Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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Christian theology through new linguistic mediums, Native languages often resisted simple acts of translation, instead preserving and encoding different theologies and religious worldviews in their very structures and grammars. While many Native American languages ceased to be spoken languages during several centuries of colonial contact, Rivett argues that the essential grammatical elements of those languages survived in missionary transcriptions to encode the cultures and religions they represented.24
So, what did the soundscapes of Moravian missions encode? Did Moravian hymns embed the survivance of cultural ways? Did these hymns represent the concerns of Moravians from Delaware and Mohican backgrounds, as well as from German backgrounds? Both Native and European Moravians accessed Christianity through music and ritual. It should not be assumed, though, that Native Christians accepted or even simply mimicked German Moravian hymns and rituals under duress or because of Moravian impositions. Music, hymns, processions, choirs, feast days and celebrations, baptisms, and other Christian rituals certainly created spiritual connections and fostered understandings of commonality, but as Jane Merritt has argued, “Moravian theology [also] influenced the development of a distinctive native Christian religion.”25 Recent scholarship on the history of Christian missions in the eighteenth-century Northeast has turned toward studying Native Christianity not from an either-or-paradigm of conversion versus nonconversion, but from a perspective that seeks to uncover how Native peoples appropriated elements of Christian theology or practice while also negotiating the drastic changes in their communities and the natural environment caused by colonization. This type of approach places Native stories at the center, rather than European American conceptions of religious conversion or environmental transformation.26 In Moravian communities, Native Christians were active in both music production and performance. They became vocalists and instrumentalists, they learned to build musical instruments, and they copied music. As they helped to create and shape the musical repertories of their communities, they added their own touches to musical manuscripts, instruments, and compositions. While missionaries may have simply desired to preach the Gospel through their own particular style of sung Christian community articulated through hymns, the process of becoming Moravian allowed Native Christians considerable space to develop indigenized forms of Christianity and music-making.27
The legacy and history of Moravian hymnody is also the legacy of a musical tradition that represented Native culture and the value of adaptation and the building of relationships and cultural ties even in the face of colonialism. This process can be seen in many different modern-day Native-language hymn traditions, such as the Catholic and Protestant hymns of the Anishinaabe and Kiowa, or the adapted Christian repertory of Inuit Moravians. Although in both instances, these musics were originally introduced by missionaries as a strategy to extinguish Native music and worship, for many Anishinaabe and Inuit people today, singing these pieces in Native languages, and adapting their performing practices, has become a way to maintain traditions and a sense of communal integrity in the face of rapid globalization and cultural instability.28 As Native scholar Lisa Brooks has commented on historic traditions of Native Christianity in New England:
In many indigenous communities, the practice of Christianity in Native New England was syncretic, combining indigenous and European spiritual practices, taking on its own character in relation to particular brands and movements of Christianity, and becoming a staple of life for many families, thus part of the fabric of communal identity and history. Now, we might not like that so many of our ancestors sought refuge in Christianity, and we may be able to see clearly in retrospect the damaging impact of such choices, but we should not deny our own histories and what we might learn from them or fall into the illusion that those choices made them somehow less Indian.29
Both Brooks and Native literary scholar Craig Womack argue for the inclusion of possibilities, such as Christian piety and knowledge, as ways to expand our historical understandings of Native individuals and communities, instead of limiting our understandings of Native experience.30 Christianity was intertwined with colonization. But the story does not end there. In the case of the Moravian missions, the particular story of both Native and European attempts to create what Juanita Little, a Mescalero Apache Catholic sister, has described in the present day as a “world-wide [Christian] family,” became intertwined in the eighteenth century with the geographic position of mission communities on the relentless frontier boundary of European colonization and Native settlements.31 As Daniel Richter, James Merrell, and Katherine Faull have argued, early Pennsylvania was a place where it was still possible for shared communities to exist, and where Native and settler interests were not mutually exclusive, but still in flux. The strict marking of people by racial categories was a consequence of the eighteenth-century wars that shattered both settler and Native communities. This book tells the story of a Pennsylvania that existed before, during, and following those wars. The history of the Moravian missions intersected with this unprecedented period of political, environmental, and cultural instability, and weaving music and sound back into these well-known historical events in early American history gives us a new perspective not only on the Moravian missions, but also on an important time period in the mid-eighteenth century when peaceful coexistence still seemed possible despite the pressures of colonization.32
A Brief History of the Moravian Missions
Pennsylvania’s Moravian communities existed within a network of settler and Native communities in North America, as well as a wider, transnational network of Moravian places and people. Both of these networks would have important implications for the fate of the Pennsylvania missions. Beginning in the 1730s, the German Moravian Church had established mission communities across the Atlantic World—the largest Protestant missionary enterprise of the eighteenth century.
In the northern American colonies, the founder of the Moravian Church, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, outlined a plan for working with Indigenous communities in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, entitled the Heiden Collegia (Plan for the Heathen) (fig. I.1a–b).34 When he created this plan in 1742, Zinzendorf and other church elders had already established a central mission community in 1741 at Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania. In the summer and fall of 1742, Zinzendorf traveled from Bethlehem north of the Kittatinny Mountains into New York and the river valleys of the Susquehanna, to meet with the leaders of various Haudenosaunee, Delaware, Shawnee, and Mohican settlements.35 Based on these meetings, his mission plan focused on several communities he believed would be receptive to Christianity. Two of the most important Native communities in Pennsylvania—Shamokin, a Haudenosaunee-controlled town at the confluence of the western and northern branches of the Susquehanna, and Wyoming (called by the Moravians, Wajomick), a primarily Shawnee and Delaware settlement in the Wyoming Valley—were to become central hubs for a Native Christian network beyond the borders of European settlements. Zinzendorf’s mission plan also included Otstonwakin on the West Branch of the Susquehanna, a settlement led by a French Canadian and Algonquin woman named Madame Montour. A mission center at Otstonwakin would allow the Moravians access to the Great Shamokin Path that led across the Allegheny