'Traditionary religion': The Great Awakening and the shaping of Native cultures in southern New England, 1736--1776

This dissertation explores the ways in which religious practices and religious conversions became important sites of cultural negotiation between American Indians of southern New England and their Anglo-European counterparts in the eighteenth century. Although the process of cultural adaptation and change was ongoing, this particular period began in the 1730s with several non-Christian Native communities on relatively large tracts of land in Connecticut and Rhode Island and on Long Island (New York) and ended in the 1780s with the voluntary emigration of hundreds of then-Christianized Indians from Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, Montaukett, Farmington, and Niantic communities to Brotherton, a newly-formed Christian Indian community carved out of Oneida territory in upstate New York. In attempting to understand how these changes came about, I argue that in the years leading up to the Great Awakening, Native Americans selectively utilized English offers of cultural and religious education in order to improve their own standing in larger colonial society. In the Great Awakening, many Indians found themselves at a cultural crossroads, and chose to publicly affiliate with Christianity in part, at least, in hopes of finding practical aid in their ongoing land disputes with colonial officials. The result was a generation of Natives who practiced incorporative versions of Indian Christianities that the Mohegan minister Samson Occom termed "traditionary religion." In the thirty years following the revivals, the generation of Indians who experienced the Great Awakening slowly began to reject most forms of Anglo-American religious involvement or supervision, first in terms of churches, then in terms of education, and finally, in terms of association and geographical proximity.