Captivity and Christianity: Narrating Christian Indian identity, 1643-182

This dissertation examines the ways in which the missionary tract, the captivity narrative, and the texts of literate Native Americans all participate in the highly contested process that defines the cultural position of the "Christian Indian." Focusing on New England missionary settlements from 1643--1829, I link overlooked archival materials written by Native American converts, the writings of better known Native Americans like Samson Occom and William Apess, and the published writings of Anglo-American colonists. My study begins with an examination of the documents by and about Christian Indians surrounding King Philip's war. From there, I move to Experience Mayhew's 1727 biographical history of Native American conversions on Martha's Vineyard, Indian Converts, which contains embedded autobiographical narratives of converted Indians. My next chapter examines the alternative ways various figures characterize Native conversion in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I begin with the writings of John Sergeant, missionary to the Mahican Indians along the Housatonic River, and relate these writings to several works by Hendrick Aupaumut, a Native American writer and diplomat educated by missionaries. My next chapter examines Brotherton, a Native community in upstate New York created by several of Eleazar Wheelock's former pupils from Moor's Charity School. Through the writings of Wheelock and his Native American pupils (Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and David Fowler), I look at the tensions between Anglo-American and Native American conceptions of the Native community. I conclude my dissertation with a discussion of William Apess, focusing most particularly on his 1829 autobiography, which has absorbed and appropriated the contradictory discourses of captivity, Christianity, and savagery. I argue that when read together, the texts produced by Native American converts and the more extensive writings of Anglo-Americans reveal the emergence of a dynamic Native American identity through Christianity, and that Native Americans' active appropriation of New England Protestant Christianity is central to a particularly Native subjectivity that resists the colonial project by using its language against itself.