Not Their Hero
Maybe the real miracle is that there are still Narragansett people today, and in Rhode Island, and NOT bitter. They celebrate a thanksgiving celebration not once but every single month. It is a miracle because the population not massacred was once force-marched to Oklahoma, except for those in the population previously shipped to the Caribbean. Just a few years ago the relations between far flung Caribbean family branches and those that preserve the tradition in Rhode Island found each other to great excitement, as I learned at the Tomaquag Museum. The miracle is the peace today, that we are not Afghanistan.
Roger Williams is not these people’s hero. His primer on the language is a source of grammar and cultural data that aided in reconstruction and preservation of the language. Laurie Weinstein in her work , The Native People’s of New England, quotes Roger Williams to correct understanding of the tribal politics of the era (e.g. p. 60). They recognize the young Roger Williams as important cultural observer, per Dawn Dove tribal elder.
And yet, the older Roger Williams seemed no better than the other English, and he is not their hero. I propose things might have turned out otherwise had Miantonomoh, Roger’s chief ally, survived and risen to power. But that is a a hypothetical. While Roger Williams was away the Winthrop clan and others prevailed in putting forward other tribes at the expense of Providence, complicit in the execution of Miantonomoh. After Roger’s return from England, given the unified tribal opposition represented by the forces involved in the Long Island massacre, the multiple layers of tribal and English Machiavellian-level politics he had encountered, and a charter from a King that conferred official English status to Providence, the course of history flowed another direction. By King Phillip’s war, Providence was no longer a merged culture town, and the indigenous burned the English town to the ground.
By then, the underlying purpose of his astute language and cultural observation per the introduction to his own published book was that natives were fully sophisticated men, and “easily persuaded that the God that made English is a greater God….1600 years ago England and the inhabitants thereof were like unto themselves … [they are] greatly affected with a secret hope concerning themselves.” Yet Williams felt that did not mean conversion into English churches, as the churches were too flawed. According to the son of the man that took over the Wickford trading post, Roger remained a preacher on the shores of the river by his trading post. No one on earth really knows if the Lord used him to catalyze the salvation of indigenous souls. Certainly the English in the Anglican and Puritan churches wouldn’t have known — Cotton Mather would not have known. Later indigenous powers seemed more interested in the surviving documents in leveraging freedom of religion to ensure their own beliefs were protected. Whatever conversions there were would have been dead by the Narragansett massacres endured in King Phillip’s War, and the burning of Providence.
In the end, Roger’s teaching did not endure as far as did his reform of the government to enable separation of the church from state control. He thought the church once freed would become purer, and perhaps once purer could evangelize once more. But he wasn’t confident that would happen before the return of the Lord (Hireling Ministry None of Christs). It would be other people in later generations that would carry the gospel to indigenous populations.
