Book of the Month: Review of David Silverman's Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America

Review by Matthew W. Dougherty

David J. Silverman Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010)

David J. Silverman’s Red Brethren follows two multi-tribal American Indian communities—the Brothertowns and the Stockbridges— whose westward migrations reveal new facets of religion and race in early America. Silverman argues that these communities used Protestant categories and concepts both to make sense of the racial identity assigned to them in early America and to propel themselves from New England to New York to Wisconsin. Like white Americans, they migrated for complex reasons: Federal pressure to sell their land and encroaching white settlement contributed, but so did their desire to form autonomous Christian communities and missionize “heathen” American Indians. Silverman thus contributes to the story of the west by showing that white Americans were not the only ones who migrated because of a belief in their particular divine mission. Although his view of the churches at the hearts of these communities grows fuzzier along the journey west, his tightly-focused narrative retains its power throughout the book.

The shared history of the Brothertowns and Stockbridges began in the 1770s and 1780s when Christian Indians from a number of northeastern tribes settled in two new communities—Brothertown and New Stockbridge—in Oneida territory. The move west was made in the hope that the new towns would be stable bases for cultural survival and missions to their “red brethren” in non-Christian tribes. Silverman argues that the Brothertowns’ and Stockbridges’ belief that they had something basic in common with non-Christian Iroquois indicates that they accepted the racial designation of “Indian,” yet attached their own meanings to it. They believed, for example, that the racial oppression they suffered resulted from of God’s curse for their ancestors’ disobedience of the commandments, and would end when divine justice was satisfied. But their acceptance and modification of the prevailing racial category of “Indian” was not without cost: Stockbridges and Brothertowns who married African-Americans were often excluded from the tribe and claims on tribal land. That internal division grew stronger as the communities moved farther west in the 1820s. Hoping that another move would provide more security from white settlers and another chance at evangelism, the Brothertowns and Stockbridges negotiated a treaty with the Menominee to allow them to settle along the Fox River in Wisconsin. In 1831, however, pressure from the U.S. government and tensions with the Menominee forced them to move yet again, this time to the shore of Lake Winnebago. Fearing that further land cessions would be forced on them unless they made a radical change, the Brothertown voted to abandon tribal status and become U.S. Citizens in 1839. The Stockbridge followed suit in 1843, but “gave back” their citizenship and resumed tribal governance only three years later. Silverman argues that disputes over citizenship in these communities were also disputes about race. Both those opposed to the idea and those in favor of it referred to taking citizenship as “becoming white” and saw it as an abandonment of legal Indian identity, for better or worse. These issues still haunt the Brothertowns, whose petition for federal recognition was denied by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2012 on the basis that their acceptance of citizenship in 1839 had put an end to their tribal identity.

   

Silverman is fortunate in that the Brothertowns and Stockbridges created an unusually large paper trail. In addition to missionary and government sources, he can draw on the writings of prominent leaders from both communities and on tribal government documents. For the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the copious writings of Brothertown’s founder, Samson Occum, are his main source. After Occum’s death, the paper trail goes on but its character changes: As he follows the story of the Brothertowns and Stockbridges to Wisconsin, Silverman relies more and more frequently on the records of both the tribal and U.S. governments, and has fewer first-person accounts. His choice to focus throughout on the religious and racial self-awareness of community leaders minimizes the shock of the transition, but the loss of Occum as a voluminous, reflective writer and vivid witness does make the latter part of the narrative less immediate and clear-cut.

Silverman’s narrative relies on the category of “Christian Indians” to designate the various Native groups that define themselves at least partly through Christianity in his story. That category fails him, however, in the final chapters of the book. So long as he focuses on New England, the dominance of independent, “New Light” Congregational churches in Christian Native communities ensures that the category “Christian Indian” designates a related set of approaches to religion and community life. As Silverman and other scholars such as Joanna Brooks, Rachel Wheeler, and Linford Fisher have shown, Native-led Congregational churches in New England were in contact with one another, circulated ideas and people, and had distinctive approaches to preserving Native traditions through Christian practice. After the Brothertowns and Stockbridges moved to Wisconsin, however, Baptist and Methodist churches began appearing in their communities, presumably undermining any sense of a unified Christian Indian identity. Silverman’s portrays the development of these separate churches as another sad sign of factionalism (200-202), but doesn’t address how changes in church fellowship and theology might have affected what it meant to be a Christian Indian. For example, did membership in the strongly hierarchical Methodist church constrain Native autonomy more than membership churches governed at the level of the congregation? Did the racial theory of the “curse of God” survive in congregations that moved away from the Reformed theology and Providential view of history underwriting it?  

The fact that we can now ask these questions these about independent Native churches in the west, however, is entirely thanks to Silverman’s groundbreaking work. With careful scholarship and a strong ear for narrative, he has brought to life a story that not only casts light on two remarkable groups whose history challenges many widely-held ideas about American Indian identity, but also persistently and clearly exposes the fault-lines in racial thinking in early America. The re-casting of our stories from the west has brought home the importance of empire, land, and migration as themes in American religious history. Silverman’s book provides a new way of thinking about these themes with a clear, affecting narrative suitable for advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students.

Jee Gam and Chinese American Religious Activism

By Joshua Paddison

Portrait of Congregationalist Jee Gam, from N. R. Johnston's Looking Back from the Sunset Land, 1898.

A man named Jee Gam appears on the cover of my book American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (published this month by the University of California Press and the Huntington Library). Presumably the image was chosen for its graphic impact and for how it puts a human face on the Chinese and Native American “heathens” who were denied citizenship due to their racial and religious identities during the nineteenth century.

However, I also like the use of this image on the cover for another reason: of all the people who appear in the book, Jee Gam is the person I admire most. Outspoken, brave, and dedicated to public activism, he led an inspiring life.

For readers of this blog, he is of particular interest because of what his life reveals about the religious history of the American West. Jee Gam’s story provides evidence of larger historical patterns characteristic of religion in the West: globalism, frequent migration and border-crossings, tremendous religious conflict and change, violent racial prejudice, and faith-based political activism.

Jee Gam traveled from his native China to San Francisco at age 14, arriving in 1863. He made the journey with his uncle, who had recently returned to China from the gold fields of California. Jee Gam and his uncle were tiny parts of an enormous immigration stream from China to the United States that flowed during the mid-nineteenth century. Forbade from naturalizing due to federal law, these immigrants also faced discriminatory state laws that barred them from voting, holding public office, and even testifying in court against whites. This made them extremely vulnerable to exploitation and violence, exemplified by the murder of 18 Chinese immigrants by a white mob in Los Angeles in 1871.

Still a teenager, Jee Gam found work as a servant in the house of George and Sarah Mooar. George Mooar was a Congregationalist minister and in his household Jee Gam converted to Christianity, soon becoming a colporteur and missionary among Chinese Californians. He joined the First Congregationalist Church in Oakland in 1870 and often worked as a court interpreter. Eventually in 1895 Jee Gam became the first Chinese American ordained as a Congregationalist minister, though he was still unable to become a U.S. citizen.

Illustration of Jee Gam, from the San Francisco Chronicle, September 20, 1895.

From the very beginning, Jee Gam used his influence and access to Protestant resources (newspapers, journals, mission boards, church networks) to fight for Chinese American political rights. In speeches, sermons, private letters, and public writings, he championed Chinese American suffrage and combated Chinese exclusion, passed in 1882 by the federal government. Historians such as Charles McClain and Mae Ngai have shown how Chinese immigrants in the U.S. challenged discriminatory laws via the court system, but the religious activism of Jee Gam and other Chinese Protestants has received virtually no attention.

Jee Gam based his arguments for political rights on a vision of Christianity that emphasized egalitarianism and universal brotherhood. In an era when many Americans believed that the Chinese were too heathenish to genuinely convert to Christianity, Jee Gam insisted on the religion’s inclusivity. “I am a Chinaman and a Christian,” he wrote in 1892. “I am not any less Chinese for being a follower of Christ…. I am in some sense also an American, for I have lived in America almost twice as long as in China.” He went on to call Chinese exclusion “un-American, barbarous and inhuman. It is unchristian, for it is contrary to the teaching of Christ.”

His work on behalf of Chinese immigrants extended beyond California. In 1879, on the eve of exclusion, he embarked on a tour that took him to Chicago, New York City, and Lowell, Massachusetts. He told Chicago newspapers about the daily threat of violence that Chinese Californians lived under from white “hoodlums” and called for suffrage and citizenship for the Chinese. Invited by Henry Ward Beecher to speak at Plymouth Church in New York, Jee Gam insisted that there were “about 1,000 Christian Chinamen in California.” He offered their lives—and his own—as evidence of the efficacy of mission work and the need to maintain open national borders.

Unlike many nineteenth-century Protestant defenders of the Chinese, Jee Gam resisted the temptation to demonize Catholics or other racialized groups. “Can every man have this faith, be he white, black, red or yellow?” he preached in 1880. “Yes. The beggar can have it as well as the king. The poor can have it as well as the rich; and the negro, the Indian and the Chinaman.” This sort of interracial, universalist rhetoric was becoming more and more scarce nationwide in the years following the end of Southern Reconstruction.

Jee Gam married a Chinese woman in 1871 and they had ten children, several of whom attended the University of California, Berkeley. In 1910, just past the age of 60, he decided to retire to China but died on the steamer en route. Chinese immigrants finally received the right to become U.S. citizens in 1943.

What would Jee Gam think of being on the cover of my book, I wonder? I suspect his first response would be surprise, given the hostility and prejudice he encountered during his own lifetime. However, considering his comfort operating in the public sphere, I don’t think he would object to the attention.

Is the RAW Cooked?

An enquiry into the significance of a category that is perhaps past its due date
By Mary L. Keller

At the meeting of the Religion in the American West (RAW) Seminar in San Franscisco, 2011, a question was posed that got my interloper gears turning. I’ll begin with that question, explain why I might best be considered at interloper in RAW, and propose what might be a cooking of the RAW.

The question was raised by a historian who asked from her position as a specialist in the southern geography of the U.S., “Why would you work so hard to define a field called Religion in the American West given that many of us have been working hard for years to get out of the confines of something called ‘the American South’? And if there is something called Religion in the American West, what is it?” Let me note two things: 1) I am paraphrasing and if others can restate that question more accurately, please do so; and 2) The collegial atmosphere of this meeting was so generous and engaged that this very important question was delivered and received in the best spirit of rigorous and respectful discussion. That discussion has continued on this blog; I hope that my post perpetuates that spirit.

This question appealed greatly to me in part because I am an interloper. Having watched RAW from a safe distance for the past several years, but not really being an Americanist or an American Westist, I was participating with a sense that perhaps I didn’t really belong there. Yet I was compelled by the theoretical and evidential depth of the group; so perhaps I was hoping that I might belong. But as the “not-a-southern-historian’s” question registered itself across the length of our corporate table, I wondered whether maybe this question of why one would carve out a geographical regional identity, and how one would attempt to articulate what was meaningful about such a category, maybe this question would solve my identity crisis by cooking the RAW, so to speak, or if not cooking it, exposing it for closer scrutiny. My fundamental concern was this: If you say “American West” have you not already employed the “mindscape” of manifest destiny? The mindscape serves as a mask that orients Euro-Americans to their eastern homelands and obscures the reality that for 12,000 years the Indigenous inhabitants had been networking north and south along the spines of mountains and veins of rivers.

I was trained in history of religions with an emphasis on critical theory as it was applied to meta-theoretical frameworks across the university. Located as I was, it was the “hermeneutics of suspicion” upon which I had focused, from Edward Said and Talal Asad’s respective critiques of Eurocentric orientalism, to Charles Long’s theoretical reorientations begun in Significations, to French feminism’s linguistic turn, and postcolonial theories of raced and hybrid identities. I arrived at the RAW seminar thinking that the fundamental issue was how this group imagines “human centers” on the cultural geography of North and at least Central America. Does RAW begin with 12,000 years of human ecology moving nomadically along the spines of the Continents, moving with rivers and seasons, for which the ancient civilizations of Central America serve as the natural “center” from which to orient one’s studies? Or does RAW replay the Eurocentric re-centering of meaning by placing the “origins” of meaning in the conquest and settler cultures as they moved north from Mexico and west from the east coast of the U.S.?

My experience of listening to the papers of the RAW seminar was of being very impressed by the authority, rigor, and insight of the presenters—I would like to work with such intellectuals! These are, I hoped, my people for future AAR meetings. But then the question was cast out across the waters of our plastic wood grain veneer table, like a wooly bugger, and I bit.

This is a wooly bugger.

West of what? If we are West, we are west of the East Coast of the U.S. And from a postcolonial perspective, why would any people imagine themselves any more differentiated by their relationship to a landscape than any other people? While each landscape will have a unique impact, why would this landscape exert a bigger impact unless a people was imagining themselves to be bigger people? Is that not a repetition of the Romantic impulse to imagine the sublime as the source for a uniquely “whole” human? Does the moniker RAW reflect more than anything else the desire to imagine that a landscape was empty until conquest arrived? Does RAW exert the cartographic reasoning of Eurocentric meanings described by Gunnar Olsson in Abysmal that necessitate the masking of what we are really up to? To make the Marauder’s Map come to life in Harry Potter, you must tap it three times while saying “I’m up to no good.”

I’m thinking of animal and geological metaphors as an alternative organizing moniker that would not, in the end, provide regional specificity but rather would relate the American West to the newest zones of contact between Indigenous and settler populations on the globe. This would be a shift from “The Home on the Range” that I fear is intrinsic to the name RAW, toward a nomadic political economy of the sacred as people adapt to Climate Change. The seminar would make better sense to me as a traveling feast, a place that would draw together Indigenous rights advocates seeking to articulate new modalities for self-governance and sovereignty from South America, to David Chidester’s work on the shifting political economy of the sacred in South Africa, to circumpolar responses to global warming. Would there be a way to maintain a glocal attentiveness in this group—allowing for both the focus on regional specificity and relationships of contiguous space on the one hand, always paired with an outreach toward global “frontiers of contact” on the other? Could we call it Frontier Zoology? Did you notice how I just invoked the first person plural, as though I belonged?

Book of the Month:

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt
review by Tisa Wenger

Editors' note: Today we kick off a new feature on the blog -- the Book of the Month. On the first Monday of each month, we'll have a review of a new or not-so-new book that is pertinent to the study of religion in the American West. We begin today with Tisa Wenger's review of Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism.

Most of you will already have heard about Darren Dochuk’s widely acclaimed new book, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W.W. Norton, 2011). This book is already accumulating richly deserved awards: the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians; and, just announced last month, the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association, named every other year for “the best book on any subject pertaining to the history of the United States.” Congratulations, Darren!

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt is chock-full of colorful characters and new historical insights that will be of interest to readers of this blog. Dochuk describes the migration of southern evangelicals to California (a move that began during the Depression and accelerated in the 1940s), their conversion to conservative political activism, and their importance in the subsequent emergence of evangelical conservatism nationwide. He does not present the convergence of evangelicalism and conservatism as inevitable in any way, and in fact he shows how volatile and varied these migrants’ political commitments were when they first arrived in California.

Sara’s last post described the discussion at the seminar meeting about whether are or should be making any claims of regional distinctiveness. This question has haunted the seminar, and every time we face it we seem to feel the need to justify our existence, to justify our focus on the West within the field of American religious history. I think Darren’s book helps us move beyond that question simply by demonstrating so well the value of attentiveness to region and to local regional cultures. Indeed he helps us understand not only Southern California but also the “western south” (Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas) where many of these migrants originated, and in far more detail than previous accounts he also shows how important these grassroots conservatives and these regional cultures were for the “religious right” that came to national prominence with Reagan’s election in 1980.

All this raises another one of our seminar’s perennial questions, which does not involve justifying a regional focus, but what seems to me the more substantive problem that there is in fact no single “West.” California is not Utah is not North Dakota is not Texas, and none of these states can be taken as a unitary entity in themselves. There are multiple regional cultures and subcultures within the purview we’ve claimed, and the question is whether bringing them together within the rubric of “Religion in the American West” obscures more than it illuminates. I could ruminate much longer on all this, but I fear I’d be testing your patience as well as moving even further away from the book I’m supposed to be reviewing. So I’ll stop here with a single piece of advice: if you haven’t yet read Dochuk, yourself a favor, and read it. NOW.

More notes from the Editors: Have you read this book? What do you think about it? Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments! If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, Quincy D. Newell reviews Gregory Smoak's Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2006).