Sources consulted
There are many interesting works on Native American religions, though not so many on the Lenape religions. From our list of sources, here are a few highlights that can get you going:
- R. B. Bolton’s 1922 Indian paths of the great metropolis is foundational.
- David Brainerd’s autobiographies and diary are an essential eyewitness account.
- Jonothan Edwards was one of the greatest theologians in American history and his biography of Brainerd is not to be missed for a Puritan perspective.
- Landford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening is as exciting as its title.
- Eva M. Garroutte’s and her colleagues’ survey of Native American religion is unique.
- Linda Gregerson tracked the questions that the Native Americans asked the European Americans.
- John Grigg’s biography of Brainerd is a smooth read.
- Pekka Hamalmein gives the perspective of the Native American warrior class.
- The Pew Forum’s survey of Native American beliefs is another unique statistical resource.
- Richard White shows how a common cultural terrain emerged as Native and European Americans interacted (though he doesn’t cover the Lenape).
The Full list of sources directly used for this study:
Apess, William. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, edited by Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Atwood, C. 1995. “Blood, Sex and Death: Life and Liturgy in Zinzendorf’s Bethlehem,” Dissertation: Princeton Theological Seminary.
Bierhorst, John, ed. 1995 The White Deer and Other Stories Told by the Lenape. New York: Morrow.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Bolton, R. P. 1922. Indian paths of the great metropolis. Miscellaneous Series 23. New York: Museum of the American India, Heye Foundation.
Bowden, Henry Warner. 1981. American Indians and Christian Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brainerd, David. 1746. Divine Grace Displayed; or, The Continuance and Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace among Some of the Indians Belonging to the Provinces of New-Jersey and Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: William Bradford.
Brainerd, David. 1746. Mirabilia Dei Inter Indios; or, The Rise and Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace among a Number of the Indians in the Provinces of New-Jersey and Pennsylvania, Justly Represented in a Journal Kept by Order of the Honourable Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Philadelphia: William Bradford.
Brightman, Robert A. “Toward a history of religious change in native societies.” 1988, In Calloway Colin G., editor. New directions in American Indian history. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press; .pp. 223–249.
Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace. 2000. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bushman, Richard L., ed. 1970. The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745. New York: Atheneum for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia.
Cogley, Richard. 1999. John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dwight, Sereno Edwards, ed. 1822. Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd: Missionary to the Indians on the Borders of New-York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Chiefly Taken from His Own Diary. By Rev. Jonathan Edwards of Northampton. 1822., New Haven, Connecticut: Converse.
Edwards, Jonathan. 1749. An Account of the Life of the Reverend Mr. David Brainerd. Boston: D. Henchman.
Fabend, Firth Haring. 2000. Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York & New Jersey in the Age of Revivals. Newark: Rutgers University Press.
Fikes, Jay C. 1996. One nation under God: The triumph of the Native American Church, edited by Huston Smith and Reuben Snake. Santa Fe: Clear Light.
Fisher, Linford D. 2012. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Flynn-Paul, Jeff. 2023. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World. Brentwood, TV: Bombardier Books.
Garfinkle, Harold. 1998 August 9. Personal communication.
Garfinkle, Harold and Michael Lynch. 1981 June. Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 11 Issue 2, 131–158.
Garroutte Eva M.; Beals, Janette; Keane, Ellen M.; Kaufman, Carol; Spicer, Paul; Henderson, Jeff; Henderson, Patricia N.; Mitchell, Christina M. Manson, Spero M.; and the AI-SUPERPFP Team. 2009.”Religiosity and spiritual engagement in two American Indian populations.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 48(3):480–500.
Garroutte EM, Anderson HO, Nez-Henderson P, Croy C, Beals J, Henderson JA, Thomas J, Manson SM; AI-SUPERPFP Team. 2014 Mar. Religio-Spiritual Participation in Two American Indian Populations. J Sci Study Relig. 53(1):17-37. doi: 10.1111/jssr.12084. Epub 2014 Mar 4. PMID: 26582964; PMCID: PMC4646059.
Gideon’s People: Being a Chronicle of an American Indian Community in Colonial Connecticut and the Moravian Missionaries Who Served There. 2009. Trans. and edited by Corinna Dally-Starna and William A. Starna. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press/copyrighted by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, vol 1-2.
Goddard, Ives. 1978. “Delaware,” in Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger, vol. 15 of Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 213–239;
Gollin, Gillian Lindt. 1967. Moravians in Two Worlds. New York: Columbia University Press.
Goodman, Glenda. 2021. “Captive Colonists, Forced Singing, and the Incorporation Imperatives of Mohawk Listeners,” in Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick eds. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.
Goodman, Glenda. 2012 Fall. “’The Tears I Shed at the Songs of Thy Church’: Seventeenth-Century Musical Piety in the English Atlantic World,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 65, 3, 691- 725. Stable URL:
Gregerson, Linda. 2002. “The Commonwealth of the Word: New England, Old England, and the Praying Indians,” ch. 11 in David J. Baker, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grigg, John A. 2009. The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hamalmein, Pekka. 2022. Indigenous continent: the epic contest for North America. New York: Liveright.
Hamilton, J. Taylor and Kenneth G. Hamilton. 1967. History of the Moravian Church. New York,
Hamilton, Kenneth G. 1971. The Bethlehem Diary: Volume I-1742-1744. Bethlehem, Pa.: The Archive of the Moravian Church.
Harrington, M.R. 1921. Religion and ceremonies of the Lenape. New York: Museum of the American Indian. Web publication:
Heckewelder, John. 1820. A Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians, from Its Commencement, in the Year 1740, to the Close of the Year 1808. Philadelphia: McCarty and Davis.
———. History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States. 1876. Reprint, Bowie, Md.: Heritage, 1990.
Hoerder, D. 2002. Cultures in contact: world migrations in the second millennium. Durham: Duke University Press.
Howard, Philip E., Jr. 1989. The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker.
Huddleston, Lee Eldridge. 1967. Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Jameson, J. Franklin. 1909. Narratives of New Netherland. 1609-1664. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Klooster, William. 2016. The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kraft, Herbert C. 1986, The Lenape: Archaeology, History, and Ethnography. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society.
Larson, Paul. 1987. Early Bethlehem and the Native Americans. Bethlehem, PA: Oaks Printing.
Lee, Wayne E. 2007. “Peace chiefs blood revenge: patterns of restraint in Native American Warfare, 1500-1800,” Journal of Military History, 71, 701-741.
Lindestrom, Peter. 1925. Geographia Americae with an Account of the Delaware Indians, translated by Amandus Johnson. Philadelphia: Swedish Colonial Society.
Merrell, James H. 1998. “Shamokin, ‘the Very Seat of the Prince of Darkness’: Unsettling the Early American Frontier,” in Andrew R.l. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Man, C.C. 2009. 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books.
Rachel Wheeler. 2008. To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Muir, Diana. 2000. Reflections in Bullough’s Pond. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
Patterson, Kristine B., Thomas Runge. 2002. “Smallpox and the Native American,” The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Volume 323, Issue 4, p. 216-222.
Penn State University resources: https://www.engr.psu.edu/mtah/articles/harvest_home.htm#:~:text=The%20Moravians%20went%20to%20live,their%20conversions%20than%20other%20groups.
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. U.S. Religious Landscapes Survey 2008. Religious affiliation: Diverse and dynamic. Available at http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf
Pointer, Richard W. 1994 September. “‘Poor Indians’ and the ‘Poor in Spirit’: The Indian Impact on David Brainerd.” NEQ 67, no. 3, 403–42610.2307/366145.
Ibid. 2007. Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pritchard, Evan T. 2007. Native New Yorkers. San Francisco: Council Oak Books.
Rubin, Julius. H. 2013. Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Sacks, Harvey. Est. 1962-1963, “Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism,” Center for the Study of Law and Society, 8-9.
Sanders, Ronald. 1978. Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
Sanderson, Eric. W. 2009. Mannahatta. A Natural History of New York City. New York: Abrams.
Schutt, Amy. 2007. Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Shorto, Russell. 2005. The Island at the Center of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
Silverman, David. 2005. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Smaby, Beverly. 1988. The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Theves, Catherine, Erick Cevbezy, Phillippe Bingini. 2016 August 30. “History of Smallpox and its spread in Human populations,” Environmental Microbiology, 4,4,10,1128.
Ward, W.R. 2006. Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670-1789.
Weslager, C.A. 1972, The Delaware Indians: A History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Westmeier, Karl-Wilhelm . 1994. The Evacuation of Shekomeko and the early Moravian Missions to Native North Americans. Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press. Studies in the History of Missions, Vol. 12.
Wheeler, Rachel. 2013. To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast. Ithaca. Cornell University Press.
White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
