“The Nursing Savior Who Had Several Mothers”: Moravian and Indigenous Subversions of Motherhood and Maternal Care

Drawing on German- and Indigenous-language sources from eighteenth-century Moravian archives, this paper argues that early Moravian theology made motherhood a central theological and ecclesiological category displaced biological maternity into a diffuse form of spiritual reproduction. Moravians figured the Holy Spirit as Mother and recognized female leaders as spiritual mothers, thereby relocating maternal authority from biological reproduction to communal spiritual care. In mission communities among Lenape and Mohican Christians, these formulations encountered Eastern Algonquian matrilineal kinship systems, generating forms of translation, friction, and appropriation. Indigenous women’s participation in institutions such as the Single Sisters’ Choirs further detached maternity from marriage and biological reproduction. Moravian missions thus emerge as sites where motherhood functioned as a contested technology of governance, intimacy, and communal belonging.