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Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America Kristina Bross. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
The importance of Native converts to the Puritan mission in New England is virtually uncontested, but in the majority of the studies on Praying Indians, scholars have given attention to their identities in relation to the two cultures that surround them: the Natives and the English Puritans. Less consideration has been given to determining how the Praying Indian figure actually affected the evangelical aim of the English occupation of New England. Responsive to this neglect, Kristina Bross, in Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America, seeks to add to the mounting scholarship surrounding Praying Indians by exploring their representation in colonial literature and their subsequent affect on the pious goals of the English missionary endeavor. As scholarship on Native Americans and conversion begins to build upon itself, authors are beginning to produce more nuanced examinations of the Praying Indians' position in New England. Bross's transatlantic treatment of the importance of Native conversion to the colonist's "errand into the wilderness" is no exception. Her book not only redefines the English and Native construction of Native American identity as well by looking at how the representation of Native converts was viewed on both sides of the ocean, it also contributes to the scholarship that suggests the need for a revision of the concept of American exceptionalism.
Bross's thesis centers upon the idea that as England endured civil unrest beginning in 1642, "observers on both sides of the Atlantic" began to re-examine the emigration efforts in the New England, with some seeing the colonization as a mistake and others seeing the move as symbolic of...