American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1643, John Eliot (1604-1690), the Roxbury, Massachusetts minister and millenarian better known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” began to learn an Algonquian dialect in preparation for missionary work. After three years of study, he started to preach to the Indians in Massachusetts Bay, and he continued to work among them until the late 1680s, when his advanced age no longer permitted him to leave Roxbury. Over the course of these forty years he attracted some eleven hundred Indians, primarily members of the Massachusett and Nipmuck tribes, to the Christian religion; established fourteen reservations (”praying towns”) for his converts; and produced for the Indians’ use a number of Algonquian language works, including a translation of the Bible. During the past twenty-five years, Eliot’s missionary career has received considerable critical attention from historians, anthropologists, religionists, and literary critics. Since 1965, substantial portions of eighteen articles, chapters in nine books, and a biography have been devoted to him, and a modern critical edition of his Indian Dialogues has appeared, as well as an anthology which generously represents him. Three major reasons for this multidisciplinary interest in Eliot can be identified. First, in the 1960s students of American Puritanism began to look for topics left unexamined by Perry Miller, whose interpretive agenda had dominated the field since the 1930s. Miller did not explore Puritan-Indian relations, and he rarely mentioned Eliot in his writings. A second reason is the academic interest in American Indians and other neglected subjects of investigation that was inspired by the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s and also by the Annales school of historiography. This interest has extended not only to the missions of Eliot and other Europeans, but also to trade, law, demography, land, military history, archeology, diplomacy, and other aspects of pre- and postcontact Indian life in early America. A third reason is the growing scholarly concern with late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestant (especially Puritan) millenarianism. No fewer than fourteen monographs devoted in whole or large part to the subject have appeared since 1969.