William S. Simmons

Conversion from Indian to Puritan

AT the ideological level, New England Puritan society in the seventeenth century renewed itself, not through birth as had been true for most of humanity in its earlier existence, but through rebirth experienced as religious conversion. Membership in the community of living saints was determined through an analysis of the preparation of ones soul for salvation, and not by kinship, territorial, or class relationships. What the convert experienced as an emotional transition in the construction of his or her identity was simultaneously a passage from one sphere of traditional social relationships perceived as sinful, into a new sphere perceived as saintly. Some New England clergymen, notably John Eliot of Roxbury, and Thomas Mayhew, Jr. of Marthas Vineyard, took seriously the responsibility which many Puritans felt to impart the means of salvation to the Indians they encountered in the New World. In their hands, conversion became the instrument for the total reconstitution of Indian cultures. Al-

Indian Peoples of California

This chapter provides a glimpse of certain key aspects of California Indian life shortly before and after the beginning of European colonization. Although it in cludes the entire area encompassed by the present-day state of California, the focus primarily is on the peoples who inhabited the north and south Coast Ranges, the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys, and the western Sierra. In selecting and depicting the topics to be emphasized, I have tried to present a balance between a comparative approach that suggests the great diversity of native California peoples, certain shared characteristics of their cultures, and specific details of particular local communities. In constructing this account, I have given substantial attention to the actual voices of those Native Californians, missionaries, anthropologists, linguists, and others whose testimonies have shaped the understanding of California Indian life at the threshold of the historic period. Native Americans had been living in what is today known as California for perhaps fifteen thousand years before explorers from New Spain first visited by ship and gave the area its present name. In the three centuries between 1542, when the expedition of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo reconnoitered the California coast, and 1849, when immigrant gold miners flooded the remote waterways of the Sierra, all California Indians had been exposed to and overwhelmed by colonists seeking labor, land, furs, and gold. Accord ing to the most reliable estimates, the indigenous population numbered around 310,000 persons who spoke perhaps as many as one hundred mutually unintelligible languages. By the late nineteenth century the native population had declined to a low point of some twenty thousand survivors, and many language communities had begun to dis appear. While the California Indian population has been growing steadily through the twentieth century, the number of spoken languages has declined to perhaps half of the original figure, and most of these persist only among a few elderly people.

Frank Speck and "The Old Mohegan Indian Stone Cutter"

Frank Speck told a story to a Wampanoag Indian of an encounter he had with a Mohegan Indian ghost. The author interprets this story as serving two purposes. First, it created a bond between Speck and the people among whom he did research. Second, it affirmed Indian supernatural belief in a context where the scrutiny by an outside observer could possibly threaten these beliefs.