Piety and Historicism

Vine Deloria Jr.’s frequently reprinted and updated God Is Red has a chariness about piety—despite its profound spirituality—that prompts us to look deeper into the history of the term for guidance. In it, the terms “pious” and “piety” are associated with usually acerbic accounts of Western religious practice. The same, for both terms, is true of his influential book Custer Died for Your Sins.13 Although he is sensitive to variations among American Indian religious practices, in God Is Red, Deloria ambitiously searches for differences between Western and American Indigenous religious foundations in order to teach a lesson about Western failings. His use of “piety” thus reinforces its identification of culture with a certain form of religious feeling—even in a book expressly designed to help bridge orientations toward the sacred. The suggestion here is that piety ill fits Native American notions of a sacred relationship among a person, a people, and the supernatural; or that it is too laden with the history of justifications of genocide and cultural conversion to function in a positive way today. This is worth pondering as scholars navigate the vocabularies for studying early America, notwithstanding the desire to use terms with sensitivity to their living meanings in their historical moments. It suggests that the difficulty with the term may be less a matter of identifying patterns of belief in the past than with the ways in which we situate, authorize, and write our scholarship.

Rooted in the Latin pietas, the word “piety” has a long, vexed history. The early modern period saw a split in the English meanings of the word “piety” into “piety” and “pity.” The former came to have the connotations we associate with it today, both positive connotations about deep personal religious devotion and negative connotations in which that same sort of devotion becomes bigotry or uncritical worship of an unworthy object. Its function in describing personal spiritual experience has become significant in contradistinction to the way one imagines a relation to state or family. The term “pity” has largely retained its constellation of meanings related to compassion, derived from vernacular uses of the word “piety” (synonymous with the meaning of the Latin word misericordia) in various languages of Latin descent from the early Christian era through the sixteenth century.

In the classical tradition, exemplified by Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas, pietas implies a tripartite devotion to the gods, to one’s family, and to one’s country. It describes an attitude or relation. It is tied to “an unmistakably Roman ideal of principled conquest,” in Garrison’s words, “that confers the blessings of order exemplified by the devotion of sons to fathers.”14 In Virgil, it is the occasion not for a formulaic set of actions but rather for depicting complex, tension-ridden decision making by Aeneas as he attempts to manage the different demands of kinship, the civic, and the divine. Pietas thus had meanings across domains that in the West increasingly became stratified after the seventeenth century. Puritan controversies over how government and church should interrelate under a commitment to God’s rule may have kept alive, through the seventeenth century, the more complex notion of “piety” as a term to describe how people navigated duties both supernatural and earthly.15 Others, however, including John Dryden, question the decline of the broader sense of the word “piety.” “Piety alone,” Dryden notes, “comprehends the whole Duty of Man towards the Gods; towards his Country, and towards his Relations.”16 Dryden offers this reminder in the preface to his translation of the Aeneid (1697), published the same year that Cotton Mather’s Pietas in Patriam was first issued in London, a text deeply invested in bringing the notions of piety as service to God and piety as service to the state into relation.17 Still, it seems that by the eighteenth century, as today, it was unusual to write of one’s devotion to family or to the state as “pious.”

It has been argued that piety’s decline as a broad cultural ideal was a function of its slipping solely into the domain of personal religious transformations, an Augustinian subjection only to God: “For piety,” writes Augustine, “is the true cult of the true God.”18 The pre-Christian colonial connotations of the term would seem to have disappeared with this transition. Yet it could be argued that colonization, as well as religion’s axial role in it, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was integral to both the specialization of the term and the decline in its ability to speak to a form of commitment that would bridge kinship, the civic, and the supernatural. Certainly some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics of the role of piety in colonialism implied that a more complex grappling with the relationship of personal to national commitments might result in at least a different sort of colonialism. Consider Leiden separatist pastor John Robinson’s reaction to news of the Pilgrims’ killing of Wituwamat and his Algonquian allies in 1622—“How happy a thing had it been,” he writes, “if you had converted some, before you had killed any”—or the well-known passage from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels:19

Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity: the Natives driven out or destroyed . . . a free License given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust. . . . And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.20

Here the Black Legend resonates, to be sure, in English deprecation of Spanish colonial cruelty, but piety and plantation are nonetheless linked in a way that criticizes colonization across all imperial settings.

The imagination of affiliation offered by the term “piety” has thus long had implications for the establishment of cultural boundaries even as its precise meanings varied. One of the reasons for this may be that ever since at least Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, there has been a tendency to define “piety” in ways that transcend space and time, which can distract from the ways the term divides groups of people. For Perry Miller, avatar of American Puritan studies, piety exhibits itself in intricate ways, including through social frameworks, as “a recurrent spiritual answer to interrogations eternally posed by human existence.” Yet its appearance is almost biologically encoded. “Puritanism was,” Miller writes, “yet another manifestation of a piety to which some men are probably always inclined and which in certain conjunctions appeals irresistibly to large numbers of exceptionally vigorous spirits.” This definition of the “exceptional” is not limited to America; indeed, is implicitly non-Western. Yet for Miller, the point of studying New England’s piety is to describe a broader Western orientation toward the divine because he sees the American Puritans as “spokesmen for what we call the Renaissance.”21 This is a transatlantic intellectual history, with a touch of universalism in its definition of “piety,” but it is about some people and not others. Walter Mignolo’s “darker side of the Renaissance” is missing from Miller’s formulation, and one wonders if Miller would have included New England’s Indigenous people among his “some men.”22 Janice Knight has elucidated the multiple pieties within the mainstream American Puritan world, and Matthew Brown and Lisa Brooks have underscored the irony that the archive on which Miller’s argument is built was in part printed by Natives and also in many cases directed at a Native audience. These arguments, however, still imply that understandings of cultural difference and of piety are interdependent. As Jordan Stein and Justine Murison put it, at times it “becomes difficult to imagine what ‘religion’ could mean, besides something like ‘culture.’”23

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, piety’s meanings in English have come to be “godliness,” or, in Calvin’s formulation, “fervent attachment to the service of God and to the duties and practices of religion.” But compare this to the use of the term in Saba Mahmood’s influential book Politics of Piety, a feminist analysis of Islam in contemporary North Africa; the Arabic equivalents of “piety,” such as taqwa, involve fear no less than duty. Mahmood’s analysis respects the particular instantiation of fear—both as outward display and internal feeling—that characterizes the women of the Egyptian mosque movement.24 The Quran here is not the source of a timeless definition of “piety” but a plank for historically specific interpretations and behaviors, not unlike the popular piety explored by New England historians. That region’s ethnohistorians have also argued that a set of broadly held beliefs about people’s relation to the invisible world—there being little distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” matters—existed among Algonquians of the northeastern woodlands, and that Native popular or everyday practices coexisted with more formal rituals and enactments of particular communities’ cosmologic commitments. If the ontologies of religious feeling may differ, so too may the disciplinary uses of the term “piety,” which develop an analytical patina that might obscure alternative histories, or that simply make it hard for us to imagine another phenomenon as the axis of analyzing a time and place like early colonial New England.

Piety’s historiographic entanglement also has to do with the way in which the term “piety” contained multivalent senses that put it at the nexus of sociopolitical disagreements in the Anglophone world. It is not that one can’t figure out whether or not a given Puritan writer is using the word in one or another way that is historically accurate. Rather, it is difficult to describe how piety cannot function within a theological context alone, or the context of private worship or the conscience. The same goes for the connotations of piety that have to do with governance—that is, with civic piety. The Puritans made piety a matter of worship and conscience, but they disagreed with each other and with other Englishmen about how much its civic version was necessary. Roger Williams criticized the Massachusetts Bay settlers and their governors for putting too much emphasis on civic piety, rather than achieving a true separation from a state he regarded as still aligned with the Antichrist. Such disagreements signal the degree to which, when we talk about piety, even in the most radically conscience-oriented of cases such as Williams’s, the word entails a context. In that context, the uses of the term or discussions of it as labels for a certain kind of activity, orientation, or emphasis on the part of a historical actor are necessarily tied to other formations, forcing us to take into account the resonances of piety beyond its ability to name a feeling or performance of affection for, or fear of, a deity.

Knowing how a term like “piety” has shifted in meaning over time introduces us to the problematic of its use in the historiographic imagination. Historicizing the term “piety,” however, presents other unique difficulties, in part because by doing so, one risks raising readers’ theological hackles or threatening their profoundly emotional senses of connection to a deity. To introduce one’s own religious sensibility openly into a scholarly analysis seems to risk undermining the very historicity whose aura would ground a scholar’s belief. That is as true in English as it is in history departments. “From Emerson and Matthew Arnold to Robert Scholes and Gerald Graff,” Tracy Fessenden observes, “the story told of literary studies’ emergence as a discipline is a supersessionary tale, in which religion cedes authority to forms of truth and suasion that no longer require its grounding.”25 Academic disciplinary authority and the authority to write about piety as other are mutually constitutive within the terms of secular modernity.

Whether it is a jeremiad against the sins of Puritan self-conception or an earnest investigation of the spiritual dynamics of their theology, the premise that we can either judge the people of God out of time or embrace the historical sympathy that they would ask us to impose on an analysis of their beliefs seems indefensible from the standpoint of the history of piety itself. The term has always implicitly dragged with it a series of contexts of power and judgment whose design is to hierarchize, separate, distinguish the “in” from the “out”—in short, to sort the world and make boundaries. This is not to say we haven’t learned from the jeremiads or from the believers’ accounts of the extraordinary self-manipulation and sense of uncertainty that the Puritans invented in order to instantiate their version of piety: manipulations of language, of law, of whole mental orientations, households, iconography, and so on. The tendency of those studies, however, has often been to exclude sociohistorical contexts in a way that furthers the depletion of context that Puritan piety itself was trying to manage. It is not as if the contents of Puritan piety are being reproduced or expressed in studies of the Puritans’ beliefs. Rather, it is an attitude toward the relationship between the human and accounts of the human and what those things can produce in the way of the world that is the unacknowledged gift of an ancient regime of piety linked profoundly to the maintenance of social hierarchies. Our narratives are sometimes believing in piety when they claim to be studying it.

Pious Resistance

Departing from previous scholarship’s focus on settler piety, students of early colonial North America during the past two decades have taken a range of approaches to centering Indigenous religious experience. Some of these approaches have been shaped by a desire to transform scholarly or popular preconceptions about Natives and Christianity, while others aim, explicitly or implicitly, at legal definitions of forms of belonging or performances of community that underpin the U.S. federal recognition process for American Indian tribes. A few of them are attentive to the contemporary spiritual landscape of the groups whose history they explore, adding a rich but potentially contentious historiographic texture. As for Posey’s “pious members of his clan,” for some traditionalists, what Scott Richard Lyons calls the “policing of traditional knowledge” involves gatekeeping the historical reputations of ancestors who were early adopters of non-Native religious ways.26 Taken together, however, from the standpoint of the study of colonial New England, this body of work suggests a provocative new range of meanings for the term “piety.”

In a collection of essays by influential scholars in this movement, Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, editors Joel Martin and Mark Nicholas situate their approach as informed by religious historians who focus on lived practice and popular religion as well as by Latin American historians interested in the relations between political movements and popular religion in Indigenous contexts. Such a strategy, they argue, “enables scholars of contact and colonialism to demonstrate how Native American individuals and communities could appropriate Christianity without necessarily agreeing with what missionaries and other professional Christians said about Christianity.” This approach has been pivotal to telling stories long hidden, and it would be hard to find a better example than David Silverman’s study of the Wampanoag of Martha’s Vineyard and their complex relationship with Christianity, Faith and Boundaries.27 Silverman uses the term “religious translation” to describe the spiritual transformations of Martha’s Vineyard, borrowing from but in some ways setting aside the arsenal of terms precipitated from the previous few decades of anthropological and cultural studies, from assimilation through syncretism to interculturality. Religious translation in this context, Silverman argues, moved in two directions. First, the Mayhew family, the lords of Martha’s Vineyard, used Wampanoag concepts to convey Christian ones to their converts. Second, Native listeners adopted and pushed back according to the needs of their community.

Silverman’s analysis is sensitive to the ways in which Christian and Wampanoag traditional ways shared conceptual common ground.28 In this approach, historical piety, understood either as a kind of internal code or way of judging a performance of faith, is tuned down as a factor both in the daily lives of New England’s denizens and in the larger picture of supernatural beliefs or practices in history. Other studies keep that sort of piety more central but shift the center of value for studying religion in Indian Country. Rachel Wheeler’s To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast thinks flexibly about the factors that deserve attention in considering the entry of missionaries to Mohican communities. Some Native groups, for example, understood themselves as intercultural brokers, and missionary work could be elegantly adapted to their purposes; others, even when members of related groups, found less value in missionary efforts supernaturally or politically, and pushed back. Wheeler argues that in some cases, “Moravian missionaries did not serve as agents of colonial power.” Given this heterogeneity, the uptake of Christianity must be studied as both a political and a spiritual phenomenon. “The question is not simply what Mohicans hoped to gain by admitting missionaries to their villages,” Wheeler insists, “but what Congregational and Moravian Christianity became as practiced by the Mohicans of Stockbridge and Shekomeko.”29

Not infrequently, as we have seen in the case of Olaudah Equiano and the Miskito prince George, Christian proselytizers were Indigenous or African. In his study of Atlantic-world Native and Black missionaries, Edward Andrews shows that such representatives of the Christian faith were integral to missionary efforts across the British colonial world, both as symbols and as actual laborers in the spiritual field. Such efforts shaped and were shaped by arguments about the most effective ways to spread the gospel; about the theology of race and of missionizing; and about the relationship between religious and other forms of colonialism.30 “This complexity,” Andrews argues, “underscores the point that missionaries, especially native ones, cannot simply be lumped into the binary categories of compassionate martyr versus avaricious imperialist,” echoing Wheeler’s valorization of both church and secular interpretive frames. By implication, such an approach posits that present-day claims that agents of the faith were either complicit with Native dispossession or heroes of adaptive resistance are not just oversimplified but ahistorical.

For the most part, Andrews’s book, like the others discussed here, upholds its commitment to noncategorization. In this, these scholars respond to Fessenden’s reminder that a “particularly resilient trick of the secular sphere’s emergence is to cast religion as itself otherworldly, atemporal, purely spiritual.” These writers all unsettle the analytical tendency of previous scholarship to center settler struggles over religion, even as their work suggests the rich potential of such an approach if brought together with analyses of everyday settler religious feeling.31 Douglas Winiarski has done just that, compellingly putting Native and settler lay convictions into the same frame of comparison.32 Winiarski agrees that New England witnessed overlapping domains of religious belief, but he goes further to suggest that Natives, settlers, and African servants and enslaved people all took a kind of modular approach to piety. They maintained a “repertoire” of practices and rationales to deploy or not, at will, in their minds or in the world, rather than a set of codes to obey in public or catechistic vigilance to internalize. Crucial for Winiarski’s argument, and indeed enabling all of those described above, is David Hall’s notion of popular piety. “Popular religion,” Hall writes, “encompassed an ideal of piety that people may have reverenced even when they did not wholly follow its prescriptions.”33 Constitutively inconsistent and interlaced with beliefs in the occult, fortune, or competing interpretations of Scripture, popular piety reconceives the study of religion as the description of a field of tensions. Winiarski tries to set aside cultural difference and colonizer–colonized status in his account. “Acknowledging the cross-pollination of Native American and European occult traditions,” he concludes, “blurs beyond recognition the thin line segregating English religion from Indian superstition.”34

What emerges across all of the work discussed here is a picture of supernatural relations as a patchwork of practices, specific beliefs, and modes of worship. In this outlook, piety is to some extent what piety does: it is pragmatic, often political, seldom orthodox. This analytical inclination, however, also raises questions. Some of these questions have to do with the relationship between individual and collective belief, and the structures of collective conviction in differently organized communities. How does the modular spirituality referred to as popular piety, with its hint of liberal-individualist thinking, relate to communal commitments to supernatural relations, such as thanksgiving feasts or fasts, mass public mourning, or public executions? Did those activities’ collective dynamics parallel, overlap with, draw from, or open a path between settler modes of group feeling and those of Native people? If kinship influenced religious commitments but these too were crosscut by private appeals to Abbomocho or Satan, when does piety begin to register unmistakably? If “the majority of the Old Colony’s Indian denizens inhabited the untidy cultural space between . . . rapidly converging conceptual worlds,” should accounts of historical agency focus on the untidy majority or on the piety inscribed by the original “conceptual worlds” still rigorously maintained by leaders in Native, African American, and settler colonial communities? What is an established religious tradition if these new descriptions of belief are true?

There is also the persistent question, inevitably political in the present, of cultural distinctiveness. It is not clear how deeply the blurring on which Winiarski insists runs into the analytical architecture of these studies. For Winiarski, beliefs are still held at a slight distance from each other: Native popular piety “closely mirrored” the English one; “language barriers and racial stereotypes . . . promoted acts of religious exchange,” but the imagining of exchange entails thinking of two previously existing, differentiable agencies.35 Although Martin and Nicholas say that the essays in their collection move beyond “authenticity” or cultural reification, one gets a sense from time to time, even in essays by visionaries in the field, that cultural particularity has not so much been displaced by hybridity or practice-based appropriation as it has moved elsewhere. This is evidenced in, for example, Daniel Mandell’s description of Massachusetts Natives’ “distinctive regional subculture,” or Joanna Brooks’s identification of Northeastern Natives’ “distinctive rituals.”36 Inside a shared resistance to describing cultural boundaries as fixed or clear (either at the historical moment under analysis or today), disagreements gestate about how to locate or describe particularity.

To an extent, the need to find that particularity is a basic analytical problem, because without a vocabulary of differences, it is difficult to make any kind of argument. That need is also an artifact of the analysts’ different historiographic intentions and assumptions—about the process of secularization, about the historical quality of subjectivity, and about what historical scholarship on this topic and era might produce in the present, beyond new information from the archives. The point of clear agreement among most scholars in this field today is also the vanishing point of the broad-scale significance they claim. As Andrews phrases it, Native people “drew from Christianity to frame new identities, amass spiritual power, preserve their cultures, and protect their peoples during a period of unprecedented change. In doing so, they became pivotal players in Protestant missionary activity and cultural exchange in the early modern Atlantic world.”37 This guiding idea for a religious studies methodology can promote a more or less similar understanding of any given colonial religious situation, wherever it might be, with respect to the agency of the colonized. In other words, “resistance” or “co-optation” might become the new “authenticity”—which is to say, a new piety. Andrews’s list constitutes the categories—not identity categories but rather categories of contemporary critical regard, or perhaps of activist relations to their social historical contexts—that function just as powerfully as any previous categories did to organize today’s reception of these early colonial figures and groups. That isn’t necessarily bad, but we should recognize how hard it is not to be pious in new ways, even as we complicate the notion of the uses of piety and theology in the colonial era or the past scholarly pieties through which they have been narrated. Such an approach, despite its healthy focus on Indigenous cosmologies, might forestall asking a larger question of the study of colonial religious history: what was Christianity becoming as a result of colonization? What was it as a result of sustained contact with others who, while having motives, did not necessarily regard those motives as godly, worldly, social, economic, and so on, but in different terms?

In offering various ways to imagine religion’s relationship with group identity, a multilayered politics weaves the concerns of Native groups struggling for self-determination or survival into a larger, long-standing debate about culture and agency in the humanities. Ideas of collectivity are historically specific and evolving; the shifting definitions of “nation,” “church,” “tribe,” and “race” have all been studied in depth, and each of those studies takes aim at what it regards as the shortcomings of applications of these terms in its time. The resonances of this historiographic condition extend beyond the limited frame of “getting the story right” from the standpoint of history. In the Native American case, tribe-to-U.S. sovereignty has often depended on an accounting of the external dimensions of tribal belonging, according to ideas about nations as being constituted by continuous existence. Such accounting is a legal convenience for the United States rather than a historically rigorous framework for judgment. Still, that standard for recognition has produced benefits for many tribes; further, recognizably Christian forms of belonging—the outward if not the inward forms of piety—have frequently been crucial to making the case for continuous tribal existence.

We stand in relation to the religious transformations of the past as both inheritors and others. Can the imagination of piety in New England expand to bridge human groups? Can it extend an invitation to Native American audiences today who are rejecting, reimagining, reviving, or creating new forms of what has gone by the name of piety? More is at stake here than the description of vernacular theology or an interrogation of the role of codes in the evidentiary regime by which piety was inculcated, asserted, and evaluated. Involved is how we imagine the relationship between feeling selves and the world—what we, informed by the sometimes repulsive historical specificities of previous pieties, might be able to sense as agency in a past world felt both as an heirloom and as a refraction through the archives.

Spiritual Parasites

Kevin McBride, an archaeologist and ethnohistorian, was working for the Mashantucket Pequot tribe on its reservation inside Connecticut when he found a ritual bundle in the burial site of a young Algonquian girl, probably Pequot. The bundle included a bear’s left paw and a fragment of finely woven cloth containing a piece of a page of a small-format, Dutch-printed Bible, featuring part of the text of Psalm 98. The date of the burial is estimated at between 1660 and 1720. This object has attracted interdisciplinary attention. Hugh Amory, a book historian and bibliographer, emphasizes that the Bible from which the text fragment came was a “hand piety” object. Such books were personal copies whose format and structure aided the “religious socialization of readers” through habitual consultation of a sacred text and a performance of godly inclinations.38 But could this child or her parents have read the Bible, much less accessed it with the kind of sophisticated referential system that Christians of the time and region did? Amory suggests that the Bible from which the fragment in the Pequot bundle was taken might have been a war prize rather than an anchor of Christian godliness.

Perhaps, however, it was given as a gift or token in, or stolen from, a household in which a Pequot enslaved person worked. Many such “servants” allocated to English settlers in the wake of the Pequot War of 1637 eventually ran away from their masters. A group of Pequots led by Robin Cassacinamon cohabited with John Winthrop Jr.’s settlers at Nameaug, a plantation Winthrop established in 1645 and that would come to be known as New London.39 As for the use of an English-language Bible among Pequots (and setting aside the possibility of a fully English-language-literate Pequot, which some translators probably were), Amory suggests that “both cultures recognized its decorative, talismanic function,” and that “it matters little whether we describe small-format Bibles as European medicine bundles, or this medicine bundle as an Indian Bible. The two are culturally congruent, in their respective cultures.” Amory’s assertion that there is “cultural congruency” to guide us implies isomorphic pieties, but can we be sure? This statement echoes familiar assertions about the universality of pious rituals in an assertion of boundaries—“respective cultures.” We certainly have here what Nicholas Thomas calls “entangled objects,” literally and analytically, but do we have entangled pieties?40

McBride disagrees about congruency even as he relies on an assertion of definite cultural boundaries structurally similar to Amory’s. “The inclusion of the page in the bundle,” McBride argues, “transforms the symbolic system of the printed word to another communicative system—that of the Pequot mortuary ritual.” In that context, he continues, “Native and European objects represented links with the community, the individual, and the afterlife and were considered highly symbolic of Pequot beliefs and practices in the physical and spiritual worlds.”41 This seems true, but it is equally so of the Puritan mortuary rituals that, for example, involved writing anagrams using the letters of the deceased’s name, or attaching written elegies to coffins as they were carried to burial. Of course, were we to speak of English practices more broadly, we would find differences in the ritual, and in what people were willing to bury with the dead, by locale, time, and sect. Those differences often spoke to varying ideas about the afterlife and the person being interred, whether political or theological (say, in the case of traitors, or of Quakers unlucky enough to be put to death in Massachusetts).42 The Pequots appear as a unified group in these analyses, but we know that they were, and remain, one of the most spectacularly contentious groups in New England, woven by kinship relations into the fabric of both surrounding and distant communities.43

Rather than insist on the unity of Pequot piety, we might speculate more aggressively across the conceptions of the invisible world in a New England both shared and divided. The concepts of “community mortuary ritual” and “piety,” linking the worlds of humans, other-than-human persons, and spirits, are both useful, but they can impede more flexible ways of thinking about a shared past and future, keeping us from certain interpretive insights. The bear paw, for example, McBride tells us, is unusual in sites like this. The bear was considered “capable of transitioning between the physical and spiritual realms of the sky and the terrestrial world and between the terrestrial and underwater worlds.” The paw, though, reminds us of the bear’s power to deal shredding, mortal blows; its presence in conjunction with a page torn from a Bible might suggest a less rosy interpretation of the kind of power being sent along with this child to Cautantowwit’s house. Moreover, among the bear’s distinctive behavioral properties is hibernation: a state between life and death, a survival habit based on renewal and reemergence—or, as Ralph Ellison puts it, “covert preparation for a more overt action.”44 If such was part of the message, then present-day interpreters are participants in the reawakening of this Pequot spirit both heralded and brought about by the choice of burial arrangements. Finally, if it is true that, as McBride argues, “children were perceived to be in a state of liminality, existing on the threshold or boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds,” the same might be said of Puritan children.45 The Salem witch trials serve as an excellent example of that. Further, seeing across the rituals and pieties of these two groups reminds us that children were also importantly, and troublingly, on the threshold between the Native and English worlds as denizens of the region imagined their futures.

The in-between use of the page has a kind of parasitical quality. I mean this in a positive sense. The Bible buried represents a means of opening a path or window to another world, a cosmos from which power might be drawn. As is often the case with real parasites, however, there is more than one potential host. A practice might draw power from more than one cosmology: bear, Algonquian traditions, Pequot kinship, English piety, European technology, and earth are all potentially contributing domains in this instance. The burial and its objects constitute a technology of mediation between the visible and the invisible, but simultaneously between the long-standing and the newcomers. These dimensions of that mediation may offer potential resonances or value for the ongoing recovery of Pequot history and the forms of renewal or creation in their new age of self-determination. Amory was probably wrong to say that the function of the Bible is the same. The formal context of burial matters, not least because of the well-documented foundational significance of spatial orientation in Indigenous North American ways. Psalm 98, in which the sea, rivers, and mountains join humans in singing a new song to the creator, may sing from this grave in ways that link past and present cultural needs, in another era of intense change for tribal members.

A different set of objects in a different site also suggests an environment saturated with attempts to open otherworldly connections that do not quite fit what we have taken to be either Native or nonconformist modes of divine mediation. Behind the original walls of Benjamin Horton’s Long Island house, first erected in 1649, were found three cloth poppets, with stick legs, now held at the restored Old House in Cutchogue (Figure 2). In an article describing the restoration of the house in 1940, Frank Brown speculates that the poppets were preserved by chance, dragged into the walls by rats. Robert St. George, perhaps doubtful of Brown’s interpretation owing to the comparatively undamaged quality of the poppets, suggests that these may be similar to poppets found in 1685 when the Salem house where Bridget Bishop lived when she was accused of witchcraft was torn down—dolls found “w’th headles pins in Them, w’th the points out ward.”46 Magical and countermagical items were buried in and around Christian houses as a means of circumventing the powerful pull of providence. Such practices were constitutive of the vernacular world of spirituality, which drew on both magic and Christian worship.

As St. George vividly illustrates, houses were contested spaces, both between men and women and between earthly needs and divine authority. But the differences between the public and the intimate also shaped the power of magical mediations like those offered by poppets. Buried under a stoop or built in the wall of the house, an invisible third power could lurk, contending with those of men and gods. Given Puritan ideas about predestination, it is not merely spatial propriety that was being transgressed with such objects. Time was also being mastered, in the old, magical mode, against Calvinist logics of divine temporality and inevitable judgment. For St. George, such practices indicate a syncretism within settler Protestantism, but not one that involves Indigenous divine forces or rituals. Native Americans are, in his analysis, mere projections. The Puritans’ denial of Indigenous subjectivity, for St. George, robs real Natives of cultural agency. This is a pity, not least because we know from both ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence that lodgings, in their construction, orientation, size, allocation of interior space to individuals, and decoration, were also sacred mediators for Natives of the region.

Perhaps it is true that these poppets owe less to the presence of Native American modes of communication than to the traditional European magical world Keith Thomas describes, or that they were no more sacred than as unexpected beneficences to the house’s furry parasites, the rats. But then again, these poppets were found in a house in Cutchogue, just across the Long Island Sound from Pequot territory (indeed, a number of Horton’s relatives had come from Connecticut) and near one of the prime wampum-manufacturing areas that the tribe had controlled on the eve of the Pequot War.47 In the settlers’ understandings, the degenerate sons of Adam roaming the wilderness did not lack for magical power. In a land still ringing with the chants of the pawwaw and the mourning songs of bereaved Pequot women, a land still laced with the memory holes and rock-and-stick piles created by Native hunters and travelers, would not Old World magic have a better chance of working? The imagination of agency that attached to the risky practice of trying to work around divine providence might have been enhanced by the near presence of people with different ways, accessing alternative, invisible powers.48

As in the case of Benjamin Horton’s rodents, there are more parasitic or transferential agents here than just Pequots and English settlers or their divine forces. The text in the Pequot bundle was illegally printed in Holland and smuggled into England for sale, eventually reaching the colonies and the Pequots. There is a temporal transference as well: the page fragment in the bundle “was preserved by contact with an iron ladle,” Amory reports, “which converted the cloth and paper to a lump of iron salt known as a pseudomorph, because it exactly reproduces the form and structure of the original in a different material.”49 An English form and a Native structure, then, are preserved for us today only because of a third material transaction with no “culture” associated with it. This structure was subsequently resurrected for analysis by the Pequots themselves, who some non-Natives in Connecticut today consider to be not only parasites but also posers because the restoration of the tribe happened through the agency of nonlocal, non-Native-identified descendants—“Indians” in legal form and economic structure, but not “material.”50

Neither the poppets nor the bundle clearly indicates piety, broadly speaking, as we tend to think of it today, either for settler nonconformists or Algonquians. Either could be supernaturally additive, syncretic, or simply traditional (in the sense of pronouncing, “I have taken the other’s spiritual power and carried it with me to the invisible world”). Neither quite proves a synthesis of beliefs, either, if that was what was sought. These are parasitical objects, mediators of agency, placed in between both immaterially and materially: between the earth world and the human world in the Pequot case, and between the public and the intimate in the Protestant one. Here cohabitation seems to be a mode of transformation, a practice acknowledging and drawing power from difference. Amory and McBride’s disagreement boils down to a conflict of epistemological schemes that have been given their current conformation in part by colonial activity: a prioritization of the universal for Amory, a prioritization of difference for McBride.

Crucially, in the contexts in which these objects reside today, they continue to perform this porous work. Neither the bundle nor the poppets have strayed far from the places of their creation; both link past and present in the context of historical preservation and education. Their interest lies perhaps more in their capacity to inspire wonder than in their potential to fuel historical judgment. Their talismanic quality, now in the context of a research center or historical museum, is retained as a residue of the sacred even as they function politically. Their political function, as emblems of Pequotness or Long Island settlerness, is difficult to distinguish from their more arcane powers, as parts of collections, to defend the existence of the Old House museum at Cutchogue or the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Our work of scholarly analysis consequently proceeds under the rule of a diachronic parasitism in the critical act, experimenting with a conception of time and evidence that might make a virtue of the unknown by embracing the unknowable in an act of intuition or imagination.

The experience of North America for many of its denizens has been, Joanna Brooks observes, “a story of catastrophe, chance, and radical disruption.” A narrative of personal revelation, of a path to wholeness outside of dominant discourse and under the eye of God, helped redress this experience, Brooks claims. It “worked for so many Americans in the eighteenth century, and . . . might work as the conceptual engine for one new way of telling of American religious-literary history: it is a narrative formula that summons meaning from randomness and disaster and uses this meaning as the basis for new, if temporary, forms of intimacy and relationship.”51 This elegantly reformulates the story of American religion on a more inclusive basis than many previous narratives, routing it through seeming discontinuities and surprising personalities, such as Samson Occom, John Marrant, and James Baldwin. I would not deny the importance of healing, intimacy, or reliable relationships. Yet that same deeply felt experience underwrote some of the more violent instantiations and narrations of piety—heterodox and orthodox—whose relationships were built on exclusion, not extension, and were comforting precisely for that reason.

I began this chapter by describing how as a student I was drawn to the Puritans’ systematic doubting of human knowledge and power. Another dimension of nonconformist ways of looking at the world attracted me as I considered the alternatives of atheism or agnosticism, the religions of so-called reason. “The genius of the Puritan movement,” as Stephen Foster puts it, was always “to invest transcendent, numinous meaning in happenstance and particularity.”52 Foster calls this the “motor force” of Puritanism and labels it as one of the few transcendent qualities of the movement itself. It seems particularly generative and nurturing to me, and it is shared by many believers across the world. When I began to learn about Native America, it struck me that this everyday ethics of finding worlds of wonder must have been one of the things that made even basic communication possible between Indigenous Americans and this group of European settlers. The study of Native ways and histories from the early colonial era, however, seemed to have more immediate bearing on the lives of people descended from those groups and places. This led to a more difficult question than whether Native people became Christian, or to what ends. Surely the Northeastern Indigenous cultures and the land in which they grew influenced Puritan ways, not just the other way around. One big question is surely how history can be told in a way that nurtures life and self-determination for people dispossessed by colonialism. Another, related one asks how it can be told in a way that helps settlers face and come to terms with what happened to the foundations of their systems of conscience, morals, and ethics in a way that will promote a more collaborative attitude toward building the future of the United States and Indian Country.

It is all too easy to become like Momaday’s dog when we begin to study piety. Perhaps, as he suggests—because for writers like Momaday and Deloria the telling of history itself is a key act in generating, elaborating, and preserving the sacred—it is merely a matter of whether we are the stuff of martyrs to the gods of history. My hope is that the objects discussed above and the trickiness of piety outlined here call attention to the difficult position scholars are in, writing across time and parasitizing evidence to try to shape our futures—whether a future we can believe in or a future in which we can believe. “Historical knowledge,” Carlo Ginzburg writes, “is indirect, presumptive, conjectural.”53 The logics of spirituality in a colonial condition are multiple, transformative, emergent, and even resurgent (as the United States’ current religious awakening, with its depressing moral vagaries, suggests), calling for a different sort of narrative about history, even a different narration of history. Making poppets or the bear paw and Bible-page bundle and then removing them from human circulation may be regarded as attempts to master time, to refold it according to the desires of the individual or small groups that crafted and buried these things. These uncanonical objects and their users’ attempts to disrupt the temporalities of their moment hold lessons for our narratives—lessons about the knowable and the unknowable, about the persistence of the not-modern or the already presentness of the future, as we attempt to change the asymmetries of power in the present.54