Cherokee reckonings: Native preachers, Protestant missionaries, and the shaping of an American Indian religious culture, 1801--1838

This dissertation explores the early nineteenth century missions to the Cherokee nation, which lasted from 1801 until Cherokee Removal in 1838-39, and reveals that the almost forty-year-long encounter proved remarkably transformative for both evangelists and Indians. Missionary preaching utterly remade the Cherokees' religious landscape. Christian evangelists brought unprecedented religious diversity to the Indian people by introducing various brands of Christianity to the Cherokees. The new religious communities that the missionaries established inspired unparalleled religious experimentation among Cherokees, who engaged various Christian communities while still maintaining traditional Cherokee practices.;The Cherokees, in turn, significantly transformed the missionaries' campaigns. Several Cherokee Christians began to preach their own versions of the missionaries' gospel message to fellow natives and launched a competing Christian movement. Cherokee proselytizers attracted far greater numbers of Indian congregants to Cherokee-led worship than did missionaries to their own services. The apparent success of the Cherokee evangelists inspired missionaries to invite native evangelists to join their mission campaigns. Once Cherokees began to preach from mission pulpits, native proselytizers began to draw scores more Cherokee worshippers to the missions. Thus, Cherokee evangelists broadened the missionaries' influence, but, in sharing Cherokee interpretations of Christianity, they also altered the missionaries' message.;Moreover, Cherokees successfully distracted missionaries from their most basic evangelical goals. As the Cherokees' Removal crisis came to a head, Cherokees began to pressure missionaries to convert their religious crusade into a political campaign to oppose Cherokee Removal. Thus Cherokees eventually forced missionaries to become political activists and to postpone their efforts to spread Christianity among the Cherokees.