American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Anyone who delves into the literature on seventeenth-century English missionization in the New World will be struck by the remarkable gap between announced intentions concerning the conversion of Indian peoples to Christianity and the attempts that were actually made. This discrepancy becomes even more obvious when one compares the feeble efforts made by English colonists with the campaigns promoted by French and Spanish invaders to convert indigenous people. Why did the English make such half-hearted attempts) Why did they fall so far short of their stated objectives? To what extent can their failures be explained in purely religious or institutional terms? This paper considers, in a preliminary way , the history of missionization in early Virginia and Massachusetts and makes some observations on how mission history has been written. Its central premise is that American historians have suffered a kind of conceptual lag when compared with scholars who have studied the phenomenon of European missionization in other parts of the world. In particular, they have until recently viewed missionization in narrow terms, seeing it as an almost purely religious endeavor and failing to understand that it was closely linked with the struggle for political control. In fact, it is not too much to state that Christianization has been one of the most important political weapons in the arsenal of colonizing Europeans in almost every part of the world where they have gone for the last five centuries. When that is understood , both the proselyting efforts and native responses in early America begin to make more sense.

One cannot understand Native American history from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries without confronting the ambiguities of white American nationalism. Historically, this phenomenon has been composed of two essential ingredients: a tolerant conviction, based on the Old Testament, that all men and all races sprang from the same original parents; and an intolerant conviction that any acknowledgment of racial unity must be accompanied by total social conversion of colonized groups to white American culture. Both attitudes-theoretical racial acceptance and complete "Anglo-conformity" - have been key facets of American Indian policy for nearly three hundred fifty years.

Democratic theory of popular sovereignty as reflected in the U.S. Constitution and the structure of the political process assumes that major decisions regarding the allocation of resources will be determined-and determined for the best - by the popular, that is, the elective branches of government. The debates surrounding the framing and adoption of the Constitution clearly express the principle that the legislative branch must have primary responsibility for making the nation's rules. Reliance on the legislature was justified by the proposition that it would fully represent all different interests-those of minorities as well as majorities.

Anthropologists have long been interested in the cultures and customs of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, and investigators have long sought to determine the type of society utilized by the American Indian, concentrating mainly on their origin and degree of civilization. The development of modem ecology, however, spawned new areas of interest and both anthropologists and biologists became aware of the fact that American Indian culture involved not only a type of civilization, but an intimate relationship with and an unsurpassed knowledge of the land on which he lived. This ability to coexist with nature was never 50 evident as it has become within the past fifteen years, as a result of the deteriorating environment modern society has produced. Society has finally realized the preciousness of natural habitats and begun to develop a "back-to-nature" attitude with emphasis on the preservation of our natural resources. This new attitude has brought with it the realization that, before the coming of the white man, the American Indian had learned to live in harmony with nature and actually shaped the forests and prairies to his own benefits with little detrimental effect on the land. How he was able to do this has been a subject of controversy for many years and a subject that modern ecologists have found difficult to digest. Today there is little doubt that the Indians were able to maintain their environment through the use of fire. Evidence is presented in the from of prescribed burning now being instituted in most U.S. parks and forests. The following discussion is a brief survey of the use of fire by American Indians as fire ecologists, and the ultimate decision to return to tradition.