Could one Native American prophet simultaneously embrace strict pacifism, Nativism, and resistance to European imperialism? Richard W. Pointer answers yes in his biography of Papunhank, a Munsee prophet baptized by Moravians in 1763 as Johannes. Pointer argues the same impulses that motivated Nativist prophets like Neolin drove Papunhank to embrace Moravian Christianity. He did so, Pointer argues, because the Moravian path fit with his own spiritual journey and its commitment to absolute pacifism. Papunhank’s pacifism, paired with his equally firm commitment to maintaining the independence of his community from both colonial predation and the Indigenous cultural practices he had rejected, make him a “surprising, countercultural figure in the eighteenth century”(5).
Pacifist Prophet begins by exploring the context of Papunhank’s Munsee upbringing. Born around 1705, Papunhank lived most of his seventy years away from European or Indigenous recordkeepers. Pointer traces how the Munsee (living primarily in the lower Hudson Valley) had...
