Resilience and Resistance: Culture, Conversion, and Survival Among the Stockbridge Mohicans
This thesis investigates the history of conversion among the Mohican band in Stockbridge, Massachusetts from the 1730s to the 1740s. Focusing on the praying town under the ministry of Reverend John Sergeant at Stockbridge in 1736, I seek to reconstruct the resistance and survivance at the heart of the Stockbridge Mohicans’ experience. My research will explore why the Mohicans chose to establish the Stockbridge praying town and why they chose to convert to Christianity, the religion of the Puritan colonizers. I will also explore how they used their conversion to promote their own community goals. While praying towns were designed by Puritan settler colonists to isolate and transform the religion and culture of Indigenous people, the Mohicans gave Sergeant permission to establish a praying town at their village and continued to practice their traditions. Examining Christian missionaries’ specific intentions in conversion while studying how the Mohicans preserved their culture in the praying town, I argue that Mohicans used Christian conversion as a resistance strategy in the context of 17th and 18th century colonialism.
Indigenous Studies, 18th Century New England, Stockbridge Mohicans, Conversion, Resistance, Survivance, Christianity, Cultural History, Diplomatic History, Ethics in Religion, Ethnic Studies, History, History of Religion, Missions and World Christianity, Native American Studies, Religion, United States History
City University of New York - City College
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