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The Indian Great Awakening - Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Hardcover, New)
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The Indian Great Awakening - Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Hardcover, New)
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The First Great Awakening was a time of heightened religious
activity in the colonial New England. Among those whom the English
settlers tried to convert to Christianity were the region's native
peoples. In this book, Linford Fisher tells the gripping story of
American Indians' attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of
colonialism between the 1670s and 1820. In particular, he looks at
how some members of previously unevangelized Indian communities in
Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island
adopted Christian practices, often joining local Congregational
churches and receiving baptism. Far from passively sliding into the
cultural and physical landscape after King Philip's War, he argues,
Native individuals and communities actively tapped into
transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights,
welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and joined
local white churches. Religion repeatedly stood at the center of
these points of cultural engagement, often in hotly contested ways.
Although these Native groups had successfully resisted
evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth
century they showed an increasing interest in education and
religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening
marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More
surprisingly, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native
individuals and sub-groups asserted their religious and cultural
autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and
forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of
education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local
reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever
possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved
to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements. But the
majority of New England Natives-even those who affiliated with
Christianity-chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert
their own autonomous existence through leasing land, farming, and
working on and off the reservations.
While Indian involvement in the Great Awakening has often been seen
as total and complete conversion, Fisher's analysis of church
records, court documents, and correspondence reveals a more complex
reality. Placing the Awakening in context of land loss and the
ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy in the eighteenth century
casts it as another step in the ongoing, tentative engagement of
native peoples with Christian ideas and institutions in the
colonial world. Charting this untold story of the Great Awakening
and the resultant rise of an Indian Separatism and its effects on
Indian cultures as a whole, this gracefully written book challenges
long-held notions about religion and Native-Anglo-American
interaction
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