‘How may wee come to serve God?’: Spaces of Religious Utterance in John Eliot's Indian Tracts

Abstract

In 1671 the Reverend John Eliot imagined the religious conversion of one of Massachusetts Bay's most admired and powerful leaders, Metacom, also known as King Philip and Sachem to the Wampanoag. After much agonising and debate, in this fictional creation Metacom eventually utters these words of conversion:Who can oppose or gainsay the mountainous weight of these arguments? I am more than satisfied. I am ashamed of my ignorance, and I abhor myself that ever I doubted of this point. And I desire wholly to give myself to the knowledge of, and obedience to the Word of God, and to abandon and forsake these sins which the word of God reproveth and condemneth.1Metacom's rejection of tribal affiliation and spirituality in favour of Protestant systems of religion and government is certainly one of Eliot's most fanciful scenes in his fictional rendition of religious conversions in Indian Dialogues. Indeed, in 1675, only a few years after its publication, the conflict commonly referred to as King Philip's War devastated the colony and with that the work of Eliot's mission in New England. Philip led Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuck and some Mohegan tribes in a brutal conflict against colonial settlers in the Massachusetts Bay area. The war, which was sparked off by the death of John Sassamon, a translator for John Eliot but also a close ally of Metacom, was also about land rights and the encroachment of colonial settlements into native territory. King Philip's War lasted approximately one year and was one of the bloodiest battles in American history: houses, villages and towns were razed to the ground, hostages were taken on both sides, and combatants were either killed in battle or tortured and mutilated if taken captive. At the climax of the war in 1676 Metacom met this fate when he was captured and beheaded: his head was placed on a spike and displayed in Plymouth for a number of years, acting as a symbol of colonial power and a deterrent to anyone planning future reprisals. Recent studies, including Jill Lepore's The Name of War, analyse the motivations and tensions which prompted this conflict and estimate that hundreds of settlers were killed, wiping out around half of the colonial settlements, and thousands of Indians were killed or sold into slavery.2One accurate part of Eliot's fictional account of Philip in Indian Dialogues is that this site of mayhem and bloodshed in the Massachusetts Bay area had previously been at the heart of John Eliot's mission and the place where many Algonquians declared their conversion to Christianity. This article considers the conversion narratives of praying Indians as well as other types of religious utterance with attention to the spaces in which speeches and other kinds of religious utterances were delivered. In this analysis space is a physical space, a wigwam, a praying town or the Cambridge synod, for example, but it is also a cultural space where certain power relationships between English and Indian speakers are negotiated. To begin with, a few notes on John Eliot and his mission will provide contextual background for this study of religious utterance by seventeenth-century Christian Indians.John Eliot left England for a new life in the emerging colony of Massachusetts in 1631. He became minister of Roxbury on his arrival in New England and fulfilled his duties towards his congregation until he died in 1690. His life's work and his historical significance as 'Apostle to the Indians' hinges on his creation of praying towns which were exclusively populated by Christian believers among the Algonquian speaking people of the Massachusetts Bay area. The mission officially began in 1629 with the Massachusetts Bay Charter and the Bay Company Seal which pictured the speech of one, solitary Indian by imposing on him the words 'Come over and help us!', invoking the plea of the Macedonians to St Paul, but Eliot's own missionary endeavour, which was one of the most successful and sustained missionary endeavours of the English-speaking colonies, was not underway until 1643. …