Rachel Wheeler

• PhD
• Professor at Indiana University Indianapolis

“Singing Box 331” takes as its focus a single Mohican-language hymn verse, “Jesu paschgon kia,” from the Moravian Mission collection at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This article is a collaboration between the authors (a historian and a musicologist), and members of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, a scholar in li...

One of the core principles of the global Moravian missionary enterprise begun in the eighteenth century was to share the gospel through song. Moravians believed that music had the power to move the human heart, regardless of culture or geographic location. As a result, thousands of hymns were composed in the Native languages of the communities in w...

This piece is a translation of a travel journal kept by missionary Johann Jacob Schmick as he traveled with the Moravian Indian congregation from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna in 1765. The community of mostly Delaware and Mohican Indians had been living under armed guard at the Philadelphia Barracks following the violence instigated by Pontiac's...

This piece is a translation of a travel journal kept by missionary Johann Jacob Schmick as he traveled with the Moravian Indian congregation from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna in 1765. The community of mostly Delaware and Mohican Indians had been living under armed guard at the Philadelphia Barracks following the violence instigated by Pontiac’s...

This presentation will reflect on the larger project I am currently undertaking: a microhistorical biography of an obscure eighteenth-century Mohican-Moravian man who lived 1742-1806. While Joshua has been relegated to a few footnotes here and there—mostly relating to his dramatic death—Joshua was at the center of many of the most important events...

This text is a work of historical pseudo-autobiography of a Mohican man baptized Joshua, who lived 1720-1775. It is written in the form of a Lebenslauf, the Moravian form of spiritual autobiography, as an experimental attempt to humanize Indian experiences of colonialism. It is based on research in the Moravian mission records, which contain extens...

Virtually every nineteenth-century local history of a New England town begins with a chapter about the last "red man" to have lived there. The tone is generally somber but optimistic—marking the sad but inevitable passing away of a noble race, thus allowing for the rise of true civilization. Scholarship of the last decade or so has been chipping aw...

This article offers a reconsideration of the Stockbridge-Mahican Indian sachem, Hendrick Aupaumut. Most treatments of Aupaumut's career have focused exclusively on his service as a commissioned agent of the newly established United States, whose job was to attempt to avert a war with the Indians of the Ohio and Great Lakes regions who protested the...

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36.1 (2005) 101-102 Shoemaker's A Strange Likeness is the latest contribution to a growing field of study devoted to tracing the development of racially oriented identities (in this case, "red" and "white" rather than "black" and "white") in early America. This short and eminently readable book surveys the lands...

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.1 (2004) 143-145 It has been more than a decade since White published The Middle Ground, a monumental study of the shared world of colonists and Indians in the Great Lakes region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The middle ground, argued White, was called into existence by the mutual dependenc...

In the summer of 1756, Jonathan Edwards preached a simple yet extraordinary sermon to his Indian congregation at Stockbridge, Massachusetts where he had served as missionary for five years. He counseled his listeners that God “advises us to be friends to our own souls” by seeking after holiness. Edwards encouraged his Indian congregants to take ten...

This article explores the development of native Christianity in the mid-eighteenth century at the site of a Moravian mission in the Mahican village of Shekomeko. Two native women, baptized Sarah and Rachel, appear prominently in the vast mission records, providing a unique opportunity to study the gendered meanings of Christian ritual for native wo...

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.2 (2001) 313-315 Blackburn proposes a new reading of the encounter between Jesuit and Indian in seventeenth-century New France. A work of historical anthropology driven by the insights and agenda of colonial discourse studies, Harvest of Souls sets out to show how the Jesuit missionary reports (transcribed, t...