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Chapter 6 asks how, in the context of King Philip's (or Metacom's) War, martyrdom rhetoric contributed to the reformulation of colonial and Native American identities. Colonists saw Algonquian offenses as yet another of the Antichrist's attacks on the saints. New Englanders became less and less interested in distinguishing between friendly and enemy Indians, eventually exiling the remaining Praying Indian communities to Deer Island, where they almost starved. Remarkably, the Massachusetts magistrate for Indian affairs, Daniel Gookin, attempted to defend Praying Indians from harassment and violence by incorporating their stories of suffering into the broader history of Christian martyrdom.

This article examines the development, form and cultural significance of Natick, the first Native American Praying Town founded in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The establishment of Natick was a key moment in the process that led to the gathering of the first Native American church in New England. It later became the model for another ten Praying Towns in the region, suggesting that it was considered by contemporary missionaries to have fulfilled its aims. The form, construction and appearance of Natick were used by supporters of the missionary work as proofs of the Praying Indian inhabitants’ sincerity, and the genuine nature of their conversion to Christianity.

This chapter travels back to the winter of 1652, when ten Native Americans recounted how their conversion “felt like”. The record of these testimonies was published in Puritan missionaries John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew's Tears of Repentance. This evidence of faith of the Praying Indian souls—“the poor captivated men”—was able to reach a wider audience than ever imagined before. These missionaries promoted a diversity of tongues and voices thus reinforcing a belief in a Universal Christianity, which regarded Indian languages derived from an event in Babel. Three pamphlets—Henry Whitfield's Light Appearing (1651) and Strength out of Weaknesse (1652) set the stage for Eliot and Mayhew's Tears of Repentance—were published in early 1950s to establish the account of these conversions.

This chapter outlines some of the benefits of collaborative research. It draws on the experience gained and the lessons learned from close to a decade’s collaboration between the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Nipmuc Nation of Massachusetts. Close collaboration as part of the Hassanamesit Woods Project between Nipmuc archaeologist Dr. D. Rae Gould of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a member of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc, and the author has resulted in numerous ontological shifts. One of the more noteworthy has been a reassessment of the history of the seventeenth-century “Praying Indian” communities of colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut that have always been viewed as having been “established” by English missionary John Eliot. Such a view, long held by historians and archaeologists alike, was challenged as an outgrowth of collaborative dialogue resulting in a reassessment of notions of community and deeper connections to traditional Nipmuc lands. As a result, research examined deeper connections between the seventeenth-century community of Hassanamesit and earlier Nipmuc use of the area. Through a series of analytical studies, it was determined that cultural and spatial continuity could be demonstrated between recent Nipmuc communities and a deeper past.

This chapter presents an “inside out” reading of Mary Rowlandson’s famous narrative of her captivity during King Philip’s War, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682). It focuses on nine passages that she recounts reading in a Bible that an Indian bestowed upon her early in her captivity, and therefore pertain to the diegesis, or narrated action, instead of the commentary on her experience. It posits that these compose a coherent, primordial interpretation of her captivity, issued, in her understanding, by God, who directed her selection of scriptures, and, through these, influenced her perspective and behavior. Rowlandson defines the boundaries of her discourse community by contrasting her orthodox literacy practices with those of the Christian or Praying Indians.

Chapter 6 tracks a shift in the morphology of conversion, as colonists replaced metaphors of spiritual pilgrimage with the language of new birth. This transition, manifest in conversion narratives recorded by Thomas Shepard, Marth Gerrish, and the Quaker Elizabeth Webb, was enabled by the Halfway Covenant and the tears of Praying Indians performing the anguish of conviction for the benefit of New England clergy. Accelerating this movement from pilgrimage to new birth and evangelicalism was Jonathan Edwards, whose proto-feminist hermeneutics made Eve a type of every Christian convert; thanks to the publication of Edwards’s private notebooks, his developing conception and use of the new birth metaphor can be traced back to early readings of Genesis. In this limited sense, the transatlantic awakenings spurred on by Edwards’s emphasis on the new birth are yet another manifestation of the early modern desire to pattern life after the paradise of Adam and Eve.