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 draws on eighteenth-century manuscripts from Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, located in Moravian archives. It explores how a spatial and environmental perspective can be used to understand the practices of eighteenth-century Mohican and Lenape Moravian Christians, rooted in a land-based epistemology. Moravian Munsee and Mohican Christians continued to prioritize the gathering and trading of medicines, as well as the protection and cultivation of ancestral corn despite being incarcerated and removed from their land. The 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 natural world. This includes engaging with the side wound and blood of Christ through the consumption of nurturing Maple tree sap, hiding in sheltering rock caves, and honeybees sucking nectar.