“Native Performances Of Christianity: Survivance In Eighteenth Century Mohawk Country” William Hart In Conversation With David Silverman

Wednesday, November 17, 2021, at 7:00 PM ET

Approximately 60 minutes

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This online event is free, but registration is required. You will be sent an email with a link and instructions on how to join the event upon registration

In this program, William Hart will discuss with David Silverman the significance and meaning of eighteenth-century Mohawks who performed Christianity and why. Hart’s findings, published in his 2020 book, “For the Good of Their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country, indicate that the old soubriquet of “faithful Mohawks” is no longer useful. Rather, Hart suggests that the choices most baptized Mohawks made over assimilating Christian practices—submission to baptism, praying, singing hymns, taking communion, and acquiring literacy—constituted “performances of” rather than “conversions to” the faith, performances directed at themselves; to their unbaptized brethren; and to European missionaries, commissioners, and settlers to signify not only reciprocity and alliance with the English and other Europeans, but also to reveal new ways of being Mohawk. In short, at the core of performing Christianity lay the survivance of Mohawk life and culture in a changing world.

William B. Hart, professor emeritus of history at Middlebury College, has lectured and published widely on the intersection of race, religion, and identity during the Colonial and Early Republic eras. He is most interested in examining Black Americans and Native Americans, who navigated life between worlds, as exemplified in his recent book, “For the Good of Their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020). Hart is currently writing a biography of Alexander L. Twilight, the first person of color to receive a college degree from an American college—Middlebury College in 1823.

David J. Silverman, professor of history at George Washington University, is the author of several books on Native American, colonial American, and American racial history, including This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019). He is the recent recipient of the William Hickling Prescott Award for Excellence in Historical Writing. A committed public historian, Silverman has consulted with multiple museums, state and national parks, tribal nations, and community organizations.