Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Taking off from this story, this chapter examines the complicated evolution of both “race” and “religion” from the earliest days of Spanish, French, and English settlement to the mid-eighteenth century. We will explore how Europeans deployed Christianity to define racial others, while those others resisted by using Christianity to demand rights and respect for themselves. Ultimately, however, what had been defined as cultural differences, and therefore mutable, eventually came to be solidified into racial difference, and therefore immutable. Race in its modern form came to define the bounds of habitations of religious communities, even if members of those communities challenged those boundaries, as did those writing the letter to the bishop in 1723. This set a pattern for the next two hundred and fifty years of race and religion in American history.

  Religion and race commingled from the earliest days of colonization. Peoples from around the Atlantic World struggled for control of their lives in a world that was transforming before their eyes. All of them dealt with a diverse world of bodies and spirits, which compelled frequent religious encounters with peoples of wildly varying cosmologies and practices. The result was a constant cultural conversation, carried on both peaceably and violently.

  North America was one of the most diverse religious societies in the world in the colonial era. French Jesuits interacted with powerful Iroquois bands; Spanish Franciscans were more or less powerless to stop Puebloans in New Mexico, including Christianized as well as “heathen” Indians, from practicing kachina dances and other ceremonials of their heritage; Anglicans in Virginia and South Carolina sent out missionaries to preach the gospel to enslaved Africans who came from a diverse variety of religious backgrounds ranging from Islam to Catholicism to tribal faiths; Protestants of all sorts in Pennsylvania interacted both peacefully and violently with natives who often used Christian intermediaries to try to protect their dwindling land base; Puritans in New England leveled charges against “popery” even as Catholics in the originally Catholic colony of Maryland found themselves as minorities even in their own world; and natives from hundreds of different tribes engaged in religious practices that differed from each other as much as from European forms. European observers, most famously the philosophe and wit Voltaire, saw in America, especially among the Quakers in Pennsylvania, a peaceable kingdom of diverse peoples and faiths living in harmony. He publicized it as a model for all to follow.

  Voltaire’s idea was not totally imaginary. Compared to many places, notably Europe, colonial North America appeared as a thriving ecosystem of religious profusions shooting up everywhere. Yet coexistence did not mean mutual understanding, and contact created conditions for causus belli more so than pax Americana. Indians living there knew better, for they experienced bouts of violent hostility in the backcountry. Whatever its primary economic and political motivations, the entire colonial project hinged on the conquering of native peoples and the exponential growth of the trade in slaves. Both quickly developed religious justifications and rationales.

  Europeans may not have had a fully developed modern idea of “race” in the colonial era, but they certainly brought conceptions of hierarchy based on religion and skin color, and sometimes on “purity of blood”—limpieza de sangre. As one historian has pithily summarized it, there was racism before race. That is, practices of racial hierarchy emerged before a fully developed quasi-biological notion of “race” solidified. Throughout much of American history, European colonizers associated themselves with the sacred, in contrast to pagan others. This was rooted in a European heritage that not only whitened images of Christ, angels, and God but also darkened characterizations of the devil, demons, and witches. Many British colonists imagined themselves as God’s chosen ones. In contrast, they envisioned Native Americans as “children of the devil,” or as “black dogs,” or other objects signifying satanic power. They divinized whiteness and demonized blackness.

  Meanwhile, however, those Europeans also engaged in various acts of proselytization, intending to bring others into the Christian fold. When they were successful, they faced questions of how an Indian or a Negro could be also a Christian person. And given that raced bodies claimed Christian privileges, Euro-Americans puzzled over how best to practice Christian proselytization, as was their biblical duty, but deploy it on behalf of racial hierarchy.

  This chapter follows a few such stories illustrating the complexities of race and religion in colonial America. Each one contrasts a moment of religious interaction, conversion, or understanding with one of power, dominance, and control. We will begin with the contrasting stories of Popé, leader of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico, and the “Mohawk Saint,” Kateri Tekakwitha, converted by (and who herself effectively converted) a French Jesuit missionary. The French who recorded the life of Tekakwitha began the process of creating the hagiographies which recently have led to her canonization. During the same era in New England, Puritan missionary John Eliot produced the first Bible published in America—in the language of the Massachusett Indians—and created a system of “praying towns” for Indian converts. These early efforts disintegrated after King Philip’s War of 1676. Afterward, New Englanders condemned natives as members of a cursed race, to be overcome by the people of God.

  In the eighteenth century, while maintaining close relations with Moravians and other sympathetic missionaries, Indians carried on a “spirited resistance,” sometimes resisting Christianization, other times adapting Christian manners and allies for their own purposes. Meanwhile, in the early eighteenth century, Francis Le Jau and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts brought their Anglican gospel to the newly emerging slave colony of South Carolina, setting up a battle between missionaries and planters for the soul of the colony. Through the mid-eighteenth century, the first international superstar evangelist, George Whitefield, found an audience among early American evangelicals, who in some cases brought the message to select groups of slaves. By the time of the American Revolution, early black converts were establishing some of the first quasi-independent black churches in America, aided and protected by Christian slaveholders but frequently attacked and surveilled by white communities suspicious of their motives.

  Christianity thus operated to define the bounds of the habitation of racial communities and to explode them. The former happened more consciously, and through the legal system; the latter emerged as a product of those who took the biblical texts about equality at their word. This interaction became fundamental to race and religion in American history.

  SPANISH, FRENCH, AND INDIAN WARS

  Spanish explorers and settlers from the sixteenth century predated the English, establishing a beachhead colony at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and settlements in New Mexico late in the century. Franciscans followed the soldiers in New Mexico and began to missionize among the Pueblo people. Three quarters of a century later, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 vividly displayed native anger at coercive Christian proselytization.

  In previous decades, early hopes for widespread Christianization, spurred on by millennial dreams of expanding the righteous Spanish empire, had been disappointed. The fabled golden cities of the northern regions were nowhere to be found; neither was the great harvest of souls that had provided the propaganda necessary for funding the struggling New Mexican missions. The more optimistic friars claimed large numbers of converts but fought continually against the reimposition of idolatry. Native dances and ceremonies especially offended their Christian sensibilities; they were the very embodiment of paganism. No matter how many times the fathers confiscated the instruments of idolatry—masks, kachinas, and other icons of Pueblo cosmology—and punished those who led heathenish dances or attacks on the priests, the native gods returned. Further, the friars grew apoplectic at Indians who satirized them and the Christian religion, comedy that entertained even Christianized Puebloans. In the mid-1650s, for example, a resident of the Awatovi Pueblo who had served as a priest’s assistant performed his own burlesque on a
Catholic Mass for a village of amused Indian comrades. Putting on the absent priest’s cloak, he chanted, prayed, and sermonized as a priest would do, to the great amusement of the crowd.

  More serious, and deadly, was a pan-Indian revolt in northern New Spain in 1680, now commonly referred to as the Pueblo Revolt. Prior to 1680, on various occasions individual pueblos or nations had rebelled against Spanish rule but consistently had been “reduced and returned to obedience.” In 1680, however, in what had appeared as a peaceful time, New Mexican natives “in general rebelled on one day and at one hour, and it was by a miracle of God that they did not destroy everything, as was their intention,” as a Spanish chronicler later wrote. He added, “Our return to the kingdom must be in the form of a conquest with men, arms, and supplies to safeguard and garrison it as it is reduced to the yoke of the holy gospel and obedience to the Catholic Majesty.”

  Beginning August 9 and continuing into the fall of 1680, through the region of the pueblos in central and northern New Mexico, natives killed nearly four hundred of the 2,500 Spanish colonists, burned almost every church in the colony, demolished crosses and chapels, and tortured and killed twenty-one of the thirty-three resident religious. Besieged Spanish leaders first defended their last citadel at Santa Fe, until Indian attacks forced them on a long march southward toward safety in El Paso. The natives followed the religious instructions of messianic leaders. They bathed to cleanse themselves from the pollution of Christian baptism, surrendered their Spanish names and Christian wives, and vowed a revitalization of Indian ways. It was the first of many such messianic and violent eruptions that took hold over the next two centuries in areas of white-native contact throughout North America.

  Popé or Po’Pay, leader of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680

  Source: Photo on Flickr from “Dougward,” licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

  Some students of the 1680 uprising have downplayed religious motivations for the revolt. They insist that the specific and horrific conditions of drought, famine, and disease in the years preceding 1680 provided the primary impetus. With modern understandings of human revolution, certainly these underlying factors appear critical. Yet the expressed motivations of the rebels themselves must be considered carefully. They aimed their wrath directly at the symbols of Catholicism, which was, after all, the primary point of contact between natives and Spaniards. At the pueblo of Sandia on August 26, 1680, for example, the delegation led by Governor and Captain-General Don Antonio de Otermín found the convent “deserted and destroyed, the cells without doors, and the whole place sacked. The images had been taken from the church, and on the main altar there was a carved full-length figure of Saint Francis with the arms hacked off by an ax. The church had been filled with wheat straw for the purpose of burning it, and fire had started in the choir and in the choir stalls. Everything was broken to pieces and destroyed; the sacristy was found empty of chests and of all sacred vessels and vestments, and of the carved figures that were there, for everything had been stolen and profaned by the rebellious traitors.” As another account put it, the Indians’ hatred toward Christian symbols extended to smearing excrement on crosses and communion tables and hacking off the arms of an image of Saint Francis.

  Further investigations into the anticolonial insurrection revealed the religious motivations and symbology behind the rebels’ cause. In December of 1681, not yet in control of the colony but anxious to learn more about the causes of the debacle, Spanish colonial leaders initiated a judicial inquiry. One early examination, soon to be confirmed by other pieces of evidence, pointed to the role of the Pueblo Indian dubbed El Popé. Native sources indicated that Indians “held him in terror” because of his supposed talks with the devil. As a veteran of earlier Indian rebellions and one who had experienced torture and lashing at the hands of the Spanish governor in 1675, Popé himself envisioned an Indian renewal that would recapture the power of the kachina, who had descended underground and would not return until the Spanish were driven out. Indeed, Popé used both Pueblo and Christian symbology. He told his followers that by living under the ancestral prescriptions, Indians would raise “a great quantity” of their traditional foodstuffs, “and that their houses would be filled and they would have good health and plenty of rest.” In planning the revolt, Popé circulated a knotted cord made of maguey fiber among villages. Those who wished to join the rebellion would untie a knot. He selected August 11, 1680, as the day of attack. It coincided with a full moon but preceded the arrival of caravans from the south that would replenish the Spanish supplies of ammunition and horses. However, two Indians captured on August 9 revealed the plan to Spanish authorities, compelling Popé’s forces to move more quickly than planned. Along with others, Popé ordered Indians to destroy all images suggestive of Christianity and remove their baptismal names by plunging themselves in rivers and washing with amole root, a traditional Indian cleansing potion. By doing so and by imitating kachina dances, Popé had told them that “they could erect their houses and enjoy abundant health and leisure.” Another interrogated Indian added that Popé and the leaders “said they were weary of putting in order, sweeping, heating, and adorning the church,” and wished to “live contentedly, happy in their freedom, living according to their ancient custom.” After the expulsion of the Spanish colonizers, Popé then insisted that Indians reclaim their lands, “enlarge their cultivated fields, saying that now they were as they had been in ancient times, free from the labor they had performed for the religious and the Spaniards.” The first century of Christian proselytization in the Southwest thus ended in violent revenge by the very natives who supposedly had been made children of the Christian God. And the Spanish Reconquista, when it came in the 1690s, was brutal.

  TEKAKWITHA

  The Spanish in the Southwest confronted already “settled” Indians in pueblo communities and thus simply stationed missionaries among them. Both the French and the English, by contrast, perceived segregating converted Indians into Christian communities as a key part of educating Indians in the ways of civilization. For the English, this meant strengthening an Anglo-Protestant empire against threats posed by the Spanish Catholic and French, and enlisting Indian allies where possible in this goal. Mere conversion alone, it was clear, was insufficient, for Christianized Indians (especially those allied with the French) were frighteningly capable of launching deadly assaults upon outposts of English civilization. Thus, over time, missionary idealism merged with imperial realpolitik in the goal of producing civilized Indians as part of the project of pacifying the New World for the Protestant king.

  Throughout North America, missionaries established missions, reserves, and praying towns for Indian neophyte and converts who would be removed from “heathen” environments and placed in laboratories of Christian civilization. These places produced Indian converts who attempted to adopt Christian ways, but they also compelled European settlers and missionaries to establish military protection for Christian Indians against non-Christian Indians and sometimes military protection from rebellious Christianized Indians.

  Kateri Tekakwitha was a Mohawk Indian who spent the last years of a short life (ca. 1656–1680) at the Jesuit mission of Kahnawake, a reserve near Montreal established for Mohawk converts who allied with the French. There, they constructed a village, grew corn, and hunted in the traditional way. They also adapted Christian ways of worship and social practices such as marriage. The French were bent on settlement and trade. They poured funds into development in the Iroquois regions of Canada. Disease and alcohol devastated Indian nations. French military invasions compelled a peace treaty in 1667 that cleared a path for the arrival of Christian missionaries among the Five Nations of the Iroquois League. The Jesuits proselytized aggressively through the 1670s. Many Indian converts moved northward, allied themselves with the French Father, and settled along French-controlled areas of the St. Lawrence River in and around Montreal. A group of French Jesuits who settled there in the l
ate 1660s recounted their joy in rediscovering “old Christians,” mostly Hurons who had been converted in previous missionary expeditions but then had to be left behind because of warfare with the League of the Iroquois. They were seen still faithfully carrying out Mass: “We could not help shedding tears of joy at seeing these poor captives so fervent in their devotions and so constant in their faith after all the years they had been deprived of all instruction.” They saw mothers making crosses on the foreheads of their children and telling them of hell and heaven. One father enthused that “their devotion greatly surpasses that of the common run of Christians, even though they were deprived for so long a time of any help from their pastors.”

  One of the oldest portraits of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha by Father Claude Chauchetière around 1696

  Source: Public domain.

  Tekakwitha was one of these converts. She was the daughter of an Iroquois non-Christian father and converted Mohawk mother. Tekakwitha’s story was particularly valued by the Jesuits because she endured persecution among her own people for her Christian ways and lived the life of an earthly saint. Having lost both of her parents and survived smallpox (though with a significant loss of vision as a result), Tekakwitha turned to Jesus. She led a small group of native women who pursued Christian perfection on earth. In 1682, two years after her death, a French Jesuit recounted, with admiration but also some hesitancy, the “austerities practiced by certain Indian women,” which possibly involved “some indiscretion.” Beginning by engaging in acts of penitence with switches and thorns, they then increased the divine agony with the use of iron girdles and other practices picked up from nuns in Montreal. “Thus have man-eaters,” as one Jesuit described it, “which they were in the past, become lambs through the grace of Jesus Christ, to such a degree that they are now exemplars of virtue and of religion for all of Canada.” The indoctrinated faithful (or so the Jesuits portrayed it) confounded heretic Dutch Calvinists who had come to convert them but instead found themselves theologically overmatched.