Black Indians and Freedmen

Reviewed by: Black Indians and Freedmen: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816–1916 by Christina Dickerson-Cousin Nakia D. Parker Christina Dickerson-Cousin. Black Indians and Freedmen: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816–1916. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 252 pp. Paper, $26.00. In Black Indians and Freedmen, historian Christine Dickerson-Cousin traces the history of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church and its efforts to reach Indigenous, Black, and Black Indigenous Americans through the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The monograph, comprising seven chapters, is the first work to take an in-depth look at Indigenous involvement in Black religion. Dickerson-Cousin argues that although the AME church is a historically Black institution often regarded as a "racially monolithic organization" (3), leaders of the church, including founder Richard Allen, envisioned the denomination as a "racially and ethnically diverse" religious body from its inception (3). Using a wide array of sources, including church records, newspapers, slave narratives, Dawes applications for citizenship, and oral histories, Dickerson-Cousin demonstrates the important role the AME church played in fostering inclusivity as well as political, social, and economic activism in Native and Black communities. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze outreach efforts to Indigenous people, exploring why many Native individuals converted and became clergy. These sections focus on the North and Midwest and emphasize the cooperation between Black and Indigenous church members in the early years of the AME church. Chapter 1 examines the evangelizing efforts of Richard Allen, as well as John Stewart, a free Black man who created the first permanent mission among the Wyandotte, and Jarena Lee, the first Black woman allowed to preach in the AME church and an influential abolitionist who preached to the Seneca and Wyandotte. These case studies, Dickerson-Cousin contends, prove that "an ethos of ethnic diversity informed AME identity" (13) and correct the oversights of scholars who have "underappreciated the extent to which Black and Native people built intercultural networks during the early republic period" (13). Chapter 2 chronicles the lives and ministries of To-wis-car-ga (Thomas Sunrise), an Oneida man who became the first Native minister ordained in a Black church and John Hall, an Ojibwe man who exhorted Indigenous people in Michigan and Wisconsin to convert to African Methodism. Dickerson-Cousin surmises that the AME church attracted [End Page 268] individuals like To-wis-car-ga and Hall because of its "tradition of self-government and resistance of white hegemony" (10) in spite of rampant (and justified) suspicion of Christianity in Indigenous communities. Native worshippers tended to view their fellow Black parishioners as "brother-cousins," a term created by John Hall that demonstrates his belief that "the common struggle that Black and Native people faced created a brotherly connection and a mutual understanding" (50). The remaining chapters examine Indian Territory and other regions in the West. In chapter 3, Dickerson-Cousin coins the apt term "African Methodist Migration" (AMM) to describe the development and importance of the denomination to Black migration and settlement of the West in the late nineteenth century (57). Scholarly discussions of Black life in the West, like Nell Irvin Painter's foundational 1977 study Exodusters, usually center on the prospect of economic autonomy and the desire to flee the racist oppression of white southerners as motives for African American migration westward. Dickerson-Cousin makes a compelling claim that religion is a vital yet underappreciated aspect of the historiography. AME clergy provided crucial financial and civic support that allowed all-Black towns in places like Oklahoma and Kansas to flourish. It cannot be ignored that these accomplishments occurred on Native land. Some Indigenous people, especially among the "Five Nations" in Indian Territory who had practiced chattel slavery, resented and attempted to contain what they considered to be incursions on their land, often violently. Dickerson-Cousin insists that the Black Americans who participated in the AMM "were not consciously engaged in the colonial enterprise that the United States government was carrying out in the West. Rather, they were an oppressed people seeking refuge and opportunity" (67). Strict proponents of the theory of settler colonialism will likely disagree with Dickerson-Cousin's justification

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