a test for religious truth. So in terms of a broader approach to this question of functionalism, how might attention to Native American sources wean us from this discomfort?

RW: I think it is a Protestant discomfort; what’s most important in Protestantism is belief. In Protestantism, you don’t pray in order to get something, so I think that carries over into scholarship, that “true” religion or “authentic” religion is about belief no matter what the outcome is. Whereas in Native American religion, traditionally, if it doesn’t function in ways that you need it to, then you question it. But I do think there is a difference between the efficacy that I am talking about and the functionalism of postcolonial discourse concerning Native American conversions. When they use “functional” in that context, they mean that the Natives don’t really believe, that they are just pulling a fast one over the missionaries, which is not the case here. I think a lot of the Lived Religion focus has called attention to the efficacy part of even Protestantism.

LF: Another thing that stuck out to me in your book is the amazing amount of detail regarding the Moravianized Mohican lifeworlds (men and women), which, as you mentioned before, largely came from the Moravian records. What did it take to access these Moravian records in terms of language acquisition, and, secondly, what was the payoff? How does accessing these records revolutionize what we think about the missionary project?

RW: The Moravian records are amazing, and I never thought as a colonial historian I’d have the problem with too many sources. So in terms of how I was able to get into them, I didn’t really know German, so the first thing I did was to take the Moravian Archives class in handwriting. After the class, I thought, okay, this is doable, so I made an effort to beef up my German. And, yes, the things that that opened up is just incredible, the kinds of sources that you just can’t find anywhere else about Native Americans in the eighteenth century. The Moravians just wrote so much, with long descriptions. I think my favorite source was a letter dictated by Rachel (a Moravianized Mohican), married to the Moravian missionary Christian Post; Christian knows German but doesn’t know much English; Rachel knows broken English from having grown up surrounded by English. I kept trying to read this letter and it wasn’t making sense, and then I started reading it out loud, I realized it was English even though it was written in a German script. So Rachel is dictating it to Maria Spangenberg, who is her spiritual mentor; Rachel’s husband is taking down the dictation but he doesn’t really know English and doesn’t really understand what she is saying, so he writes what he hears with German phonetics, but it is actually English. So “very” is “were” and “cry” is “krei,” and so forth. To me, it felt like the most unmediated document that gave us the perspective of a Native American woman from that time period.

LF: Okay, I’ve got to ask this, since I’m sure blog readers will want to know: What is up with the word “Mohican”? Isn’t that just a tribal designation invented by James Fenimore Cooper? (Vs. Mohegan and Mahican) And—while we are on the topic—was there a “last” of the Mohicans?

RW: Mohegans are the people of southern Connecticut; Samson Occom is probably the most famous. Mohicans are different; the people today descended from these people—so no, there was no last of the Mohicans—they call themselves Mohican, that’s ultimately why I went with that term. Historians have generally used Mahican, coming from the original Dutch Mahikkander. Mohicans themselves from the beginning of my story called themselves Mahicanuk, at least the Stockbridges used that term. Up until the book, I always used Mahican in all of my work, but given that the people today use Mohican, and that’s the more familiar term, I decided to go with it.

LF: That’s helpful. And did you have a lot of correspondence or interaction with present-day Mohicans while working on this project?

RW: Not a lot, but some. I participated in a 2001 conference on the reservation in Wisconsin (descendents of the Stockbridges) who, incidentally, featured in an episode of The West Wing a while back. It was really interesting to tour the reservation and to spend a couple of days there. Probably the majority of Stockbridges today are Christian; some of them were very interested and happy to hear about my work on the Mohican Christians, but some of them were not (usually the non-Christians). I also got to know Bill Miller, a Christian Mohican musician who several years ago won the Best Native American Grammy, and that was probably the most important response I got from my book—I sent him a copy, and he very much appreciated it, especially the Moravian stuff. He really felt a strong sense of identification with those Mohican men who were among the first Christians.

LF: What is your next project on?

RW: It’s going to follow the life of Joshua, who is in one of the final chapters of my book. Joshua lives this amazing, incredible life, where he shows up in the most important events of American nation-building, even though he is from this obscure Christian Mohican community. I think telling his life story against the backdrop of these other important events will give us a very different perspective on the events of American nation-building, while also just being a very fascinating glimpse into the lives of individual Native Americans. He will be the main focus, but it will be a five-generational family study. He is born in 1740, the year before the start of the Moravian mission, his parents convert, his grandparents convert; he grows up in this bi-cultural world speaking German, speaking Mohican; he learns to play the spinet; he’s a cooper, he’s a hunter. His community keeps moving west hoping to move out of the current theater of war. In the 1740s, they move from New York to escape King George’s War; they land in Pennsylvania but then the French and Indian War heats up; they move west again to Ohio and land right in the middle of battles over territory there between Britain and America, during that time Joshua is hauled away by the British who accuse him of spying for the Americans. Meanwhile the community where they now live in Gnadenhutten, Ohio, is attacked by an American militia and 96 Indians are killed—all pacifist, Moravian Mohican Indians—including two of his teenaged daughters. They move west again to Indiana, settling with a refugee community of Delawares, and then the Shawnee prophet comes around in the early 1800s and tries to get Joshua’s community to join [in a pan-Indian uprising], and they say no, we are pacifists. Joshua is accused several months later by the Shawnee prophet of witchcraft and is burned at the stake. I think the story is gripping and will also give a whole new perspective on these events.

Thoughts on the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference

Welcome to our newest contributing editor, Linford Fisher, who starting this fall will be Assistant Professor of History at Brown University (moving on from Indiana University, South Bend). Lin completed his Ph.D. from Harvard University a few years back, and works on early American religious history. His first post as a contributing editor concerns the just-completed Religion and American Culture Conference, hosted by my long-time compatriot and partner in crime, Philip Goff, who heads the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI. Thanks to Lin for this report on the "state of the art" in the field.

Any other attendees at this conference who want to post your thoughts here, please send along whatever thoughts you have and I'll post them here.

Thoughts on the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference

Linford D. Fisher

Saturday, June 6, 2009. 10:37 PM. I just passed a Jesus truck. Literally. I am speeding north onRt. 31, the lonely and very straight highway that runs between Indianapolis and South Bend, Indiana. Sitting at a red light somewhere north of Kokomo, I could not help but notice a huge

Mac truck and trailer with “JESUS” painted in massive, red-block letters on the one side of the trailer, parked in a truck stop but facing the highway to make its message unavoidable. As I momentarily reflect on the cultural origins, meanings, and ambiguities of the trailer, somehow this feels like a fitting ending to a two-day conference on religion and American culture (in Indiana, no less—a state in which “In God We Trust” is emblazoned onto most license plates).

The past few days, June 4 – 6, marked the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference in Indianapolis, hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI and funded in part by the Lily Endowment and Indiana University. Although it would be impossible to adequately capture all the details and nuances of the rich presentations and the discussions that transpired among the one hundred and ten registered participants seated in a large circle around a central presenter table, what follows are perhaps some of the more salient recurring themes.

WHAT IS THE FIELD?

First and foremost was the issue of what the field of the study of religion in America actually is. Jon Butler, the very first presenter, predictably (and enjoyably) played the contrarian by proposing that American religion or American religious history is not even a field at all, and that it is, at best, perhaps a shared set of questions, or merely a literature. Although Butler’s comment on the non-field-ness of the field was immediately challenged in the discussion that followed by Robert Orsi and others, it did trigger a bit of self-reflection over the ensuing sessions regarding the shape of field. Clearly most people who spoke considered it to be a viable, distinguishable field, but no satisfactory answers were offered about its precise shape other than that the field is held together by a loose interest in religion in American life, past and present, more than particular questions or methodologies.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY: PROMISES AND PERILS

Secondly, and relatedly, was the unavoidable and recurring theme of interdisciplinarity, particularly as it relates to the methodological practices of the study of American religion and culture. The conference exhibited simultaneous disciplinary diversity and homogeneity. On the one hand, the program lineup featured a pleasant mix of scholars with appointments in religious studies, sociology, and history, with the full spread of institutions represented, from schools of theology to tier one research universities. However, when asked during the first session, the clear majority of the 100 or so people present identified themselves as historians; the second largest group was those who self-identified as religionists; the third largest group was the
sociologists. Relatively absent were the self-professed anthropologists (one, two at most), political scientists, and theologians (although not by design, according to organizer Philip Goff).

The conference seemed to foster an interdisciplinary dialog, but at times forthright discussion of disciplinary boundaries and methods only seemed to reinscribe these same differences. As one participant quipped, the Thursday session on sociology probably only further alienated the historians who were present (even as another participant joked about the sociologists sleeping during the more historically-oriented sessions). And both days, surprisingly, a vigorous defense of “disciplinarity” emerged, since, as Jay Demerath argued, disciplines make their greatest contribution when they are true to themselves. Nonetheless, I for one walked away with a long list of possible books to read that I might have not otherwise considered, which I think is a good thing.

POWER: MORE THAN JUST A TIRED TROPE

Another recurring theme was the importance of ongoing attention to the dynamics of power. Paula Kane reminded the group that power was central to the cultural turn thirty years ago, especially as framed by critical theorists who used to be standard reading for graduate students; too many students now are interested in the local and ethnography and are ill-equipped to answer larger questions that might help trace the production and uses of power. In a later session, Rudy Busto once again brought power to the fore in his lamenting of the confusion between ethnicity and race. Ethnicity—by far the more acceptable and benign of the two in terms of public and academic discourse—tends to obscure the inner workings of power. Talking about race keeps power in our sights, as Amanda Porterfield reminded us in the last session.

GRAND NARRATIVES / SYNTHESIS

In a related yet different vein, the problematic of the grand narrative always seemed to be lurking in the background. Although one would think that in this group of scholars grand narratives would be a dead-end topic, in fact the opposite seemed to be true. During the discussion at the end of the session on “Competing and Complementary Approaches in American Religious History,” a somewhat spirited debate over the value of grand narratives ended with—perhaps to the sociologists’ great delight—an impromptu poll of those who had decisively abandoned a grand narrative in their own teaching of the field. Astonishingly, only two people self-identified in this way. The rest of us either admitted that we de facto teach a narrative of some sort or else still saw some value in an idealized “self-correcting” grand narrative that is continually subject to revision (largely through ongoing, specialized and localized studies). David Hall, in his comments on Saturday morning, proposed that “THE” grand narrative of American religious history (historiographically speaking) has been that of showing the relevance of religion to the development of the nation state, particularly during moments of crises (Revolutionary War, election of 1800, the start of the Civil War, etc.), á la Sidney Mead and historians of the 1950s. It is a testament to the staying power of magisterial syntheses that Daniel Walker Howe—whose 2008 Oxford book, What God Hath Wrought, won a Pulitzer—was the keynote speaker at the closing dinner on Saturday evening.

A TAYLORIAN CRISIS OF THE ACADEMY?

A final recurring theme—that also doubled, rather uneasily, as a form of comedic relief—was Mark C. Taylor’s now infamous April 26 Op-Ed in the New York Times, “End the University as We Know It,” in which he calls graduate education the “Detroit of higher learning” and wonders if graduate programs are cultivating skills for which there is no market. Although few scholars present agreed with Taylor’s dour estimation of the university and its future, his editorial prompted recurring reflection on larger concerns regarding the future of the field, the job market, disciplinary positioning, publishing, tenure, and funding sources.

The conference ended on Saturday evening with a scrumptious dinner and a series of reflections on the history of the Center (on its twentieth anniversary) from Jan Shipps, Edward Linenthal, and Conrad Cherry, followed by a keynote address from Daniel Walker Howe on ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­“The Importance of Understanding Religion in American Society.”

Overall, the conference was delightful, and I am encouraged that it seems there will indeed be a second such conference in two years, according to the R&AC Center director, Philip Goff. As a historian of early America, however, I was surprised that the conversation gravitated so much towards topics, methodologies, and issues that related to the twentieth-century and contemporary study of religion in America rather than the earlier and—arguably—equally important eras of American history. Has early American religious history ceased to be a relevant part of this discussion? Additionally, with regard to methodology and theoretical frameworks, the vibrant presence of sociologists and the stark absence of anthropologists combined with the strong preference for the present made me wonder what the relationship is between one’s chronological focus and the methodologies one chooses to engage and appropriate (early American historians, for example, tend to draw on anthropological models, not sociological ones, although I’m still unsure why this is the case). The two days also passed with scant reference to Native Americans and questions of sexuality and religion (although the absences of both were briefly noted), and only passing reference to issues of transnational religion, international religious contexts, and globalization. And somehow, inescapably, I couldn’t help but feel like the conference slightly resembled the “Jesus” trailer I saw on Rt. 31 with its subtle but powerful assumptions about the ongoing centrality of Christianity (and even Protestantism?) in American religious life. I look forward to picking up these and other additional topics in two years, if not before. In the meantime, kudos to Philip and his staff for an excellent conference.