For the Good of their Souls

Reviewed by: “For the Good of their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart Erin Kramer “For the Good of their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country. By William B. Hart. Native Americans of the Northeast. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. 298 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. Though the Haudenosaunee nations of the eighteenth century once received much of early American historians’ scholarly attention, they have held a much less prominent position in scholarship of the past twenty years.1 Daniel K. Richter’s formative The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League during the Era of European Colonization (1992) continues to provide a foundational narrative of Haudenosaunee history in the eighteenth century, and though many articles and book chapters have enriched knowledge of Haudenosaunee lifeways, economic networks, gender roles, diplomacy, and experiences of the American Revolution, this critical era is in need of more sustained examination.2 William B. Hart’s “For the [End Page 149] Good of their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country, which spans the eighteenth century, proposes to contribute to a new generation of scholarship that builds from and reassesses the work of Richter and his predecessors. By applying performance theory to Mohawk religious practice, Hart argues both that Christianity became a means of building “imagined faith communities” (4) with the English that helped protect Haudenosaunee sovereignty and that their apparent embrace of it should be interpreted—drawing on the work of Gerald Vizenor—as a method of “survivance” (11).3 Rather than seeking to discern what Mohawks believed or the sincerity of their “conversion” to Christianity, Hart contends that we should consider their actions as deliberate and practiced performances of Christianity.4 As he notes, “Through rehearsed behavior, one ‘becomes’ rather than ‘is.’ In the process, performance inscribes on the performer his or her condition of liminality, of becoming, of emerging as something or someone else” (5). Adapting Michel Foucault, he argues that Mohawks enacted religious alternation for the Anglican missionaries surveying these performances and that they therefore performed Christianity in some circumstances and Haudenosaunee religion in others, rather than “syncretically” (7) blending them. Performing Christianity, then, became a mode of survivance, and it allowed Mohawks to enter “into the imagined community of the English on their terms” (17). Hart applies theories of performance, imagined communities, and survivance in novel ways to missionary records from eighteenth-century New York, determining that Mohawks chose how and whether to engage with Anglican missions. He traces a century of missionaries and diplomats who disagreed about how best to “convert” the Haudenosaunee nations and their various efforts to teach Christianity as well as English to Mohawk children. Jesuit missions to Mohawks in New France have received many scholarly treatments, but the Anglicans of New York and their competing forms of proselytization remain understudied, and Hart brings to light new stories of how these missions served English imperial goals and diplomacy. Language, literacy, texts, and catechisms are particularly fertile ground for performance [End Page 150] theory and studies of survivance, and the sections of the book that address these sources and themes provide new and important insights. The act of teaching is particularly significant to Hart’s argument, and his chapter about Mohawk schoolmasters and catechists contains the book’s most interesting analysis. Further, Hart’s “multidisciplinary” (20) approach shines through in the use of linguistics to discuss the work of translators, the importance (and lack thereof) of religious texts translated into Mohawk and English, and the power associated with literacy. Much of Hart’s previous scholarship focused on intermediaries and go-betweens, and so it is no surprise that he gives the matter of translation, and the role of translators, careful attention.5 In the section about “discourse brokers” (131), he offers a thorough understanding of the multiple layers of translation involved in the act of proselytizing and receiving religious instruction, as performed by both Euro-American missionaries and Mohawk catechists. Despite the introduction’s claims that the book will be a work of Mohawk ethnohistory, these examples mark the high point of Hart’s engagement with Mohawk perspectives because the book’s materials

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