2 - “Pray Sir, consider a little”: Rituals of subordination and strategies of resistance in the letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock

Summary

The most wise, righteous, and gracious God doth of tentimes leave for a season his own children to manifold temptations, and the corruptions of their own hearts, to chastise them for their former sins, or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption, and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled; and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon himself, and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for sundry other just and holy ends.

Church of Scotland, The Confession of Faith, 1756

the best way in which the master can serve his own interests is to work away, day in, day out, with constant care and attention, weaving the ethical and affective, as well as economic, bonds which durably tie his khammes to him [I]f the master wants to persuade the khammes to devote himself over a long period to the pursuit of the master's interests, he has to associate him completely with those interests, masking the dyssymetry of the relationship by symbolically denying it in his behaviour. The khammes is the man to whom one entrusts one's goods, one's house, and one's honour And just as [the khammes] never feels entirely freed from his obligations towards his former master, so, after what he calls a ‘change of heart’ he may accuse his master of ‘treachery’ in abandoning someone he had ‘adopted.’

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977

In 1754, Eleazar Wheelock opened his Indian Charity-School in Lebanon, Connecticut, with the goal of educating Indians to be missionaries and schoolteachers among their own people.