From Wild Savages to Penned Hogs: Gendered Expectations and Experiences of New England Christian Indians in Eighteenth-Century War and Diplomacy

New England praying towns were peculiar places where indigenous peoples lived culturally hybridized lives. Though they were expected to shed their indigenous identities and adopt Anglo gender norms, “Christianized” Indians creatively reconciled dual gender identities that were both Indian and Christian. These identities worked well within the confines of the praying town, but times of war forced them to confront dichotomous gendered expectations from Anglo colonists and other indigenous peoples. When conflict involved Indians and colonists on opposing sides, there was little room for fluid Native identities that embraced aspects of both cultures. In wartime, Christian Indians were expected to perform particular expressions of manhood and womanhood depending on the cultural space in which they existed. This paper explores the gendered experiences of New England Christian Indian men and women during the Revolutionary and Northwest Indian Wars. Ironically, the same colonials who supported projects to “civilize” Indians, asked those same Native men to embrace their Indian “savagery” while at war. Native women, on the other hand, were expected to hold firm to their Anglicized life ways and were instructed to remain at home after they initially travelled with their men to make camp outside of Boston in 1775. Women’s confinement to the home front proved problematic later in the century when Western tribes expected to see Christian Indian women at council fires that included Christian Indian men. For this group of people, gender, ethnicity, and religion shaped how they could and could not respond to the realities of war.