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→Praying Indians: Delaware indians
==Praying Indians==
==Praying Indians==
===New England praying Indians===
A class of Christian Indians known as ''praying Indians'' helped the European Colonialists, but were treated shamefully due to distrust by most of the Colonialists. Missionary John Eliot arrived in [[Boston]], [[Massachusetts]] from England in 1631, and learned the language of the local Native Americans. Eliot preached to the Massachusett Tribal Sachem Waban at Nonantum (Wellesley, MA) on October 28, 1646, and Waban immediately turned to the Lord [[Jesus Christ]] and his people also soon became Christians.
A class of Christian Indians known as ''praying Indians'' helped the European Colonialists, but were treated shamefully due to distrust by most of the Colonialists. Missionary John Eliot arrived in [[Boston]], [[Massachusetts]] from England in 1631, and learned the language of the local Native Americans. Eliot preached to the Massachusett Tribal Sachem Waban at Nonantum (Wellesley, MA) on October 28, 1646, and Waban immediately turned to the Lord [[Jesus Christ]] and his people also soon became Christians.
Deer Island today exists mainly as a sewage treatment plant, but with a park with an open walk which remembers the plight of the Natives that were once imprisoned there.<ref>[http://natickprayingindians.org/history.html Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoag]</ref> <ref>[http://www.helloboston.com/BookFiles/Pg_303-382.pdf The Memorial History of Boston 1630-1880 Vol. I, p. 321]</ref><ref>Blackwell Reference Online; A Dictionary of American Reference; Purvis, Thomas L. 1997</ref>
Deer Island today exists mainly as a sewage treatment plant, but with a park with an open walk which remembers the plight of the Natives that were once imprisoned there.<ref>[http://natickprayingindians.org/history.html Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoag]</ref> <ref>[http://www.helloboston.com/BookFiles/Pg_303-382.pdf The Memorial History of Boston 1630-1880 Vol. I, p. 321]</ref><ref>Blackwell Reference Online; A Dictionary of American Reference; Purvis, Thomas L. 1997</ref>
===Praying Indians in Delaware===
During the period of the 1730s to the 1770s, the Delaware Indians had been forced out of their homelands in the east and had found temporary refuge along the Ohio River.
Among these was a contingent of Moravian Indian converts in western Delaware. During the 1740s the Moravians had established communities of Indian Christians from Georgia to New York , but these were gradually moved westward further away from "civilization", due to increasing pressures of European settlements. Yet the Moravians believed that healthy communities could exist separate from both the negative influences of European society as well as the pagan customs of non-Christianized Indians.
In the early 1770s settlements of Christian Indians were established in Gnadenhutten, Salem and New Schonbrunn where Delawares, Mohicans, and other tribal affiliations mingled together as religious communities.
However, war between some of the Delawares outside these communities and the Americans broke out, resulting in the destruction of Coshocton on April 19, 1781, which was located in the middle of the warpath between the American forces at Pittsburgh, and the British stronghold of Detroit.
The Christian Indians in the Moravian villages were unarmed noncombatants and at this time were not molested, but in September 1781, certain Indian tribes who were allied with the British forced the Christian Indians and the white missionaries to move from their Moravian villages to a new village on the Sandusky. The missionaries were also taken to Detroit and tried for treason by the British, but were acquitted.
Being in need of food over 100 of the Christian Indians returned to their old Moravian villages in February of 1782, seeking to harvest the crops they had been forced to leave behind. However, war was still ongoing, and an adhoc militia of 160 Pennsylvania local frontiersmen led by Colonel David Williamson, seeking to destroy Indian villages and looking for Indian scalps, found the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten. Although the pacifism of the Moravian Indians was well known, and they had been very helpful to the American cause, the militiamen accused them of taking part in ongoing raids against them, and sought to frame them as guilty. At a council called by Williamson, his men (some of whom had recently lost relations to Indians) voted to kill them all, with records showing only 18 voting to spare them.
A website<ref>http://gnadenhutten.tripod.com</ref> created to honor the slain (and the main source for this section), states,
{{cquote|
On the evening of the 7th, the Indians spent their last hours praying and singing, knowing that their spirits would soon be in the presence of their God. They did not resist, they did not struggle. The next morning the slaughter began. The women were killed in one building, the men in the other. The old, the young and the infants were all massacred. The lists of the victims contain the names of infants and toddlers who were killed. As the victims were brought into the slaughter houses, many sang hymns, others prayed. The word of God was on their lips as the mallet or tomahawk crashed into their skulls...
The other abandoned Moravian towns were then burned as well. Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre. The bordermen who had committed the mass murder were hailed as heroes by most of their fellow frontiersmen, but were deemed as criminals by most of the rest of America.}}
90-96 Delaware (Lenni Lenape), Mohican, and other Indians who had been converted by Moravian missionaries to Christianity died, and as a result of the the massacre, Indian distrust of Americans and resistance to them much increased. <ref>[http://gnadenhutten.tripod.com Gnadenhutten Massacre]</ref><ref>[http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gwilli824/moravian.html Information on the Militia Criminals]</ref>
==Negative effects of resettlement==
==Negative effects of resettlement==