Captivity narrative
Following the North American experience, additional accounts were written after British people were captured during exploration and settlement in India and East Asia.
Since the late 20th century, captivity narratives have also been studied as accounts of persons leaving, or held in contemporary religious cults or movements, thanks to scholars of religion like David G. Bromley and James R. Lewis.
[1] In addition, modern historians such as Linda Colley and anthropologists such as Pauline Turner Strong have also found the North American narratives useful in analyzing how the colonists or settlers constructed the "other".
Other types of captivity narratives, such as those recounted by apostates from religious movements (i.e. "cult survivor" tales), have remained an enduring topic in modern media.
[citation needed] Jonathan Dickinson's Journal, God's Protecting Providence ... (1699), is an account by a Quaker of shipwreck survivors captured by Indians in Florida.
The numerous conflicts between Anglo-American colonists and the French and Native Americans led to the emphasis of Indians' cruelty in English-language captivity narratives, which served to inspire hatred for their enemies.
[9][page needed] During Queen Anne's War, French and Abenaki warriors made the Raid on Deerfield in 1704, killing many settlers and taking more than 100 persons captive.
Seven captivity narratives are known that were written following capture of colonists by the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet tribes in Nova Scotia and Acadia (two other prisoners were future Governor Michael Francklin (taken 1754) and Lt John Hamilton (taken 1749) at the Siege of Grand Pre.
[15] The fifth captivity narrative, by John Payzant, recounts his being taken prisoner with his mother and three siblings during the Raid on Lunenburg (1756) by the First Nations (Maliseet/Wolastoqiyik) in the French and Indian War.
[19] Lt. Simon Stephens, of John Stark's ranger company, and Captain Robert Stobo escaped together from Quebec along the coast of Acadia, finally reaching British-controlled Louisbourg and wrote accounts.
[26] In his book Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (1980), Frederick W. Turner discusses the effect of those accounts in which white captives came to prefer and eventually adopt a Native American way of life; they challenged European-American assumptions about the superiority of their culture.
Numerous adult and young captives who had assimilated chose to stay with Native Americans and never returned to live in Anglo-American or European communities.
[27] Where The Spirit Lives, a 1989 film written by Keith Leckie and directed by Bruce Pittman, turns the tables on the familiar white captive/aboriginal captors narrative.
It sensitively portrays the plight of Canadian aboriginal children who were captured and sent to residential schools, where they were stripped of their Native identity and forced to conform to Eurocentric customs and beliefs.
It is not unusual for anyone who grew up in a religious and culturally conservative household – and who later adopted secular mainstream values – to describe themselves as a "cult survivor", notwithstanding the absence of any abuse or violence.
Some captivity narratives are partly or even wholly fictional, but are meant to impart a strong moral lesson, such as the purported dangers of conversion to a minority faith.
Though the Maria Monk work has been exposed as a hoax, it typifies those captivity narratives which depict a minority religion as not just theologically incorrect, but fundamentally abusive.
In Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas writes: The basic structure of the captivity narrative concerns the rescue of "helpless" maidens who have been kidnapped by "natives"[.]
In the limiting case, exiting members without any personal grievance against the organization may find that re-entry into conventional social networks is contingent on at least nominally affirming such opposition coalition claims.
The archetypal account that is negotiated is a "captivity narrative" in which apostates assert that they were innocently or naïvely operating in what they had every reason to believe was a normal, secure social site; were subjected to overpowering subversive techniques; endured a period of subjugation during which they experienced tribulation and humiliation; ultimately effected escape or rescue from the organization; and subsequently renounced their former loyalties and issued a public warning of the dangers of the former organization as a matter of civic responsibility.
As is true of the broader category, anti-cult captivity narratives are sometimes regarded with suspicion due to their ideological underpinnings, their formulaic character, and their utility in justifying social control measures.
In addition, critics of the genre tend to reject the "mind control" thesis, and to observe that it is extremely rare in Western nations for religious or spiritual groups to hold anyone physically captive.
Anti-cult captivity narratives which attempt to equate difference with abuse, or to invoke a victim paradigm, may sometimes be criticized as unfair by scholars who believe that research into religious movements should be context-based and value-free.
The typical contemporary anti-cult captivity narrative is one in which a purported "victim" of "cult mind control" is "rescued" from a life of "slavery" by some form of deprogramming or exit counseling.
However, Donna Seidenberg Bavis was a Hare Krishna devotee (member of ISKCON) who – according to a lawsuit filed on her behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union – was abducted by deprogrammers in February 1977, and held captive for 33 days.
She subsequently filed a lawsuit claiming that her freedom of religion had been violated by the deprogramming attempt, and that she had been denied due process as a member of a hated class.
[36] In this type of narrative, a person claims to have developed a new awareness of previously unreported ritual abuse as a result of some form of therapy which purports to recover repressed memories, often using suggestive techniques.
However, the book has been extensively debunked, and is now considered most notable for its role in contributing to the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare of the 1980s, which culminated in the McMartin preschool trial.
The narratives' exciting nature and their resilient young protagonists make for very educational and entertaining children's novels that have for goal to convey the "American characteristics of resourcefulness, hopefulness, pluck and purity".
The Oxford Companion to United States History indicates that the wave of Catholic immigration after 1820: provided a large, visible enemy and intensified fears for American institutions and values.
