Father Le Jenne reflected on the primitive practices of Indian societies and hypothesized that Native Americans are “descended from Cain.” (49) Effectually this served to blur the distinction between the Indian and the sin by locating primeval sin within Indian heredity. Sin became embodied in Native American society and physical anatomy giving a quasi-racial status to the antagonistic orientation. In 1634-35, Father Julïen Perrault, of the Society of Jesus, wrote a letter to his Provincial, in France in which he described the bodies of the Indians near the Island of Cape Breton:

As to the people, there is nothing anomalous in their physical appearance; you see well-formed men, good-looking, of fine figures, strong and powerful. Their skin is naturally white, for the little children show it thus; but the heat of the Sun, and the rubbing with Seal oil and Moose fat, make them very swarthy, the more so as they grow older. (50)

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49. Jesuit Relations, 11:24.
50. Ibid., 8: 210.

Do present-day Pennsylvanians feel any responsibility or guilt over this Moravian Massacre?

I didn’t know anything about it until I read your post. I doubt any of my neighbors who are actually native to this area know anything about it.

Most of my neighbors have no idea that the nearby highway follows an old Lenni Lenape trail. I don’t imagine that if they are not interested in why the highway winds and twists and follows the top of the ridges, that they would be interested in a long-ago massacre, let alone feel the need to resurrect any guilt over it.

I imagine if I said anything to them, they would say, “Huh!” and then promptly forget about it. To be honest, the fate of the Phillies and Eagles is a much more present concern.

Part of the reason for the lack of connection, probably, is that few of the Lenape (Delaware) Indians live in this region anymore since they were moved to reservations in the Midwest. Out of sight, out of mind.

Also, as far as I understand it, the perpetrators of these massacres didn’t belong to any powerful non-governmental entity such as the Mormon Church, so there is no easy scapegoat. Are you going to go track down the descendants of Lazarus Stewart and make them apologize for the actions of the Paxton Boys over 230 years ago?

Why does there seem to be a double standard between the contemporary debates over guilt for Mountain Meadows vs. American Indian massacres? That’s a very complex question, and the answer only partly stems from “the fact that it was Indians being massacred rather than Euro-Americans.” Because whites have historically devalued and dehumanized Native American lives, there hasn’t been much outcry over such massacres. On the other hand, whites killing whites is seen as a big deal, and it feeds into suspicions of radical religion turning violent.

Native Americans have hardly forgiven the massacres and violence perpetrated against them, and much of the last half century has been spent trying to get redress or at least recognition that these massacres even happened. For example, the Bear River Massacre, where the U.S. army slaughtered 300-500 Shoshones in northern Utah in 1863, was classified as a “battle” until the 1980s, when whites began recognizing it as a “massacre.” Native American activists have been working for several decades to get interpretive markers on the sites of massacres that reflect an American Indian viewpoint, and they’ve had only partial success. But these attempts don’t attact the same type of media attention as Mountain Meadows, in part I think because of how anti-Mormons use MM as a weapon against the church but also because of the fact that American Indian issues are all but invisible to many whites.

Regarding the questions you pose about the Moravian Massacre and the Mountain Meadows Massacre … it seems to me that MMM receives and deserves attention (and demands, to some degree, guilt and apology) at least in part because it is an isolated incident.

While Pennsylvanians may have offered no formal apology for the massacre you discuss here, many Americans, Protestants, etc. have expressed regret, felt shame and guilt, and tried to rectify to some small degree the multitude of massacres perpetrated by their forefathers against the collective Native American population.

I enjoy Richter’s book as well. It has been criticized by some historians for the imaginative liberties it takes in trying to re-envision American history from the perspective of those who were already there. Nevertheless, I enjoy the literary flourishes and the excellence of his writing as a way of giving a voice if only imagined, to the indigenous population–many of which would die from the diseases the Europeans carried.

I think Richter’s most brilliant observations emerge in the ways he treat Native American conversion stories. He examines white and Indian conversion stories side by side. Although these Native American testimonials had been interpreted and transcribed by the missionaries trying to teach them and thus were subject to these white missionaries’ biases, the differences in the indigenous narratives from traditional white accounts probably constitute the true voices of the Indian converts. Even though this methodology creates some problems because such differences might have been constituted based on stereotypes, this methodological approach represents one of the most imaginative ways of thinking through sources that I have ever seen.

I highly recommend Richter’s book even though it doesn’t really have much to say about Mormon history. It represents a great literary experience as well as a great historical experience.