TheChristian Munsee are a group ofLenape (also known asDelaware), anIndigenous people in theUnited States, that primarily speakMunsee and have converted to Christianity, following the teachings ofMoravian missionaries. The Christian Munsee are also known as theMoravian Munsee or theMoravian Indians, theMoravian Christian Indians or, in context, simply theChristian Indians. As theMoravian Church transferred some of their missions to other Christian denominations, such as the Methodists, Christian Munsee today belong to the Moravian Church,Methodist Church,United Church of Canada, among other Christian denominations.[1]
The Christian Munsee tribe has produced several people who have become notable figures inChristianity and the Delaware Nation as a whole, such asGelelemend (a Lenape chief),John Henry Kilbuck (a Moravian Christianmissionary to the Native peoples in Alaska),Papunhank (a Moravian Lenape diplomat and preacher), Glikhikan (Munsee chief, Moravian elder, and Christian martyr), and Washington Jacobs (a chief of theMoravian of the Thames reservation).[2]
Present-day Christian Munsee communities includeMoravian of the Thames, the Christian Munsee tribe in Kansas, and theStockbridge–Munsee Community.[3][4]
Starting in the 1740s, theMoravian Church sentChristian missionaries to North American Indian tribes and started settlements, with full tribal support.[5] The ranks of the Christian Munsee included influential Lenape chiefs from the start.[5] The Moravian Christian approach was to preserveLenape cultural practices while introducing Lenape to theGospel message with the entirety of the Christian faith.[5] As such, Moravian Christian missionaries developed theorthography for Lenape dialects andDavid Zeisberger "compiled dictionaries of various Native tongues, translating them into English and German".[5][6]
TheMunsee were the Wolf Clan of theLenape, occupying the area where present-dayNew York,Pennsylvania andNew Jersey meet. The first recorded European contact occurred in 1524, whenGiovanni da Verrazzano sailed into what is nowNew York Harbor. Like most native peoples of the Atlantic coast, the Munsee suffered from the introduction of European diseases, such assmallpox andinfluenza, that were endemic among the newcomers, but to which they had no acquired immunity. Those who survived were forced inland by encroaching European settlements.
By the mid-18th century, one group of Lenape people began to follow the teachings ofMoravian missionaries. The Moravians were descended from exiled Protestants from Morava, now Czech Republic, who founded aProtestant denomination fromHerrnhut in theGerman state ofSaxony. They sought to protect their converts by creating separate mission villages in the frontier, apart from both European settlers and from other native people.
The most prominent missionary among the Munsee wasDavid Zeisberger. In 1772, he led his group of Christian Munsee to theOhio Country, which he hoped would isolate them from the hostilities of the approachingAmerican Revolution. However, in 1782, a force ofPennsylvania militiamen, in search of Indians who had been raiding settlements in western Pennsylvania, happened upon a group of ninety-six of Zeisberger's Christian Munsee harvesting corn, and rounded them up in the eastern Ohio village ofGnadenhütten. The Munsee protested their innocence of the incidents and explained theirChristian convictions and practice of non-combatant andnonresistance. But the militia took a vote and decided to kill all of these "Indians", including the women and children. Those killed are known as the Moravian Christian Indian Martyrs.[7][8][9]
While the American militiamen murdered the Moravian Christian Indians in Gnadenhutten, a messenger sent by the Moravian missionaries inSandusky on March 3 reachedSchoenbrunn on March 6 in order to deliver the news that all of them would be moving to Detroit. Two of the Moravian Indians from Schoenbrunn went to tell their brethren in Gnadenhutten but on their journey there, they saw that American soldiers had mangled body of Joseph Schebosh Jr, a Moravian with an Indian mother and European father.[10] They buried his body and quickly returned to warn their brethren in Schoenbrunn as they thought that the others at Gnadenhutten met the same fate.[10] The Moravian Christian Indians at Schoenbrunn fled to Sandusky before the American militiamen could reach Schoenbrunn, where they planned to commit another massacre.[10]
In 1798, David Zeisberger led many of the Moravian Christian Indians back to Ohio, where they established theGoshen Mission nearSchoenbrunn. Zeisberger lived there until his death, after which many of the Moravian Christian Indians moved to Ontario (cf.Delaware Nation at Moraviantown) and others to Kansas, along with Christian missionaries who continued to live and work among them.[11][12] The descendants of Jacob and Ester, the surviving children of Israel Welapachtshechen (who was martyred in theGnadenhutten massacre), make up the majority of the Christian Munsee tribe in Kansas today.[13]
After ten more years of strife, most of the Christian Munsee followed Zeisberger toOntario, Canada, where they established a new home at Fairfield, commonly known asMoraviantown, along theThames River.[14] There they lived in relative peace for twenty years, supporting themselves with their farming and industry.
But they became unwitting victims during theWar of 1812, when American soldiers burned their village to the ground during theBattle of the Thames. The battle is well known historically as a victory for United States GeneralWilliam Henry Harrison, and for the death of theShawnee chiefTecumseh, an ally of the British, but the destruction of Moraviantown is little more than a footnote. The Munsee fled into the wilderness for safe haven until hostilities had ceased, then returned to build a new Fairfield across the Thames River to the south, which is now known as Moraviantown.
In 1903, the Moravian Christians transferred the Munsee mission in Moraviantown toMethodist Christians, a denomination that eventually joined theUnited Church of Canada. Today many Christian Munsee still belong to thisUnited Protestant denomination.[1]
By the 1830s, a faction of the Christian Munsee favored a move to the American West. In 1837, some of the Munsee from Fairfield journeyed toWisconsin to join another Christian band of Indians, the Stockbridge Indians, a combination of the last remnants of theMohican andWappinger peoples of the east bank of theHudson River in New York, whence the two tribes became known collectively as theStockbridge-Munsee. They are now theStockbridge-Munsee Community inShawano County, Wisconsin.
However, most of the Munsee eventually returned to Canada.[citation needed] The Christian Munsee in southern Ontario remain today as theMoravian of the Thames and theMunsee-Delaware Nation.
A small band of Christian Munsee decided to migrate again, this time to Kansas Territory, to join their non-Christian Lenape kinsmen. They settled first inWyandotte County, thenLeavenworth County. A few families settled nearFort Scott inBourbon County. By 1857, most of the otherLenape (of Kansas) were removed toIndian Territory (now Oklahoma).
The Christian Munsee, who then numbered less than one hundred, chose to purchase a new reservation inFranklin County from a small band ofOjibwa (Chippewa) that had migrated from Michigan. The Treaty of 1859 officially combined the Swan Creek and Black River Band Chippewa and the Christian Munsee on a reservation of twelve square miles along theMarais des Cygnes River near the town ofOttawa. Signing the treaty for the Munsee were Henry Donohoe, Ignatius Caleb, and John Williams.
Although the two tribes shared a reservation and were considered one tribe by the United States government in all dealings, they maintained their separate identities in cultural and religious practices. The Moravian church continued to sendmissionaries to the Munsee.
Under theDawes Act, the Chippewa-Christian Indian Reservation, as it was known in the 1859 treaty, wasallotted to the individual members and descendants of the tribes in separate 160-acre plots. The people eventually acceptedassimilation. In 1900, the final disbursement of federal funds was paid, and all benefits and official recognition as Native Americans were dissolved. A number of the Christian Munsee Tribe in Kansas live on the reservation inOttawa, Kansas where they cling to their Christian faith and Lenape heritage.[3]
The Christian Munsee tribe has produced several people who have become notable figures in bothChristianity and the Delaware Nation as a whole:
The monument to the Moravian martyrs at Gnadenhutten stands upon the site of the Indian town, now the modern cemetery. The small mounds mark the graves of the victims whose bones were gathered by the faithful missionaries some time after the massacre. At Goshen, a short distance up the Tuscarawas, is the grave of the leader Zeisberger.
In the village cemetery, where lie the dead of a century, stands a huge granite monument. This graceful shaft marks the resting place of ninety Christian Indian martyrs whose ruthless butchery furnishes one of the darkest pages in American history.
