<%@LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" CODEPAGE="65001"%> #9 War Years to 1815

Indigenous and Settler Christianities in Canada

Professor Alan L. Hayes, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto

#9. War years, 1744–1815

FOR FURTHER READING

Edward E. Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, (Harvard 2013)

Joel Martin and Mark Nichols, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (U of North Carolina Press, 2010)

James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford, 1986)

Anne Polk Diffendal, "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Assimilation of Foreign Protestants in British North America," PhD thesis, U of Nebraska, 1974

Peter M. Doll, Revolution, Religion, and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in British North America (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2000)

Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian education in the american coloniea (U of Nebraska, 2007)

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2011)

R. Douglas Hunt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Indiana U.P., 1996)

Carol Devens, Countering Colonization: Native American Womlen and Great Lakes Missions 1630–1900 (U of California, 1992), is "pre-post-modern" in usually assuming a clear binary between Christian and traditional.

A version of this history told in wampum belts was produced by Rick Hill of Six Nations Polytechnic.

Haudenosaunee, New York

Charles Inglis' "A Memorial Concerning the Iroquois," addressed to Lord Hillsborough, is in "The Documentary History of the State of New York" (1850), vol. 4, 666-675; it can be read online in "Canadiana."

J. W. Lydekker, “The Rev. John Stuart, D.D., (1740–1811): missionary to the Mohawks,” in Historical Magazine of the Episcopal Church 11 (1942): 18–64

Frank J. Klingberg, "Sir William Johnson and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1749-1774), in Historical Magazine of the Episcopal Church 8 (1939): 4-37.

Bruce Elliott Johansen, Barbara Alice Mann, eds., Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) (Greemwppd Press. 2000)

Douglas Leighton on John Norton, on-line

Roger Sharpe, "The Word among the Early Six Nations," on-line

Mohawk Chapel, on-line

Wheelock

James Axtell, "Dr. Wheelock's Little Red Schoolhouse," in The European and the Indian: essays in the ethnohistory of colonial North America (Oxford, 1981), 87-109.

Colin G. Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (University Press of New England, 2010)

Pre-revolutionary William R. Nester, Haughty Conquerors": Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763 (Praeger, 2000)

Alfred A. Cave, "The Delaware Prophet Neolin: A Reappraisal," Ethnohistory 46 (1999): 265-290.

Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of Norrh America (Oxford, 2006)

An Algonquin reflects on the meaning of the Treaty of 1764

Sara Mohammedi, "The Interpretation of Christianity by American Indian Prophets," Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 3 (2002): 71–88.

American Revolution and First Nations
Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: the Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006)

Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution (Vintage, 2007)

Acadia & Maritimes

Jennifer Reid, Myth, Symbol, and Colonial Cncounter: British and Mi'kmaq in Acadia, 1700-1867 (U of Ottawa Press, 1995)

Judith Fingard, "The New England Company and the New Brunswick Indians, 1786-1826: A Comment on the Colonial Perversion of British Benevolence," Acadiensis (1972) (a pdf version is linked here)

John G. Reid, "Empire, the Maritime Colonies, and the Supplanting of the Mi'kmaq / Wulstukwik, 1780–1820," Acadiensis 38 (2009): 78–97, and online here

Quebec and the Canadas

Alain Beaulieu, Martin Papillon, Stéphan Gervais, Les autochtones et le Québec: des premiers contacts au Plan Nord (Presses de lÚniversité de Montréal, 2014)

Thomas G.M. Peace, "Two Conquests: Aboriginal Experiences of the Fall of New France and Acadia," PhD thesis, York, 2011

Ewen J. MacDonald, "Father Roderick MacDonell, Missionary at St. Regis and the Glengarry Catholics, in The Catholic Historical Review 19 (1933): 265-274

Ontario. Dept. of Education, Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada, volume 1 (1894)

Ontario, Report of the Ministry of Education(1884)

Cornelius J. Jaenen, "Some Unresolved Issues: Lorette Hurons in the Colonial Context," Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 21 (1997): 111-125

Patrick Campbell, Travels in the interior inhabited parts of North America in the years 1791 and 1792; in which is given an account of the manners and customs of the Indians, and the present war between them and the fœderal states, the mode of life and system of farming among the new settlers of both Canadas, etc., (1793)

Marijke E. Huitman, "'Land of which the Savages Stood in No Particular Need': Dispossessing the Algonquins of Southeastern Ontario of their Land," MA thesis, Queen's, 2000, pdf link here

Jean-Pierre Sawaya, La Fédération des Sept-Feux de la vallée du Saint-Laurent: XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Sillery, 1998)

 

 

Summary

From a European point of view, the period from 1755 to 1815 was marked by a series of wars involving the English and French Empires, in which First Nations figured as allies of one side or another. Things looked different from a First Nations perspective. First Nations were fighting to protect their land, people, trade, and independence. They formed and changed alliances, or pronounced themselves neutral, for strategic reasons. Christianities sometimes supported, sometimes mitigated, and sometimes challenged that process. First Nations understandings of their goals and strategies were often shaped by the wisdom of First Nations prophets and spiritual leaders that in turn was influenced by Christianities: examples discussed here are Neolin (Lenape), Tenskwatawa (Shawnee), and Handsome Lake (Seneca). As always, despite the preferences of settler missionaries, First Nations Christianities didn't exclude traditional practices and identities, although they sometimes reinterpreted or reformed them. Racial categories were increasingly used to construct the relationship between settler and Indigenous peoples, and their religions. Compared with the actual complexities of settler–Indigenous relations, it was so easy to deal with just two categories, "white" and "Indian:" you knew exactly who your enemy was. Offsetting that tendency, however, was an intercultural engagement that could blur identities and that often hybridized Christianities. At the end of the period, as a result of mlitary, economic, and demographic changes, settler colonialism was increasingly able to marginalize and repress First Nations.

Outline of this webpage

  1. Overview of dates
  2. Primary sources
  3. Protestants before 1776 (Mohawks; Moor's Charity School; Oneida)
  4. The Royal Proclamation (Land disputes; the Ohio; race; French and Indian War; Neolin; Pontiac's Rebellion; the Royal Proclamation of 1763; the Treaty of Niagara of 1764; the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1768)
  5. Joseph Brant
  6. The Revolutionary War; refugees; dispossession
  7. Acadia
  8. Protestants and the land 1760–1815
  9. The War of 1812 (Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh, First Nations warriors)

Overview of dates

Some dates

Sources

Archival sources are spread far and wide, but a large proportion of primary source material has been transcribed and published, and, of that, a significant proportion is now available on-line. For serious research that's intended for publication, archival sources should be consulted, since errors do creep into transcriptions. But for general purposes transcriptions and dependable Internet sources are a very welcome resource.

Protestants before 1776

Protestants begin thinking about mission. Roman Catholic foreign missionaries were energetically at work from the earliest days of New Spain, frequently mitigating the brutality of the explorers, traders, and settlers. Protestant settlers were far more fitful in their attempts to "convert the heathen," even though the latter was typically a mandate in their charters for colonization. The more zealouso American Protestants were jealous of the successful example of the French. Thus a missionary in the 1750s (John Ogilvie) wrote the following to the SPG:

There is not a Nation bordering upon the five great lakes, or the banks of the Ohio, the Mississippi, all the way to Louisiana, but what are supplied with priests & schoolmastres, & have very decent places of worship, with every splendid utensil of their religion.  How ought we to blush at our coldness & shameful indiffernece to the propagation of our most excellent religion.

In this section we turn our attention to the Indigenous peoples that wound up in Canada, who were within the reach of the settler Protestants in New York and New England: the Haudenosaunee west of Albany. We've seen that a handful of Dutch Reformed clergy in New York did connect with them in the period of New Netherland (before 1667), but that Roman Catholics had made by far the stronger impression.

The challenge to English Protestants to step up their game would become more acute in Canada in 1763 when colonial authority over the territory passed from France to England. In addition to evangelistic motives, the Church of England, as the established church in England, also evidenced a political agenda: it was sure that making people Anglican would make them more loyal to the King, and to settler political interests.

The Mohawks and the Anglicans

Geographical context. It will be recalled that, before the American Revolution, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy occupied a 300-kilometre corridor from near Albany to Niagara Falls, like a huge Longhouse; and that the Mohawks were the Eastern Door of the Longhouse. They therefore had the closest relations with settlers (first Dutch, then English) in Albany, and, accordingly, they attracted the most missionary attention. It will also be recalled that, from the 1670s, most Roman Catholic converts among the Mohawks had moved north to Jesuit missions or réductions in the St. Lawrence River Valley and had become autochtones domiciliés, sedentary First Peoples, in the federation called the Seven Fires. The council fire for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, where decisions were made for all the Five (later Six) Nations, was in Onondaga territory, near present-day Syracuse. The population of this territory in 1770 was about 8000 Haudenosaunee, plus another 800 from other Indigenous and settler nations.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts ("SPG").This Church of England missionary society was founded in 1701 to spread the gospel and support English colonists in "the king’s “plantations, colonies, and factories beyond the seas.” Before the American Revolution, its work with the Mohawks was the most persistent of all its Native North American missions. By 1715 it had translated enough of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer to support services of worship. The SPG was highly clericalistic and Eurocentric, which limited its success for its first three or four decades in Iroquoia, especially since its mission there was really only adjunct to settler ministry in Albany. Still, we read that in the early decades of the SPG mission Mohawk women were independently taking the initiative to lead prayer groups and to teach some Christian principles.

The four "Indian Kings." In 1710, during "Queen Anne's War," as a tactic for strengthening an alliance between the English and the Haudneosaunee, four "Indian kings" were taken to England to thrill Londoners, appear before the SPG, and meet the Queen. Of course the First Nations didn't actually have kings; three Mohawks and one Mahican played the part. It was a serious exercise in diplomacy mixed with a public relations stunt. It made an impression. The Dutch artist Jan Verelst painted a portrait of each of the "kings" (see one of them at theleft). The Queen became fully inspired to support the mission to the Mohawks. She provided a church, a missionary house, a fort ("Fort Hunter"), prayer books, bibles, decorations, and a full silver communion set (pictured below right). (The communion set, now divided between Grand River and Tyendinaga, has an interesting later history of its own; see the article in the linked pdf.)

Mohawk Christian leaders. Building up a Mohawk Anglican church required the leadership of native catechists, schoolmasters, and liturgical leaders.

Sir William Johnson (1715?–1774). Johnson (pictured below right) was Britain's superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern American colonies from 1756 to his death. He had been living in the Mohawk River valley since 1738, first as an agent for a wealthy uncle but increasingly on his own as a trader, public official, and military commander. He became fully at home with the Mohawk language and culture; Chief Hendrick became one of his mentors in that process. He married (à la façon du pays) Gonwatsijayenni, Molly (Mary) Brant, and had a number of children with her. (He actually had dozens of children with an indeterminate number of women, mainly Mohawk.) He worked hard to protect the Haudenosaunee from settlers' designs on their land and assaults on their culture. But he also maintained his British lifestyle in an elegant home (pictured below) which is now open to the public in a state park. He supported his lifestyle with black slaves and white indentured servants. He was generally trusted (but also at least slightly mistrusted) by both the Haudenosaunee and the British: he was a master negotiator, or as some say a bit of a con man. While protecting Indigenous lands from settlement, he also was able to acquire a considerable amount of property, making him, by some accounts, the second largest property-owner in British America. He was a committed Anglican, and apparently a sincerely devout one.

(The late Norm Casey, the long-time Anglican pastor of Six Nations, used to lead his congregations and friends in occasional historical tours to the Mohawk Valley, including Johnson Hall [pictured below left]. He would note that Johnson's home was the model for the home in which the Mohawk poet and performer Pauline Johnson was raised on the Grand River.) .

Johnson's missionary strategy. With the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754, and for another fifteen years, the SPG's attention in Iroquoia languished. This state of affairs disappointed Johnson. He worked with the clergy at the influential Trinity Church, New York, to develop a visionary plan for mission work in the Valley. He invited the clergy up to his estate to meet Mohawk leaders and exchange wampum belts, and he guided their thinking about mission strategy in another direction from the SPG's conventional "old, beaten" way, which prioritized clergy authority, a centralized location, and Indigenous assimilation into English society. Instead, Johnson was positively impressed by the more inculturating approach of the Jesuits, which had obviously been highly successful. The outcome was a lengthy memorandum in 1771 from Charles Inglis of Trinity Church to the colonial secretary, Lord Hillsborough. Its principles were evidently Johnson's. They include the following:

I've identified what I think are some highlights in this document, but, to be honest, there are also some "lowlights." The document is indeed quite Eurocentric, though that's no doubt partly with a view to its aristocratic English readers. It's also highly anti-Catholic prejudice, and generally governed by considerations of political expediency.

Moor's Charity School, 1754

Eleazar Wheelock. Wheelock was a Congregationalist pastor in Lebanon, Connecticut, and an itinerant revivalist preacher during the "First Great Awakening" of the 1730s and 1740s. Opponents of the Great Awakening punished the revivalist preachers by taking away their salary in 1743, and so Wheelock made up some income by taking in students. One of them, though, wasn't a paying customer, but a charity case. That was a Mohegan student named Samson Occom (pictured here), who became a Christian and a celebrated (though poor) preacher. Flushed with this success, Wheelock decided in 1754 to set up an Indian residential school for Indigenous boys and girls. The school was named after a wealthy Connecticut farmer who sponsored the school financially. Wheelock combined a profound disdain for Indigenous peoples, an autocratic nature, a penchant for self-advertisement, a narrow understanding of Christianity, and Eurocentric goals for education. He was also hard to please. He persevered for fifteen years before he gave up and opened a new school primarily for settler students. That was the origin of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, now one of the eight "Ivy League" colleges.

Purpose of the school. Wheelock proposed to "purge all the Indian out" of his pupils, convert them (if they weren't already Christian), and train them to be missionaries to Indigenous peoples (not necessarily their own peoples; just any Indigenous peoples). Instruction included Latin and Greek, and classical western literature. The school prefigured the later Indian residential schools of Canada in many ways:

Wheelock arranged for missionary appointments in Iroquoia for some of the graduates. He sought to oversee them in their mission appointments, but, being ignorant of Haudenosaunee ways, oblivious to the needs of the missionaries, and thiristy for appreciation, he very often alienated them.

The record of the school. During the first seven years Iroquoia was a war zone and Wheelock received no students from that region. Instead he taught Indigenous pupils from the northeastern American colonies such as Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. With the peace of the Iroquois Covenant Chain in 1760, Wheelock began recruiting Haudenosaunee students as well. By one count, during its whole existence the school taught a total of 52 Indigenous pupils. Several left prematurely; a few died. Five became missionaries, and seven became schoolmasters. Few if any of its pupils lived up to Wheelock's desire to produce people like himself.

Fund-raising. Wheelock marketed the school aggressively, writing public relations materials and collaring potential benefactors. Since running the school was his business, he profited from some of the proceeds. In 1766 he acted on a particularly inspired fund-raising idea: he'd send an Indigenous minister to impress wealthy folks in England. His choice, of course, was Samson Occom, who had made good as an ordained minister and an effective peracher. Occom, along with a settler colleague, returned with the remarkable sum of £12,000. As a very rough estimate, that might be worth Cdn $3,500,000 today. But by 1770 Wheelock was discouraged by the failures of the school, which he attributed to the inferior nature of Indigenous peoples. In addition, his hopes of branching out into Indigenous lands were opposed by Wliliam Johnson, who resisted colonial settlement and also didn't much like Wheelock. Wheelock therefore essentially absconded with the funds that Occom had raised for Indigenous schooling, moved to New Hampshire, and used the money for settler education. Occom said, "All the money has done is, it has made Doctor's family very grand in the world."

Criticisms. Both settler and Indigenous people grew very critical of Wheelock's school.

Some pupils. Several significant Christian leaders attended Wheelock's school.

Older histories usually single out Kirkland as Wheelock's most successful missionary graduate, but that may be because (1) he wrote more than the others, (2) he inflated himself more than the others, and (3) he was a settler. Those who have looked closely at the documentation have come away with the sense that Kirkland's First Nations colleagues and mentors helped him out of scrapes, challenged his bad ideas, and generally made him look good.

The Oneida

A case study. Before the American Revolution, Christianities emerged and gained substantial followings in all the Six Nations, except possibly the Cayuga. Although the Mohawk at first attracted the most attention from settler Protestants (largely because it was closest to Albany), the Oneida nation soon appeared to be a comparably promising prospect for Christian mission. Indeed, its language and culture were more similar to the Mohawks than to the other four of the Six Nations, and the kinship ties of the Mohawk and Oneida were close. Over all, the Oneida situation probably best evidences the complex interplays of social, cultural, political, and theological differences and tensions in Indigenous–settler Christianities, and so it makes for a particularly fascinating study. Although this specific case is connected to a specific time, place, and set of people, it's in many ways representative of patterns of complexity in settler and Indigenous Christianities throughout Canadian history.

Geography. The Oneida were the second fire of the Longhouse, just beyond the Mohawks from the Dutch and English settlements around Albany. They were the smallest in population of the Five (later Six) Nations. Their territory extended over six million acres in what's now central New York, where a city, county, and lake bear the Oneida name today. Oneida territory was culturally diverse in the eighteenth century, as it became a destination for Indigenous immigrants and refugees from elsewhere. Among these the Tuscarora people were most notable; after they were forced out of North Carolina by settler territorial encroachment and war, they came to the Oneida region after 1712 and were accepted as the sixth of the Six Nations in 1722. But Lenape, Shawnee, and Mahicans were there too, as well as other Six Nations peoples, as well as British, Dutch, and German settler people. The Oneida were particularly closely connected to the Mohawks, whose language and culture were more similar than the other four of the Six Nations, and who shared many kinship lines. The main settlements in Oneida territory were:

Social divisions. Tensions existed between the Oneida of traditional ways and the Oneida who were open to British ways.

Reasons for Protestant engagement. Many Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist evangelists, both settler and Indigenous, found a ready hearing from the Oneida, especially those at Kanonwalohale and Onaquaga, who offered warm hospitality to them, or at least to the more likable ones. . Among the reasons that historians suggest to explain why many Oneida were open to Christian ideas are the following:

As the historian Alan Taylor has said, the Oneida were not "passive recipients" but "demanding catalysts" for Protestant missionary work.

Leaders. The most effective Christian leaders among the Oneida were, not surprisingly, the Oneida themselves, not settlers, and not members of other First Nations. Thus although several Algonquian speaking First Nations missionaries made valiant efforts with the Oneida, they usually flamed out. And the achievements of the settler missionaries were usually mixed.

Tensions around Christianities. Christianities unsettled Oneida society, or perhaps more often exacerbated divisions that already existed.

Christianities and Haudenosaunee spirituality. While English missionaries disparaged Oneida culture, and traditional Oneida elders in turn disparaged Christianity, many Oneida Christians saw attractions in both these spiritualities. After all, the Oneida had experienced enough forms of Christianity to know that it was pretty malleable.

The Royal Proclamation

Importance. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 has been called Canada's "magna carrta" of Aboriginal land rights. Its historic authority was recognized by three members of the Supreme Court of Canada in its Calder decision of 1973. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 25, explicitly incorporates the Aboriginal rights recognized by the Royal Proclamation.The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1991–1996, highlighted it as a key to Indigenous–settler reconciliation. At first sight it may not appear essential to the story of Indigneous and settler Christianities in Canada. But Indigenous peoples see an intimate connection between land and spirituality that sometimes eludes settler folk; and the councils of the mainline churches in Canada since the 1960s have understood that, as a matter of gospel discipleship, they are called to solidarity with Indigenous peoples in their fight for the recognition of Aboriginal land rights. So the background, intentions, and immediate aftermath of the Royal Proclamation deserve attention.

Land disputes. Settler encroachments on Indigenous territory and disputes about land generated mayhem, political agitation, violence, and war from the 1740s to the end of the War of 1812. The "Overview" of dates above gives some brief examples. We've just noted some tensions around land use in Haudenosaunee territory before the American Revolution, but those were comparatively benign, since both New York nor Britan wanted to protect their military and trade alliances there, and so avoided provocation as much as possible. The area of dispute most important for Canadian history was the Ohio River valley. This is no longer part of Canada, of course, but until 1795 it was.

Ohio. The Ohio River rises at what's now Pittsburgh, and flows southwest into the Mississippi River at what's now the southern tip of Illinois. This area between the Appalachian mountain range and the Mississippi, south of the Great Lakes, was of critical interest to a number of players. In the years leading up to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the interested parties included the following:

There was no peaceful way to keep order in the Ohio. No one had the recognized authority to try. As a result, there were many acts of horrific violence triggering at least equally horrifically violent acts of revenge.

Race. Many historians have traced the racial construction of Indigenous–settler conflict to this period. Colonial settlers were more often lumping all "Indians" together into a single prejudiced stereotype; First Nations peoples began speaking generically of "whites." (True, it's hard to know for sure what the First Nations people were saying, since what they said was almost always written by the settlers, but most historians think that this language of "whites" was accurately represented.) Accordingly, if a settler wanted to avenge a murder by, say, a Shawnee, any "Indian" would do. If a Shawnee wanted to avenge a murder by, say, a Virginian, any "white" would do.

The most dramatic example, shocking in its extreme but otherwise like many others, was the massacre at Gnaddenhutten, Ohio (pictured here). It's now a historical monument. The background to the story begins in the 1740s, when missionaries from the Moravian Church, which taught Christian pacifism, started to sponsor small communities of Lenape (Delaware) Christians. In March 1782 a Pennsylvania militia group raided the Gnaddenhutten community, and finding artifacts like spoons and tea kettles, and noting brands on the horses, decided that they were thieves. As Richard White interpreted it, "for Indian haters," who made stark binary distinctions between "white" and "red," "all these things were marks of whites," and if "Indians" possessed them, they must have stolen them. The militia took the Christian Lenape two or three at a time into slaughterhouses, one for men and the other for women and children, and killed them with mallets and knives — 28 men, 29 women, and 39 women. They plundered the loot, and burned the villages. None of the perpetrators was ever brought to justice.

French and Indian War. This American segment of a global war between European empires, called the Seven Years War, consumed the years from 1754 to 1763. From a First Nations perspective, it was a war to protect Aboriginal lands and rights. Different First Nations allied with different parties, depending on their sense of their strategic interests.

But the victory of either France or Britain wasn't in the interest of any of the First Nations. Their higher strategy was to maintain a balance of power between the two European empires, France and Britain..

Outcome of the war. From the point of view of Euro-Canadian history, the war ended with the fall of Quebec in 1759 and the fall of Montreal in 1760, upon which Britain took authority in Canada pending the Treaty of Paris in 1763. From a First Nations point of view, however, the realy turning-point of the war was the capitulation of the French Fort Niagara (pictured here) in 1759, after British and Haudenosaunee warriors under the command of Sir William Johnson had laid siege. (Seneca warriors who were with the French in the fort exited under a flag of truce, since they didn't want to fight their fellow Haudenosaunee.) You can visit Old Fort Niagara, complete with re-enactors; it's near Youngstown, New York.

With the fall of Fort Niagara, French alliances in the pays d'en haut fell apart, and Indigenous peoples in the Ohio were horrified to realize that the British conqueror would no longer be held in check by France.

The Seneca attempted unsuccessfully to continue the war against Britain with its First Nations allies to the west.

British arrogance. Once Britain won, it made no effort to construct a lasting peace with the First Nations, as New France had done well. To be sure, during the war, Britain ssaid all the right things and made very reassuring promises. In a treaty with 500 chiefs at Easton (in what's now Pennsylvania) in 1758, when Britain needed the support, or at least the neutrality, of First Nations, it promised that, if it won the war, it would leave them at peace in their lands, exit Ohio country, and rebuild a peaceful trading relationship. British officials reiterated this promise in several other situations, as in 1760 at Fort Oswego (now part of Oswego, New York). In the articles of capitulation of Montreal in 1760, Article 40 guaranteed that France's "Indian" allies "shall be maintained in the lands they inhabit," and shall have "liberty of religion." But after the war British leaders, particularly the dreadful Jeffery Amherst, the governor-general of British North America as of 1760, treated Indigenous peoples as conquered subjects. The British:—

Amherst expressed the goal, in so many words, of exterminating the Indian race, and wanted to distribute to them blankets infected with smallpox. (If you think that story is a myth, the University of Massacusetts has news for you.) It isn't clear whether he got his way. William Johnson kept advising Amherst to maintain French policies amd the tried-and-true traditions of Indigenous–settler relations, but to no avail.

In early 1763, the news reached Canada that France had ceded its territory to Britain. Indigenous peoples were first crushed, then defiant. They began to prepare for war.

Prophetic movements. During this very troubled period several First Nations and settler prophets, male and female, arose to proclaim messages both spiritual and political that showed the influence of Christianities. While settler churches were generally conservative institutions, the Christian Scriptures are rich with prophecies, apocalyptic visions, condemnations of the rich and powerful, and calls for social justice. They are always a great resource for defiant and radical movements. First Nations prophets often drew on them for messages of reform, renewal, and resistance.

Neolin. One of the most important of these prophets, because of his influence on a First Nations rebellion, was Neolin, a Lenape who was residing in the Ohio country. He received a life-changing vision in 1761 which he described in language reminiscent of the New Testament book of the Revelation of St. John, but also of First Nations visions and stories. A woman of radiant beauty led him to the summit of a mountain, where a handsome man dressed in white presented him to the Master of Life.

"I am He who hath created the heavens and the earth," the Master of Life told Neolin. "Because I love you, you must do what I say."

The Master of Life denounced the sins of his children: alcohol, promiscuity, witchcraft, unkindness, and above all their indulgence of settler land-grabbers. Neolin's message combined attacks on settler colonialism, with all its cultural hegemonies and its projects of land dispossession, with calls for the reform of First Nations societies, whose spiritual weakness, he thought, had enabled the settlers. In other words, Neolin saw First Nations peoples not simply as victims of settler colonialism, but as agents who could take control of the situation by deciding to follow God's commandments. And God's principal commandment at this time was to keep First Nations and settler people separate. (Or perhaps it was that Indigenous people should remain separate from the British in particular; there's some doubt.)

Neolin's prophecies appear to connect Christian and First Nations wisdom in the project of social reform and justice. But some elements seem more distinctly Christian than First Nations: direct access to a supreme, all-powerful God who guides history and hands down commandments; the Devil; an afterlife of heaven for the righteous, and hell for the unrepentant; and additional rituals, some of them intended to replace such traditional ceremonies as those involving medicine bags and bundles. Neolin's prophecies are an example of the cultural interchange of Christian and spiritual wisdoms in the project of social justice.

Pontiac's Rebellion. Neolin's prophecies caught on beyond his own Lenape people, and most notably they caught the attention of Obwandiyag (Pontiac), an Odawa war chief in Detroit. That town had a fort, formerly French but now in English hands, and around the fort a diverse population of Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Wendat peoples. Pontiac succeeded in uniting these peoples in a short-lived, very brutal anti-British action that began with the fort at Detroit. It has been called the First Nations War of Independence. The rebellion moved on to Fort Pitt (at what's now Pittsburgh), Fort Niagara, and the countryside. The rebellion achieved none of its long-range purposes, but First Nations warriors were effective against British soldiers, and the war was extremely costly to the British in lives and treasury. It was painfully evident to the Lords of the Board of Trade and Plantations in London that a less arrogrant, more conciliatory policy would have been cheaper. Amherst was called home and replaced.

Pontiac continued to seek alliances against the British for another two years. When his taste for war seemed to flag, Charlot Kaské, a Roman Catholic Shawnee war chief, led the resistance in his stead. In 1765 a council of First Nations leaders at Detroit ratified a peace agreement presented by Pontiac and a British emissary.

Drafting the Royal Proclamation. In September 1763, a few months after Britain had received colonial authority over Canada in the Treaty of Paris, one of the King's secretaries of state asked the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations to draft a proclamation "declaratory of the several arrangements to be made in the new acquisitions in America," including matters of "Indian" commerce. The Board evidently kept in mind the dangers of worrying First Nations about the security of their land-holdings. From that point of view they should have announced that Britain had no authority over the land at all. But, on the other hand, their other problem was that settler squatters were invading First Nations lands, and that the colonies, particularly Pennsylvania and Virginia, were eager to expand westward. From that point of view, the Board wanted to assert its authority over the land, so that Britain could flex its muscle to restrain the colonies and expel the squatters. This is the reasonable interpretation offered by the Ojibwe legal scholar John Borrows to explain why the Royal Proclamation, when it was published, looked so double-minded.

Issuing the Royal Proclamation. The Board worked fast, and on October 7, 1763, the king issued his Proclamation. It renamed Canada "the province of Quebec," defined boundaries (or sometimes left them vague), and mandated governments for its new territories. And, most importantly in the long term, it protected Aboriginal lands according to the following provisions:

The relevant excerpt from the Royal Proclamation can be found here. On the one hand, it seems to assert Britain's sovereignty over First Nations land; on the other hand, it seems to say that First Nations have rights to the land for as long as they want. If they do want to dispose of any land, the Crown is the only potential buyer.

The Council of Fort Niagara. Officials in London were no doubt oblivious to the traditions of Indigenous–settler relations, and thought that a simple unilateral royal proclamation could settle Indigenous–settler affairs. William Johnson knew better. First Nations weren't subjects of the Crown, but independent nations. The Royal Proclamation would have no authority among First Nations unless First Nations agreed to it. He knew that it needed to be transformed from a unilateral declaration to a multilateral treaty. By now Johnson was free of Jeffery Amherst, and he was arguably the most important British official in British North America. He called together a peace council for the summer of 1764 at Fort Niagara. He made sure that invitations were delivered to First Nations far and wide, along with copies of the Proclamation and strings of wampum, according to traditional practices.

The Treaty of Fort Niagara. When the council was convened, it was reportedly the largest and most representative in history, with 2000 chiefs from two dozen nations, arriving from territories extending from Hudson's Bay to the Missisippi to Acadia. (Some First Nations refused to attend.) The gathering renewed the Covenant Chain of Friendship, added oral promises, and exchanged gifts and wampum belts. A new two-row wampum belt, like the ones that had been presented so many times since the arrival of the Dutch a century and a half earlier, confirmed the treaty. John Borrows has argued (in this pdf) that the Treaty of Niagara, incorporating the Royal Proclamation, the verbal promises, and the two-row wampum, is the fundamental agreement between the British Crown and the First Nations of Canada.

The failed treaty at Detroit. A few weeks later Colonel John Bradstreet met with Indigenous representatives at Detroit to negotiate a peace treaty. It turned out to be unacceptable to both Britain and the First Nations, so it might be ignored, but the reaction to it was telling. When William Johnson saw it, he was dumbfounded: the draft treaty asserted British sovereignty. First Nations certainly had no intention of accepting such an idea, Johnson knew, so it must have been included

from the ignroance of the Interpreter or from some other mistake; for I am well convinced that they [the First Nations] never mean or intend, any thing like it; ... neither have they any word which can convey the more distant idea of subjection, and should it be fully explained to them, and the nature of subordination punishment etc., defined, it might produce infinite harm.

The Treaty of Fort Stanwix. In 1768 William Johnson met representatives of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, each of the Six Nations and Shawnee and Lenape representatives at Fort Stanwix (now a historical monument in Rome, New York). The intent was to settle land disputes and reduce violence between squatters and First Nations peoples between the Appalachians and the Ohio River by a cession of land. The Haudenosaunee, who claimed territory all the way to the Tennessee River, believed they had the right to surrender this land, without the permisson of the First Nations living there. Johnson, himself a land speculator, ignored his conflict of interest. As the simple map below shows (thank you, National Park Service), this Treaty extended British territory way beyond the Proclamation line to include territory south and west of the Ohio River. Correspondingly, it pushed "Indian territory" ever further to the northwest. Johnson didn't actually have the authority from London to reach this agreement, and to many at the time, and to almost everyone since, it looked like a bad idea. The Haudenosaunee collected over £10,000 from Britain for ceding this additional land. (The Shawnee and the Lenape, who lived on this land, didn't accept the treaty. The Shawnee continued to fight for land south of the Ohio until 1774, when, as a result of Lord Dunmore's War, they were forced to concede it. But then the American Revolutionary War placed the land again in dispute among First Nations, British, and Americans.)

The Quebec Act (1774). This Act of the British Parliament extended the boundaries of the province of Quebec very aggressively, to include what's now Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota. A likely reason for this expansion of boundaries is that the British wanted more direct control over this territory in order to forestall settler and squatter invasions and land speculation, and to protect the First Nations there. To the American colonists, however, this was an "intolerable act" and a cause for war.

Joseph Brant

Significance. Joseph Brant (Thayandanagea), a Mohawk, Wolf Clan, was a leader in one of the last "pan-Indian" movements for Aboriginal land rights before the twentieth century. During his lifetime he was more effective than any other single person at keeping issues of Aboriginal land rights and social justice on the agenda of Canada's colonial rulers. Some have called him an unacknowledged founder of modern Canada. His commitment to Anglican Christianity was a key part of his identity; he was a missionary, worship leader, preacher, Bible translator, church builder, and parish leader.

Early life. Brant grew up in a Christian household, it appears, mainly in Canajoharie (the "Upper Castle") on the Mohawk River. His family was comfortably situated. It was involved with trading, was was professionally connected with William Johnson. When Joseph's sister Molly became William Johnson's wife à la façon du pays, young Brant enjoyed privileged access to Johnson's First Nations and settler social network. He fought for Britain in the French and Indian War, then functioned as a diplomatic emissary for Johnson, and fought again for Britain in Pontiac's War. He attended Wheelock's school in Connecticut, as well as (briefly) an SPG missionary school in Canajoharie. His facility with English and the western elements of his education made him unusually bicultural, an essential qualification for his many diplomatic tasks and for his advocacy on behalf of his people. After two marriages each ending in the wife's untimely death, he married Catherine Adonwentishon, a Mohawk, Turtle Clan, of high clan rank.

Military leadership. Brant was named a Mohawk war chief in 1771. During the American War of Independence, he was the military leader of a volunteer company for the British, and received an officer's commission from the governor of Quebec, Frederick Haldimand. He received no pay, but Haldimand promised to protect Haudenosaunee land rights if the British won the war.

In Canada. When the British didn't win the war, Haldimand nevertheless supported Britain's Haudenosaunee allies. A little later we'll look at some of the things he did, but for now let's just note that Brant became a recognized leader at a new Haudenosaunee territory at Grand River, which runs from north to south into Lake Erie, west of Lake Ontario. His critics would say that his leadership had an autocratic and self-interested dimension, and his reputation at the Six Nations of the Grand River has been tarnished by his sale to settlers of lands that weren't his to sell. Also, from the end of the American Revolution he was the principal leader of the Western Confederacy of First Nations fighting for American and British recognition of Aboriginal land rights in Ohio country, as we'll consider shortly.

Anglican leadership. After his first wife died in 1771, Brant lived for a year or two with John Stuart (1740–1811), the SPG missionary at Fort Hunter near Tiononderoge, "the lower castle." Brant had quickly struck up a friendship with Stuart, a tall, warm-hearted Pennsylvanian. Brant tutored Stuart in Mohawk, and regularly acted as his interpreter at church services. The two of them collaborated on translations into Mohawk of the Gospel of St. Mark, an exposition of the Anglican catechism, and a history of the Bible, all published in 1787. Later, at Grand River, Brant arranged the construction of the Mohawk chapel, the oldest Protestant church in what's now Ontario, and seems to have functioned as its principal superintendent.

Revolution, refugees, dispossession

The American Revolution. Many American colonists in the 1770s resented having to pay to protect First Nations beyond the Appalachians. Britain was imposing taxes and financial charges on the American colonists for this purpose among others. They also resented the Quebec Act of 1774 which extended the territory of Quebec way into "Indian country" to give greater protection to the First Nations there. (They also resented the Quebec Act for maintaining French-Canadian culture and for giving Roman Catholics far more rights than they enjoyed in England itself.) In April 1775 war broke out, pitting American rebels or "Patriots," who wanted independence from Britain, against "Loyalists." Governments of the thirteen "original" British American colonies committed themselves to the Revolution. The other British colonies didn't go along (Nova Scotia, St. John's Island [now Prince Edward Island], Quebec, Newfoundland, Rupert's Land, West Florida, East Florida).

First Nations and the Revolution. Different First Nations made different decisions about the Revolution:

Destruction. The Revolutionary War was disastrous for First Nations outside New England. The Haudenosaunee suffered a particularly heavy toll; even though some of them had supported the Patriots, the rebels didn't readily distinguish one "Indian" from another. General George Washington was provoked by the military successes of Haudenosaunee Loyalists to order "the total destruction and devastation" of Haudenosaunee towns and crops. The resulting Sullivan Expedition of 1779 left hundreds homeless, many of whom died in the winter freeze. After the war, Americans — many of them Sullivan's soldiers, who liked what they saw as they were destroying it — were free to sweep westward into "Indian country," taking over land and eliminating opposition. Clearing the Haudenosaunee out of their homelands was beneficial to the Americans, since the Mohawk Valley is the main land route into Ohio country.

Sarah Pearsall, for the National Endowment for the Humanities, reflects on one woman whom the Sullivan Expedition spared, known as Madam Sacho, and another who was killed. This 18th-century watercolour of a Mohawk woman illustrates her reflection.

The Treaty of Paris. Indigenous people weren't consulted in the treaty negotiations ending the American War for Independence, and no provision whatever was made to protect Indigenous lands. First Nations were appalled, and many of their British settler allies were ashamed. The rebels, however, were happy. The state of New York began expelling the Haudenosaunee and selling their land to speculators and developers. The Treaty also failed to define a boundary in Ohio country between American and British.

Haudenosaunee refugees from the USA to Canada. became refugees. supported the hundreds of Haudenosaunee refugees from New York, and granted even paid reparations to the Mohawks (though not to the rest of the Six Nations). He made sure to supply the refugee camps at Niagara;

The Northwest Indian War and the Western Confederacy. From 1783 to 1795 disputes about land rights in Ohio country led to a virtually unprecedented pan-Indian political entity. Joseph Brant (pictured here) has been called its "guiding light." .

Acadia

The British and Roman Catholics. After Queen Anne's War, the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Île-Royale (Cape Breton Island) to France and the rest of what's now Nova Scotia to Britain. But for the next several decades, the British were effectively contained at Annapolis Royal and Canso. New France and First Nations had the run of the rest. Boundaries in what's now New Brunswick remained contested; French Roman Catholic missions were built in the disputed area. On Île-Royale the French built a fortress at Louisbourg which the British found threatening. At first Britain gave Acadians a year to swear an oath of allegiance to Britain, or leave. The Mi'kmaq and Maliseet, fellow Roman Catholics, felt solidarity with the Acadians, and French missionaries became leaders of a resistance movement. Since Britain began to worry that Acadians would leave for Île-Royale, which would strengthen the French and weaken their own situation, they at length decided to require from the Acadians only a declaration of neutrality.

Wars. A series of wars further united Acadians and regional First Nations against the British, who, as Mi'kmaq knowledge-keepers affirm, were regarded as pagans.

The British won a critical battle in 1755. They then began brutally expelling Acadians who refused to become Anglicans. Some Acadians had already self-exiled to Île-Royale ("the Acadian exodus"), but they were expelled when Louisbourg fell in 1758.

Pierre Maillard is the best known figure on the Mi'kmaq side, although he was a settler French priest. In 1735 he was sent from France, by the Paris Foreign Missions Society, as a missionary to the Mi'kmaq. A brilliant linguist, he became fluent in their language in a few months, and later developed a pictographic shorthand for the language to assist in the liturgy. (There's a little debate as to whether this was a "writing system.") Maillard's pictographs were still being used in places into the twentieth century. Every year, for several years, Maillard visited every Mi'kmaq settlement in Île-Royale, Île-St-Jean, and British Acadia. His long letter on Mi'kmaq customs and language, and on his understanding of mission work, is as valuable an ethnographic source as the Jesuit Relations in an earlier era. (The letter was published in 1863 in Soirées Canadiennes, and can be read in "Canadiana Online" here.) Maillard was seen both by his church superiors in Quebec and by his government superiors in Paris as an outstanding priest, and in 1754 he was made vicar general of Île-Royale with jurisdiction even over the Récollet missionaries, who were considered a bit laggard. His passion for social justice for the Mi'kmaq people led him into a highly political ministry, including translating the people's declarations of war, accompanying them into battle, and granting them absolution, sometimes in advance of the violent acts that they might commit. He justified his understanding of missionary duties in letters to British officials. In 1759, when the Mi'kmaq cause against the British seemed hopeless, he and other missionaries accepted terms for peace, and, to avoid further bloodshed, he accepted a government appointment as British agent to the Mi'kmaq to persuade the many communities to sign peace treaties. He was allowed to maintain an oratory in the battery at Halifax to say mass for Acadians and Mi'kmaq. On his death in 1762 the government of Nova Scotia organized a state funeral for him.

Loyalist immigration. About 30,000 Loyalists descended on Nova Scotia (which until 1784 included New Brunswick). As a result, Mi'kmaq and Maliseet peoples suffered widespread dispossession of their land. In peninsular Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, which had little "back country," the traditonal Mi'kmaq economies of hunting, fishing, and harvesting were devastated. In New Brunswick and Cape Breton Island, which did have back countries, Mi'kmaq and Maliseet had to move there, away from their traditional lands and rivers, to organize new economies. In all these places, sacred sites were routinely desescrated by Loyalist immigrants. Nevertheless, until 1815, as historian John Reid has shown, First Nations were in many cases successful in negotiating conciliations with settler governments. They found ways to put to use their long experience with inter-cultural trade and diplomacy. They made the argument, sometimes effectively, that since they hadn't been conquered and hadn't ceded land, settler governments at least owed them reciprocal consideration.They could also remind the governments of their need for defensive allies against aggression from the United States.

In New Brunswick. Until 1784 the settler province of New Brunswick was part of Nova Scotia, which in 1765 granted settlers a million acres of Maliseet and Mi'kmaq land without consultation with First Nations. Between 1785 and 1787 about 15,000 Loyalists arrived in New Brunswick, displacing 5000 settlers and First Nations who were already there.

The New England Company. This very early English missionary society began operating in New Brunswick almost immediately after the American Revolution. It had been founded in 1649 to bring "the Gospel of Christ unto and among the heathen natives in or near New England." Its programs involved "civilizing" First Nations people, teaching them English, training them in skills useful in English society, Christianizing them, and training them to "civilize" and "Christianize" their own people. After the American Revolution the New England Company was obliged to exit its operations in the United States, and looked instead to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the West Indies. In New Brunswick a group of local settler Anglican clergy and laypeople was recruited to give leadership to the Company's projects. One of them, Edward Winslow, has left historically significant papers that are available on-line. In 1787 the Company's local commissioners began looking for opportunities to set up "Indian" day schools. Since the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet were already overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, the intent of the Company wasn't to Christianize them, but to Protestantize them.

The New England Company was later known for overseeing two of the very worst Anglican Indian residential schools, at Lytton and Brantford. The society still exists, and makes grants and gives scholarships.

The school at Sussex Vale, New Brunswick. After various unsuccessful plans and efforts focusing on "Indian" day schools, the New England Company established a school at Sussex Vale. To induce First Nations parents to send their children, the Company would house and feed the families on site, and give them gifts. In the mid-1790s — gradually, since First Nations folk were suspicious of this sudden show of settler benevolence — some families were beginning to sign on. For many years the school had little success to show, and so in 1807 the disappointed commissoiners hit on a new approach: children would be segregated from their families, and at the right age apprenticed to settler families, who would receive the consideration of £20 a year (a very high sum). Children as young as eight months were bound out. The project was a dismal failure, as the Company's English overseers finally discovered when they sent investigators to New Brunswick to evaluate the situation. It turned out that the masters who held the indentures were interested only in the money paid to them and the service rendered to them. The Anglican priest who acted as schoolmaster was incompetent. There was evidence of corruption among the local agents. There was sexual exploitation of children. The children didn't learn to read. The Mi'kmaq and Maliseet families remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, whose missionaries, unlike the Anglicans, were required to learn Native languages. Indeed, the very concept of the school was ridiculous: how could "graduates" evangelize their people if they weren't bilingual and had been segregated from their own culture from infancy? The school was closed in 1826, and the New England Company ended its work in New Brunswick, leaving its victims to recover.

Christianities and land, 1760–1815

Land for Loyalists. The Loyalist stampede during and after the American Revolution changed Canadian history for both First Nations and settlers. About 80,000 Loyalists came to Canada, of whom 10,000 settled in western Quebec ("Upper Canada" after 1791; now Ontario). To accommodate them, the Crown purchased increasing quantities of land from Indigenous peoples, in a series of Upper Canada Treaties under the general terms of the Royal Proclamation. Many of these treaties were irregular, and in later years were renegotiated or litigated. Some are still outstsanding. Among the irregularities were the following:

As an example, the Crawford Purchase of 1783 with the Mississaugas covered land from Gananoque to the Trent River and thirty miles deep from Lake Ontario, for which the government paid an assortment of blankets, clothing, hats, guns, ammunition, and red cloth. But much of this land was Algonquin territory, not Mississauga. Algonquins weren't consulted.

Anglicans. There were no full-time Anglican missionaries to Indigenous peoples in Canada during this period. Anglican authorities gave priority to coping with the Loyalist migration. (Nova Scotia, which wasn't yet part of Canada, had received about 8000 New England planters after 1759.)

But a settler minister wasn't necessary to maintain a Christian community at Grand River. The people there appear to have invariably had weekly services led by Six Nations volunteers. Most of these volunteers haven't been identified, but a grandson of Joseph Brant is an exception: he was Henry Aaron Hill, Kenwendeshon. It's reported that before he took services he donned a surplice and applied vermilion to his face. A traveler in 1792, Patrick Campbell, has left a brief description of a service at the Mohawk chapel: "I never saw more decoroum or attention in any church in all my life." He also loved the "charming" singing. There was a sermon from the Mohawk leader, but evidently Campbell couldn't understand it and didn't comment on it. In 1798 the priest from Niagara reported 550 members of the Grand River church, "friendly serious Indians" who had been evangelizing neighbouring First Nations groups, marked by "serious deportment and attention." Taking communion was hardly more than an annual event for most Anglicans in the eighteenth century, but the Niagara priest remarked that the communicants at Grand River were "as pious and conscientious as can be found ... in any Christian congregation."

Methodists. Early Methodist preachers, such as Nathan Bangs, reported visiting First Nations communities in Canada. But although Methodist revivalism began to make a considerable impact on rural settlers, it was only later that the revival seems to have reached First Nations.

John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen). Norton, from Scotland, pictured below left, was adopted as a Mohawk, Wolf Clan, with Brant as his uncle. He led Six Nations soldiers on the British side into several battles of the War of 1812. His tactics at the Battle of Queenston Heights were particularly praised. He was made a "Pine Tree Chief," not in a hereditary line. Historian Douglas Leighton has noted his ambiguous multicultural identity, which was by no means rare in the Canadian world of Indigenous–settler interchange. His rise from obscurity into a close connection to Brant, and his fumbling diplomatic efforts for the recognition of Six Nations land rights, opened him to suspicion from both Haudenosaunee people and colonial officials. He translated the Gospel of John into Mohawk for the British and Foreign Bible Society; 2000 copies were printed in 1806. Only three copies survive today.He continued translating Scriptures afterwards. He disappeared mysteriously in the 1820s.

Moravian Christians. After the Gnadenhutten massacre, the remaining Moravian Christians among the Lenape faced an increasingly untenable position. In addition to racist violence from whites, they also faced hostility from other First Nations for their Christian pacifism, which, it was thought, had made them weak and vulnerable, and endangered other First Nations. The Moravians sought a more isolated situation. Over the next ten years they moved five times, accompanied by their missionary. In 1792 they received a land grant at the place now called Moraviantown, Ontario, on the Thames River, in the municipality of Chatham-Kent, and their people have been living there since 1792. It was not an idyllic existence. Their missionary, David Zeisberger, who during the Gnadenhutten massacre had been sitting in a British jail, under suspicion for his American sympathies, tried to exercise a stern discipline. He demanded not only obedience to pacifist standards, but also the rejection of "heathen" practices. It's clear from his journals that he was broadly unsuccessful, for he frequently expressed discouragement at the people's "backslidings" into heathenism. He was a bit more successful at turning the mission community into a farm, where the people grew crops, raised cattle, kept bees, and tapped maple syrup. But, to Zeisberger's chagrin, the Lenape Christians still often went off on hunting and fishing expeditions, contrary to his wishes. Nearby white settlers also caused grief for the Lenape Moravians, coveting their land, blaming them for local problems, and trading liquor. Finally Zeisberger left the Moraviantown community and returned to Ohio. He had spent sixty years as a missionary to the Lenape, Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk, Ojjibwe, and Mahican peoples, and was conversant in all their languages.

In 1813 the Moravian mission was burned down by American soldiers: they did so in a fit of pique, since it had no strategic value. For two years the Lenape Christians found temporary refuge in various places around western Lake Ontario, and rebuilt their mission on the other side of the Thames River in 1815.

Roman Catholics. Indigenous Roman Catholics had to sustain their Christian discipleship with relatively little support from settler clergy.

Handsome Lake, Sganyodaiyo (1735–1815), was an influential Tonawanda Seneca elder and prophet who revived traditional religious observance. He had his first dramatic vision in 1799, and it was followed by other visions. His "good message," Gaiwiio, was written down after his death and published as "The Code of Handsome Lake. " It developed into a religion which continues to have devoted adherents, and the Code is recited at Six Nations longhouse meetings every September. Handsome Lake was critical of settler Christianity. He told the story of a minister in the time of Christopher Columbus who was directed in a vision of the Lord to travel to America with cards, money, whisky, a fiddle, and blood corruption. But it turned out that "the Lord" in the minister's vision was actually the devil, intent on undermining First Nations life. In Handsome Lake's second vision he met Jesus Christ in paradise, who endorsed Handsome Lake's message. In a vision of hell Handsome Lake saw the punishments in store for those who committed immoralities, such as drunkenness, abortions, love magic, gambling, witchcraft, ribald music, and sales of Aboriginal land. Some have seen here evidences of Christian teaching about an almighty spirit, angels, the opposition of heaven and hell, the threat of punishment for sin, and the offer of redemption after repentance. If so, this is another example of ways in which Christianity was part of a complex religious engagement which helped revitalize traditional religions.

The War of 1812

Tenskwatawa, "the Prophet." The Western Confederacy had declined after Jay's Treaty, but in the early 1800s a new pan-Indian movement arose to defend First Nations against settler colonialism and the threat of acculturation. .The spiritual prophet of this movement was the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, who had been at the Battle of the Fallen Timbers. In 1805 he had a vision of the Master of Breath who showed him the promise of a heaven of game and honey for the virtuous, who escaped the powers of the evil spirits. Tenskwatawa embraced the idea of a racial distinction between "Indian" and "white," as established by the Great Spirit. Indians were wild, young, and masculine; whites were tame, old, and feminine. Whites, or at least white Americans, were the progeny of the Great Serpent. Tenskwatawa preached reform, incluiding prohibitions of alcohol, white material goods and clothing, witches, and intermarriage. As with Neolin, Handsome Lake, and, indeed, dozens of other male and female prophets, both Indigenous and settler, in these blood-soaked times and places, we can suspect an interplay of diverse spiritualities and cultures generating a creative energy for reform and justice.

Prophetstown. Tenskwatawa and his brother established a community called Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River, near what's now Lafayette, Indiana. Thousands of First Nations people moved there. They hoped that Prophetstown might be the seed of a secure Indian state that would cover what's now Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. (Prophetstown is now a state park with a museum and living history exhibits.) In 1811 a thousand United States troops under the command of William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana territory, marched to Prophetstown. There are different stories as to what happened next, but apparently Tenskwatawa instructed some followers to murder Harrison in his tent, and promised them immunity from American bullets. The provocation led to a battle with casualties on both sides. Harrison's troops then burned Prophetstown to the ground. Tenskwatawa went into exile in Canada for a dozen years. Harrison went on to become president of the United States. His vice president was John Tyler, and his jingoistic campaign slogan, exploiting Indian hatred, was "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" The Battle of Tippecanoe is often seen as the beginning of the War of 1812.

Aboriginal lands and the War of 1812. This complicated war had many contributing causes. One of them was American westward expansion and First Nations resistance. As Canada had been suffering numerous raids across its border from Americans, the British had found it strategic to maintain friendship with First Nations peoples. Thus one cause of the war for the Americans was their resentment of British intrigue and military assistance for First Nations peoples. The United States declared war in June 1812. The war had many American opponents, particularly in New England.

First Nations involvement in the war. Canada was vastly outnumbered by the United States, and its small military depended on Indigenous allies. The United States had Indigenous allies of its own. For the British, no Indigenous ally was more important than Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and warrior (pictured right), and the better known brother of Tenskwatawa, the Prophet. Tecumseh and other First Nations peoples probably made the difference in preventing the colonies of British North America from being absorbed into the United States. Here's a brief summary of their contributions.

Significance. A bit of detail has been given here (in point form) because older Eurocentric histories, if they make any mention at all of the First Nations contribution to Canada in the War of 1812, make it appear to have been simply supportive. That wasn't the case. Without Tecumseh at Detroit, the British cause might well have been lost early in the war. At several other battles First Nations warriors sometimes outnumbered British troops. And even in small numbers often made the difference with their bravery and tactical acumen.

Britain's short-lived gratitude. Canadian settler officials recognized that the protection of the country had depended on the participation of their First Nations allies. They convened First Nations chiefs to a series of conferences to express their gratitude, and presented them with King George III Peace Medals. A special peace medal was struck for the occasion, as shown at left, with Britannia offering a medal to a First Nations warrior. But it wasn't immediately presented because the die was broken before the ceremony.

A turning point. With war years behind it and an "era of good feeling" ahead of it, with a sense of security from serious American attacks or other foreign interference, with settler populations growing, and with Indigenous populations gradually being moved to more remote locations. the settler Canadian government no longer needed to cultivate a military alliance with its former Indigenous allies. Moreover, the fur trade had dramatically declined in economic importance, and was being replaced by forestry. In 1810, 75% of the value of exports from the port of Quebec was lumber. The fur trade had required Indigenous participation; forestry only required Indigenous disappearance. The Indigenous peoples of Canada were to be increasingly isolated and patronized.

 

Text is copyright © 2020 Alan L. Hayes