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Bernd C. Peyer. The Tutor'd Mind. Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America. Amhurst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1997. 420 + xii pp. Notes, index. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $19.95.
In the recent boom of American Indian history, one area of that has not received sufficient attention is the role that acculturated, Christian Indians have played as negotiators between their Indian cultures and the new dominant culture that confronted them with the onset of European colonization. Perhaps this is because some historians may see these Indians as "selling out" to colonialism, somehow losing their authentic "Indianness." In this rather dense work, Bernd C. Peyer looks to explode this myth by analyzing the lives and writings of four Indian missionary-writers who lived in the years before the Civil War. With the onset of the Puritan "praying villages," American Indians along the eastern seaboard became the first to experience what Peyer terms "internal colonialism." However, this fact does not relegate Indians to passive roles in an unjust system. The missionary-writers Peyer investigates not only react to this system, but seek to use it to their (and their peoples') advantage. The actions of these early converts seem to place them in the same intellectual category as the latenineteenth- and twentieth-century assimilationist reformers who...