Native American Missionary-Writers

In recent years, historians have turned increasingly to biography to explain the cultural changes that Native Americans experienced after the European invasion of America. Native people who lived before the Civil War left relatively few of the records normally used to construct biographies, and individuals appear intermittently in more general sources. These circumstances have limited the length of most biographies to essays, many of which have been published in anthologies that present a collective biography of a particular kind of experience. In The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America, Bernd C. Peyer follows this tradition and analyzes in the context of European encounters the lives and writings of four Native converts to Christianity "under the premise that these representatives of an Indian proto-elite consciously followed the paths they sincerely believed would lead their people out of the colonial situation" (p. 19). Peyer frames his biographies in terms of "internal colonization" (p. 2) and the "decolonized personality" (p. 3). Internal colonization occurs when colonizers outnumber indigenous people, such as in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and produces a decolonized personality, the "tutor'd mind." In such a situation, the dominant society is not interested in cultural exchange or conservation but in imposing its own supposedly superior culture on indigenous people. The "tutor'd mind" is one tool by which colonizers attempt to accomplish this goal. The individual achievements of the "tutor'd mind," however, never qualify him (all Peyer's subjects are men) for full acceptance by the colonizer. As a result, Peyer's subjects "made rational and critical assessments of contemporary Indianwhite relations and expressed their own notions for improving their people's situation" (p. 20). Samson Occom (1723-1792), the Mohegan protege of Dartmouth College founder Eleazar Wheelock, converted to Christianity as a young man and enrolled in school at twenty for a course of study that totalled about four