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"Gideon's People" is the story of an American Indian community in
the Housatonic Valley of northwestern Connecticut. It is based on
some three decades of nearly uninterrupted German-language diaries
and allied records kept by the Moravian missionaries who had joined
the Indians at a place called Pachgatgoch, later Schaghticoke. It
is supplemented by colonial records and regional political, social,
and religious histories and ethnographies. As such, it represents
the only comprehensive, thoroughly contextualized description of a
Native people in southern New England and adjacent eastern New York
for the mid-eighteenth century.
The Moravians' diaries report on the day-to-day activities in the
community, including house-building, the production of material
goods, hunting, fishing, and farming. We are told of marriages,
births, deaths, disease, and the calamity of alcohol abuse. The
unavoidable interactions with surrounding Indians and close-by
colonial farmers and townspeople are offered in detail, along with
the sometimes contentious relations with local and colonial
authorities. And there is the omnipresence of the missionaries'
religious message to the Indians, frequently accepted and then
tested by the inevitable temptations and, more than once, spurned.
But we also learn of the struggles of the Moravians to feed and
clothe themselves at a distance from their congregation in
Bethlehem and their endeavors, often marked by conflict and deep
personal pain, to lead their Native flock to the Lamb.
"Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women" makes available in English a
rare collection of eyewitness accounts by German Catholic
missionaries among the Lakotas in the late nineteenth century.
German missionaries played an important role in the early years of
the St. Francis mission on the Rosebud Reservation, and the Holy
Rosary mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation, both in South Dakota.
Although the accounts reflect the dominant perspective and attitude
of missionaries and white teachers in the period of assimilation
policy, they also offer firsthand accounts of the Lakotas in the
early reservation years by Jesuits who saw themselves as friends
and defenders of the Indians against a government policy they
considered inappropriate and harmful. During the watershed years of
1886-1900, the German missionaries witnessed and participated in
key events in the history of the American West, including the Ghost
Dance, the Wounded Knee massacre, the Drexel Mission fight, the
repression of Lakota rituals, and the growing importance of
Catholicism for many Lakotas. The volume also describes the role of
women in the mission and the process of converting and schooling
Lakotas.
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