Prayer city
Places in New England where the remains of the indigenous people who lived there were to be Christianized in the 17th century were referred to as prayer towns .
When the Pequot War broke out in 1637, an Indian boy from Long Island was taken prisoner. Some time later he became a servant in an English family and learned the English language. John Eliot , a Puritan minister in Roxbury , took him to her because he needed an interpreter who both English and belonging to the Algonquian languages belonging Massachusett language dominated the Indians. He was to help him in his endeavors to teach the tribes of Massachusetts the Christian faith.
This collaboration soon led to a remarkable missionary project, the so-called cities of prayer among the Massachusett Indians. It also became a milestone in the history of American printing and Indian education according to European criteria. In 1663, Eliot's translation of the Holy Scriptures into the language of the Massachusett appeared as the first Bible printed in North America .
Eliot's efforts were rooted in Puritan views of pagan conversion. While the English compatriots in Virginia were hardly interested in converting the Indians, the conversion of unbelievers was a godly goal for the Calvinist Puritans.
When Elliot began his missionary work, life was so hopeless for many Massachusetts Indians that this puritanical form of Christianity was seen as a way out of trouble. In 1650 he settled some Indian converts in Natick . On 6,000 acres of land (24.3 km²), this settlement about 27 km southwest of Boston was to become a model congregation of the Red Puritans - a prayer city. In the next few years belonging to the parish of Natick would become a status symbol among the tribes of the region and form a kind of Indian elite. The converts, for their part, spread the Christian faith in more distant Indian settlements. When they found out about the relative prosperity of the Natick Christians, they wanted to be part of it and convert to Christianity. But no one could be persuaded to leave his home village, so cities of prayer were built in other places as well. Soon there were fourteen prayer cities around Massachusetts Bay and another seven were sprung up in central Massachusetts by the Nipmuck .
In 1675, however, this development came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the King Philip's Wars . The missionary residents of the fourteen prayer cities on Massachusetts Bay were suspect to both warring parties. For example, the residents of Natick, Marlboro, and Punkapog (now Canton ) were forcibly relocated by the colonists to Deer Isle in Boston Harbor, while many of the Christian Indians from Magunkaquog (now Ashland ), Hassanamesitt (now Grafton ) and Chabankongkomun (now Webster ) were forced to jointly join the Indian warriors. After the war, the military and political power of the Indians was considered to have ended and relations with the indigenous people were no longer of such great interest in public politics. The Indians generally sank to a lower economic level in colonial society, sometimes to the status of serfs . As such, they have generally been forgotten and are rarely mentioned in contemporary representations. They were sometimes treated as social cases, or at the other extreme discriminated and cheated on, but by and large simply ignored.
In 1684, eight years after King Philip's War, there were only four prayer cities on Massachusetts Bay instead of the former fourteen: Natick, Punkapog, Wamesit and Chabanakongkomun . The Indians also held church services in the seasonal summer camps, from where they fished, hunted and picked chestnuts.
The Natick Indians , once the most successful acculturation experiment , were "practically extinct" by the time of the Senate report of 1848. Since 1810 they were under a guardian who supervised the sale of their last land in 1828 and also administered the proceeds.
The last land of the punk apog was sold by their guardian around 1840, the proceeds went to the poorest members of the tribe. At the time, many went to Boston, Canton, and Stoughton , but were still considered wardens of the state and received isolated support from the state of Massachusetts.
literature
- Bruce G. Trigger (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians . Vol. 15. Northeast . Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC 1978 ISBN 0-16004-575-4
- Alvin M. Josephy jr .: The world of the Indians , Frederking & Thaler GmbH, Munich 1994 ISBN 3-89405-331-3