The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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Be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.66
In this passage Pope links the scientist’s hubris with the Indian’s naïveté, chiding both for reducing God’s power to a finite scope. Better off than the scientist, the Indian still merits our pity and perhaps our amusement for his simplistic faith. Our pity takes many forms as several meanings of the word poor coincide. Deprived of civilization and abstract thought, the Indian also is oppressed by brutal colonists who pretend to embody the word Christian. Most of all, he is spiritually bereft. Replacing angels with dogs and heaven with happy hunting grounds, he misses out on the blessings of a rational yet revealed religion. Unlike in missionary writings, his poverty does not demand action from the reader. Rather, his marking as “poor” helps construct a consensus between Pope and his readers, unifying them through their reaction to the Indian as he illustrates what they should not believe. Between a missionary tract of 1655 and this poem of 1733–34, the “poor Indian” has changed from an image impelling charitable action to a vehicle of erudite discussion and moral education.
As Pope’s reference to the tormenting “Christians” suggests, the figure of the poor Indian borrowed much from the noble savage, whose moral simplicity was used to set off Europeans’ contrasting hypocrisy. Ultimately, though, these figures oppose each other. Poor Indians are defined through their need for the very things that noble savages do not need, Christianity and European civilization. This trope was not unique to English texts, as the French, the Spanish, and other colonizers also were inclined to describe Indians as pitiable. The English phrase, “the poor Indians,” shares much with the Spanish word miserable, which was a legal term for Indians that at least theoretically granted them protections under Spanish rule.67 This resemblance is ironic, because what often makes Indians “poor” in English writings is their mistreatment by the Spanish. It also is ironic because in English the term poor invoked no legal privileges, only emotion.
Along with moral philosophers, many authors of missionary writings were aware of the problems suggested by the reactions they sought from readers. Even as they generated an emotional response to raise funds and convert heathen souls, they worried that such emotion could be alienating and ineffectual. They debated whether pity involved identification with the sufferer and led to alleviating that suffering, or whether it simply became a source of pleasure at the cost of another’s pain. These writings thus offer a case study for examining not only how the British generated connections with each other through their shared feeling for the victims of suffering, but also how and why they came to feel conflicted over such feeling.
The ways in which Indian converts interpreted this term also suggest the variable status of pity in a colonial framework. In A further Accompt of the Progresse of the Gospel (1659), the missionary John Eliot recorded the speeches of several “praying Indians” to display their preparedness for admission to full communion. One of these Indians, Piumbubbon, tailored the beatitude “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:1) to his Massachusett audience: “For poverty of spirit, we are the most poor, feeble, despicable people in the world, but let us look in what case our spirits be, for if our hearts be answerably poor, and low, as our outward condition is, then we are in the way to be made truly rich, for the Kingdome of heaven is promised to such as are poor in spirit.”68 To the degree that we can acknowledge these lines fully as Piumbubbon’s, they reveal a Christian convert transforming the word poor from a signifier of humility and destitution to a path toward salvation. Piumbubbon essentially accepted a pejorative portrayal of Indians by English colonists, but he used the logic and the language of Christianity to eradicate the negative implications of that portrayal.
The faith that Piumbubbon expressed in the salvific and leveling connotations of “poor,” an optimistic outlook that best fits the earlier stages of missionary work, was belied over a century later by Samson Occom’s use of the same word at the end of his autobiography. After detailing the many ways in which the ministerial establishment of the colonies had insulted him, Occom compared his own status to that of a “Poor Indian Boy” who was beaten by the master to whom he was indentured. Noting that when asked why his master beat him so much, the boy replied, ‘“because I am an Indian,’” Occom applied this conclusion to his own situation: “So I am ready to Say, they have used me thus, because I Can’t Instruct the Indians so well as other missionaries; but I can assure them I have endeavoured to teach them as well as I know how;—but I must Say, ‘I believe it is because I am a poor Indian.’ I Can’t help that God has made me So; I did not make my self so.”69 Occom expressed his anger at the racial discrimination he suffered by resorting to an ironic use of the very term that helped inspire missionary projects. In so doing he detached this term from the compassion that originally produced it, revealing the abysmal treatment that such pity rationalized.
One of the greatest factors separating Piumbubbon’s and Occom’s uses of “poor” is the action that they saw connected to this word. Piumbubbon felt that Indians’ poverty—which he marked as a depletion of material wealth and status—accelerated their admission to a Christian community within which they found salvation and spiritual wealth. He did not focus on the actions of the English people who pitied Indians; rather, he attended to the action of the Indians as they sought a Christian god. Poverty was for Piumbubbon a spiritual opportunity. While he shared Piumbubbon’s faith in the salvation “poor” Indians could receive, Occom saw the insidious potential of this term as he described the discrimination it could obscure. He also played with the word’s various meanings, shifting from a general connotation of piteousness to a focus on financial dearth. Occom was poor because he was paid less than white missionaries and received less respect. His poverty was the result of British behavior, not the motivating force behind it.
As he revised the trope of the “poor Indian” to expose the hypocrisy of his would-be benefactors, Occom revealed the processes by which pity, under the auspices of the word poor, can be linked to the very sorts of treatment that would seem to inspire it in the first place. While I argue that missionary writings often were more about their readers than their Indian subjects, the understandings of benevolence that they developed had an immense impact on the indigenous peoples of America. The U.S. policy of Indian removal could not have been established as easily as it was without the conflicted sentiment with which the British came to regard Indians. Although this sentiment eventually shed its religious origins, it could not have developed as quickly as it did outside of a missionary context, with its concern for the fate of heathen souls. When, in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe passively witnessed and then mourned the death of Friday, he was imitating the missionaries as much as he had done when he first converted his fantastically loyal servant.70
The final chapter of this book comments on the history of American Indians’ erasure—in British minds if not in reality—through religious pity and ineffectual benevolence. One of my goals in writing this book has been to prevent the continued repetition of this sentimental erasure in our contemporary culture. I have worked from the conviction that we will never be able truly to hear Indians within texts authored by colonizers until we understand how it is that colonial discourse silenced them. Precisely because they often expressed sincere pity for Indians, and because they protested their own culture’s treatment of Indians even as they gave their culture the rhetorical tools to support that treatment, missionary writings present an important area for analysis. My hope is that studies like this one will complement the work of other scholars to illuminate imperial history from the perspective of Indians and other conquered peoples. Only by understanding the mechanics by which benevolence can erase its object, especially in a sentimental and a colonial framework, can we then see those pitied objects more accurately as real people who actively sought to resist or mitigate the effects of colonization on their own cultures.
What Is a Missionary Writing?
Because I am more concerned with portrayals of mission than with the events of missionary work, I use the term missionary writing loosely. It denotes the journals, letters, and reports written by