Sketch of the Brothertown Indians

The "Sketch of The Brothertown Indians" was written in 1855 by Thomas Commuck, a member of that community. It was initially published in the Wisconsin Historical Collections in 1859. In the first sentence, Commuck makes it clear that he believes that his tribal government had made the right decision in the 1830's when they chose to accept citizenship and allowed their reservation to be divided into parcels for private ownership.

Today's Brothertowns continue to be an organized community, still not recognized as Indians by the United States government. However, the Brothertowns, whose headquarters is now in Fond du Lac (WI), have been trying for a long time to become "re-recognized," and federal agencies are now giving it some serious consideration. A government anthropologist was sent to Fond du Lac a few weeks ago to gather data.

The Citizen vs. Indian controversy is complex enough that I really want to be careful to avoid making any generalizations about it. At least for some period of time, many of the Brothertowns felt that Citizenship was the right choice for them. Meanwhile, their neighbors, the Stockbridges, were divided more-or-less evenly on the Citizen vs. Indian controversy and their political in-fighting was so bitter that it nearly destroyed that Native nation. I would say that the Brothertowns now wish their ancestors had kept their tribal recognition, but, I bet the way they look at it now is that their ancestors shouldn't have had to choose between being recognized as citizens and recognized as Indians. And who can blame them for that?

The Mohican Ten Commandments

"The Mohican Ten Commandments" is not the title of an actual document, but it refers to something much like the Ten Commandments in the oral history of the Mohican Indians that was put in writing by Captain Hendrick Aupaumut. Three different fragments of Aupaumut's complete history have been put together and published as part of American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s-1930s, edited by Bernd Peyer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

Maybe it isn't right for me to refer to Aupaumut's statements as "Commandments," because he introduced them in this way: "The Head of each family - man or woman - would...waken...their children and teach them, as follows"(page 66).

Each admonishment, or "Commandment" if you will, consists of a paragraph, but I'll shorten them so they fit into my post:
"My Children - you must remember that it is by the goodness of [God] we are preserved through the night...."
"My little Children, if you see an aged man or woman on your way doing something, you must pity on them, and help them instantly"(page 66).
"My little Children- you must be very kind to strangers...."
"My Children- again listen. You must be honest in all your ways."
"My Children- you must never steal anything from your fellow men...."
"My Children - you must always avoid bad Company."...
"My Children- you must be very industrious."...
"And further, my Children- when you grow up, you must not take wife or husband without the consent of your parents and all relations."...
"My Children- at all times you must obey your Sachem and Chiefs"(page 67).

Obviously, these points are overlapping, but not the same as the Commandments that were given to Moses in the 20th chapter of Exodus. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Captain Hendrick Aupaumut believed that the traditional Mohican ideology was compatible with Christianity.

Thanksgiving....a little historical perspective

Marge Bruchac, is an Abanaki Indian and a professional museum consultant. A few months ago I received something she wrote in 1998 and posted to some kind of online community in 1999. She called it "Thanksgiving and Giving Thanks in New England" - a little historical perspective (I'll try to find a link so you can read the whole thing). Here's some of what she had to say:

For centuries, all the Algonquian Indian peoples of New England have practiced rituals of feasting and giving thanks throughout the year, in every season, for every harvest [including Maple sugar harvest, strawberry harvest, and squash harvest]. Native beliefs and customs of hospitality called for sharing with relatives and strangers including the Pilgrims.

Bruchac informs us that the people that we call "Pilgrims" actually referred to themselves as "saints," because they were Separatists (see my previous post for an explanation of Separatism). In fact, they didn't call any feast they enjoyed a "Thanksgiving." According to Bruchac, that term wasn't used by whites until the 1800's. Nevertheless, a feast shared by Pilgrims and Indians really did happen. Bruchac acknowledges that "Massasoit and 90 warriors showed up to eat and drink," and although she tells us that 19th century "romantics rescripted [sic] the past to suit their fantasies," I still think there must have been something special about what most Americans now refer to as "the first Thanksgiving."
Why else would we continue to celebrate it for so many years?

Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform

Parts of William G. McLoughlin's book, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (University of Chicago Press, 1978), have helped me to understand the nature of Algonkian church history and the broader movement of frontier Calvinism. In a previous post, I mentioned that a focus on Old Testament law encouraged a sense of guilt. Furthermore, that background of guilt and anxiety enhanced the conversion experience which Calvinists (Puritans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians) understood to be an outward sign that one was predestined for salvation. In fact, McLoughlin wrote that it was not unusual for a conversion experience to be "overwhelming in its power, transforming in its result, and ecstatic in the sense of relief it provided"(43, 63-65).

Well, if conversion experiences were really "all that" (and they certainly were for some people), there were people that felt so special for having their conversion experience that they didn't want to belong to a church which included those who might not be predestined for salvation. Those people became known as Separatists.

Anyway, you may be saying to yourself, "what does McLoughlin's book have to do with Algonkian church history? " A lot. McLoughlin explains that those who suffered more tensions and repressed rage against society were more deeply relieved by their conversion experiences and as a result, emotional conversions made frontier Calvinism popular among the poor, Black slaves, women, children, and Indians (page 75).

Blue-eyed Indian

Aside from some of the standard stereotypes and assumptions, most non-Indians really don't know much about today's American Indians. But occasionally something will happen that brings them attention from the media. In 1992, a remake of the movie The Last of the Mohicans (based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper), prompted a reporter for the Troy [New York] Record to interview Steve Comer, the only enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians who lives in the Mohican's ancestral homeland.

The article that resulted from Daniel Lorber's interview of Comer ran under the title "RENSSELAER COUNTY'S LAST MOHICAN: 'Blue-eyed Indian' Last of Line to Walk in Ancestor's Footsteps"(October 11, 1992). (Steve notes that his eyes are "technically Hazel," but appear to be blue at times depending on the lighting.) Newspapers really aren't the best place to get a summary of centuries of tribal history, but this particular article - thanks to Comer's knowledge and Lorber's reporting - is better than most.

Stockbridge Mohicans have told me that as they travel the country and tell people that they are Mohicans they are often told by those people that they no longer exist. Comer spoke to that: "In spite of everything, we've survived, and we want people to know we have survived. We lost our language, our history, our lifeways, but we didn't lose our Indian-ness."

Currently Steve Comer is an Archaeology student working on his PhD and active in promoting a wilderness skills demonstration that will be part of the 400-year commemoration of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that was home to the Mohicans, but later named after Hudson. I'm grateful that he has appreciated my research into the history of his tribe.

The Indians of Lenapehoking

Titles and names of groups can be confusing or misleading. One example: The Stockbridge-Munsee Indians. In spoken communication, people often don't realize that there is a hyphen between the words "Stockbridge," and "Munsee," so they make the reasonable, but incorrect assumption that the Stockbridges are a band of Munsees. Actually, of course, they are Mohicans, (or, arguably, they are amalgamated Algonkians). But who are the Munsee Indians?

A book that appears to be written for middle school students, The Indians of Lenapehoking (1985, Seton Hall University Museum) by Herbert C. Kraft and John T. Kraft addresses our question. The people who once lived in an area that included all of New Jersey, plus much of the land surrounding it, once called themselves the Lenape, or "the ordinary people." In the 1600's the English began calling them the Delaware Indians (page 2). (The Mohicans believed they were descendants of the Delawares and referred to them as their "grandfathers.")

According to Kraft and Kraft, "two related but distinct" groups of Indians made up the Delawares. Those living north of the Raritan River spoke a Munsee dialect, while those south of the Raritan spoke a Unami dialect (page 2).
(Map courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

The question of how the Stockbridge Mohicans became the "Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians" is too complex for me to get into now. Suffice it to say that the "Munsee" part doesn't refer to the Brotherton Indians, it refers to other Delawares that joined the Stockbridges later on.

Brothertown, New York, 1785-1796

Although Samson Occom is the most famous of the Brothertown Indians, he was not their most powerful leader, in fact, in the last year or two of his life he moved to New Stockbridge (about six miles from Brothertown). Brothertown would not have been established if David Fowler, a Montauk, had not established a relationshhip with the Oneidas in central New York State. After that, Joseph Johnson, a Mohegan, was the most influential in bringing the amalgamated nation of Algonkian remnants together. Few historians have taken the time to focus on the Brothertown Indians, which makes an article I located in New York History (vol 81, no.4, October, 2000, pages 457-492) particularly valuable. "Brothertown, New York, 1785-1796," was written by Anthony Wonderly and its title is perhaps modest, because Wonderly gives some ink to who the Brothertowners were before they came together and finishes up with a brief discussion of their emmigration to what is now Wisconsin.

The Brothertown Indians came from at least six different tribes, including Montauketts, Narrangansetts, Niantics, Pequots, Mohegans, and Tunxis (the "Farmington Indians").
The challenges that Wonderly identifies, include 1) dealing with white encroachment, 2) adjusting to an agricultural economy from an economy that was still based to a large extent on gathering clams and oysters, and finally 3) the "sectarian competition" between tribal subgroups who were either Methodist, Baptist, Separatist, or Presbyterian (476).

Wonderly's impression, and he is probably correct, is that the challenge of growing their food as whites did was particularly significant. He suggests that the Brothertown Indians often went hungry and it was their poverty that gave white farmers from New England an opening to move in and lease the Indians' land. Please read the article if you want to know how things unravelled from there. (I suggest you ask your library to get it for you as an interlibrary loan, I don't think it is on the web.)

Occom's "Short Narrative of My Life"

Samson Occom wrote a brief (26 pages) autobiography in 1768 and a much-briefer one (only one page) in1765. His motivation for writing (historians believe), had something to do with his preaching tour of England and Scotland, in which people were puzzled over the reality that an Indian could actually be both educated and "civilized" according to white standards. If a man could preach and behave that well, they wondered, could he have ever been a true "wild" Indian?

Thus Occom's autobiography begins: "I was born a Heathen and brought up in Heathenism, till I was between 16 & 17 years of age, at a place called Mohegan, in New London, Connecticut... My parents livd a wandering life, for did all Indians at Mohegan, they Chiefly Depended upon Hunting, Fishing & Fowling for their living and had no connection with the English, excepting to traffic with them in their small trifles."

Occom acknowledged that preachers sometimes came into the area, but they did not appeal to him until "When I was 16 years of age, we heard a Strange Rumor among the English, that there were Extraordinary Ministers Preaching from Place to Place and a Strange Concern among the White People." As Bernd Peyer explains in a footnote, Occom was describing what is known to history as " 'the Great Awakening,' a massive religious revival which began in Europe around 1720 and then spread along the entire English-speaking Atlantic seaboard during the 1730's and 1740's."

Given the remarkable person Samson Occom was, I can guarantee more posts to come about him. His autobiography is on the web. [Bernd Peyer's background notes are found in American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s - 1930s, (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). ]

The Puritan Mind

We won't fully understand the "Red Puritans," until we understand the white ones. I will now quote from Herbert Wallace Schneider's The Puritan Mind (University of Michigan Press/Henry Holt, 1930) in order to set up posts yet to come.

According to Schneider, "The Puritans, searching the scriptures for texts relevant to their own particular needs, soon discovered the general similarity between them and the ancient Israelites. The Lord had obviously chosen them, as he had the children of Israel, to carry out his plans for the redemption of the world. They had been driven from their homes...for the sake of building a promised land..... The Puritans' constant preoccupation with the Old Testament and Mosaic law was...the natural turning for comfort and counsel to a people who seemed to have undergone a similar experience"(26).

He adds,"The belief in their divine election in a great work soon ceased to be a mere faith and came to be regarded as an empirical fact"(27).

The scrict laws that gave meaning and comfort to that culture also, of course, brought a sense of guilt to its members. This vague guilt was one of the key ingredients in the conversion experience, the outward sign that God had chosen an individual for salvation. More on that in future posts.

Schneider's comments clue us in also on the motivation of missions. This is not to say that missionaries and their supporters were not concerned about saving individual Native souls, nor to say that they didn't care about the Indians' temporal needs, but there was also something else. The conviction that God chose them for "a great work," came from Biblical passages related to the coming of the Millenium. Some thought the second coming of Christ would be brought about by the conversion of Native nations.

The Panoplist, (October, 1818)

If you know the history of the Stockbridge Mohicans, you know that they had to make a number of moves. Very briefly, I will mention the plan to move from New York State to the White River of Indiana. Essentially, a promise made to the Stockbridges by Thomas Jefferson was not honored by those who came after him, including William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory (and an "Indian fighter"). As a result, only one Stockbridge band stopped off at Indiana and only for a few years.

Anyway, John Metoxen was the chief or headman of the band that left New York and headed for Indiana in 1818. Of course, in those days, that part of the country was a wild frontier, but Metoxen's band was able to take a short break from their travels in a little town in Ohio. A clergyman met them there and described the experience in a letter to the editor of The Panoplist, (the October 1818 issue of the mission publication). Here's what he said:

They "arrived in September on their way to White River, Indiana, stopped over the Sabbath, asked to attend a meeting, [and] asked if the Lord's Supper would be administered and expressed great joy and inquired if they could be admitted. On questioning them it was found their Chief and others were regularly formed into a [Calvinist] church. Their credentials and appearance gave a satisfactory evidence of their piety. A number of them attended the public worship dressed in Indian habit and six came forward to the communion table. They conducted with the utmost propriety and solemnity and some were bathed in tears. When a Psalm was named they all took out their books and turned to it. It was the most interesting day ever in this place."

He continues, "On Monday I visited them and then conversed and prayed with them and never was more kindly and cordially received. I found that a large proportion of them had Bibles and could read. The Chief had a Scott's Family Bible. They also had other religious books."

Whenever I hear somebody say that Indians are "spiritual but not religious," or that they "just went through the motions" in order to receive handouts from missionaries, I think of a few documents, one being that letter in the Panoplist. Probably the best place to get a photocopy from The Panoplist would be through the Congregational Library in Boston, call them at (617) 523-0470.

Occom's Preaching

Samson Occom is unquestionably one of the biggest heroes of Algonkian Church History. According to Colin Calloway (New Worlds for All, 1997), there were 133 Christian Indian preachers in the thirteen colonies before they claimed independence from the British. But of course, there is a difference between being a "preacher" and successfully going through the rigors required for ordination.

In 1759, Samson Occom, a Mohegan, was the first Indian to be ordained as a Presbyterian minister (by the Presbytery of Suffolk). There is so much to say about Rev. Occom, not only did he shatter many stereotypes, but he also preached a famous execution sermon, achieved fame and raised a fortune in a preaching tour of Britian and Scotland, and led a collection of Algonkian Christian remnants to form a new Indian nation called Brothertown. Each of these achievements deserves its own post on the blog.

One of Occom's biographers described his preaching:

"He was prone to dwell in the fashion of his time upon the peril of the soul. He gauged the success of his pleading by the tears he produced, by the degree to which auditors were aroused to fright and alarm over the terrible question of salvation. His chief aim was to arouse the conviction of sin" (Samson Occom, by Harold Blodgett, 215).

Brotherton Reservation

After John Eliot himself, one of the most famous missionaries to the American Indians was David Brainerd. In the 1740's, Brainerd found the Delaware Indians at Crossweeksung, New Jersey open to his preaching and willing to become Christians. But since ownership of the land there was in dispute and since the soil was more fertile 15 miles away, Brainerd acquired another tract of land there which became the mission town of Bethel in 1746. Brainerd died in 1747 at the age of 29.

About ten years after Brainerd's death, it became clear that white settlers were about to move into the area. To prevent this from happening, Stephen Calvin, a New Jersey Delaware who served as Bethel's schoolteacher, as well as other chiefs and a coalition of white Presbyterians and Quakers got together and influenced the New Jersey colonial government to purchase over 3000 acres in the pine barrens. "Brotherton," was the only Indian reservation in the history of New Jersey.

By 1801 there were less than 100 Delawares left on the Brotherton reservation. Captain Hendrick Aupaumut of the Stockbridge Mohicans (then living in New York State) had already invited the Brothertons to join his people in a letter he wrote in 1793. Several other letters were sent back and forth and petitions to the government of New Jersey were also written. The petition they wrote in 1801 was acted on with the state selling the Brotherton's land in order to pay for their transportation to New Stockbridge, New York. A subsequent treaty made the Brothertons legally a part of another small Indian nation, the Stockbridge Mohicans.

The primary documents and some of the background that I have discussed here were compiled in a little book edited and published by Richard S. Walling (ISBN 0-9768719-3-9). The title is Brotherton Reservation & Weekping - Coaxen A Documentary History: The Betrayal of the Indigenous People of New Jersey. (Clinton A. Weslager and Herbert Kraft have also written books about the Delaware Indians that briefly address the Brothertons.)


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