Turtle Marks, Medicine Gatherers, and the Sap of the Side Wound: Tracing Relations with Other-than-Human-kin and Land-based Epistemologies in Eighteenth-Century Indigenous/Moravian Archives.

This paper is based on eighteenth-century multilingual manuscripts from Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, which are located in Moravian archives. These manuscripts include letters, diaries, petitions, and liturgies. The paper also draws on collaborative archival research that I conducted with Munsee language keepers in the spring of 2024, as well as on engagement with contemporary tribal member efforts to revitalize and protect plant kin and medicines. This paper aims to explore how a spatial and environmental perspective can be used to understand the practices of eighteenth-century Mohican and Lenape Moravian Christians, which are rooted in a land-based epistemology. It also looks at how these Native Christians continued to rely on and protect their kin relationships with plants and animals. First, the paper discusses how Moravian Munsee and Mohican Christians continued to prioritize the gathering and trading of medicines, as well as the protection and cultivation of ancestral corn. This was despite being incarcerated and removed from their land. The Lenape and Mohican Moravian archives also reveal the importance of traditional hunting practices and grounds, and the marks of relations with animal kin, such as clan animals. Finally, the paper examines how Indigenous interpretations of the so-called Moravian blood and wounds Christology were formed through a relation to the land and with other-than-human beings. This includes engaging with the side wound and blood of Christ through the consumption of nurturing Maple tree sap, hiding in sheltering rock caves of the Northeastern woodlands, and suckling honeybees gathering nectar.