Pair 11: Colonialism and Conversion

Along with the imperial competition for territorial expansion and hopes for material gain, a central goal of European exploration and colonization in the Western hemisphere was the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity, of whatever stripe a particular colonizing power espoused. While the emphasis placed on conversion was rooted in ethnocentric ideas about the inferiority of so-called “pagan” religious practices, the evangelistic urge was central to many sincerely held Christian beliefs in Europe. The impact of the conversion effort has left different traces in different part of the Americas. In Latin America, much of what we know about individual Indigenous people from the 15th and 16th centuries comes from records of baptisms, marriages, and other religious ceremonies kept by Catholic missionaries. In the territory that is now the United States, much of the work of evangelism was conducted by Protestant missionaries, with the result being an emphasis on print over ritual. The Clements Library’s collections have rich holdings in the printed output–Bibles, sermons, psalters, etc.–of the effort to Christianize the Native peoples of North America.

Mamvsse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament : kah wonk Wusku Testament Ne quoshkinnumuk nashpe wuttinneumoh Christ noh asoowesit John Eliot.
Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1685.

Because the Clements Library’s copy of the second edition belonged to Samson Occom (1723-1792). A member of the Mohegan nation in what is now Connecticut, Occom converted to Christianity during the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and studied with the Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock, and eventually learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1759, Occom worked as a missionary to numerous Native communities, most notably the Montauk and the Six Nations. This particular copy has rich stories to tell, stories that we are only beginning to understand, as scholars are conducting new work on the Indigenous world of print in early America. Occom sold his copy of the Bible–likely the only copy of the Bible that he owned printed in his native language–to a man named Thomas Shaw in 1790, who then donated it to Yale University. Tracing the life history of this landmark work in the effort to Christianize Native Americans, and learning more about what role it played in the career of the most famous Native American Christian minister in 18th century America, is an example of the new scholarship that can grow out of items that have been in the library’s collection for a century.