Week 3: Women's Indian Captivity Narratives

Week 3: Women's Indian Captivity Narratives

So, if you haven't already figured it out, my trend throughout this blog is aimed at Good, Evil, and peace.


Please don’t take offense to anything I write in my blogs. I have a bunch of issues with structured religions. I tend to lash out. Take everything with a grain of salt if you tend to be offended.

The Slave Narrative of Mary Rowlenson really irritated me. Her feelings of superiority to her captors because she felt “God was on her side” seemed like the epitome of the issues that still underlie most of the socio-cultural issues in our nation. In my honest opinion, Puritans (and Christians, for that matter) in general feel compelled to “purify” other cultures that have their own religions. Who says other religions are wrong? Why can’t it all be right? Just because something is different does not mean that it is wrong or evil. Apparently, not much was learned from the witch trials.

From the Native American’s perspectives, the puritans were the invaders, the corrupters of their land, which they worshiped among other things. Yet, the self-righteous puritans thought so little of the Native people, that they underestimated their beliefs and values. Whenever I study early American history, I get frustrated. We idealized the first thanksgiving and the first relationships with the Native Americans, yet we don’t really understand what the puritans caused. They destroyed the land and started what we are only starting to realize is bad for the planet in the past few years. Yes, I understand America paid restitution to the Native Americans and gave them some land back, but it’s more of a nice gesture than anything else.

Christianity is one of the only religions that feels the need to save other people instead of accepting. This built-in prejudice is what founded America. Because of this, we can never have equality unless we reevaluate our entire national foundation. The Native American people had their own culture before the first people landed in the new world from Europe. But because the puritans did not understand their culture, or try to, and understand how they were affecting the Native Americans, the Native Americans had no choice but to use brutality to defend what they thought was right. Not that violence was the right choice, but people can only take so much oppression. It’s human nature.

Reading this story brought up some of the feelings that I went though when I first read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. (If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it!) When I read that book, I felt like someone had slapped me with the truth. To me, Christian missionaries are always portrayed as the good guys. They went into poor villages, helped build schools, and gave clean water and other things. Achebe completely flips this scenario on its end. His story is from the point of view of the tribal people the missionaries came to visit. He describes the horror that the missionaries brought if the people refused to convert to Christianity. Either you converted or they burnt your village, in so many words. Now I’m sure this isn’t how it is now, but at one time, Christians believed that if other people weren’t with them, then they were against them. This pitted Christians against everyone else, just as the puritans pitted themselves against the Native Americans.
To the puritans the Native Americans were played into their own views of religion and what “God’s plan” was. The Native Americans were supposed to do what they did because God wanted them to help strengthen the religion of the puritans. I have great issue with this line of thinking. To try to fit everything into a sort of mould because it suits your own version of life. This is the same as common day stereotypes and social structures. (See Week 4)

Do you think I’m reaching here? I don’t know if my criticism of structured intolerant religions has blinded me. I know I may be attacking Christianity, and it may be all religion in general, I’m not sure. Just working with what I have. What do you think is the natural course of events if religion that has the “if you’re not with us you’re against us” mentality?

To add to this idea, I want to shift back to religion, again I apologize.

Early Christians, like those of the colonies of Mary Rowlenson, thought they were all that and a bag of chips. That’s why many of the puritans left England in the first place, religious freedoms. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM! Yet throughout history, we can definitely see that these people did not believe in any religious freedom of their own. It was as with Achebe’s book, “Join us or Die”. In the book Utopias in America by Jyotsna Sreenivasan in the section called “Persecution”, the details of all religious persecution are laid out. “The Ephrata Cloister, which lived communally in Pennsylvania from 1732 to 1786, believed in keeping Saturday as their Sabbath. They were arrested and fined for working on Sundays. In addition, male settlers, angry because their wives and daughters were attracted to the community, beat the Ephrata leader several times” (Sreenivasan 56). I know this isn’t exactly the same time as Rowlenson, but it’s what they became. The evolution of the colonies has lead from not accepting the Indians to not accepting each other, on the same merits that our nation was colonized.

I really like the idea of Utopia and I completely believe that America is one, and has many sub-utopias inside.

Sreenivasan, Jyotsna. Utopias in American History. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2008. Print.