Autonomy, Not Assimilation Waban and the Praying Indian Political Experiment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony

Abstract

<p>The first missionary efforts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony attracted the support of an aspiring Native American leader, Waban, who would become known as the first convert to Christianity in the colony. Waban's distinctively limited confessions of faith, as related in the writings of Puritan missionaries, suggest he was pursuing a political solution to the question of how a displaced, shrunken Native American people, were to live alongside a rapidly growing settler community. His answer was a self-governing township that mixed traditional Native American practices with the structures of Puritan community governance. But his desire for independent authority and his incomplete acceptance of the Bay Colony's mainstream Puritan theology marginalized him and cleared the way for the Bay Colony's leaders' own political program for Native peoples: separation and subordination.</p>