Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America

Abstract

In Messianic Fulfillments, Hayes Peter Mauro combines art history, religious studies, and Native American history to examine four strains of evangelical Christian visual and textual representations of Native Americans, from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Each chapter covers a particular group: Puritans, Quakers, Mormons, and progressive Social Gospel Christians. Mauro walks the reader through forty-six illustrations (paintings, lithographs, engravings, life masks, and photographs), explaining the artists’ training, backgrounds, and composition choices, along with the reception and provenance of their works. He discusses the visual languages of the artists and especially their “chromatic metaphors,” which not only helped solidify racial categories but also granted them spiritual meaning (213). Because the small illustrations are black and white, the reader must find larger color illustrations to do his explanations justice. The section on Mormons curiously relies on twenty-first century reproductions of nineteenth century works. Mauro focuses on the depictions of the conversion processes, arguing that “the ‘deviant’ Indian and the ‘normative’ Anglo were polarizing constructs that were metaphorically staged in image and text and especially in material culture” (2). These traditions all “advocate[d] forms of Christian American triumphalism” (5), and many within these traditions made “‘empirical’ claims that such physiological racial distinctions had a direct correlation with intellectual and moral capacities as well as a relative need for Christian salvation” (7).His definition of “evangelical Christianity” emphasizes evangelism—that is, conversion efforts—but not evangelicals’ privileging of biblical authority. Latter-Day Saints, due to their addition of the Book of Mormon to the body of scripture, would usually be excluded from most definitions of that phrase. While some Quakers took steps toward evangelicalism in the nineteenth century, many Quakers did not. While these denominations may fall under a very broad definition of “evangelical Christians,” the emphasis on these groups means that many prominent evangelical missionary groups are excluded from discussion. Within his description of Calvinism, some readers may find his close association of “works” with salvation among the Puritans unsettling. To most Puritans, fulfillment of the law and completing one’s calling through work were outward manifestations of a justification that an individual has little role in—salvation was the work of God alone. His analysis of New England’s visual compositions is more convincing, especially in terms of Puritans as inspirational subjects for Second Great Awakening artwork and its celebration and reinterpretation of John Eliot’s evangelism.The chapter on Quakers explores the art of Benjamin West, Edward Hicks, and others. Quaker artists idealized Native American–Quaker interactions but tended to “depict encounters between Quaker exemplars and racial Others” and tied their religious conversion to their full inclusion in the emerging market economy (63). Academically trained Mormon artists used their conventions to convey the subjugated place of racial Others, especially Lamanites (ancestors of Native Americans), in the Mormon worldview. To early Mormons, this helped justify violence against Utes and Paiutes who resisted the invaders of their Utah homelands. Mauro interprets Social Gospel Christianity as the inheritor of earlier evangelical trends and argues that the Hampton and Carlisle Institutes manifested Social Gospel evangelicalism. The transformation of “Others” into commercial and industrious people who would resemble Euro-Americans to the extent possible was all part of their salvation, though their racial distinctiveness was always emphasized in the institutions’ staged photographs.In his analysis of specific works, and the visual traditions they reflected, Mauro’s analysis of composition, chromatic metaphors, and artists’ racial assertions will be instructive to ethnohistorians, anthropologists, text-based historians, and art historians.