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Preface
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface In October 1823, William and Amanda Ferry opened a boarding school for Metis children on Mackinac Island, Michigan Territory, and in doing so they set in motion an intense spiritual battle to win the souls and change the lives of the children, their parents, and all others living at Mackinac. For the next fourteen years children born and raised in the fur-trade society of the western Great Lakes region lived at the school with evangelical Protestant missionaries from New England and New York. The missionaries left no doubt that they intended to remake their students into evangelical New Englanders, and at first glance it appears that the experience at the school must have been an endless series of confrontations brought about by clashes between people from two very different and incompatible cultures. A close examination of the mission, however , reveals a much more complicated story that has not been told until now.1 This book fills a void in the history of evangelical Protestantism in the United States and its impact on relations between Indians and European Americans in the early nineteenth century. Although much has been written on the motivation for the rise of evangelicalism, its growth, and its role in shaping the course of events in the United States, little has been written about the confrontation between evangelicals and the fur-trade society of the western Great Lakes. I use the Mackinaw* Mission as a lens to observe how Protestant missionaries related to this multi-ethnic society and how different people responded to the demands made upon them by the evangelicals. The story of the Mackinaw Mission is that of how people holding different world views negotiated and struggled with each other while working to create a society based on their individual principles and values. This book expands the written history of the western Great Lakes region by emphasizing the important role played by the Metis, a group of people who had "The correct spelling of the Mackinaw Mission is with an "aw" ending. All other spellings of Mackinac, Mackinac Island, Straits of Mackinac, and so forth are with an "ac" ending. I have used the "aw" ending only when using the proper name "Mackinaw Mission." The confusion over the spelling of Mackinac arises from the fact that it is pronounced as if it ends with "aw," and many people spell it phonetically. xiii BATTLE FOR THE SOUL both Indian and European heritages. As our understanding of the Metis deepens, more is revealed about how Americans viewed them and their fur-trade society. The primary subjects of this book are Metis children, of French-Canadian or American fathers and Chippewa or Metis mothers. Coming from the Lake Superior country, they comprised one-half of the students at the school. About onefourth of the other children had Odawa mothers, while the remainder had mothers from other tribes, including the Sioux, Cree, and Assiniboine. The childrens responses to the missionaries reveal much about the evangelicals and their varying capacities to adapt to ways that appeared strange to them. A third purpose of this book is to demonstrate how a group of enthusastic missionaries, powered by uncompromising religious motivations, served as agents of Americanization at Mackinac. The missionaries assumed that all people who expected to live in the United States would accept republican principles of government , would learn and use the English language, and would see the virtues of agriculture as a way of life. Once properly taught, the Native people (adults and children) could take their places as citizens in a society rooted in evangelical Protestant Christianity and enlightened government.2 To the missionaries' chagrin , things did not work out exactly as they had hoped; their work resulted in the revival of Catholicism and the continuation of the fur trade as a way of life for their students and their parents. Most of the children did not become the people the missionaries had hoped. Before proceeding, some terms and names need to be explained as used in this book. The terms evangelical Christianity, evangelical Protestantism, and evangelicalism will be used interchangeably. Evangelical Christianity defies precise definition.3 Persons who held significant theological differences, such as Methodists and Presbyterians, were often considered to be evangelicals. Evangelicals, at least for the purposes of this study, shared a number of common beliefs. They believed that the world was divided into two groups-the redeemed and the lost. Only persons who had accepted the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, as portrayed in...