November 12, 2014 | 11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Cost:
Free
Contact:
Phone
812.465.7089
Email:
mjstacer@usi.edu

Additional Information

USI is pleased to announce the Fall 2014 schedule for the Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquia series. This information is also available on the Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquia website https://www.usi.edu/liberalarts/special-programs/liberal-arts-faculty-colloquia.

Please note that there is variation in the day of the week, time, and location for each colloquium.

Light refreshments will be served at each colloquium. The public is invited to attend this free event. Please direct all questions to mjstacer@usi.edu

Dr. Sakina Hughes
Assistant Professor of History
Department of History

“'The Community Became an Almost Civilized and Christian One': John Stewart's Mission to the Wyandots and Religious Colonialism as African American Racial Uplift”

Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 11 am in Kleymeyer Hall (LA 0101)

In the summer of 1816, an African American man named John Stewart had a series of visions that directed him to "Christianize and civilize the wilderness" of the Old Northwest. Armed with his bible and the blessing of the U.S. government Indian agent, Stewart began his mission in a multiracial community where Wyandot, Delaware and African American people lived. Stewart's ministry became the first permanent Methodist mission in the U.S. Within a generation, the U.S. government forced the Wyandot and Delaware people out of the region. The African American community, many of whom had escaped slavery, also left due to white encroachment and the threat of violence. This talk opens a conversation on the multifaceted relationships between African Americans and Native Americans, and religion and U.S. expansion in the nineteenth-century American Midwest.