Related by Blood and Wounds: Religion, Kinship, and Intimacy in Mohican and Lenape Homelands

Abstract

This historical study examines how Mohican, Lenape, and white congregants of the Moravian Church, a marginalized Protestant community, made and unmade relations in eighteenth-century northeastern America. It argues that early Indigenous–Moravian encounters produced layered and ambivalent sites where religious worldmaking, Indigenous relational logics and survivance, and colonial power coexisted, converged, and collided. Rather than treating Lenape and Mohican conversion as mere rupture, assimilation, or individual affiliation, this study foregrounds what I call kinversion: a process of incorporation, negotiation, and reworking within overlapping relational networks and obligations. The dissertation therefore asks not only, or even primarily, how Indigenous people became Christians, but also how and why European and Indigenous Moravians became relatives: siblings, spouses, spiritual parents, children, teachers, healers, and co-laborers. Moravian Christocentric communal religion reimagined the congregation as family, grounded in the body, blood, and wounds of Christ. Mohican and Lenape engagement with Moravian Christianity unfolded through Indigenous kin logics that shaped diplomacy, governance, ceremony, land relations, and more-than-human obligations—phenomena through which belonging was made, authority negotiated, obligations recognized, and shared peoplehood imagined. These practices and relationalities in Indigenous-Moravian communities generated sacred, familial, sexual, same-gender, interracial, and ecological intimacies that exceeded dominant Protestant family norms, and thereby drew criticism and moral panic. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, these relational possibilities were increasingly transformed, fractured, and constrained by white Moravian assimilation, Indigenous dispossession and racialization, and the disciplining of earlier communal and affective forms of religious life. This study draws primarily on German-, English-, and Eastern Algonquian-language manuscripts, including mission diaries, congregational records, correspondence, memoirs, and hymnody. It also treats material culture, bodies, built and natural environments, and everyday devotional life as sites of religious knowledge-making. I read these sources through theoretical lenses and interventions from queer and Indigenous studies that foreground kinship, intimacy, relationality, embodiment, land, and more-than-human obligations. The project is also shaped by community-engaged research with Mohican and Lenape descendant communities and by a commitment to relational accountability, asking not only what the archive contains but how such histories should be carried and cared for. By centering kinship and intimacy as foundational categories of analysis, this dissertation contributes to the study of early American religion, Native American and Indigenous studies, Moravian studies, queer religious history, and mission historiography. It shows that religion, kinship, and intimacy are not separate domains but mutually constitutive practices and analytics.