Puritan millennialism was a form of religious and national identity formation that hinged upon the belief, circulating among some English Christians, that they “would live to see (or were already living within) the millennium, the thousand-year rule of saints prophesied to precede or, depending on one’s interpretation of difficult scripture, to follow Christ’s second coming” (Bross 12).

This project understands millennialism as multivalent in its regard of Indigenous tribes, or in some cases divided. While some Christian imperialists viewed Native peoples as heathens needing redemption — and potentially belonging to the Lost Tribes whose conversion was a harbinger of Christ’s second coming — others viewed the English as akin to Israelites who would drive out the Canaanites (in this narrative, the Indigenous tribes) from their promised land (Cave 277). As Bross notes, “Praying Indians” were cast variously as “redeemed captives of Satan, as warning to English saints against apostasy, and significantly, as members of Israel’s Lost Tribes” (Bross 30).

In the complex negotiation of “Biblical types” (31), or the allocation of character roles in anticipation of the day of judgement (Israelites, Canaanites, Jews, Romans, gentiles, et cetera), both Puritans and Indigenous Christians aimed to fill the gap between the coming of Christ and the book of Revelations. Puritan millennialism as expounded in the 1640s and 1650s looked to Indigenous people as indicators of prophetic fulfillment; as Bross notes, “Fixing their identity was important for determining the start and progress of the millennium and would indicate whether effective evangelism would even be possible” (12). The prophesy, however, could cut multiple ways depending on the identity of the Indigenous: gentile, Jewish, or pagan.

One common instantiation of these tropes in Puritan New England is in the oft-circulated Biblical exegesis of Ezekiel 37 in which, against the backdrop of a desolate and scattered Israel, the prophet Ezekiel obeys God’s command to resurrect a pile of bones. The passage outlines a vision of the eventual restoration of Israel:

¹ The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the field, which was full of bones: ² And he led me round about by them, and behold, they were very many in the open field, and lo, they were very dry. ³ And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. ⁴ Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. ⁵ Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live. ⁶ And I will lay sinews upon you, and make flesh grow upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, that ye may live, and ye shall know that I am the Lord. ⁷ So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, there was a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. ⁸ And when I beheld, lo, the sinews, and the flesh grew upon them, and above the skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. ⁹ Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind: prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God, Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. ¹⁰ So I prophesied as he had commanded me: and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. ¹¹ Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is gone, and we are clean cut off.¹² Therefore prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your sepulchers, and bring you into the land of Israel, ¹³ And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your sepulchers, ¹⁴ And shall put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then ye shall know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.

This image, as it circulated in the 17th century, resuscitated the ‘wandering tribes of Israel’ trope as well as the idea of divine covenants, or promises. Ezekiel 37’s promise is decidedly an Old Testament covenant, one that is later supplanted by New Testament covenantalism that emerges with the figure of Christ.

Bross picks up on a section of this passage and its circulation in 1646 by John Eliot, who preached to Indigenous people in New England at the time, in order to illustrate how the “resurrected bones” of Indigenous people played a key role in bringing the future millennial kingdom to pass (35). The following sections of the exhibit will look at this metaphor as it appears in the written word of Indigenous activists and Christians, to see how the idiom takes on new resonances and how the idea of the ‘covenant’ changes form.