In southern New England, most Native people resisted the advances of Christian missionaries until the 18th century.
Although missionaries visited the Pequots and other Natives in Connecticut in the 17th century, few Native people gave up their traditional ways of life and converted. For Puritan missionaries, teaching religious ideas was just one step in “Christianizing” Native people. In addition to giving up Native spiritual beliefs, missionaries also insisted that Native people adopt European ways of life -- including cutting their hair, wearing European-style clothing, living in framed houses, and farming by European methods.
Native people in Connecticut resisted the efforts of missionaries, sometimes refusing even to meet with them until land disputes with colonial authorities were settled. To Native people it seemed plain that most Europeans were not good Christians—so why should Natives convert?
Not until the middle of the 18th century, when a movement for religious revivalism known as the Great Awakening came to America, did the Pequots and other Natives in southern New England begin converting to Christianity. In contrast to Puritanism, this movement emphasized an emotional style of preaching, as well as the importance of a person’s internal calling to Christianity. The new evangelical Christianity of the Great Awakening appealed in particular to the poor and powerless, whites and African Americans as well as Native people.
Another important factor in the spreading of Christianity among New England Natives in the latter part of the 18th century was the work of Eleazor Wheelock. Wheelock was a Yale-educated minister who established a school for Natives in Connecticut in 1754. His hope was that his students would not only be converted to Christianity and learn European ways of life, but that they would then return as missionaries to their tribes.
The Mohegan preacher Samson Occum was one of the young Native men educated by Eleazar Wheelock. A convert to Christianity but a staunch defender of Native culture, Occum would go on to lead a movement among Southern New England Natives to establish Christian Indian farming communities like the one established at Indiantown on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation. Soon, though, Occum would conclude that the only hope for the preservation of Native culture lay far away from English settlements. In a movement called the Brotherton Migration, Occum’s followers began abandoning their New England reservations in the 1780s to move west -- to land that was given to them by the Oneida Indians of central New York State.
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