The text is about Mary Rowlandson, who was captured for 11 months and 5 days by the Indians. She tells us about how they survived the English settlers, even when they cut down all their corn. We´re also hearing about her admiration to the way God smiles at this wild people.
Puritan is a word used on an extreme group of English Protestants in the 16th century. The word comes from pure, which actually describes them pretty good. They thought of them self as purer than other people, and called themselves children of God.
Mary Rowlandson believed that if you behaved as a good person, God would help you and guide you. This we know from the text, because she says that the settlers´ acts had made God angry and know he punishes them by helping the Indians to survive. But the Indians believed otherwise. A lot of them believed, that God was in everything; in the threes, the flowers, the rivers and the animals. Every single thing in the Universe contained a part of God. They survived because of their faith in the nature and all the small things around them.
While the puritans believed that they were the most ‘pure’ and divine people on earth, Indians thought that everything had a spirit and should be treated equal. Mary Rowlandson doesn´t understand, that God helps the Indians to survival, and figures out that it must be because of one of the puritans failures, and not because of the goodness in Indians. She looks down at them by thinking like this and she also writes in the text: “I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God in providing for such a vast number of our enemies in the wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth.” This quote shows also that she doesn´t at all admire the Native Americans, but believes that it is all God, and they wouldn´t survive without him.
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