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British Missions, Native Missionaries

John Eliot, of course, was “The Apostle to the Indians”—the founder of Puritan New England’s Indian missions, the guiding light behind the Christian Indian “praying towns,” and the leader of Massachusetts Bay’s project to publish Christian texts in Algonquian. From the early 1640s through King Philip’s War, Eliot’s apostolic mission was at the center of the New England colonists’ engagement with their Indian neighbors. By choosing Native Apostles as his book’s title, Edward Andrews at once gestures toward Eliot and pushes him into the background. Andrews focuses on the people who brought Christianity to “natives,” a topic that would traditionally lead him to put “The Apostle to the Indians” somewhere near the center of his project. Andrews, though, is convinced that the key actors were the natives themselves. Thus, when discussing Eliot’s New England, Andrews foregrounds Indian “apostles to other Indians” (p. 53), the Indian apostles, that is, who were ordained ministers, lay preachers, teachers, and informal role models, and who staffed the missions and schools on a day-to-day basis, lived in the praying towns, traveled the roads that linked those communities, and sought to blend Christian teachings and Indian ways of life. The “more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the ‘Eliot missions’” that Andrews calls for “demands,” he believes, that “we take celebrated missionary John Eliot out of the picture” (p. 53). It is a provocative argument. And to make that argument more provocative still, Andrews means it to apply not simply to seventeenth-century New England but also to the entirety of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. His book tells the story of American Indians and Africans “attempting to Christianize their communities” (p. 4). He traces the activities of “Native Apostles”—and the Britons who sponsored, thought, and wrote about them—on mainland North America and in the Caribbean, as well as at British slaving stations on the west coast of