After the Historical Revolutions: Or, When the Tree Falls in the Historical Paradigm Forest, Does Anyone Listen?

Paul Harvey

A review of (and an announcement of) some challenging new works in earlier American History, and the history of the American West, got me to thinking about the changing of the historical paradigm guard -- or whether those guards get changed at all by scholarly revolutions. These are questions which affect the course of American religious history, but bear with me for a short detour before discussing that further.

These thoughts first came from reading Charles Mann’s review of Daniel K. Richhter’s new book Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past (Harvard Press) in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (yes, Virginia, I do read the Wall Street Journal! But I'm not sure if the link will let in non-subscribers; if it doesn't and you want to read, I'm happy to send it to you).

I know nothing about this book other than this review, but I am a big fan of Richter’s earlier work Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, a favorite of mine to use in class for its wonderful illustrations of how changing one’s angle of vision creates an entirely different historical sense of a period. Richter also engages in some deft analyses of early American documents of religious history from the European-Native encounter, including John Eliot’s bizarre but fascinating Indian Dialogues, of course the Jesuit Relations, Indian conversion narratives, and various ceremonial encounters at treaty negotiations.

In his review of Richter’s new book, Mann writes:

“Every few decades, historians develop a new way of looking at the past. I am not talking about ‘revisionism’ but unifying conceptual schemes, the sort of mental framework that Frderick Jackson Turner created in his argument for the importance of the frontier to our history or that Bernard Bailyn established in his studies of the American Revolution’s ideological orgins. Historians debated Turner for a long time and continue to debate Mr. Bailyn. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were arguing with Mr. Richter a decade from today.”

When I become King of the World I will permanently ban the word "revisionism" and its variant "historical revisionism" (as I have already banned the words "bias" and "politically correct" in my classrooms, since they have become barriers to thought and discussion), since they have been rendered meaningless for precisely the reason Mann explains there.

But the revolution in understanding is not just in the early America of Richter. My longtime friend Anne Hyde, Professor of History at my sister institution Colorado College, is about to publish her magnum opus for the West of the first half of the nineteenth century, Empires, Nations, Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860, part of University of Nebraska’s outstanding series History of the American West series. If this this means anything to you, as it will to some of you, the immediate predecessor to Anne’s book is Colin Calloway’s monumental work One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark.

(As a brief aside, when Anne and I were in graduate school, she always made it to the library at 8:00 a.m. sharp, while I was lucky to drag myself, half hungover and ears still ringing from some too-loud jazz concert the night before, by 10:00 or 11:00 at best, which explains a lot about the great scholarly discipline it took for Anne to finish this huge work, while I was busy watching the Mavs beat the Lakers).

Anne’s work may suggests a paradigm for understanding the history of the West in that era, in a way such as Richter and Colin Calloway have done for earlier American history. Her work also features chapters fully integrating the Mormon West into the larger picture, and too much else of interest besides to even begin to summarize here.

All of this is exciting as an historian. But all of it also makes me wonder how, whether, and when any of this affects public consciousness of earlier American history. Lately we’ve been talking about Barton et al., and of course the bookshelves at your Barnes & Noble are full of everything Founding Father related. I understand that, but considering the impact of the works above – great on historians, perhaps little on anyone else – makes me wonder about similar questions for religious history.

The older paradigm of American religious history will be familiar to many blog readers here, and most are familiar with its more recent challengers, summarized in works such as Tweed’s edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History. I once saw Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, God rest her soul, blast away at that book at a Young Scholars in American Religion conference, with most of the authors in that book in attendance; it quickly became clear she was itching for a fight with a group that had no interest in fighting with her on the alleged evils of “postmodernist” history, since that debate was long since old and tired at that point; at the end of it, Diana Butler Bass got up and urged her to give up swinging at phantoms since none of us were in the ring with her. Sitting in the back row with Diana, I gave her a big high-five for trying to extricate us all from such an unproductive conversation.

Much of the newer paradigm seems to come from removing religious history from the specific story of the American nation-state, and using categories that engage religious experience at its own level rather than as some proxy for political parties or current day culture wars. We've blogged here extensively about some recent classics that move American religious history/studies well down this path -- by Leigh Schmidt, Robert Orsi, Kathryn Lofton, and numerous others.

Again, however, for religious history as for the studies of earlier American history mentioned above, one wonders whether and how this affects any sort of public consciousness or discussion, and whether it’s the job of religious historians to evangelize for these perspectives that challenge or disrupt how we perceive the American religious past (and present). Or maybe scholars should just do their work, let popularizers who are good at popularizing disseminate this stuff to the general public (like happens in science all the time -- neuroscientists do their thing, and then someone like Oliver Sacks explains a little bit of it to us), and trust that over a generation or two it will find its way into the more general understandings. That's a comforting and easy role to take, but it leaves not much excuse for complaining about why some pseudo-historians advise presidential candidates while the rest of us get to advise freshmen how to raise their grade from a D to a C.

As usual, I have no answers, only questions. You're welcome.

[Sutton -- sorry about your Lakers. Not].

Rituals of Violence, War, and Death Among the Wendat/Huron and the Dakotas: Two New Studies

Paul Harvey

War, violence, and rituals of death have been central to American history, nowhere more so than among Native Americans. Here, just wanted to alert you to a couple of new works that advance new understandings of religious rituals surrounding war, violence, and death.

First, last week Historiann called my attention to a new book which I have yet to see but looks hugely promising, especially as a classroom-usable text. I'll quote from her here:

Erik Seeman’s The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). From the book jacket:

“Two thousand Wendat (Huron) Indians stood on the edge of an enormous burial pit… they held in their arms the bones of roughly seven hundred deceased friends and family members. The Wendats had lovingly scraped and cleaned the bones of the corpses that had decomposed on the scaffolds. They awaited only the signal from the master of the ritual to place the bones in the pit. This was the great Feast of the Dead.”

Witnesses to these Wendat burial rituals were European colonists, French Jesuit missionaries in particular. Rather than being horrified by these unfamiliar native practices, Europeans recognized the parallels between them and their own understanding of death and human remains. Both groups believed that deceased souls traveled to the afterlife; both believed that elaborate mortuary rituals ensured the safe transit of the soul to the supernatural realm; and both believed in the power of human bones.

Appreciating each other’s funerary practices allowed the Wendats and French colonists to find common ground where there seemingly would be none. Erik R. Seeman analyzes these encounters, using the Feast of the Dead as a metaphor for broader Indian-European relations in North America. His compelling narrative gives undergraduate students of early America and the Atlantic World a revealing glimpse into this fascinating — and surprising — meeting of cultures.

Anyone who has poked around at all in The Jesuit Relations will recognize descriptions of the feasts of the dead in these documents to be some of the most immediately compelling and gripping (if, as always with the Jesuits, problematic) primary sources for 17th-century Native American religious practices. Weighing in a a svelte 176 pages, this book looks like an effort to use these kinds of sources in a way that opens them up and makes discussion of cross-cultural religious encounters in early America accessible for classroom discussion.

And here's a powerful new article of interest to many of you, by our friend and colleague Jennifer Graber, whose first book The Furnace of Affliction has received attention at our blog before.

The article, based on some outstanding research in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, is "Mighty Upheaval on the Minnesota Frontier: Violence, War, and Death in Dakota and Missionary Christianity," Church History 80 (March 2011): 76-108.

The piece begins by asking "If . . . war is the norm rather than the aberration in American national life, how are we to understand the transformations experienced in 1862 by missionaries and Dakotas as part of a larger American story . . . [and how do we] understand how violence worked to reshape the participants' religious lives?" Graber considers the effects both on missionaries from the ABCFM and the Dakotas of the Dakota War in Minnesota in the late summer of 1862, a horrific outbreak of violence which resulted in the deaths of several hundred settlers and later the mass public execution of over 300 Indians, particularly focused on non-Christian Indians and "medicine men" who were thought to be the ringleaders of the revolt. Graber makes effective use of concepts of Christianity and violence drawn from Emma Anderson's Betrayal of Faith, Jill Lepore's The Name of War, and Harry Stout's "Religion, War, and the Meaning of America" (from Religion and American Culture, Summer 2009, 275-89).

In one section, Graber considers the religious responses of Dakotas to this signal event in their history, including the "conversion" of many of those awaiting execution. She provides a complex portrayal difficult to summarize here but well worth the read. Alongside this, Graber considers also the effect that the trauma of war had on the missionaries, and concludes that "these men underwent their own transformation. Their encounter with violence and devastation, punishment and incarceration caused them to mitigate and complicate the revivalist Calvinism they brought to the frontier. Their vision of missions made up of churches and schools became something else altogether, one of reservations and prisons that God used to make Indian converts."

Despite its short length, this sobering piece had me reflecting in ways which inspired some previous blogging about Emma Anderson's Betrayal of Faith. Highly recommended reading, especially after our last continuous decade of religion, violence, war, and death.

Creolization and Kreolization

Emily Clark

Academic talk of Native American-European cultural hybridity and cultural conflict immediately take my mind to the Caribbean world and major port cities like New Orleans or Santo Domingo. When authors write about “creolization,” I think of cultural intersections between French, Spanish, Native American, and African traditions in the American South. I don’t immediately think of Alaska. However, a new book I recently reviewed for Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction has widened the geographic spread I associate with creolization, or rather kreolization.

In the 1980s and 1990s, theorizing of the Atlantic World by historians such as Bernard Bailyn and later David Armitage placed the colonial Americas within a more nuanced, engaging, and dynamic framework. The Pacific World and its impact on the colonial Americas has yet to be as thoroughly explored as the Atlantic, but works such as historian Gwenn A. Miller’s Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America demonstrate the importance of expanding the view of colonial American encounters. With the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska in 1784, the Russian empire continued its eastward movement setting up its own business-oriented, colonial enterprise in the “new world.”

Together, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church and the education imparted by the fur-trading Russian-American Company offered government and trade officials a method to “civilize” the Alutiiq population and thus extend Russia’s imperial border. Miller’s micro-history of interactions between indigenous Alaskans, Russian fur traders, and missionaries on Kodiak Island elucidates how “a distinct Kreol colonial society” developed that “was neither wholly Russian nor wholly Alutiiq.” In a world of mutual dependence, intimate encounters between Russian fur traders and Alutiiq women led to a new Kreol generation of colonial subjects to be defined, controlled, and integrated into the imperial Russian enterprise. In their attempts to convert, Christianize, and “civilize” the Alutiiq people, the Russian missionaries demonstrate how interactions between Native Americans and their colonizers were fraught with complications on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. The British praying towns, the French Canadian seaways, and the American southwest were not alone. Though the situation in Alaska was less physically violent, it wasn’t necessary less culturally complex.

For a long-time, the gaze of American historians was that of the covered-wagon pioneers - westward. Miller is certainly not the first or only scholar to change the frame of reference. In her contribution to Thomas Tweed’s 1997 Retelling US Religious History, Laurie Maffly-Kipp elucidates how a narrative based in the Pacific Rim further illuminates typical historical account. Daniel Richter’s often cited Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America encourages historians to think about their narratives from the shoes – or moccasins – of “the other.” Miller’s book offers a colonial narrative far from the cities of Boston, New York, or Charleston that is both similar and different from the stereotypical westward European expansion model. For those of us interested in syncretism, cultural mixing, hybridity, colonial intersections, creolization, or whatever you want to call it, Kodiak Kreol provides another vantage point from which to theorize.

Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape

Paul Harvey

Here's a review from Choice of a new anthology/essay collection of tremendous value to those interested in the relationship of Native Americans and Christianity. Below the review I'm pasting in a table of contents, as well; as you will see, a number of the top scholars in this field -- Joanna Brooks, Hilary Wyss, Emma Anderson, Rachel Wheeler, Michael McNally, Steven Hackel, and others -- are represented here. So, first the brief review, and then more detail below that; the link below in the title takes you to the book's website at UNC Press. For those not as familiar with this topic, this is a great way to introduce yourself, in bite-sized portions, to some of the best recent scholarship.

Native Americans, Christianity, and the reshaping of the American religious landscape, ed. by Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas. North Carolina, 2010. 325p index afp; ISBN 9780807834060, $75.00; ISBN 9780807871454 pbk, $27.95. Reviewed in 2011mar CHOICE.

Martin and Nicholas's valuable essay collection addressing Native American interactions with European/European-American Christianity during the Colonial period and into the 19th century incorporates multiple disciplines, including history, religious studies, Native American studies, anthropology, and literary studies. Collectively, the authors illustrate Native agency in interactions with non-Native Christians. Rather than presenting Native experiences from a Eurocentric perspective, the authors show how Natives embraced Christian symbols and ideas, using them in ways that benefitted themselves and their fellow Natives and showing that, for those who chose to embrace Christian faiths, it was possible to be both Native and Christian. The essays also show that even when interaction with non-Natives brought Native communities hardship, Native peoples shaped Christianity in such a way as to benefit themselves and their communities. Each essay is well researched, eloquently written, and significant to the understanding of Native experiences in and with Christianity. An important contribution to a variety of disciplines, most importantly US Christianity, Native peoples, and US history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above

Table of Contents:

Hard feelings : Samson Occom contemplates his Christian mentors / Joanna Brooks -- Eager partners in reform : Indians and Frederick Baylies in Southern New England, 1780-1840 / Daniel Mandell -- Crisscrossing Projects of Sovereignty and conversion : Cherokee Christians and New England missionaries during the 1820s / Joel W. Martin -- Native American popular religion in New England's Old Colony, 1670-1770 / Douglas L. Winiarski -- Blood, fire, and "baptism" : three perspectives on the death of Jean de Brébeuf, seventeenth-century Jesuit "martyr" / Emma Anderson -- The Catholic rosary, gendered practice, and female power in French-Indian spiritual encounters / Tracy Neal Leavelle -- The souls of Highlanders, the salvation of Indians : Scottish mission and eighteenth-century British empire / Laura M. Stevens -- Print culture and the power of native literacy in California and New England Missions / Steven W. Hackel and Hilary E. Wyss -- Hendrick Aupaumut : Christian-Mahican prophet / Rachel Wheeler -- To become a chosen people : the missionary work and missionary spirit of the Brotherton and Stockbridge Indians, 1775-1835 / David J. Silverman -- Conclusion : turns and common grounds / Mark A. Nicholas -- Coda : naming the legacy of native Christian missionary encounters / Michael D. McNally

Woman in the Wilderness: Letters of Harriet Wood Wheeler

Paul Harvey

Here's a very nice primary source book for your collection or for your university library, that adds much to the literature on nineteenth-century missionaries, especially female missionaries, and white-Native interactions: Nancy Bunge, ed., Woman in the Wilderness: Letters of Harriet Wood Wheeler, Missionary Wife, 1832-1892.

In this volume, Bunge has collected the most significant letters and writings of a missionary and her family, who worked among the Ojibwe from the 1840s through the 1860s, including during the period of the removal of the Ojibwe from their lands in northern Wisconsin; the collection also includes a newspaper article from Julia Wheeler in 1862 which condemns government policy for leading to the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota, which culminated in the hangings of 38 Sioux in December 1862. In this volume, Wheeler begins with fairly conventional Protestant attitudes from her home area near Lowell, Massachusetts, but during her years as a "missionary wife" becomes an advocate for her subjects.

The editor, Michigan State University professor Nancy Bunge, discusses the process of collecting the material for this compilation here. The result of her work is a letter collection that allows the reader to watch the evolution of the subject over a quarter century or more, and to understand in a more intimate way the lives and interactions of white and natives on the midwestern frontier.

Remember, Remember the 29th of November

Emily Clark

American history contains many anniversaries – some good, some bad, some remembered with parades, some remembered with shame, and some often forgotten. Today, November 29^th, marks the 146^th year anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, a tragic event in 1864 Kiowa County, Colorado in which some 700 men of the Third Colorado Cavalry under John Chivington surrounded and attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. After the gun powder blasts settled, at least 150 Native Americans lay dead.

Of all the locations in the United States National Park Service, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site is the only one to include the word “massacre” in the title (though the 2005 historic marker called it the “Sand Creek Battle Ground,” picture taken from National Park Service website). Yesterday this piece of American history was brought to my attention by the compelling and engaging book Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (2007) by Emory English professor Michael Elliott. Elliott’s book is an artful blend of ethnographic fieldwork and history of the life of Custer and his spectral-like legacy that looms over the thousands of Americans who are fascinated by his life, military career, and – perhaps most of all – his death. Locating the power of memory and public history of Custer enthusiasts in the land he walked, rode, and lived upon, the memoirs he and his wife left behind, and the immense appeal of the unknowns surrounding his famous death, Elliott deftly explores “Custerology” – or the “historical interpretation and commemoration” of all things Custer – as a site of the inherent and “collective ambivalence” of the relationship between the United States and “the indigenous peoples who have lived within its borders.” To accomplish his task, Elliott interviewed members of the Little Bighorn Associates (a group of American history/Custer aficionados), spent time with Steve Alexander (a living historian of Custer’s life), talked with local Native Americans, and dug deep into the primary sources and existing historiography surrounding Custer. The result is an enjoyable read on a sometimes disheartening, but always fascinating topic.

Established in April of 2007, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site calls attention to what contemporary National Parks Director Mary Bomar called one of “the tragedies that affect our national consciousness.” About 500 hundred were present at the site’s dedication, including Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders who turned out on April 28^th for the ceremony. Typically when I think of America’s National Parks system and religion, my mind conjures images of John Muir sitting near Yosemite’s Cathedral Rocks writing defenses of his beloved landscape or tales from the Park-to-Park Highway’s first “pilgrims” in the 1920s West in search of spiritual rejuvenation (perhaps this due to my love of Ken Burns documentaries). The Indian Wars’ so-called “clash of cultures” elucidates contentious moments of American religious history, and its memorialized sites bring into focus religious intolerance, violence, and resistance. Though not the most lovely way to begin the week, this somber note certainly complicates popular public history narratives of the grand first Thanksgiving between friendly pilgrims and Indians near Plymouth Rock.