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Reading at the Table: To Live upon Hope

When: Thursday, April 08, 2010 | 11:30 AM-01:00 PM
Where: Faculty Club

Rachel Wheeler, "To Live upon Hope:  Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-centurey Northeast"

Through extensive research, especially in the Moravian records of day-to-day life, Rachel Wheeler offers an understanding of the lived experience of Mohican communities under colonialism. She complicates the understanding of eighteenth-century American Christianity by demonstrating that mission programs were not always driven by the destruction of indigenous culture and the advancement of imperial projects. In To Live upon Hope, Wheeler challenges the prevailing view of accommodation or resistance as the two poles of Indian responses to European colonization; colonialism placed severe strains on native peoples, yet Indians also exercised a level of agency and creativity that aided in their survival.She systematically employs the rich German-language Moravian archive to study New England Indian history. This path-breaking use of sources and Wheeler's fine-grained analysis of the differing Moravian and Congregationalist priorities are major achievements.