05/24/2026
A recent visit to the Moravian Archives yielded several compelling discoveries relating to Michael, a baptized Delaware (Lenape) man whose heavily tattooed appearance and movement between Indigenous and Moravian communities made him a striking figure within the documentary record of the eighteenth-century interior.
Working through mission diaries, correspondence, and German-language materials revealed several overlooked references that further situate Michael within the cultural and social landscape of the mid-Atlantic frontier. What becomes increasingly apparent in these records is the extent to which Indigenous individuals like Michael navigated multiple worlds simultaneously, moving among Native homelands, mission spaces, kinship networks, and colonial spheres while carrying visible expressions of identity, memory, and community.
Particularly interesting were additional references relating to Michael’s son Benjamin, identified in the records as “Benjamin, the Mohican, son of Michael.” Unlike the idealized conversion narratives often preserved within missionary literature, Benjamin appears in several entries connected to behavioral troubles and tensions within the mission community. Moravian writers referred to him as “rather wild,” while Michael himself was described as the “father of a very ill-behaved lad.” These fragments offer a far more human and complicated portrait of Native conversion, family strain, generational conflict, and life within the Moravian mission world.
One especially remarkable passage preserved in Michael’s Moravian memoir described his tattoos in extraordinary detail:
“The figures that he had on his face were a large snake on the one right side at the temple, and from starting at the lips a pole that [ran] between the eyes and the nose and up the forehead onto the head, on which pole there was every quarter of an inch something of a round figure, like a scalp. On the left cheek, he had two spears cross-wise over one another, and at the jaw line the head of a wild boar. All of it was done very neatly.”
For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of archival work is watching fragments begin to connect across scattered sources a passing remark in a diary, a notation in a church record, a brief physical description preserved almost by accident. Together, these traces allow us to approach Indigenous lives not simply as subjects within missionary narratives, but as active participants shaping the historical landscape around them. Compiling all the pieces of the puzzle, an image starts to take shape.
A new article is currently being developed directly from this recent research visit, expanding on Michael’s life, tattoos, family, mobility, and the broader material and cultural world he inhabited along the eighteenth-century frontier.
