Christian Missions to Native Americans

While the predominant model of Christian mission in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved missionaries working abroad, a quite different model emerged in North America, as Christian settlers encountered Native American cultures. Missionary work began in New England as early as the seventeenth century, as Puritan settlers made contact with local tribes. It is generally agreed that this colonial missionary outreach to Native Americans failed. Nevertheless, it remains of considerable historical interest.

The Puritan missionary John Eliot became interested in the culture and language of the Native Americans who lived around Roxbury, one of the first towns founded in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and learned Natic (as this regional variant of Algonquian is known) to preach to them. He was able to attract support for his missionary work in the region, eventually managing to gain parliamentary approval in 1649 for the establishment of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. His translation and production of the Bible into Natic took place over the period 1661–3, using a professional printer, Marmaduke Johnson, sent over from England in 1660 on a three-year contract.

Eliot believed that Native Americans who converted to Christianity should be gathered together into towns of “Praying Indians” where they could be supervised and nurtured in Christian knowledge. By 1674, there were fourteen such towns of “Praying Indians,” with a total population of four thousand. Yet “King Philip’s War” – a conflict between colonists and Native Americans – put the “Praying Indians” in an impossible position. They were disowned by their own tribes, and suspected of retaining tribal loyalties by the coloni- als. In the end, the tribes in eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut were broken up, and the survivors were forced to move west of the Connecticut River.