John Eliot's Playing Indian

In the fullest formulation of this argument, Kristina Bross writes that the mission and its products-Indian converts as well as the texts that advertised them-served multiple purposes for English subjects: as "markers of God's blessings on English colonialism" (2), as a "means by which English readers-whether in Boston or London-could gauge their personal saintliness" (2), and as portents heralding "the true role of New England" (3), the acts of the Praying Indians, particularly during the troubled period of the Civil War and Interregnum, were "used to fix English identities on both sides of an Atlantic 'frontier'" (7). A less marked residue of missionary rhetoric can be perceived in literary studies, which have sought to restore Indian agency to the encounter by uncovering durable Indian voices that, as Craig White puts it, contain not merely "echoes of European models" but "extensions of native antecedents" (439).17 For all the appeal of such an approach, I concur with David Thompson that "the [modern] critic's desire for a pure, precontact native voice" that sounds through the din of English script or scripture "must also submit to its share of scrutiny" (423); the quest for antecedents, for performance originals, must yield to the recognition that in performance, the return is always a departure.