Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Abstract

Could one Native American prophet simultaneously embrace strict pacifism, Nativism, and resistance to European imperialism? Richard W. Pointer answers yes in his biography of Papunhank, a Munsee prophet baptized by Moravians in 1763 as Johannes. Pointer argues the same impulses that motivated Nativist prophets like Neolin drove Papunhank to embrace Moravian Christianity. He did so, Pointer argues, because the Moravian path fit with his own spiritual journey and its commitment to absolute pacifism. Papunhank’s pacifism, paired with his equally firm commitment to maintaining the independence of his community from both colonial predation and the Indigenous cultural practices he had rejected, make him a “surprising, countercultural figure in the eighteenth century”(5).Pacifist Prophet begins by exploring the context of Papunhank’s Munsee upbringing. Born around 1705, Papunhank lived most of his seventy years away from European or Indigenous recordkeepers. Pointer traces how the Munsee (living primarily in the lower Hudson Valley) had to navigate relationships with the powerful Six Nations and neighboring colonies. Chapter 2 examines Papunhank’s road to becoming a prophet and then his gradual moves toward Christianity. Pointer argues Papunhank’s first recorded statement in 1760 reveals that his “pilgrimage” involved “mostly indigenous spiritual practices and methods” (51). Papunhank’s journey began with a vision, which led him to gain renown as a prophet and healer. But a journey that began with the sort of neotraditionalist practices becoming common at the time led him first to absolute pacifism and then Christianity. Chapter 3 traces Papunhank’s meeting with Moravians that included both German missionaries and Indigenous converts. Although intrigued by the Quakers he met, Papunhank decided to join the Moravians, whose emphasis on Christ’s bloody sacrifice as a source of spiritual power, Pointer suggests, would have appealed to a Munsee worldview. Chapter 4 details Papunhank and his followers’ struggle to avoid both the conflict known as Pontiac’s War and the violent reprisals of Indian-hating whites. Chapter 5 traces their refounding of Wyalusing as a Moravian town with the permission of the Six Nations. Chapter 6 details how, in the wake of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Papunhank and the Munsee, Lenape, and Mahican converts living in Wyalusing decided to seek refuge in the Ohio Country. Chapter 7 covers the final years of Papunhank’s life, taken up with his efforts to keep the Indigenous Moravian communities of Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten out of the Shawnee war with Virginia (known as Dunmore’s War) while staying in the good graces of the nearby Lenape. Papunhank’s death in May 1775 meant that he did not live to see the slaughter of the residents of Gnadenhütten—including his family—at the hands of Pennsylvania militia in 1782.Pacifist Prophet is a nuanced look at an unusual figure, grounded in deft use of German-language accounts of Papunhank’s Moravian coreligionists. And while this is a book about Papunhank, some of the author’s assessments would have been strengthened by more discussion of the Moravians and the Quakers whom Papunhank looked to as potential spiritual and political allies. Papunhank sought both to build an Indigenous Christian community and to nonviolently resist the European imperial project, but Pointer never fully spells out how he views the Quakers’ and especially the Moravians’ relationship with that project. Were they gentler agents of empire, or were they countercultural fringe actors swimming against that current, more in line with Papunhank’s own vision? Pointer acknowledges that much of his subject’s life will remain unknown; therefore, a closer look at the company he kept—who provided most of the surviving evidence of his life—would have clarified what will nevertheless be an important book for scholars of eighteenth-century Nativism and Christianity alike.