Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
History and Religion
New England Women and the Geographies of Power (Part Three)

New England Women and the Geographies of Power (Part Three)

Last updated on: March 31, 2023 at 2:00 am by Joey Cochran

0 Comments

New England Women and the Geographies of Power (Part Three) 2023-03-29T16:36:10-04:00 Joey Cochran

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Deerfield was attacked on February 29, 1704 during Queen Anne’s War. Four dozen French soldiers and seven score Mohawk Indians assailed the town. Over 140 Deerfield inhabitants were taken captive and put upon a forced march to Fort Chambly in Canada. One cause for the attack included an attempt to take captive into the wilderness the minister of Deerfield, John Williams, who might be exchanged for coveted captives the French wished released from the English during Queen Anne’s War.

A pair of Williams’s children, John (6 years) and Jerusha (1 month), were brutally slain during the attack on Deerfield. Eunice Stoddard Williams, John’s wife, perished on the forced March North into the French Canadian wilderness. John Williams, the minister of Deerfield, and a few of his children were later ransomed back to the English, released, and returned to British imperial civilization.

But not all were redeemed from the wilderness. Eunice Stoddard Williams’ namesake, who was seven years old at captivity, assimilated with the Indians never to return to the English way of life. She married a Mohawk, Arosen, and had three children. Called by her Mohawk name, Kanenstenhawi (Eunice Williams), converted to Roman Catholicism and was baptized Marguerite. All signs in the documentary record indicate that she renegotiated her devout Christianity into a new space and expression of it. While she was no longer Puritan, it appears that she was a wife and mother, who passed on her sincere Christian belief to her children.

Regarding this astonishing cultural conversion, Kathryn Reklis notably remarks, “The coupling of Roman Catholicism and Indian alliance as a fate worse than death in this family drama suggests, albeit primarily in terms of conflict, that Puritan New England was not a self-enclosed enclave but was in fact deeply immersed in the imperial experiments that forced cultures into intimate proximities” (Kathryn Reklis, Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination, 47.)

Nonetheless, the product of Eunice’s cultural conversion from this clash of cultures was an unwelcome outcome to her family. How could they let the Indians claim one of their own? How could they let the Catholics claim one of their own? How could they let the wilderness claim one of their own?

Her father John Williams, grandfather Solomon Stoddard, and other leading men of New England tried for years to redeem her. Her brother, Stephen Williams, came the closest to successfully redeeming her. In adulthood, Kanenstenhawi visited him on numerous occasions, even bringing her children for an extended stay through a winter.

After her family forsook her, John Schuyler was the first Englishman to broker a meeting with Kanenstenhawi in adulthood. He met with her and her husband, Arosen, in the quarters of the superior priest at the mission, Cholonec. After which he wrote a memorial of the encounter. He described her as “looking very poor in body, bashfull in the face, but proved harder than steel in her breast” (John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 104.)

Kanenstenhawi refused to speak but two words during the whole encounter. She stood silent as she listened to Schuyler’s appeals that she return to her home and people of New England. After hearing the whole plea, she responded: “Jaghte oghte” (Maybe not), which was the polite decline of the Mohawk.

John Demos provides a piercing interpretation of why Kanenstenhawi was set against returning to New England. It’s a rather striking interpretation worth sharing at length. It’s truly best understood in the context of having heard the entire account of the captivity. However, I think Demos’s interpretation gets the message across. After the raid on Deerfield and the successive march to Fort Chambly, little seven year old Eunice found refuge in the wilderness after her father forsook her there.

WE WHO READ this “memoriall” almost three centuries later can easily understand the feelings of its author. But what about its subject, the unredeemed captive herself? What were her feelings—held tight, though they were, behind the “steel in her breast”? Her husband gives us a clue, with his reference to her father’s remarriage. And there is, as well, a certain logic in her situation. Otherwise we can only speculate—only imagine—but that much, at least, we must try. So the trader would be here, this very afternoon. She had talked with the headmen, with the priests, with her family: all had assured her that she would be kept safe. Her husband would be with her the whole time; a priest would see the trader first and explain her position. Her home now was the village; her people were the Kahnawake. She would not go back to her English father, not now, not ever.

Her English father: what claim could he possibly make on her anyway? With a clarity born of old bitterness, she remembered the last times she had seen him.

She remembered his coming to the village when she was still a small child—feeling scared and strange, and gripped inside by the ties of her old life. She had begged him then to take her away, but he had failed her utterly. A prayer; some empty words of comfort; a sorrowful good-bye. In her mind’s eye she could still see the back of his bowed head, the heaviness in his step, as he trudged off toward the river.

She remembered the long journey through the forest, up from Deerfield. At first, she had clung to him tightly, as a squirrel clings to a tree; but weak as he was, and clumsy on his snowshoes, he could not walk for the two of them. Then a kind, strong man from the village—a man she knew now as her uncle Hatironta—had swept her up and set her atop his own broad shoulders. And in that position she had traveled almost the entire route to Montreal. When, from time to time, she had turned her head for a glimpse to the rear, she had seen her father lurching heavily through the drifts, falling back, gasping, calling out for rest. The Kahnawake had laughed and joked about him. This tall man with the fine clothes and finer words, this great leader of the “Bastonnais,” this favorite of God: how he had been brought low! Her sorrow for him had turned to pity, and finally to shame.

And there was more. The journey had begun with a terror so extreme that her memory could not sort out the details. But strangely disconnected images remained—images that included herself as though seen by someone else. Herself shocked from sleep, and flung out of bed, in a pitch-dark room—as intruders smashed in the door. Herself squeezed with her English brothers and sisters (shadowy figures now) beneath a bench against a wooden wall. Herself amidst a disordered throng in the meetinghouse, prisoners awaiting an unknown fate. Herself frozen on a trail by a winding river—what trail? what river?—as her mother—what mother?—was led off to be killed. Her father was there, too: there in the dark room, struggling vainly to fire his gun; there in the meetinghouse, eyes raised toward an apparently indifferent God; there by the riverside, helplessly bidding her mother good-bye. (Had he really taken another wife, so soon after his return?) Faithless, forgetful father: protector who could not protect, comforter who would not comfort, caretaker who did not care.

All that was behind her now, far behind. Yet the trader’s coming had brought it back, like the embers of an old fire stirred to life beneath the ash. The priests said she must see him, must give him a hearing. All right: she would see, she would hear. But they couldn’t make her speak. Silence would be her reply; its meaning would be clear enough. (John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 108–09)

Demos leaves us with a miserable impression of the Reverend, John Williams, leading figure of the frontier town of Deerfield. He seemed so ill prepared, in body and spirit, for the events that occurred that fateful day on February 29 and the weeks following during the march to Fort Chambly. No doubt, it took much more than a sturdy, spiritually minded soul to endure the kind of life these early New Englanders lived, on the frontier of the Atlantic World. Some were prepared to subdue the wilderness, while other were ill equipped and prepared to endure what the wilderness would demand of them. John Williams, the minister of Deerfield, was the latter sort. Ill-equipped. Ill-prepared.

Yet, somehow, his little seven year old daughter, Eunice, was nurtured by the wilderness. In the wilderness, she cultivated the fortitude to survive the trauma she endured. Upon pieceing together the scattered information we have on Kanenstenhawi, it is apparent that she thrived in the wilderness and navigated a different way of being than the Puritan way. Kanenstenhawi’s choice to remain in the wilderness conveyed that not all who wander into the wilderness are lost.

Kanenstenhawi’s life provided a counter-narrative that threatened and challenged the message of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity account. Rowlandson’s account vindicated the British imperial way of life. It upheld the role of the woman sitting at her hearth in her home. Her account vilified the Native way of life in the wilderness, and exulted in how she was delivered from the dangers and trials of the wilderness. One can see why the British worked feverishly to recover Kanenstenhawi from exile in the wilderness.

Both Puritan women were wrenched from the hallowed space of British domesticity. While one was a mother and the other a child, they both faced significant challenges and had to learn to survive and thrive in an unfamiliar geography. The experience shaped both of them and clarified what they wanted for themselves. Both were given the opportunity to return to the domestic sphere, once they had sampled the ways of the wilderness, but only one returned.

Both derived power from the wilderness and contentment from the home. Mary Rowlandson proclaimed victory over the wilderness and sought solace in her return to British domesticity. Kanenstenhawi conquered the wilderness by embracing it, and found contentment in rejecting British domesticity.

History is filled with stories of bold women like Mary Rowlandson and Kanenstenhawi, women whose circumstances demanded that their devout Christian faith would have to negotiate new and difficult geographies that would test the mettle of their faith.

Some who have had the patience to follow each part of this series might feel compelled to ask the question: Who is the better woman? I think that is the wrong question to ask.

A better series of questions include: What are the geographies of power that women have to negotiate today? How are they negotiating those geographies of power as women? Are women being ineluctably thrust or exiled from one geography of power to another? Why?

History and Religion

Previous Post

March 30, 2023

Reading the Rabbis

Next Post

April 3, 2023 Christ or Moloch?: A Reflection on Nonviolence and the Civil Rights Movement

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Life Force is a guilty pleasure of mine! Not a great film, but a fun ..."

philipjenkins

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

"I love horror but would have to acclimate back to Lovecraft and especially Machen. Have ..."

Terry

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

"Very good point about MacDonald.I am certainly a Machen fan!"

philipjenkins

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

"The Scottish author George MacDonald integrated fairy world into his fiction in a way that ..."

Terry

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe Guest Post guest post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who saw the vision of the valley of dry bones?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel Daniel