Experience Mayhew's Indian Converts: A Cultural Edition (Review)

Among the large body of missionary texts documenting the conversion of Native North American peoples during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Experience Mayhew's Indian Converts (1727) is unique for its attention to the individual lives of Wampanoag people on Martha's Vineyard and for the long history of interaction between the Mayhew family and the Indigenous people they sought to convert. Fluent in the Algonquian language Wôpanâak, Mayhew spent his life, like three generations of his family before him, preaching to the Wampanoag community on the island. His book offers the greatest detail of any written about an Algonquian community during the period, and, given the recent scholarly interest in the literature produced around the efforts to Christianize Native people in North America, Laura Arnold Leibman's edition of this significant book is a timely one.