Black Indians and Freedmen: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816–1916 by Christina Dickerson-Cousin (review)

Reviewed by: Black Indians and Freedmen: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816–1916 by Christina Dickerson-Cousin Robert Keith Collins (bio) Black Indians and Freedmen: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816–1916 by Christina Dickerson-Cousin University of Illinois Press, 2021 grounded in oral histories and primary sources from historical church records, Christina Dickerson-Cousin challenges readers to examine the roles the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church played in contact between Africans and Native Americans over one hundred years. This book takes readers on a journey into the lives of ministers who struggled to create religious inclusivity in the face of discrimination and whose agency suggested that religious motivation for common unity, as fellow "people of color," played key roles in the presence of the AME Church from Oneida in the Northeast to Black Indians, Freedmen, and Native Americans of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory. The book fills three explanatory gaps found in literature relevant to Native American and Indigenous studies of African and Native American contact: (1) how the AME Church established a presence with and within Native American communities; (2) how the active roles of both Native American and African American AME ministers enabled this presence; and (3) how the intercultural interactions between former slaves of Native Americans and African American and Native American ministers of the AME Church enabled the expansion of their ministry in Indian Territory. For Dickerson-Cousin, the notion that the AME Church has been exclusively African American is a myth. Chapter 1 interrogates this myth by discussing the lives of ministers such as Richard Allen. A former slave, Richard Allen was drawn to the Methodist movement because of its racially egalitarian message, supported by the practice of evangelizing all, regardless of race or class. Allen's early ministry as a Methodist, particularly during the American Revolution, brought him into contact with members of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. Known for preaching to customers during his salt deliveries, including "General George Washington's army encampment at Valley Forge (pg.14)," Allen may also have preached to Oneida allies that joined the encampment in May 1778. Although the historical record is not tribally specific about which Native American [End Page 150] communities heard his preaching, what is clear is that Native American communities were active recipients of his outreach from the 1820s to the 1830s. The blended Montaukett and African American church in North Amityville, established in 1815 by Daniel Squires and Delancy H. Miller, was incorporated into the AME Church as Bethel AME Church and included prominent members such as "Elias Hunter and Fanny Hunter (née Cuffee)," whose descendants intermarried with the Montaukett, Shinnecock, and Unkechaug (19). Chapter 2 explores the experiences and ministry of Thomas Sunrise (Oneida), the first Native American ordained as an AME minister, and John Hall (Ojibwa), the first Native American AME Deacon, who referred to his African American congregations as "brother-cousins" (45). Sunrise's ministry, like that of Hall's, centered on equality. Often wearing traditional Oneida regalia when preaching to African Americans, Sunrise's message highlighted shared experiences with displacement that he observed between fugitive slaves and Oneida coping with removal. Despite occasional negative African American stereotypes about Native Americans, his commitment to the denomination did not wane. In the 1870s he was appointed AME "missionary to the Indians of Canada" (40), and he continued to advocate for African American and Native American equality until his death in 1891. The intriguing analyses in chapters 3 and 4 provide a foundation for understanding the nature of African Methodists Migration (AMM) into Indian Territory. These discussions center on the invitation extended by Chickasaw Freedwoman, Annie Keel, AME member responses to suffering experienced by Indian Freedmen, intermarriage between African American men and Black Indian women, and the creation of "All Black Towns" that led to the establishment of approximately seventeen AME congregations by 1878. The following year, the Indian Mission Annual Conference (IMAC) was created, an organization devoted to evangelism in Indian Territory. Chapter 5 discusses the agency and diversity of IMAC ministers, such as African Creek, Peter Stidham, who was among the first AME ministers from the Creek Nation, and Robert...

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