Religion
Pointer
Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
Explores how Native Americans influenced the Christianity of their colonizers
INDIANA
University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis http://iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796
Encounters of the Spirit
Religion in North America
Encounters of the Spirit
Historians have long been aware that the encounter with Europeans affected all aspects of Native American life. But were Indians the only ones changed by these cross-cultural meetings? Might the newcomers’ ways, including their religious beliefs and practices, have also been altered amid their myriad contacts with native peoples? In Encounters of the Spirit, Richard W. Pointer takes up these intriguing questions in an innovative study of the religious encounter between Indians and Euro-Americans in early America. Exploring a series of episodes across the three centuries of the colonial era and stretching from New Spain to New France and the English settlements, he finds that the flow of cultural influence was more often reciprocal than unidirectional. Richard W. Pointer is Professor of History and Department Chair at Westmont College. He is author of Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of EighteenthCentury Religious Diversity (available from Indiana University Press).
Native Americans and European Colonial Religion INDIANA
Richard W. Pointer
Cover photograph: El es Dios! Statue at Convento de La Cruz, Querétaro, Mexico. Photo by Bill Wright.
ENCOUNTERS OF THE SPIRIT
RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
ENCOUNTERS OF THE
SPIRIT Native Americans and European Colonial Religion
Richard W. Pointer
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
Portions of the author’s article ‘‘The Sounds of Worship: Nahua Music Making and Colonial Catholicism in Sixteenth-Century Mexico’’ (Fides et Historia, Summer/Fall 2002) are reprinted herein by permission of Ronald Wells, editor of Fides et Historia. Portions of the author’s chapter ‘‘From Imitating Language to a Language of Imitation: Puritan-Indian Discourse in Early New England’’ (Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., Puritanism and Its Discontents) are reprinted herein by permission of Associated University Presses. Portions of the author’s article ‘‘ ‘Poor Indians’ and the ‘Poor in Spirit’: The Indian Impact on David Brainerd’’ (New England Quarterly, September 1994) are reprinted herein by permission of the publisher of The New England Quarterly. This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail
[email protected] ∫ 2007 by Richard W. Pointer All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or ut