Native Christianity in Plymouth By Douglas L. Winiarski This is an excerpt from a paper presented at the recent Mashantucket Pequot History Conference hosted by the MPMRC. The paper examines the religious worldview of Native Americans in eighteenth century Plymouth County, Massachusetts. During the provincial period, most Wampanoag families lived outside the famous Puritan "praying town" enclaves, according to Mr. Winiarski, a professor of religion at the University of Richmond, Virginia.  "In this paper I reconstruct the beliefs and practices of a people who were neither fully integrated into English society, nor "traditional" by the standards of their ancestors. The excerpt below covers the introduction of my paper in which Josiah Cotton preaches what is, in my opinion, a rather nasty and ethnocentric sermon to his small Wampanoag congregation. Cotton’s four-decade preaching career coincided with a dramatic period of growth for the New England Company. Yet the progress of the gospel varied from region to region. Well into the eighteenth century, the homelands of the southeastern Connecticut tribes remained, in the cynical words of one eighteenth-century European traveler, the "most salvage" country in New England. Here, large groups of Indians continued to congregate at regional sites for seasonal ceremonial dances, and reports of men and women resorting to traditional powwows circulated frequently. The Wampanoag families who resided on Cotton’s farm and in towns throughout Plymouth County occupied the ambiguous middle ground between these two trajectories. Virtually every Indian appearing in vital, church, probate, and property records hailed from a family that was affiliated with one of the Indian congregations in the region, but this nominal Christianity may have masked dramatic variations. Over the course of his career, Cotton worked with deeply pious Native Christians who joined Indian churches in full membership; yet others shied away from his biweekly meetings and clung tenaciously to clandestine forms of ancestral religion." The frigid morning air greeted Josiah Cotton rudely as he trudged across the fields through the snow. His destination that Sabbath morning in the winter of 1710 was a small cluster of wigwams located on the edge of his property at "Plain Dealing"--a prosperous farm located a few miles north of Plymouth, Massachusetts. His purpose: to deliver an "Indian Sermon" to Francis Ned and the several Native tenant families who lived and labored under his watchful eye. Cotton must have grumbled along the way. After all, he had always despised sermon composition. It was, in his words, an "irksome" and "fatiguing" task--and especially odious whenever he suffered from one of his frequent headaches. And so it was both surprising and ironic that the reluctant minister’s son-turned-magistrate spent countless hours preparing for the most rigorous preaching assignment of all: gospelizing Plymouth’s scattered population of Christian Indians in their own tongue. Arriving at Ned’s wigwam, Cotton turned back the bark-covered door and stepped inside. This was no place to preach a formal sermon. Though tolerably warm, the ancestral dwelling structures of Plymouth’s Wampanoag residents were poorly lit and the small fire that smoldered constantly at the center filled the interior with acrid smoke that burned the eyes and made reading difficult. Confined to the edges of the wigwam--amid a motley assemblage of Indian and English manufactures, Cotton was forced to sit on benches in the very midst of his congregation. Ned’s wigwam stood in sharp contrast to the Plymouth meetinghouse, with its elevated pulpit and large congregation neatly stratified into pews of differing social status. Indeed, New England meetinghouses reinforced the authority of conventional clergymen, but Cotton was forced to make due with less. The lay missionary withdrew a small, neatly stitched manuscript from his pocket and looked carefully at the words written on one side in English and on the other in the Massachusett dialect. Then, slowly, in a halting and hesitant voice, Cotton began to read his carefully prepared sermon notes: "kuseh kenau Indianog teagwe womoausuonk teagwe wuttamantamooonk uttuk anoaltikne... Behold ye Indians what Love what Care what Cost has bin used by the English here, for the Salvation of your precious & immortal Souls... It is not because we have expected any temporal advantage from you that We have bin thus concerned for your good; No it is God that hath caused us to desire his glory in your Salvation." John Eliot, the Wampanoag’s first "teacher" had yearned for their salvation as well, Cotton asserted. "You know how he has fed & cloathed you as well as taught you. You know how his Bowels yearned over you, even as thô you had bin his Children." But now the famed seventeenth century "Apostle to the Indians" stood in righteous judgment over his errant Native converts. If Eliot’s spirit should "find you among the Wicked on the Day of Judgment," Cotton warned Ned and the assembled Indians, "He will then be a dreadfull Witness against you, & when the Lord Jesus passes that Sentence on you Depart ye Cursed,...even your own Eliot will say Amen to it all" (Cotton 1710a). When the English first arrived in New England, he continued, "The Indians were without the true God. They were Idolaters, & worshipped & served the Devil instead of God." But Eliot and his missionary successors, Cotton included, had "brought the knowledge of Christ & salvation by him to You." The Wampanoag should express their heartfelt thanks for such pious condescension; moreover, they must be sure not to "imitate" the English "in any thing that is bad." "Our Christ, our Religion," Cotton argued, his voice perhaps rising to a crescendo, "teaches us good things to live Soberly righteously & Godly, but our wicked hearts make us do bad things." How many times had he warned them about drinking to excess? How many times had he cautioned them to be wary of greedy employers? How many times had he exhorted them to walk in Christ’s ways? If the Indians would only "follow an honest Calling," Cotton asserted, nothing would hinder them from building estates as considerable as those of their English neighbors. But at present, his native auditors were "poor, mean, ragged, starved, contemptible & miserable"...languishing in debt, vice, and violence; beholden to others for their very livelihood (Cotton 1710a). At first glance, Cotton’s insensitive and condescending sermon performance appears to reinforce one prominent interpretation of Indian-Puritan relations: the Plymouth lay preacher and civil magistrate differed little from earlier generations of ethnocentric Puritan missionaries who infiltrated Indian villages and succeeded in undermining the political, economic, and cultural autonomy of New England’s Native American population. And yet, an eager audience of perhaps two dozen Indians had assembled to hear Cotton preach that cold morning in the winter of 1710, and their spiritual sophistication clashed oddly with the crudity of their impoverished surroundings. Consider Francis Ned, host of the worship exercises. Perhaps donning a pair of spectacles as he listened intently, Ned may have taken up his handsome edition of the "Eliot Bible" and tracked down the scriptural verses that peppered Cotton’s sermon performance. He would have had ink, paper, and quills at his disposal for scribbling down sermon notes or marginal annotations. Ironically, Ned would have come by all of these items through generosity of Cotton himself, who disbursed books, blankets, and other charitable contributions from the New England Company to Indian families throughout Plymouth County. Ned’s apparent receptivity to Christianity in the face of Cotton’s ethnocentrism raises intriguing questions about the utility of interpretive models of Native American religion in eighteenth century New England that privilege either acts of heroic resistance or cowardly accommodation. Instead, the argument that follows builds upon recent scholarship that explores the complex and, at times, contradictory ways in which Indians struggled to survive in provincial New England. For some historians, simply rescuing Indians from the obscurity of local records and deeply engrained cultural narratives regarding the "vanishing Indian" have proven worthy goals. Others have delimited the socioeconomic status, material culture, literacy rates, tribal politics, and family structures of eighteenth century Indian communities. Many of these studies envision Native identity as contested and negotiated among a diverse and, at times, fragmented indigenous population. Unwilling to view Native American culture in monolithic terms and seeking greater agency for the impoverished and marginalized members of provincial society, they highlight the halting process through which a pan-tribal "ethnic identity" slowly emerged during the eighteenth century.