"Compact History" of the Mohicans

An ambitious project was started a while back by Lee Sultzman. The idea was to write "about 240 compact tribal histories." Although I doubt that he's finished 240 histories, the ones that Sultzman did write are well done and in the spirit of the internet, he asks us, his readers, for feedback.

The first paragraph of the "History" section that Sultzman has on the Mahicans [Mohicans] is consistent with everything that I've read and consistent with the idea that it was not missionaries, but rather another European industry that brought on the downfall of the Mohicans and other once-mighty Native nations.

Throughout the 1500s, European sea captains rode the Gulf Stream north along the east coast of the United States on their return to Europe. It became common practice to add some last minute profit to their voyage by stopping enroute to capture native slaves. For this reason, many coastal tribes became hostile to the pale-faced men from the big ships, but the Mahican lived well-inland and had no such experience. Employed by the Dutch East India Company to search for the Northwest Passage (a fabled shortcut to China), Henry Hudson sailed through the Verrazano strait and entered the Hudson River in September, 1609. For the reasons mentioned, the Wappinger on the lower river proved hostile, but Hudson continued upstream until stopped by shallow water near the Mahican villages just below Albany. The Mahican were not only friendly but eager to trade. Hudson exhausted his trade goods and returned to Holland with a cargo of valuable furs which immediately attracted Dutch merchants to the area. The first Dutch fur traders arrived on the Hudson River the following year to trade with the Mahican. Besides exposing them to European epidemics, the fur trade destabilized the region, and rather than prosperity, it brought the Mahican death and destruction.

Click here to continue reading.

The Lost Tribes and the Louisiana Purchase

I have already explained what the lost tribes theory is, and the role it played as a motivator to missionaries as part of their millenialist worldview. But would you have ever thought that Thomas Jefferson gave the lost tribes theory some thought before going ahead with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803?

As you may have learned in school, Jefferson was known for his intelligence, being not only the 3rd president of the US, but also an inventor, a scientist and more. In regards to religion, he was a Deist, and didn't think of God as being active in the course of human history. But he gave the lost tribes theory some consideration.

After trading with Indians in the southern colonies for forty years and observing their speech and practices, James Adair returned to London where his book, History of the American Indians, was published in 1775. Adair devoted hundreds of pages to specific evidence which he believed proved that American Indians were lineal descendants of the Israelites. Many whites living in the thirteen colonies believed Adair and felt that finding the lost tribes and rebelling against Britain were part of a divine conspiracy that would bring on the millenium.

So Thomas Jefferson had to decide if the American Indians really were as central to salvation history as many believed, or were they, as Richard Popkin writes, "just people," who would have to "find their place or role in a secular world, not in a fanciful voyage to the Holy Land"?

In an article in Eighteenth Century Studies, Harold Hellenbrand determined that Jefferson asked John Adams his opinion about the lost tribes theory and they ultimately agreed that "Adair's evidence was superficial and inconclusive"(Popkin, page 79). As a result, Popkin concludes: "The Louisiana Purchase was for Jefferson a commitment that the United States would develop as a secular redeemer nation, solving the problems of mankind by reason and science, and not as part of scriptural history."

For Further Reading:

• Popkin, Richard "The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory," a chapter in Hebrew and the Bible in America, Shalom Goldman, Editor. University Press of New England, 1993.
• Hellenbrand, Harold. "Not 'to Destroy But to Fulfil': Jefferson, Indians, and Republican Dispensation," in Eighteenth Century Studies, 18 (1985).

Natick Dictionary

James Hammond Turnbull (1821-1897) was a philologist (which means he studied languages). He didn't work directly with Algonkian-speaking Indians, but was fortunate to have the chance to "deciper rough phonetic accounts" passed down from the 1600's and 1700's (source). (Undoubtedly John Eliot's Natick Bible was used.)

If you're not already familiar with any Algonkian languages, but want to learn one or more, the Natick Dictionary might be the best place to start becasuse words are translated both from Natick to English, and also from English to Natick. Turnbull is given credit for being the first white scholar to understand how highly systematic the Algonkian languages were [are].

Although recently reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, the Natick Dictionary was originally printed by the United States Government Printing office about six years after Turnbull's death and that edition can now be found online thanks to Google.

The Algonquians of Schaghticoke

In a recent post, I mentioned something about a village called Schaghticoke that (according to Patrick Frazier) was inhabited by refugees from various Algonkian nations. Not long after that post hit the net, I got a message from one of the Schaghticoke Indians, a man who identified himself as Mickey. I spoke with him this morning on the phone and the history which he told me about is better taken from the Schaghticoke Indian Reservation's website than from my notes.

As you know, this blog is about Christianity in the Algonkian tribes, so I asked Mickey if he is a Christian. I don't remember what he said, but it wasn't "yes" and it wasn't "no" either.

There is a stereotype held by some non-Christian Indians that Christianity is "the white man's religion" and nothing more than a tool of oppression. But then there are people like Mickey, who, although they are not members of a Christian church, understand that the Algonkian Indians were spiritual people before whites came to Turtle Island (America) and most of the ones who became Christians did it to maintain their spirituality.

According to Mickey, Algonquian means "All become One," and he and his people are doing what they can to put a stop to all kinds of segregation. This strikes me as being different from other Indian communities that I know of. Often in the course of trying to preserve an Indian community, the downside is that outsiders don't always feel welcome.

Red Man Dispossessed

How did the Indians at Stockbridge, Massachusetts lose their land? That question is addressed by Lion Miles in an article that appeared in the New England Quarterly in 1994 and was later re-printed as part of a book called "New England Encounters." The title of his article, "The Red Man Dispossessed: The Williams Family and the Alienation of Indian Land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1736-1818," reveals who the true villians were in the process.

The article is largely summed up when Miles states "Ephraim Williams, his son Elijah, and designing European traders cheated the Indians out of their land"(on page 75). The period of time which Miles refers to as "the great land grab" didn't begin until after Jonathan Edwards was no longer the missionary. John Sergeant [Sr.], Edwards and Timothy Woodbridge, the schoolteacher, advocated for the Indians, ensuring that the great land grab didn't begin until the end of the 1759. (But, as you may also read in Miles' article and elsewhere, Edwards, Woodbridge, and John Sergeant each also received sizable parcels of land when the mission town was being set up.)

There was a court system in place that was supposed to protect the Indians from fraud, but unfortunately, Miles explains, as the Sheriff of Berkshire County, Elijah Williams, had a conflict of interest. His purchases of Indian land made him "a very wealthy man"(page 70).

Christmas at Shawano County, 1858

When they came to what is now Wisconsin, the Stockbridge Mohicans were an agricultural people, but after they lost their land on the east shore of Lake Winnebago, the next move was to a part of Shawano County, where most of the land was too swampy and rocky to farm. The treaty of 1856 that created the Shawano County reservation was welcomed by the Citizen Party, but many in the Indian Party protested it by refusing to move.

Jeremiah Slingerland, whose life story will be spelled out in future posts, was one Indian Party member who didn't participate in the protest. Slingerland and his wife, Sarah, were the tribe's schoolteachers, and Jeremiah had a number of irons in the fire, he farmed, preached, and was active in tribal politics. (I don't refer to him as "Reverend Slingerland," since he was not ordained until many years after he graduated from an eastern seminary.)

On December 25th, 1858, Jeremiah Slingerland wrote a letter to his Aunt, Electa (Quinney) Candy (she is another person who will be featured in future posts). The letter is largely about politics: members of the Indian Party were trying to purchase land from their "Uncles," the Oneidas. He tells also of tough times, saying that Benjamin Doxtator is "about blind from drunkenness." A truer indicator of poverty, however, is his description of the school. Slingerland tells his aunt that "My school is in progress tho, not so many attend as in the fall because many can't get shoes - the agent will send up a box of them tho, to furnish the school children."

The Slingerlands adopted a number of children who didn't make it into adulthood. At the age of seven, they also adopted "Teaspoon" Davids, aside from him none of their children reproduced. The Christmas Day letter seems to be the only evidence of a "Franky" Slingerland, here's what it says:

"Today is Christmas and our little Franky is five years old - A Merry Christmas to you."

and

"Franky wants me to say to Aunt this is his birth day and is five years old."

The letter is contained in the John C. Adams Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.

Thelma Davids Putnam

Algonkian church history would be incomplete if it were not for Thelma [Davids] Putnam (1901-1993).

As a Stockbridge Mohican elder, Thelma Putnam was satisfied with Rev. J.N. Davidson's tribal history, except that his account ended in the 1890's - just about the time when the Stockbridge Mohicans seemed to go from Calvinist to Lutheran. So Ms. Putnam (or "Aunt Thel" as some people still refer to her today) took up the task of writing an updated tribal church history.




A photo from page 18 of her book --->








A descendant of the Millers and Yoccums on her mother's side and David Naunauneekanuk on her father's side, Thelma Davids was born in 1901 (Davids Family Genealogy). She grew up in the town of Red Springs, just across the road from the Lutheran mission. As a result, she "grew up with personal knowledge of and [was] a personal friend of many of the pastors, teachers, and employees of the Lutheran Mission" (Putnam, page 2).

Reflecting back in her later years, Thelma Putnam was realistic enough to understand that not everybody had loved the mission the same way that she did, but the descriptions she gives us of her childhood memories leave no doubt that the mission church was the center for "all social life" for many of the Stockbridge Mohicans (page 15).

As her nephew, Steve Comer, tells it, Thelma Davids was the first Stockbridge Indian he knew of that "went off the Rez and made her name in the world." When Thelma Davids was growing up it wasn't common for rural people (not just Indians but also whites) to attend high school. But Thel attended and graduated from Milwaukee Lutheran High School and went on to serve as a missionary/teacher to the White Mountain Apache Indians in Arizona.



<----After returning to Wisconsin, Thelma married Steve Putnam. They raised eight daughters and one son.


Nobody that I had a chance to ask was able to confirm this, but Thelma Davids Putnam appears to have followed in the footsteps of the German-born Rev. Francis Uplegger, who began his ministry in Shawano County, and later became the "Director of the Lutheran High School in Milwaukee" and missionary at the White Mountain Apache Reservation (page 31).

While there was one mission church at Stockbridge, Massachusetts in the 1700's (and it was supported by wealthy and powerful people overseas), the situation was very different in the 1900's. In the twentieth century, a number of small, scattered Indian congregations sprang up in Shawano County. The credit for preserving the history of those congregations goes to Thelma Putnam. Her book, Christian Religion Among the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians (written in 1978 and self-published) tells of the many comings and goings of ministers and their families. It also tells in detail how various church communities lacking financial resources began without the benefit of a church building and met in people's homes, the cook shack from an old logging camp, the tribal headquarters, and even in a converted saloon.

The book is for sale ($15) at the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library-Museum.

A Nation of Statesmen

There really isn't a complete and definitive history of the Stockbridge Mohicans, but A Nation of Statesmen by James Oberly (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005) is arguably the closest thing to it. The book's subtitle, The Political Culture of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, 1815-1972, is a tipoff that Oberly's focus is on politics and I agree that politics was a huge focus of the Stockbridge people - more than religion was - during that period of time. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the Stockbridge Mohicans were bitterly divided into a "Citizen Party" and an "Indian Party" for generations. It is a conflict that has been addressed by others before. But Oberly, a professor at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, does a good job of fleshing out the bigger picture of how the Citizen Party leaders were allied with Democrats in Washington, while the Indian Party leaders were allied with Republican legislators.

Something that I haven't mentioned yet, is that between about 1895 and the mid-1930's, the Stockbridge Mohicans were not recognized as a political entity. But thanks to their political leaders, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community was the first Native nation to re-organize under the Indian Reorganization Act. A Nation of Statesmen also chronicles that remarkable piece of history.

You can compare these maps from Oberly's book to the ones in my post "Wisconsin's Past and Present."

Oberly's book also has appendices which contain documents such as relevant treaties, acts of Congress, etc.

Church of the Wilderness

A phrase in a poem written by John Greenleaf Whittier (a Massachusetts Quaker) in the 1800's has stayed with the Stockbridge Mohicans to this day. "The Preacher" was the name of the poem and J.N. Davidson used the phrase "church of the wilderness" as the title of the first chapter of his history of the Stockbridge Nation. Here's part of the poem:

In the church of the wilderness Edwards wrought,
Shaping his creed at the forge of thought;
And with Thor's own hammer welded and bent
The iron links of his argument,
Which strove to grasp in its mighty span
The purpose of God and the fate of man!
Yet faithful still, in his daily round
To the weak, and the poor, and sin-sick found,
The schoolman's lore and the casuist's art
Drew warmth and life from his fervent heart.

Today the Lutheran Church of the Wilderness is one of two active Lutheran churches on the small Stockbridge-Munsee reservation.

Intro to Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards was the most famous person to ever preach to the Stockbridge Mohicans, in fact, he was so influential in early American history that I had to read one of his sermons in a literature class in the public high school I attended. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was the name of the sermon.

Edwards made more than just a cameo appearance in Algonkian church history: After John Sergeant died, Edwards was chosen as the next missionary at Stockbridge [MA], serving there from 1751 to 1757. Despite the "fire and brimstone" stereotype we have of Rev. Edwards, a few historians are now recognizing that he did some really positive things for his Indian charges. In fact, the sermons about sin that caused such great anxiety in white churchgoers weren't the same sermons that he preached to the Stockbridge Mohicans. I promise more about Edwards in later posts.

The Stockbridge Iroquois?

In the last few decades, many of the Stockbridge Mohicans have gone from shortening the name of their people from the "Stockbridges" to the "Mohicans." Of course, there are reasons for this. First of all, the word "Stockbridge" couldn't have been picked by Indians. The name "Stockbridge" was taken from an English town with that name. And now that Indians can be proud of being Indians, why not refer to themselves by an authentic Indian name?

Now I'm going argue that the name "Stockbridge Indians," though not as romantic as "Mohicans," is more historically or genealogically accurate. It is a rather simple argument, really. Many of the Indians that joined the Stockbridge community over the years, were non-Mohicans. It began with Algonkians that had lived among or been politically influenced by the Mohicans since the 1600's. These groups would include (probably the Schaghticoke's and) the Wappingers. In 1756 the remnant of the Wappingers, numbering 227 souls, joined the Stockbridge community. At that time there were probably only about 200 Stockbridge "Mohicans," but the community became larger by taking on the Wappingers.

Then of course, there are the Munsees, they are not Mohicans. There are the Brotherton Delawares (but they might not have many descendants left among the Stockbridges). And the Gardner family were Narrangansetts.

So far, I've only mentioned other Algonkians, but there were also Indians from Iroquois nations who joined the Stockbridge community. The treaty of 1856 included language that encouraged the Munsees and all other Indians that were still in New York State to settle in the new Stockbridge-Munsee reservation. Some of the New York Iroquois took the government up on this. J.N. Davidson (page 44) says he was told that Senecas, Onondagas, and Cayugas, "about eighty in all," joined the Stockbridge community in the 1850's.

There were also escaped slaves and others with African blood marrying into the Stockbridge community, and white people, what about the white people?! There is a lot of German and other white blood among those who are members of the Stockbridge community. Maybe they could call themselves the Stockbridge Tri-racial Community - If you can think of something more genealogically accurate than that, please let me know.

Prospectus: Brothertown

David J. Silverman, a history professor at George Washington University, has been working on a book about the Brothertown Indians over the last few years. In 2006 Silverman allowed Rich Church, a Brothertown, to share his book prospectus over the Brothertown listserv. A few days ago, Silverman gave me permission to quote from the prospectus and added that the book will be in stores and libraries by the fall of 2009 if not sooner. The title will be Brothertown: American Indians and the Problem of Race. Here's a few quotes:

"One of the striking features of Brothertown, New Stockbridge, and the Oneidas, is that these Indian communities met almost every demand placed upon them by white authorities: they adopted Christianity,literacy, the English language, male plow agriculture, and eventually, even private property. yet, wherever they moved, state, federal, or territorial governments did everything they could to force the Indians out yet again....there was nothing the Indians could do to persuade authorities that Indians deserved a place in the republic."

"Indians across the Northeast began regarding themselves as America's true Christians, because , after all, it was they who shared everything they had with one another despite their trials. By contrast, the Indians cast whites as indelible hypocrites."

Silverman also says that the first generation of Brothertowns was interested "not the least of all, [in] forming a new town in which they could ban all Indians who had married African Americans or who descended from such marriages."

That may sound politically incorrect, but the Brothertowns were trying to preserve what was left of their Native culture. Furthermore, they knew that if somebody had any African blood, they would be treated as Negroes, which was even worse than being treated like Indians.