The Moravians: John Heckewelder

John Heckewelder

This is the third and final post in my series on the Moravian missionaries to the Native Americans during the 18th and early 19th centuries. These men and women were saints of sturdy faith, indeed, and they suffered many trials in their devotion to spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ. Like all humans, they also had flaws, as we’d expect. When he was only a youth, the subject of today’s post, John Heckewelder, went to the Muskingum River in Ohio in the spring of 1762 as Christian Frederick Post’s assistant in his mission to the Delaware Indians in the Ohio Territory. Like John Mark, the young man who accompanied Paul and Silas on their first missionary journey only to turn back when the going got tough, Heckewelder fled that fall when the Indians became increasingly hostile toward the Whites. At the end of the year, however, with the conflict known as Pontiac’s War looming, threats against Post’s life finally forced him to flee as well.

Heckewelder spent the rest of his life as a missionary among the Delaware at a crucial period of their history, while they were progressively being driven from their lands in Pennsylvania into Ohio, and eventually to Ontario. His book, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, which published in 1818, is a classic work that offers readers and historians insights into the history and lives of the Delaware even today. I own a copy of it myself and am using it to do research for my historical series.

Moravian Baptism of Indian Converts

Heckewelder was born in England in 1743. His parents were German Moravians, and in 1754 they moved their family to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the headquarters of the Moravian Church in North America. Young Heckewelder grew up among fellow believers who ministered to the Delaware living along the Susquehanna and Allegheny rivers. Heckewelder’s parents apprenticed him to a cooper as a boy, but in 1762 he accompanied Post on his journey into the Ohio Territory as his assistant. Under Post’s guidance and later that of David Zeisberger, Heckewelder lived among the Delaware Indians throughout the 1760s and 1770s, becoming fluent in their language and intimately acquainted with their culture.

After the French and Indian War, the colonists in Pennsylvania were hostile toward all Indians because of the devastating raids they had suffered. English settlers and soldiers also continued to move into the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains claimed by the Indians, pushing the original inhabitants ever farther west. In the early 1760s a Delaware prophet named Neolin came to prominence. He told of a vision in which the Master of Life had commanded him to call the Indians to abandon the ways of the Whites and cast them out of the Ohio lands, which he had given to them. Only then would they gain the blessing of the Master of Life, and he would restore their power and prosperity. In 1763, under the influence of this teaching, many of the tribes renewed their attacks against the English, led by the Ottawa leader Pontiac and the Seneca leader Guyasuta in a war that came to be known as Pontiac’s War. The Moravian missionaries and their Indian converts, who like the Quakers and Amish were nonresistant, found themselves under suspicion—and often attack—by both the English and the Indians.

Gnadenhutten Massacre

The American Revolution made their situation even worse. Although the Moravians remained neutral, the Americans suspected them of aiding the British because they would not fight on their side. At the same time the British accused Heckewelder and Zeisberger of treason, claiming they passed intelligence from the Indians to the American rebels. The two missionaries were arrested and hauled in front of British officers at Detroit and held there for months. Meanwhile, a group of soldiers in Pennsylvania’s militia brutally murdered 96 unarmed Indian converts, including women and children, at the village of Gnadenhutten.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Heckewelder assisted in reestablishing the Moravian Indian refugees from Pennsylvania in Ohio after the war. He also was instrumental as a negotiator between the Indian communities and the new United States government. After his retirement, he returned to Bethlehem, but continued to occasionally work as an interpreter and agent for the Indians for some years. He devoted his greatest energies to writing, however. He published 3 books between 1818 and his death in 1823, which were based on his intimate knowledge of the Delaware. Leading scholars sought him out for details of the Indians’ languages, customs, and legends. He essentially served as a bridge between his generation, who grew up while the Indians still inhabited Pennsylvania and other eastern states, and new generations whose only knowledge of the aboriginal peoples came from history books.

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J. M. Hochstetler is the daughter of Mennonite farmers and a lifelong student of history. She is also an author, editor, and publisher. Northkill, Book 1 of the Northkill Amish Series, won ForeWord Magazine’s 2014 INDYFAB Book of the Year Bronze Award for historical fiction. Book 2, The Return, releases in April 2017. Her American Patriot Series is the only comprehensive historical fiction series on the American Revolution. One Holy Night, a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story, was the Christian Small Publishers 2009 Book of the Year.

Moravian Missionary David Zeisberger

David Zeisberger

David Zeisberger is arguably the most widely known Moravian missionary to the Native Americans. He was certainly a remarkable man and a faithful messenger of the gospel.

Zeisberger was born on April 11, 1721, in Zauchtenthal, Moravia, a region now in the Czech Republic. His family moved to the Moravian community of Herrnhut not long after it was founded on Count von Zinzendorf’s Saxony estate in 1727. Zeisberer remained behind to complete his education when his family emigrated to America, and joined them in 1738 at the Moravian mission to the Creek nation in Savannah, Georgia.

The following year Zeisberger helped to found the community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which was dedicated on Christmas Eve 1741. Four years later he went to live among the Mohawk. He became a member of an Indian family, received an Indian name, and was admitted into the Six Nations. He did not adapt to all the ways of the Indians, however, almost always wearing his black coat. Fluent in the Onondaga language, he assisted the noted Conrad Weiser in negotiating an alliance between the English and the Iroquois at Onondaga, near present-day Syracuse, New York.

Zeisberger was ordained a Moravian minister in 1749 and became the senior missionary to the Lenape, or Delaware, tribe in Pennsylvania. He stood only slightly over five feet tall, but he seemed made of steel as he tirelessly traveled through primeval forests, over mountain ranges, and across rivers, visiting tribe after tribe. He was a staunch advocate for native rights, and his efforts to establish both white and native Moravian communities brought him into conflict with first British, and then American authorities. Although the Six Nations and the Delaware passed laws that he was not to be molested in his work, he often faced threats against his life from both Indians and Whites.

Power of the Gospel, Charles Schüssele, 1862

The painting on the right portrays Zeisberger preaching to the Indians at Goschgoschünk on the Alleghany River. The service was actually held in the council house, with the Indians gathered around the fire to hear him speak, men on one side, women on the other. Among the men were some who twelve years earlier had participated in the massacre of several Moravian missionaries on the Mahony River. As soon as Zeisberger rose to speak, every eye was fixed on him, and he knew that a tomahawk could cut him down at any moment. He later wrote, “Never yet did I see so clearly painted on the faces of the Indians both the darkness of hell and the world-subduing power of the Gospel.”

The outbreak of the American Revolution placed Zeisberger and his converts between “two exceeding mighty and wrathful gods who stood opposed with extended jaws,” as one native orator put it. Both sides pressured the Indians to take up arms for their side. Zeisberger opposed this and urged the tribes to remain neutral in the war. The English sent the war hatchet to the Delaware twice, and both times Zeisberger and his native congregation, who were nonresistant, sent it back. Zeisberger even received a letter asking him to take command of the Christian Indians and bring the scalps of all the rebels they could slaughter to the British. Needless to say, he threw the paper into the fire! His native Christian communities welcomed, fed, and housed people on both sides of the war. Inevitably this aroused the suspicions of both the British and Americans concerning Zeisberger's loyalties. The British accused him of giving aid to the Americans, and the Americans accused him of working on behalf of the English. Even so, there were many who acknowledged the work of grace the Holy Spirit was doing through him. Some American and the British military officials not only encouraged, but also at times provided aid for his work.

Gnadenhütten Massacre

In 1781, during the Revolution, the British arrested Zeisberger at Fort Detroit along with his assistant, John Heckewelder on charges of treason. They were eventually acquitted, but in 1782, while they were still imprisoned, a company of Pennsylvania militiamen commanded by Lt. Colonel David Williamson brutally slaughtered unarmed Delaware converts at Gnadenhütten, Ohio, an incident known today as the Gnadenhütten Massacre. While the Christian Indians were gathering corn for their starving brothers who had been forced from their villages on the Tuscarawas, Williamson and his troops surrounded them and accused them of supporting the British. Ignoring the converts’ protests that they were neutral and nonresistant, Williamson and his men murdered and scalped 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children. Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre. The victims included six national assistants and a woman who spoke English and German. On a single day of horror 96 people, one third of Zeisberger’s congregation, was lost.

As a result, the already displaced Indians of the mission were again forced to flee their homes. During the twenty-year struggle over possession of the Ohio Valley, Zeisberger and his flock were driven from one settlement to another some 15 times. Conflicts with other native tribes and the expansion of white settlements into native lands finally forced many Moravian Christians to retreat to Michigan and Ontario. Zeisberger accompanied the group that moved to southern Ontario, where they founded a prosperous mission town in Fairfield. But at the age of 77, he returned to the destroyed villages in the Tuscarawas Valley of Ohio, where he founded Goshen in present-day Tuscarawas County. He spent the final decade of his life there.

Zeisberger has been called the apostle to the Indians and friend of the Indians. During his life he produced dictionaries of several native languages, a history of the northeastern Indians and the land they occupied, and religious works in the Iroquoian and Algonquian languages. He was a great linguist who mastered the Delaware and Iroquois languages, as well as developing a working knowledge of other related Indian dialects—this in addition to German, Dutch, and English. The books he published include A Delaware Indian and English Spelling-book, with an appendix containing the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, some scripture passages, and a litany; A Collection of Hymns for the use of the Christian Indians written in the Delaware language, which includes the Easter, baptismal and burial litanies; , a volume of Sermons to Children; a translation of Moravian Bishop Spangenberg’s Bodily Care of Children; A Harmony of the Four Gospels; and a grammatical treatise on Delaware verb conjugations. He also prepared a seven-volume lexicon of the German and Onondaga languages, an Onondaga grammar, a Delaware grammar, a German-Delaware Dictionary, and other similar works.

During his ministry Zeisberger founded the settlements of Friedenshütten (Tents of Peace) on the Susquehanna, Goschgoschünk on the Alleghany, and Lavunakhannek and Friedenstadt (Town of Peace), on the Beaver River below Pittsburgh. In Ohio Territory on the Muskingum and Tuscarawas rivers, he founded the settlements of Schönbrunn (Beautiful Spring) with its meeting house that could accommodate 500 people, Gnadenhütten (Tents of Grace), Lichtenau (Meadow of Light), and Salem. Colonel Daniel Morgan said, “The Indians in Zeisberger’s settlements are an example to civilized whites.” These settlements were all neat and orderly, with log houses lining the streets. The modestly dressed native townspeople tilled the land and tended the abundant nut and fruit trees, their children attended the village schools, and all worshiped God with prayers and hymns in their own language. White Eyes, a notable Delaware captain, was quoted as saying, “I want my people, now that peace is established in the country, to turn their attention to peace in their hearts. I want them to embrace that religion which is taught by the white teachers. We shall never be happy until we are Christians.”

Zeisberger's Gravestone

When he briefly returned to Bethlehem in 1781, Zeisberger, then 60 years old, gave in to his friends’ persuasion and married 37-year-old Susanna Lecron. They left to return to the mission field less than a week after their wedding. They labored together for the remaining 27 years of his ministry among the Indians, and only after his death did Susanna return to live among the widows at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Except for a few short intervals, Zeisberger ministered among the Indians for 62 years. By the time he died at Goshen on November 17, 1808, at the age of 87, he could count several thousand converts from almost every tribe in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Ontario, northern Virginia and Kentucky, and eastern Indiana and Michigan as a result of his ministry. He was deeply loved by his native congregations. While he lay dying, the chapel bell tolled as the people quietly gathered in the room to sing him home with the hymns he had translated into the Delaware language. He is buried in Goshen among his beloved Delaware brethren.

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J. M. Hochstetler is the daughter of Mennonite farmers and a lifelong student of history. She is also an author, editor, and publisher. Northkill, Book 1 of the Northkill Amish Series, won ForeWord Magazine’s 2014 INDYFAB Book of the Year Bronze Award for historical fiction. Book 2, The Return, releases in Spring 2017. Her American Patriot Series is the only comprehensive historical fiction series on the American Revolution. One Holy Night, a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story, was the Christian Small Publishers 2009 Book of the Year.

The Moravians: Christian Frederick Post

In last month’s post I covered the beginnings of the Moravian Church in Europe, the Moravians’ beliefs, and their missions outreach. Today we’ll take a look at one of the most notable of the intrepid Moravian missionaries who ventured from Europe to other countries to spread the gospel: Christian Frederick Post.

Moravian Chapel at Bethlehem, built in 1751.

Post was born in Prussia in 1710. Little is known of him until 1742 when he came to Pennsylvania with the Moravian migration that established Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He initially worked to form a church federation among Christians of German heritage in that area, but his ability to learn native languages made him more suited to organizing native groups.

Between 1743 and 1749 Post ministered to the Moravian Indians living in the Hudson Valley in New York State and in western Connecticut. He earned the respect and trust of his Indian neighbors by learning their language and customs and by twice marrying native converts: Rachel, a Wampanoag, whom he married in 1743 and who died around 1745; and Agnes, a Delaware woman he was married to from 1747 until she died in 1751. Post had four children with his wives, but all died as infants. Suspicion and threats by local colonists against Post and his converts led to his being jailed in New York, then expelled from both New York and Connecticut. He returned to Europe in 1751. From there he was sent to Labrador for a time but eventually returned to Pennsylvania and his ministry among the Indians.

Post emerged as a significant figure in 1758 during the French and Indian War, when Governor William Denny enlisted him as his emissary to the Delaware Indians living along the western frontier. Along with Pisquetomen, a Delaware headman of considerable influence, Post played a central role in peace negotiations between the English and the tribes allied with the French. The two men journeyed across Pennsylvania in spite of great danger from both colonial and native enemies to carry news of the 1758 Easton Treaty with the eastern tribes to the Indians living along the Allegheny and Ohio rivers.

Delaware Chief

The western tribes gladly accepted Governor Denny’s offer to restore peace if they agreed to remain neutral while British General John Forbes attacked Fort DuQuesne. However, the Indian leaders emphasized that the English must withdraw from the Ohio Territory after defeating the French. If they did not stay east of the Allegheny Mountains, the Delaware sachem Tamaque warned, his people would again take up the war hatchet. A short time later, the government’s agents who were with Post insisted that the Indians had changed their minds and would welcome the establishment of forts in Ohio Territory. Post met with the Indian leaders, confirmed that they had not changed their minds about the presence of the English in their lands, and insisted on giving that message to the governor.

Late in 1761 Post traveled to the native settlements in Ohio’s Muskingum River Valley and built a cabin there before returning to Bethlehem for the winter. The next spring he returned to continue his ministry, accompanied by a young Moravian assistant, John Heckewelder. Again the governor of Pennsylvania enlisted him as a messenger, this time to summon Tamaque and other Indian leaders to a treaty at Lancaster. After the August treaty, during which he served as one of the interpreters, Post went back to the Muskingum to resume his missionary work. But that fall the Indians’ hostility against the Whites rose to the point that Heckewelder hurriedly left. Post was finally forced to flee for his life at the end of the year as events rapidly moved toward another war, this time under the leadership of an Ottawa chief named Pontiac and a Mingo chief named Guyasuta.

Post was motivated by faith, not politics, and these experiences convinced him that God’s work and politics don’t mix. He finally asked the governor not to employ him as an emissary if the promises given to the Indians weren’t going to be fulfilled. He came to the conclusion “that a man whose Caracter it is to bring Words of Goddely and immutable Truth to the Nations, ought to be somewhat more cautious than others in carrying to the same People worldly messages, as these latter are often subject to unforeseen Disappointments” and that “the Lyes of our Messengers will always expose us [missionaries] to Danger from the Indians.” (Quotes from “C. F. Post and the Winning of the West” by Walter T. Champion, Jr.

Post married Mary Margaret Stadelman Bolinger in January 1763, and seeing that his efforts to maintain peace and convert the Indians had failed, set off for the Carolinas later in the year to preach among the Cherokee. In 1764 he sailed to South America to establish a mission among the Indians of the Mosquito Coast. But when he returned to Pennsylvania in 1767 seeking additional funding from the Moravians, he was told that his services were no longer needed. He promptly enlisted as a missionary with the Anglican Church and returned to Nicaragua, where h labored in the jungles into his seventies.

Post returned to Pennsylvania for the last time in 1784. He settled in Germantown near Philadelphia, where he died the following year, survived by his wife. Charles Thomason, a Quaker who was a contemporary of Post’s remembered him as “a plain, honest, religiously disposed man.” One of his fellow missionaries aptly described him as a “man of undaunted courage and enterprising spirit.” David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder are two of the spiritual heirs of Post’s missionary work among the Delaware. I’ll take a look at their lives and ministries in my October and November posts.

Christian Frederick Post shows up in The Return, book 2 of my Northkill Amish Series, coauthored with Bob Hostetler, as he passes through Sauconk in 1758 on the way to a dangerous meeting with hostile Indians tribes to try to persuade them to abandon the French while in the very shadow of Fort DuQuesne’s guns. He appears again in 1762 at Tamaque’s settlement along the Muskingum with his young assistant John Heckewelder when he resumes his mission there and summons the Indian leaders to a treaty at Lancaster.

Post truly was a bold and faithful servant of Jesus Christ. In what ways does his example inspire you to live a bolder and more faithful life as a disciple?

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J. M. Hochstetler is the daughter of Mennonite farmers and a lifelong student of history. She is also an author, editor, and publisher. Northkill, Book 1 of the Northkill Amish Series, won ForeWord Magazine’s 2014 INDYFAB Book of the Year Bronze Award for historical fiction. Book 2, The Return, releases in Spring 2017. Her American Patriot Series is the only comprehensive historical fiction series on the American Revolution. One Holy Night, a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story, was the Christian Small Publishers 2009 Book of the Year.

Moravian Missions to the Indians

In doing research on the French and Indian War, I recently ran across a man named Christian Frederick Post, a Moravian missionary who was highly instrumental in negotiating peace between the English and the Native American tribes allied with the French. I knew only a little about the Moravians, and this piqued my interest. In digging further I discovered how extensive the Moravians’ missionary efforts were among the Indians—and how successful. Today we’re going to delve into the history of this denomination and their missions outreach to the Indians.

The Beginnings of the Moravian Church

Jan Huss

The name of the Moravian Church comes from a country currently a part of the Czech Republic, which was then known as Moravia. In the mid ninth century large numbers of people in Moravia and adjacent Bohemia converted to Christianity. When the Roman Catholic Church brought the church in this region under their jurisdiction, many of the members objected and a reformation eventually movement arose. In 1415 Jan Hus, the foremost of the reformers, was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. The Moravian Church, officially known as the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren), was established as a result of Hus’s death, 60 years before Martin Luther began what we know as the Protestant Reformation. By 1517 the Moravian Church included at least 200,000 members. It printed its own hymnal and catechism, as well as a Bible for the people of Bohemia and Moravia in their own language.

Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf

The church spread into Poland as the result of persecution and continued to grow rapidly. In 1722 a pietist nobleman, Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, offered refuge to several Moravian families. They established the community of Herrnhut on his Saxony estate, which became a safe haven for many more refugees. Count Zinzendorf, who eventually became a bishop in the Moravian Church, urged the Brethren to take the gospel around the world, and in 1732 the first missionaries went out to the West Indies and Greenland.

Missions to the Indians

Moravians first came to America in 1735. The community they founded in Savannah, Georgia, didn’t prosper, and in 1740 they began a mission among the Mohicans at the village of Shemomeko, New York, where the first native Christian congregation in the colonies was formed. On Christmas Eve 1741 the Moravians also established a mission called Bethlehem in Pennsylvania in order to spread the gospel to the Delaware Indians. This became the center of Moravian missions in colonial America. Additional communities followed, including Nazareth and Gnadenhutten, as well as congregations in Philadelphia, New Jersey, Maryland, on Staten Island in New York, and in North Carolina.

In 1741 Count Zinzendorf traveled to Pennsylvania. He met with leading men such as Benjamin Franklin, and with the assistance of the well-known translator and negotiator Conrad Weiser, also met with Iroquois leaders and concluded agreements that allowed Moravian missionaries to move freely throughout lands under Iroquois control.

Lenape Chief Lapowinsa

The Moravians quickly developed strong relationships with the Indians among whom they served. Their focus on the Scriptures for guidance in matters of faith and conduct and on religion from the heart was compatible with many Native American spiritual traditions, especially those of the Delaware. The Moravians’ practice of equality of spiritual life in their communities also appealed to the Indians. Unlike other Protestant missionaries, the Moravians lived and dressed like the Indians, and converts shared common quarters with white believers of all social levels. In the Salem, North Carolina, community, in fact, slaves were also able to become full members of the Church and were even eligible for election to church offices.

These practices and the Moravians’ efforts to stop the profitable liquor trade with the Indians aroused opposition from the English colonists. Because of local hostility to the Mohicans in New York, rumors were spread that the Moravians were either secretly Jesuits or were allied with these “atheistic papists”. In spite of those who defended their work, at the end of 1744 the colonial government expelled them from New York, forcing the Moravians to close the mission at Shemomeko.

Baptismal service at a Moravian mission

Moravian missionaries remained faithful to their native converts, however, moving westward with them as the Indians were progressively pushed into Ohio Territory after the French and Indian War ended. They also began new missions in the South, including among the Cherokee in 1801. When the Cherokee were forced to move to Oklahoma in the 1830s, Moravian missionaries moved with them. This mission continued until the end of the Civil War, when it was transferred to the Danish Lutheran Church and became the Oaks Mission School.

Even though the Moravians played an important role in U.S. history, church membership is only about 60,000 in all of North America today. There are more than one million members around the world, however, mostly in eastern Africa. Other major Moravian centers include the Caribbean, South Africa, Winston-Salem, NC, and Bethlehem, PA.

In my next few posts, I’m going to focus on several important Moravian missionaries to the Lenape and other native tribes in Ohio Territory during the 18th and early 19th centuries: Christian Frederick Post, David Zeisberger, and John Heckewelder.

I was very impressed by the Moravian missionaries’ faithfulness to Christ and their attitude toward and treatment of the native peoples they worked among. What do you admire most about the Moravians’ missions and teachings?

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J. M. Hochstetler is a descendant of Jacob Hochstetler’s oldest son John. An author, editor, and publisher, she is the daughter of Mennonite farmers and a lifelong student of history. Northkill, Book 1 of the Northkill Amish Series, won ForeWord Magazine’s 2014 INDYFAB Book of the Year Bronze Award for historical fiction. Book 2, The Return, releases in Spring 2017. Her American Patriot Series is the only comprehensive historical fiction series on the American Revolution. One Holy Night, a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story, was the Christian Small Publishers 2009 Book of the Year.

The Delaware's Annual Big House Ceremony

The Northeastern Woodland tribes observed many common festivals and ceremonies such as the maple, planting, and green corn festivals, but many tribes, including the Delaware, had an annual religious ceremony that differed from those of other tribes. The Delaware’s supreme annual religious service was the Big House Ceremony, in which they worshiped and reestablished their moral relationship with their Great Spirit, Manitou.

Big House Ceremony

Big House sketch from Conner Prairie.

The Delaware had a temple, called the Big House, which symbolized the universe and was used exclusively for this annual ceremony. They believed that the universe consisted of 12 houses stacked one upon the other, with Manitou residing in the 12th and highest house. When the people entered the Big House, they visualized themselves as passing through these twelve stacked houses to come before the great deity. Therefore they believed that everyone who entered the Big House and everything used in it had to be pure. No metal objects of any kind were allowed in the Big House, and ritually impure persons, such as menstruating women, were denied entry.

Forty feet long, 14 feet high, and 24 feet wide, the building originally resembled a longhouse in form and construction, with its front facing east and its rear facing west. By the early 1800s it was often built of logs or boards, with gabled ends. The eastern door, facing the direction of the rising sun and moon, represented the beginning of everything. The western door, which faced the setting of the sun and moon, symbolized both the end of everything and the Good White Path, which one travels from birth to death. The building’s hard-tamped floor represented the lesser manitou, Mother Earth, and the underworld; its four walls, the four cardinal directions; and its vault, the sky’s dome, the domain of the Elder Brothers, sun and moon. Two smoke holes were located in the roof, one above each of the two sacred fires.

The great central post supporting the roof’s ridge pole represented Manitou’s staff, on which his hand rested and through which he transmitted power to the Delaware. A carved face hung on its east and west sides. A single smaller carved face also decorated the 6 smaller posts that supported the roof along the building’s north and south sides as well as the posts of the 2 doors. These faces weren’t the object of worship, but simply served as channels for worship. All of them were painted red on the right side and black on the left, with red symbolizing life and black, death.

The leader, or “Bringer-in,” managed every aspect of the ceremony. The 6 ceremonial attendants he appointed—1 man and 1 woman from each of the tribe’s 3 divisions, Wolf, Turkey, and Turtle—camped in tents on the square yard at the eastern end of the Big House, the men on the north and the women on the south side during the 12 days of the ceremony. On the first night the 3 male attendants built two fires of elmwood using the sacred fire drill reserved for that purpose. When the fires were lit the 3 female attendants entered and swept turkey wing fans on both sides of the fires 12 times to banish all dirt and evil influences from the building and to open a road to heaven. Two guards were stationed outside the building.

Sketch from The Magic Moccasins by Jane Barks Ross.

For the ceremony, all the people, including visitors, camped outside the Big House beyond the attendants’ tents, arranged by gender, tribal division, and sex. During the day the people spent their time in games and other activities, and the women cooked the hominy, corn mush, meat, and berries for the nightly feasts in large kettles as well as food for daily meals. When it came time for the ceremony, adults and children old enough to stay quiet entered the Big House by the eastern door, dressed in their finest clothing. Everyone sat in separate sections according to their tribal division, with the men and women seated separately within their sections. The Bringer-In or leader, the attendants, and the drummers occupied separate places of distinction. Two drummers began the ceremony by beating on a rolled up deer hide on which wooden slats were tied. This was followed by a long prayer of thanksgiving to Manitou.

Dreams and visions are very important among the native peoples, and the first 11 nights of the ceremony were devoted primarily to reciting visions as a form of worship. The Bringer-in began the service by chanting his story while dancing and shaking a turtle shell rattle, accompanied by the singers and drummers. One at a time other mature men took turns  reciting their visions and leading the songs and dances. The hard-trodden dancing path that led counterclockwise from the east door down the north side, past the fires to the west door, then doubled back on the south side to its beginning symbolized the Good White Path, down which man winds his way to the western door where all ends. Dancers paused at each carved face to recite verses to them. Between the dances both men and women swept the Good White Path twelve times with turkey wings, recited prayers to the Manitou twelve times, and smoked tobacco. Bowls of food were passed around counterclockwise, with each person taking only one spoonful so everyone could share. The dances continued until no one else wished to take up the rattle and recite their vision.

Misinghalikun

On the 4th day, ceremonial hunters went out, and that night the Mask Being, or Misinghalikun, the creator and keeper of game animals, appeared to lead the Mask Spirit Dance. The person impersonating him appeared frightening and imposing wearing a floor-length bearskin coat and a great wooden face painted red on the right side and black on the left and carrying a stick, a turtle-shell rattle, and a bearskin bag. Around the 6th or 7th day the hunters returned, bringing in more meat for the nightly feasts.

On the 9th night the fires were allowed to go out. The ashes were carried out the Big House’s western door, and new fires were kindled with the sacred fire drill. The carved images in the Big House and the face images on the drumsticks received a fresh coat of paint. Then the cheeks and foreheads of the participants were rubbed with red in a sacred rite of consecration.

On the final night of the ceremony, the women danced and recited their visions. In the morning the fires were extinguished, first the eastern fire and then the western fire. The ashes were thrown out the western door, then the participants filed out the eastern door to form a row north and south facing east. Everyone cried out the prayer word “Ho-o-o” in unison six times standing and 6 times kneeling, then the ceremony was concluded and the Big House closed up for another year.

Do you see any similarities in the Delaware’s religious beliefs and worship to Judeo-Christian beliefs and practice? If so, what are they?

Resources
“The Delaware Big House,” H. L. McCracken 
“The Big House,” Lenape History
“A Study of the Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony,” Frank G. Speck, American Anthropologist 
The sketches of the central post, the Big House encampment, and the Misinghalikun are from The Magic Moccasins by Jane Barks Ross (1985).

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J. M. Hochstetler is a descendant of Jacob Hochstetler’s oldest son John. An author, editor, and publisher, she is the daughter of Mennonite farmers and a lifelong student of history. Northkill, Book 1 of the Northkill Amish Series, written with award-winning author Bob Hostetler, won ForeWord Magazine’s 2014 INDYFAB Book of the Year Bronze Award for historical fiction. Her American Patriot Series is the only comprehensive historical fiction series on the American Revolution. One Holy Night, a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story, was the Christian Small Publishers 2009 Book of the Year.