Demons, Saints, & Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902–1962) (review)

In his book Demons, Saints, & Patriots Mark Clatterbuck provides an excellent analysis of the history and cultural conflicts of the U. S. Catholic missions to the Native Americans. He focuses his discussion of mission history on the Indian Sentinel, a journal produced by the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions to promote, defend, and seek funding for the missions. By careful interpretation of the Sentinel, Clatterbuck shows the perspectives, ideologies, and purposes of the various authors featured in the Sentinel who recount their firsthand experiences in the missions from 1902 to 1962. In the introduction, Clatterbuck notes that there have been many accounts of the missions that have either portrayed the missionaries as unselfish heroes or have launched scathing attacks on the missionaries; Clatterbuck successfully avoids either extreme. Rather, he shows how the missionaries viewed the Native Americans and their culture during different periods on the missions. Clatterbuck also is interested in explaining the mind-set of the missionaries, many of whom were Europeans immigrants, and their adaptation to the American political and cultural landscape.

Clatterbuck provides a concise and accurate account of the controversies surrounding the federal funding of the mission schools prior to 1900. Here he explains the reasons for the founding of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, and he describes the hostile political climate toward the Catholic mission schools. The anti-Catholic climate of the time fostered a defensive attitude at the Sentinel; its writers consistently argued that the Catholic missionaries were promoting the best ideals of American patriotism in the missions.

In succeeding chapters, Clatterbuck argues that the authors of the Sentinel, particularly from 1900 until 1920, often portrayed certain groups of Native Americans in the missions as devotees of demonic, superstitious religions. Yet Clatterbuck provides evidence of the opposite in which priests describe other tribes with glowing praise as very religious, happy, charitable, and peaceful. However, Clatterbuck does not attribute the positive or negative reactions of the missionaries to the differences in Native American religions or cultures; rather, he attributes these divergent descriptions to the difficulties of the missionaries in expressing their attitudes about cultures unlike their own. He provides examples of missionaries accepting certain Native American practices and dances and rejecting others; however, he does not provide a clear explanation as to why they rejected certain practices. In his evaluation of the attitudes of the missionaries toward the Native Americans, Clatterbuck does acknowledge the Jesuit theology before the Second Vatican Council that emphasizes missionary adaptation and natural law: a tradition that looks for evidence of the presence of virtue in non-Christian cultures. He shows that this strain of thought was also at work in the writing of some of the contributors to the Sentinel.

Clatterbuck then describes the ending of the publication of the Sentinel in 1962 and the Church’s increasing acceptance of Native American spirituality. By this time, he notes the Sentinel no longer portrayed Native Americans as a people with a foreign culture but rather as a group that had been converted and were patriotic American citizens. He then provides many examples of the new openness in the Church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council to inculturation and the inclusion of Native American culture and spirituality in Catholic practice.

In his work, Clatterbuck provides a good resource for understanding the Catholic missions and the missionaries’ viewpoints. His account is balanced, and he emphasizes that the missionaries, far from having a single monolithic approach, had a variety of perspectives on the different Native cultures.