Calvinists and Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands
My research interests lie in the areas of social and cultural change. In my recently published book, Calvinists and Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands, I explore the influence and limits of the Dutch Reformation upon the relationships that developed in the Northeast Woodlands in the period up to 1750. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, cartography, ethnography, history, linguistics, psychology, and theology, I juxtapose and analyze textual, visual, and material evidence in an interdisciplinary way. The resulting insights challenge the enduring notion that Native Americans and New Netherlanders maintained a social distance between one another, that intimacy between them proved elusive, and that Indigenous peoples and Dutch Reformed clergy could not “overcome” the “exacting, exclusionary standards of membership” in the Dutch Reformed Church.[1]
Instead, the evidence shows Native Americans and New Netherlanders hunting, smoking, eating, and drinking together, sharing their faith while traveling in a canoe, and sleeping in each other’s bedrooms. Such details emerge in documents written by New Netherlanders like Reverend Johannes van Mecklenberg (Megapolensis). Author of the most accurate and nuanced account of the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawks) by a Dutch Reformed minister, Megapolensis provides a window into the dynamic, multifaceted relationships that developed between the Indigenous and European peoples living in the Northeast Woodlands. He quickly realized the extent to which New Netherlanders relied on their Indigenous neighbors. Indeed, Indians secured their survival by unwittingly living out the gospel: Indians provided them with food and taught them how to clear the land, cultivate corn, fish the local waters, hunt turkeys, and construct and use canoes and snowshoes. In short, many of those living in the early modern Northeast Woodlands were interested in developing both spiritual and social relationships as well as commercial relationships.
[1] See Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), xii; Nan A. Rothschild, “De sociale afstand tussen Nederlandse kolonisten en inheemse Amerikanen,” ‘One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure’: De metamorfose van het Europese gebruiksvoorwerp in de Nieuwe Wereld, ed. Alexandra van Dongen (Rotterdam: Exhibit Catalog, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1995), 189–190, 193; Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Samenwerkende Uitgeverijen Prometheus-Bert Bakker, 1999), 272; Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 318; Andrew Brink, Invading Paradise: Esopus Settlers at War with Natives, 1659, 1663 (Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation, 2003), 13–14, 23–24, 221–223; Donna Merwick, Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch–Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 52; Susannah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014), 127, 143, 172, 188–190; Noorlander, Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 183, 187.
Receipt of Sale of “a Certain Negro Woman Slave named Peg and her negro female Child named Phoebe” by Samuel Schuyler, a merchant in New York, to Garret Lefferts for the sum of £70, dated 23 April 1772 and signed in the presence of Schuyler’s wife, Elizabeth Clopper
My subsequent research project examines the role of race and religion in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in New York and New Jersey in the period up to 1865. Like my research on Indigenous-European relations in the Northeast Woodlands, the research for this new project has been generously funded. In 2018 the Louisville Institute awarded me a Project Grant for Researchers that enabled me to conduct deep archival research during the 2018–2019 academic year.
This grant enabled me to conduct deep archival research in the Brooklyn Historical Society, the congregational archives of the Reformed Church of America, and the National Archives. I translated letters and pamphlets written in eighteenth-century Dutch and analyzed Reverend Peter Lowe’s extensive correspondence as well as an original Dutch edition of Willem Bosman’s Nauwkeurige beschryving van de Guinese Goud- Tand- en Slave-kust (Accurate Description of the Guinean Gold-, Ivory- and Slave-Coast) published in 1704. I have also tracked down late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century memberships lists of DRC congregations in New York and New Jersey and completed the tedious work of identifying the members of the Flatbush DRC between 1780 and 1830 and the number of Black people each member claimed as property, if any, in the years 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, and 1830 in an Excel spreadsheet. With the help of student research assistants funded by Calvin University Summer Research Fellowships in 2019 and 2020, I also began identifying the members of the Collegiate (New York City) and the Tappan congregations who claimed Black people as property between 1790 and 1830. This archival work helped me identify the principal voices in the debate concerning the place of African Americans in the DRC, including some of the African Americans who were petitioning to become members of the church. It has also helped me begin to understand how the Dutch constructed race in the eighteenth century and how those constructs influenced Americans such as Thomas Jefferson—who, I discovered following a search of his library holdings, owned a copy of the French edition of Bosman’s Description of the Guinean Coast published in 1705—and the members of the Flatbush DRC who soundly rejected the “Negroes” petition to become members of the congregation in 1788.
I shared some of my initial findings in a paper presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Dutch-American Studies in 2019. This paper was subsequently published as a chapter in an edited collection entitled Dutch Americans/Canadians and Education (Van Raalte Press, 2020). Additionally, John Kennedy, a teacher in the History Department at Detroit Country Day High School (DCDHS), invited me to present my initial findings at DCDHS as the 2019 Jefferson Lecturer in 2019.
The primary impact of this research lies in its historical analysis. This project is an empirically grounded historical study seeking to answer historical questions such as how did the DRC negotiate race in the eighteenth century and how did it change over time? How did ideologies of race shape ideas of membership such that African Americans were largely denied that right? Why did the church remain silent on the issue of slavery? Why were the voices of those combatting racism silenced or ignored?
Although this project is not intended to be prescriptive, one of the more valuable aspects of history is its ability to help us see our present world and its alternatives through a different lens. It may also serve to remind us that we are all, to a certain degree, influenced by the biases and prejudices of our age, especially when we do not recognize them.
Stamp designed by Sara Tyson in 1986 for a Canada Post postage stamp commemorating Konwatsi'tsiaienni (Molly Brant)
I am also investigating the roles played by Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) women during the mid-late seventeenth and early-mid eighteenth century. While conducting research for my book, I came across numerous records highlighting the resilience of Kanien'kehá:ka women during a period in which disease, dispossession, and violence threatened the survival of their people. The Robert Livingston papers in the Brooklyn Historical Society, Dutch account books of the fur trade in the New-York Historical Society and the New York State Library, baptismal and marriage records from the Reformed Protestant Dutch churches of Albany and Schenectady, colonial manuscripts, council minutes, court minutes, and manorial records in the New York State Archives, and the Van Rensselaer Manor records and the papers of Sir William Johnson in the New York State Library preserve some of the history that reveals the roles played by Kanien'kehá:ka women such as Otsistókwa, Hillitie van Slyke, Moeset Tassama, Karanondo, and Konwatsi'tsiaienni. The aforementioned sources coupled with oral histories may go a long way in illuminating the ways in which Kanien'kehá:ka women helped their people navigate the troubled waters of the Northeastern Woodlands during the latter part of the early modern period.
Speaking Request / Contact
stephen.staggs@mailfence.com