Reading Indians' Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and
Representational Approaches

Erik R. Seeman

To begin to understand the peril and the promise of using Euro-American descriptions of Christian Indians' deathbed scenes, consider the following accounts. Experience Mayhew, Protestant missionary to the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, published descriptions of nearly eighty such scenes, including a report of Abigail Ammapoo's dying moments in 1710. Ammapoo was attended diligently in her final days by her daughter. Too diligently, thought the mother, who asked her daughter to get some rest. But the young woman would not lie down, opting instead to sit next to her sleeping mother's bed. As the daughter became drowsy, she was treated to a spectacular supernatural display. She "suddenly saw a Light which seemed brighter than that of Noon-day; when looking up, she saw two bright shining Persons, standing in white Raiment at her Mother's Bed-side, who, on her Sight of them, with the Light attending them, immediately disappeared."1 Here Mayhew offered evidence that Christian Indian deathbed scenes sometimes included a supernatural element almost never found in descriptions of European and Euro-American deathbed scenes: observers (as opposed to the dying person) witnessing spirits.	1
In contrast to that highly particular account, the Jesuit Jérome Lalemant's 1647 description of the deathbed scene of a "good Christian widow" lacks virtually any historical or cultural specificity. According to Lalemant, this dying Huron woman proclaimed, "I am not grieved at my sufferings, but rather because I have offended God. He looks at me, and sees what I endure; I do not tell him to take kind thought for my body, but rather to have pity on my soul. When shall I see him? When shall I leave this life?"2 Given its heavy reliance on Christian models of good deaths established in the late medieval period, this speech could have been attributed to almost any person, Catholic or Protestant, Indian or European, from the fifteenth century through the twentieth.	2
These cases exemplify the differences between what I have termed "model" and "unorthodox" deathbed scenes. Whereas Lalemant's description adheres closely to the conventions of Christian models for a good death, Mayhew's includes elements that depart widely from the model. It is possible to use the distinction between model and unorthodox deaths to learn from otherwise seemingly intractable sources.	3
Very few scholars have analyzed Indian deathbed scenes recorded by Europeans and Euro-Americans.3 The decision to ignore missionaries' descriptions of deathbed scenes is certainly understandable. In missionary sources that already provide scholars with difficult challenges of bias and ethnocentrism, deathbed scenes seem to be among the least reliable passages. Clergymen had numerous incentives to exaggerate how pious their dying Indian charges were. The trial of dying, missionaries believed, tempted converts to revert to old ways. A glorious death was therefore the best proof of missionary success. Dying speeches also had the advantage, from the missionaries' standpoint, of being irrefutable. Once dead, an Indian could not complain that his or her words had been misquoted. Furthermore, many deathbed descriptions simply lack the ring of authenticity. It is hard to imagine that the Indians' often stilted and formal speech corresponds with what actually occurred on the deathbed. This tendency toward stock speeches resulted partly from the genre conventions of hagiography, which influenced both Catholic and Protestant descriptions.4 And, finally, it does not inspire confidence when missionaries recorded long speeches—sometimes many years after the death—as direct quotations.	4
Paying attention to the distinctions between model and unorthodox deathbed scenes allows one to use these sources more carefully and critically than has previously been possible. Specifically, taking into account the differences helps bring together the two most influential approaches to European-Indian contact: the ethnohistorical method and the representational approach.	. . .