| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America. By Kristina Bross. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xii, 257 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-8014-4206-0. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8014-8938-5.)

In this important and provocative book, Kristina Bross argues that seventeenth-century accounts of British missionary work among the Indians in colonial New England constitute a "transatlantic debate" (p. 101), in which English writers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean used the figure of the Indian proselyte to construct their own spiritual and national identities. The first half of the book traces the emergence of this figure primarily through the Eliot tracts, eleven publications by John Eliot and other authors that were printed in London between 1643 and 1671. In these tracts, Indians are compared to the "dry bones" of Ezekiel 37, which were resurrected through the power of Ezekiel's prophesying just as Indians who convert to Christianity—"Praying Indians"—are restored to spiritual life by the sermons of the Puritan missionaries. Bross claims that this missionary project gave colonial Puritanism a new "errand" (p. 10) just as confidence in its status as spiritual exemplar had begun to wane, and the millennialist implications of Indian conversion helped establish the spiritual significance of Puritan success in England after the civil wars.

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