Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (review)

The title of this volume is misleading because the “American religious landscape” is larger than the book’s geographic and interpretive scope. Still, these essays contribute valuably to a healthy scholarship on indigenous Christianities. Three essays—one on Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf by Emma Anderson, another on Illinois Marian devotions by Tracy Neal Leavelle, and one on the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe by Michael D. McNally—encompass indigenous Catholicisms. Others by Joanna Brooks, Daniel Mandell, Rachel Wheeler, and Douglas L. Winiarski focus on indigenous New England Protestantisms, and one by David J. Silverman features those in New York and Wisconsin. Two studies, one on the Cherokee by Joel W. Martin and another on California by Steven W. Hackel and Hilary E. Wyss, pursue a comparison with New England missions. Another by Laura M. Stevens contextualizes New England missions in their Scottish and British sources. Michelene Pesantubbee’s foreword, the editors’ introduction, Mark A. Nicholas’s conclusion, and Michael D. McNally’s retrospective and forward-looking legacy essay round out the volume.

Although the editors’ emphasis on the essays’ interdisciplinary character also is a bit overstated—this is not a text that stresses either method or theory (but see Nicholas)—the contributors do derive from multiple disciplinary homes such as history (6), religious studies (5), literature (3), and Native studies (1). The editors note aptly that the essays represent a sea change in the study of North American missions. All reject Christianization as a progressive achievement. Similarly, the contributors are not politically correct inheritors of the victimization scholarship that reacted against the uncritical valorization of Christian missions. These essays focus on the multiplicity of the motivations and outcomes of indigenous agency. Their reconstructed Christianities recognize identity; adaptation; resistance; and, more often than not, a religious and political critique of the colonial encounter. As evidence of the volume’s consolidation of the missionization field, each essay has rich citations that provide readers access to primary and secondary sources.

An important indigenous perspective—the rationality of Native Americans’ religious syncretism—is only partially visible in these essays. Because many of the essays take up missionization within tribal cultures with previous colonial histories and peoples with post-traditional subsistence, political, and religious practices, it is difficult to see the surviving religious philosophies and life values of precolonial indigenous peoples. For all of that, the essays document the Christianities as developing religious world-views aiming for cultural survival. These include historical developments in the terms kitchi manitou, the Great Spirit, the great and good spirit, and discourses focusing on God and Jesus Christ. Although these theological transformations have yet to be traced ethnographically and historically (see McNally, p. 298), close study of these rhetorical shifts would reveal the fault lines of historical religious change and the ruptures and reconfigurations of indigenous ways of reasoning about—and ways of acting on—cosmic being, modes of knowing, and the survival and adjustment of religious values that have sustained Native American identities into the present.

As the volume’s careful framing suggests, understanding indigenous perspectives on religious change has developed richly in a single generation. These essays capture a crucial insight. Although missionaries brought an alien purposefulness to the encounter, indigenous peoples everywhere acted as the crucial arbitrators of both the process and the evolving outcomes of missionization.