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New England missionaries and American Indian art at the Peabody Essex Museum - Salem, Massachusetts

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1999 by John R. Grimes

The quill-decorated birch-bark box shown in Plate II contains a carefully written note dated August 5, 1831, that reads:

This morn[ing] the mission family and several of our friends, accompanied S. Hall & wife, E. Ayer; the teacher, & Mrs. Campbell, the interpreter to the Lake Shore, where we united in singing the Missionary hymn....After singing we commended them by prayer;...& they left us for La Point, an island in [Lake] superior, about 600 miles distant from Mackinaw, where they commence their missionary labours.

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The box is one of the American Indian objects collected by nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries that are now in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. These objects comprise a fascinating component of the museum's American Indian collection - the oldest continuing collection of its kind in the United States.

The American Indian collection dates to the early days of the museum's predecessor, the East India Marine Society, which was founded in 1799 by a group of prominent Salem sea captains and supercargoes. Voyaging all over the world, these entrepreneurs were among the first Americans to have regular contact with many other cultures. They brought back knowledge of the wider world and artifacts that became the basis of the society's renowned museum. In 1821 the society produced one of the earliest museum catalogues in the United States.(1)

Exploration and trade often evolved hand-in-hand with evangelism. In 1812 the first missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) were ordained at the Tabernacle Church in Salem before setting sail for India. Within about two decades the ABCFM had become a global enterprise, riding a tide of Congregational revivalism.(2) Its missionary activities created significant tension in the New England theological establishment. The conservative Unitarian minister in Salem, the Reverend William Bentley (1757-1819), called the missionary zeal a "mad scheme" supported by contributions of "the most illiterate fanatics."(3) Bentley's outrage notwithstanding, the organization received large contributions from the wealthy merchant families of Salem, Newburyport, and Boston, as well as smaller sums from congregations throughout New England.

The first of the ABCFM missions to the Indians was in 1816 to the Cherokee in what became Brainerd, Tennessee, now part of Chattanooga. Cyrus Kingsbury (1786-1870), a native of New Hampshire and a graduate of the Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, was the energetic evangelist instrumental in establishing ABCFM missions to the Cherokee throughout the Southeast. The board's annual report of 1817 records that under Kingsbury the missionaries at Brainerd had built a dwelling, a boarding school for twenty-six students, a farm, and a gristmill (see Pl. VI). According to the report, Kingsbury "preached regularly each Sabbath...to an increasing congregation, which then numbered about 100" (out of a Cherokee population reported to total twelve thousand).(4)

Kingsbury and others founded a mission among the Choctaw Indians in 1818 at a remote station near the Black River in Mississippi that they named Elliott after the missionary John Eliot (1604-1690). A church was completed by March 1819, and in April a school was opened somewhat prematurely by the arrival of eight Choctaw children who had traveled 160 miles "expecting to find all things ready," according to the missionaries. Under the circumstances, "it was thought best to begin." By the end of the year the missionaries reported that there were sixty pupils of whom sixteen "could read the bible with propriety and ease."(5)

Most of the ABCFM missionaries were graduates of Williams College, Princeton College, and other prestigious schools. They were also talented linguists who set about acquiring Indian languages with great determination, speedily establishing orthographies, writing dictionaries, and translating religious texts from English into the Indian languages. Stephen Return Riggs, for example, was a graduate of Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and an ABCFM missionary to the Dakota at Lac qui Parle overlooking the Minnesota River (see Pl. I). He devoted a lifetime to the study of the Siouan languages (of which Dakota is one) and published, among other works, The Dakota First Reading Book (1839), An English Dakota Vocabulary (1852), Grammar and Dictionary of the Dakota Language (1852), and, with Thomas S. Williamson, Dakota Wowapi Wakan, the Holy Bible in Dakota (1879).(6)

Samuel Austin Worcester, another ABCFM missionary, translated the scriptures into Cherokee (see Pl. XIII) and played an important role in establishing the press used to publish the Cherokee Phoenix and Indians' Advocate, a weekly newspaper edited by Cherokees and published in New Echota, Georgia, in both Cherokee and English. It was the first American Indian periodical in the country.(7) The Cherokee section was printed in a system of symbols representing the eighty-six sounds found in the Cherokee language. The syllabary was invented in 1821 by George Guess (c. 1770-1843), who was also known as Sequoyah. The editor of the Cherokee Phoenix between 1829 and 1832 was another Cherokee Elias Boudinot (see Pl. XIII).

New England missionaries and American Indian art at the Peabody Essex Museum - Salem, Massachusetts

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1999 by John R. Grimes

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