Study Guide Death
Table of Contents
Overview
At its most basic level, Indian Converts is an attempt to understand death and to define what death means for a community of readers. Each of the biographies included necessarily ended in death, not only because Puritans felt that only at the moment of death could a life be truly evaluated, but also because Puritans believed it was at the moment of physical death that people passed into eternal life. For Puritans and non-Puritans alike, death has the potential to seem hopeless, chaotic, or unknown; the work of Indian Converts, then, is to assuage those fears both by providing the mourner with evidence that the deceased was “saved” and advice on how the reader might joined this community of the saved (“saints”) before it was too late.
Indian Converts is not alone in its focus on the deceased. It would not be inaccurate to describe Puritans as having a culture of death. Most of Puritan art and aesthetics is tied to funerary practice: the most elaborate carvings are on gravestones, and some of the most moving and popular poetry was either elegiac or warned of coming Judgment Day. This aesthetic slowly developed and changed over time, and it often reflects the changing theology of the Puritan community. While Puritan strongholds characterized New England’s spiritual development as “decay” or weakening, their more liberal brethren viewed the shift as a gradual enlightenment. In either case the shift is reflected in the material artifacts that surrounded death: for example, while early gravestones prominently display winged death’s heads, skeletons, and hourglasses, by the late eighteenth century winged cherubs had become more popular. Apocalyptic images and rhetoric waxed and waned in response to the rise and fall of New England millenarianism.
The illnesses and wars that ravaged the Puritan colonies also decimated New England’s Algonquian communities. Wampanoag spiritual leaders turned to both Native and white practices to heal their communities and console them after death. Although Indian Converts suggests that Wampanoags either practiced traditional religion or Christianity, burials from this era often reveal that Wampanoags hedged their bets and used both systems. It is also quite likely that unlike the British, Wampanoags did not view the religious systems as mutually exclusive. In any case, the apocalyptic rhetoric of the colonists must have appealed to many Wampanoags: the catastrophes waged upon their community were easily read within this end world framework. For the many Wampanoags who had lost much or all of their family, the Puritan belief that death was not an end but a beginning must have provided some much needed consolation. The artifacts in this section can help readers assess the extent to which the funeral and deaths reflect standard Puritan and/or Wampanoag ideologies.
Items Related to Death in the Archive
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