"Sathans inventions and worships": Two 17th-century clergymen on Native American religions

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-290
Author(s):  
Nancy Senior
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Native People ◽  
Indigenous Language ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Native American Religions ◽  
Indigenous Religions ◽  
Roger Williams

Roger Williams (1603-1683) and Louis Nicolas (1634-1682?) discuss the native people and religions of North America in different ways. Each wrote a book about an indigenous language; both describe Native customs and religious practices. Both of them believe that any non-Christian is lost, but their references to indigenous religions are different in tone, and reflect their positions in 17th-century controversies. In an apparent paradox based on theological grounds, the man who found New England Puritans not pure enough speaks more tolerantly of non-Christian religions than does the more broadly educated Jesuit.

North America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Shushan
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Native American Religions ◽  
Widespread Acceptance ◽  
Revitalization Movements ◽  
Per Se ◽  
High Level ◽  
Near Death Experiences ◽  
Afterlife Beliefs

Dozens of Native American near-death experiences (NDEs) from the late sixteenth to early twentieth centuries are presented, ranging from across the continent. Many were accompanied by indigenous claims that they were the source for local afterlife beliefs. There were also many afterlife-related myths, and shamanic practices with NDE-like afterlife themes. In addition, numerous religious/cultural revitalization movements were claimed to have been grounded in the NDEs of their founders, and were conceptually related to the phenomenon. Near-death experiences could thus be an empowering force on a socio-cultural-political level in response to the threat of European dominance. There was a widespread acceptance and valorization of NDEs and related phenomena, and a high level of interest in the afterlife per se. Native American religions often showed a clear reciprocal relationship between shamanism, afterlife beliefs, and NDEs.

Intolerance toward Native American Religions

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Native American Religions

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.

scholarly journals Encroachment by Word, Axis, and Tree: Mapping Techniques from the Colonization of New England

2004 ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Margaret W. Pearce
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Native People ◽  
Boundary Line ◽  
Mapping Techniques ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Town ◽  
New Devices

It is well established that mapping has been an important tool for the colonization of North America. Techniques such as removal of toponymy, alteration of a boundary line location, and use of a map grid, were all successfully used for advancing colonial interests in the printed regional and national maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article compares these known techniques to those that were used in local, town level mapping in Connecticut during the same period. Whereas toponymic removal and replacement are found to remain central to cartographic encroachment at the local level, English colonists also successfully encroached on unpurchased Native lands through other uses of toponyms, as well as new devices such as the axis, tree-marking, and appropriation of Native mapping style. Native people actively contested these encroachments at the town and colony levels; these resistances successfully slowed but did not stop the mappings’ effects. The final effectiveness of each encroachment technique is found to depend on its ability to maintain a vague definition of territory and boundaries within an aura of precision and legality.

scholarly journals Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices, ed. by L. Charleyboy & M. Leatherdale

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colette Leung
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Native People ◽  
Humanities Computing ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
University Of Alberta ◽  
The People

Charleyboy, Lisa, and Mary Leatherdale, editors. Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices. Annick Press, 2016.This magazine-like anthology for young adults presents a plurality of contemporary Native American voices, using beautiful design and high quality photographic layouts. The forms of expression these voices take are varied, and include poetry, art, memoir, hip-hop lyrics, question and answer interviews, fiction pieces, and fashion photography, among others. Over fifty pieces are featured, from well-known Native American artists from across North America, such as throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, author Joseph Boyden, and actress Michelle Thrush, although many other voices are represented too, including those of chefs, youths, fashion designers, journalists, and more. Native American Nations from all over North America are represented, including Blackfoot, Cree, Blood, Metis, and mixed race. Short biographies on each contributor are featured at the end of the book. Although Dreaming in Indian is meant for young adults, it will appeal to a broad spectrum of the population, including children and adults.Dreaming in Indian is presented in four different sections: ‘Roots,’ ‘Battles,’ ‘Medicines,’ and ‘Dreamcatchers’. ‘Roots’ covers pieces related to ideas of home and the past, ‘Battles’ examines issues such as racism, gender identity, abuse, addiction, and poverty, ‘Medicines’ shows the innovative ways youth have found healing in music, art, sports, and cultural traditions such as jingle dancing and hoop dancing, and ‘Dreamcatcher’ looks towards how Native people are currently shaping the future for Native youth. Topics covered within these sections also include bullying, the effects of residential schools, and suicide, but also extend to feeling like an outsider both within and outside of your culture, career advice, how culture must grow, and reactions to stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans in popular culture. In addressing these issues, Dreaming in Indian offers glimpses and directions for how to move forward without patronizing or becoming removed from the topic. Even more powerful are the multiple viewpoints that are brought to the same issue.  Different Native voices often offer differing thoughts on the same topic, illustrating how myriad and complex the people and these issues are.Ultimately, Dreaming in Indian is a powerful book that provides a well realized portrayal of Native people by Native people. As a non-fiction work, it fills a niche not often addressed, and showcases the talent and passion of the people it engages. The book can be read in a couple of hours, but due to its rich content and the fantastically detailed visuals, it is the kind of work that one returns to multiple times, and that stays with the reader long after it is finished. This book will appeal not only to those of Native descent, but to anyone who has sought to connect to their own identity, and to other human beings.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4Reviewer: Colette LeungColette Leung is a graduate student at the University of Alberta, working in the fields of Library and Information science and Humanities Computing who loves reading, cats, and tea. Her research interests focus around how digital tools can be used to explore fields such as literature, language, and history in new and innovative ways.

Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) and the English origins of Algonkian linguistics

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Salmon
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
North America ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Indigenous Language

Summary Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer whose scientific writings – had they not been allowed to remain in manuscript – would long ago have earned for him an international esteem comparable with that of Galileo and Kepler. Only in recent decades has his status been recognised by scientists, but not, so far, by linguists. Yet he was the first English traveller to North America known to have recorded an indigenous language, for which he devised a dictionary and a phonetic alphabet. He also recorded a large number of Algonkin words during his stay in North Carolina in 1585–86, some of which are found in the account of his travels which he published in 1588, more than fifty years before Roger Williams’s (1603?-1683) Key into the Language of America (1643), which has often been regarded as the first such work. The manuscripts of the dictionary and the phonetic alphabet were thought to be lost, until a few years ago a sketch of the phonetic alphabet was found; and in 1988 a detailed holograph copy came to light. The present paper, while describing this recent discovery, provides a brief survey of linguistic relationships between speakers of North Carolina Algonkin and English colonists between 1586 and the arrival of the Mayflower pilgrims in 1621, and traces Harriot’s influence on later 17th-century linguists.

Missionary linguistics in seventeenth century Ireland and a North American Analogy

1985 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Salmon
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
English Language ◽  
Far East ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
John Eliot ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
The Many ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
Roger Williams

Summary Accounts of Christian missionary linguists in the 16th and 17th centuries are usually devoted to their achievements in the Americas and the Far East, and it is seldom remarked that, at the time when English Protestant missionaries were attempting to meet the challenge of unknown languages on the Eastern seaboard of North America, their fellow missionary-linguists were confronted with similar problems much nearer home – in Ireland, where the native language was quite as difficult as the Amerindian speech with which John Eliot and Roger Williams were engaged. Outside Ireland, few historians of linguistics have noted the extraordinarily interesting socio-linguistic situation in this period, when English Protestants and native-born Jesuits and Franciscans, revisiting their homeland covertly from abroad, did battle for the hearts and minds of the Irish-speaking population – nominally Catholic, but often so remote from contacts with their Mother Church that they seemed, to contemporary missionaries, to be hardly more Christian than the Amerindians. The linguistic problems of 16th-and 17th-century Ireland have often been discussed by historians dealing with attempts by Henry VIII and his successors to incorporate Ireland into a Protestant English state in respect of language, religion and forms of government, and during the 16th century various official initiatives were taken to convert the Irish to the beliefs of an English-speaking church. But it was in the 17th century that consistent and determined efforts were made by individual Englishmen, holding high ecclesiastical office in Ireland, to convert their nominal parishioners, not by forcing them to seek salvation via the English language, but to bring it to them by means of Irish-speaking ministers preaching the Gospel and reciting the Liturgy in their own vernacular. This paper describes the many parallels between the problems confronting Protestant missionaries in North America and these 17th-century Englishmen in Ireland, and – since the work of the American missions is relatively well-known – discusses in greater detail the achievements of missionary linguists in Ireland.

Anglicans, Puritans and American Indians: Persecution or Toleration?

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 189-198
Author(s):  
H. C. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Sermon On The Mount ◽  
The World ◽  
Roger Williams ◽  
Ways Of Life

‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature’ (Mark 16: 15). Modern historians find it fashionable to categorise Missions as examples of Cultural Conflict. Members of the ethnohistorical school—concerned especially with the meeting and blending of Indian and European ways of life—present Conversion as a species of Persecution: an infringement of Indian human rights, an exercise in ethnocentrism or exploitative capitalism—part of the Cant of Conquest. Conversion—the colonialisation of a native belief system—means ‘acculturation’, ‘deculturation’, or tragic ‘despiritualisation’. Accounts of the relation between Indians and English colonists in colonial North America take a hint from the complaint of Roger Williams of Rhode Island, writing in 1654 to the authorities of Massachusetts about the destructive wars, cruel and unnecessary, against the tribes of New England. Christianity means conquest, harsh and brutal. Some of this emphasis on atrocities may spring from historians’ indignation at Christian activities apparently so alien to the Sermon on the Mount.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document