“For the Good of Their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country

Abstract

William Hart’s stated objective in his fine new monograph is to “problematize” the ways in which individual “faithful Mohawks” (20) engaged and performed Protestantism over the course of a long eighteenth century. Informed by deep research in a sizeable primary archive of missionary correspondence, and grounded in broad study of both ethnohistorical scholarship on Christian missionization and performance theory, Hart’s book succeeds admirably in providing an evenhanded assessment of the phenomenon of Anglican missionary work among the Mohawks from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Additionally, his insights into this particular case study address broader questions for all those interested in the dynamics of cross-cultural contact.Hart moves beyond long-standing tropes in studies of missionary work among Indigenous people, expressing healthy skepticism of the efforts of prior scholars to measure the degree to which Mohawk conversions to Christianity were bona fide. Instead, Hart maintains that we can glean better insights into Mohawk engagement with Church of England missionaries by assessing the Mohawks’ actions—how they assimilated the religious messaging offered to them, integrated it into their own cultural framework, and subsequently performed it among themselves and before settler audiences. Fundamentally, Hart contends that Mohawks engaged Protestant Christianity initially as a means of “turn[ing] outsiders [i.e., the Anglican missionaries] into insiders” (4), and eventually, by the mid-eighteenth century, as a vehicle for acquiring literacy in a world where “talking papers” (i.e., treaty documents, land deeds, contracts) (228) exerted powerful influence over the Mohawks’ collective future.Hart is forthcoming about the limits of his evidence—he does not presume to represent what Mohawks believed about the Anglican faith (138, 227–28). Rather, he is more interested in how the Mohawks residing in the Mohawk Valley during the eighteenth century leveraged their acceptance of Protestant missionaries as part of a broader effort to cultivate ties of alliance to Great Britain. Carrying the narrative through the upheavals of the Revolutionary War, Hart also offers a detailed and nuanced assessment of the role of Anglican religious performance in the establishment of post-Revolutionary Mohawk/Haudenosaunee diasporic communities in Upper Canada (Tyendinaga and Grand River).Notwithstanding Hart’s commendable unwillingness to allow the current international boundary between Canada and the United States to structure his inquiry into the Mohawks’ social and political history in the first, second, and sixth chapters of the book, there are some ways in which a still more comprehensive adoption of that perspective might have offered better contextualization of his chosen case study. By 1700, two-thirds of the Mohawk population resided in the St. Lawrence River Valley community of Kahnawake (24). By the eve of the American Revolution, that proportion grew to approximately three-quarters of the Mohawk population, with additional Mohawk communities at Kanesatake and Akwesasne, each of which hosted a Catholic mission. A more consistent effort by the author to engage in comparative assessment of how the so-called Catholicized (36) Mohawks of the St. Lawrence Valley engaged the Jesuits over the course of the eighteenth century might have shed important light on the contemporaneous approaches to Protestant missionaries of their kinfolk remaining in the Mohawk Valley.Hart’s study is a welcome addition to early North American ethnohistorical scholarship. The book offers fresh insight not only into Mohawk culture during a crucial era of their history but also into the challenging question of assaying what the Mohawks meant and wanted by their persistent (albeit infrequently answered) requests for Protestant ministers.