Perishing Heathens: Stories of Protestant Missionaries and Christian Indians in Antebellum America by Julius H. Rubin (review)

Recent studies of Protestant missions to Native Americans have emphasized Native resistance to conversion and acculturation. By contrast, Perishing Heathens: Stories of Protestant Missionaries and Christian Indians in Antebellum America focuses on the elements that united white missionaries with the few Cherokees, Ojibwes, Osages, and other Native peoples who underwent conversion. Julius H. Rubin argues that both missionaries and Native converts were shaped by shared understandings of evangelical selfhood, including an intensive personal piety marked by recurring cycles of melancholy and rapture, the struggle to cultivate a spirit of "disinterested benevolence," and a "democratic personality" based on the spiritual equality of all believers (pp. 5, 131). Taken together, these figures should be seen as "representative lives who forged a distinctive evangelical religious personhood and identity founded upon religious values" (p. 4).

The first three chapters address white Protestant missionaries working on behalf of Presbyterian, Congregational, and Dutch Reformed organizations. In the vein of his earlier work on religious melancholy, Rubin highlights the sense of inadequacy, sinfulness, and disappointment that marked many of these missionaries' lives. Missionaries to Native peoples entered their fields full of optimism, shaped by millennial hopes and the urgency of saving "perishing heathens" from spiritual desolation. However, their optimism was soon tempered by rampant disease, the rarity of Native conversions, and the practical difficulties of running model Christian homes and schools. Rubin includes a discussion of mental asylums to illustrate the physical and mental tolls of missionary life. The missionary known only as "Miss D," for instance, served for only a brief period before spending the rest of her life under full-time care for apparent mental illness caused by malaria. More exploration of nineteenth-century understandings of mental illness would have enriched this discussion. Nevertheless, Rubin offers a vivid depiction of the struggles of missionaries who tried (and often failed) to meet the idealized standards of personal piety and missionary devotion modeled by earlier Protestant heroes like David Brainerd.

The second half of the book examines how Osage, Cherokee, and Ojibwe converts adopted these same elements of evangelical selfhood. The majority of these converts hailed from communities that were already liminal in some way: Osage children sent to mission schools, Cherokees who had embraced U.S. agents' "plan of civilization," and members of mixed white and Ojibwe families (p. 121). Rubin argues that although converts such as Catharine Brown (Cherokee) and Jane Schoolcraft (Ojibwe) sought to preserve certain elements of Native history and nationhood, they otherwise wholeheartedly rejected Native lifeways and embraced missionaries' modes of piety and self-understanding. This conclusion runs contrary to the claims of scholars including Theda Perdue and Michael D. McNally, and Rubin needs to do more here to support it. While he acknowledges that Native peoples were not blank slates, he tells us little about potential affinities between Native and white Christian religious understandings. One wonders, for instance, whether Brown's address of white Christians as "sister and brother" was solely the result of Brown's new "democratic personality," or whether such language also reflected Cherokee understandings of fictive kinship (p. 131). It is also surprising that Rubin does not more fully explore the significance of the phrase "perishing heathens." Many white leaders, including architect of the Trail of Tears Andrew Jackson, were convinced that Native peoples were doomed to extinction. How did this concept shape these missionaries' and converts' interactions?

Perishing Heathens is most successful as a study of missionary culture. Scholars of missions and Native America will find Perishing Heathens to be a thought-provoking, if not entirely cohesive, study of the habits of life and mind that both missionaries and Native converts were expected to cultivate. Evangelical ideals often proved unattainable, but the struggle to live up to them defined the antebellum missionary experience.