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Native American Religious Beliefs

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Recommended: Puritan ideas and values

The Puritans were a strong unified religious community that centered their lives and their community on a specific set of beliefs. They believed that life was a test and those who passed this test would not only be successful, but also be delivered to holy blessedness all their lives and in the next. On the other hand, those who failed this test would face the consequences of a life damned by the devil. Notably in addition to that belief, they were God’s advocates and God’s law were their political laws. One specific facet of the Puritan belief system discussed in this paper is religious exclusiveness. This belief is evident through their literature and has carried an impact through time into the lives of Americans to this day. The American …show more content…

Puritan leaders, felt it was their job to convince the world that there was a God, and one of the ways in which they did this was showing how the Natives revealed the presence of the devil, in hopes that others will join their pure community out of fear. Throughout The Narrative Of The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, her prejudice terms describing the Natives clearly reflects how powerful and strong of an impact the Puritan exclusiveness of other belief systems has on a person. Prejudice terms as well as other terms were used such as, “savages”, “bloody heathens”, “merciless”, “infidels”, “ravenous beasts”, “black creatures”, “wolves”, etc. . For example, after Rowlandson was taken from her home in Lancaster, she mentions, “I had often before this said that if the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken alive, but when it came to the trial my mind changed; their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit, that I chose rather to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous beasts,”.(par 6, lines 1,2,3,4) Rowlandson first stereotypically declares the Native Americans as Indians, then states how she once thought she’d have rather died than to be held captive by them and then refers to them as “ravenous beasts”. That being said, it is clear how the negative views of the Native Americans by the Puritan belief system that she was apart of, has influenced her opinion and experience with them. Similarly, in the Ann Bleecker’s Captivity Narrative: The History of Maria Kittle, the religious exclusion and prejudice attitudes towards the Native Americans is

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The narrative offers an account which can be used to describe the particularly puritan society based on the ideals of Christianity and the European culture. It offers a female perspective of the Native Americans who showed no respect to the other religious groups. The narrator makes serious observation about her captors noting the cultural differences as well as expectations from one another in the society. However, prejudice is evident throughout the text which makes the narratives unreliable in their details besides being written after the event had already happened which means that the narrator had was free to alter the events to create an account that favored her. Nonetheless, the narrative remains factually and historically useful in providing the insights into the tactics used by the Native Americans

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She uses anything from “othering” to repetition to religion to prove the fact these Indians were savage. “Little do many think what is the savageness and brutishness of this barbarous enemy, Ay, even those that seem to profess more than others among them, when the English have fallen into their hands” (260). Othering directly effects the reader’s views of the Indians, reading personal accounts of horrific acts committed by Indians and eating vulgar food like horses does effect the outlook on Indians, form the reader’s perspective. Mary Rowlandson spiritually finds God during the capture and we can see the dependence start to grow for the Bible and talking to God. She strongly believes in God’s providence, thinking he was with her the whole entire trip, leading her, having a plan the whole time for things to work

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