Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America (review)

For decades, North American mission history has focused on two groups: Jesuits in New France, whom historians admire for their cultural adaptability and relative successes; and New England Puritans, who usually come off as spectacular failures for their cultural chauvinism and lack of effort. During the past decade, meanwhile, a third group has entered the picture that upsets this contrast of successful Catholics and unsuccessful Protestants. During the 1700s the Unitas Fratrum, better known as the Moravians, operated missions in the Pennsylvania backcountry, the southern mainland colonies, and the Danish West Indies. Several scholars have produced impressive monographs on these missions, but this volume—which originated from a 2004 conference at Pennsylvania State University—is the first to place the Moravians in comparative perspective.

The conference that inspired this book marked the publication of the diaries of the missionary David Zeisberger, and as a result, many of the essays concern Zeisberger or the Pennsylvania and Ohio missions in general. Although the chapters vary in both quality and purpose, they tend to describe Moravians much as previous historians have portrayed Jesuits: as intrepid and adaptable backcountry operators who used innovative methods to win Indian converts. R. David Edmunds sets the tone in the first essay, a biographical sketch of the Delaware war chief Isaac Glikhikan, claiming that unlike most natives, this student of Zeisberger became a genuine convert. Other essays focus on Moravian sources, explaining how they contribute to an understanding of Delaware ethnography—another echo of scholars' past enthusiasm for the Jesuit Relations. The best essay, by Walter W. Woodward, focuses on the medium of song as a tool of intercultural communication, explaining how Moravians and native proselytes shared an aural culture that allowed missionaries to communicate difficult concepts. The chapter is fascinating in that it manages, unlike any of the others, to offer a rationale for the Moravians' successes. These Germans were different from both Catholics and Calvinists in that their expressions of faith focused less on ritual or the word and more on sound, which suited Algonquians well.

The smaller number of articles on Catholic missions, meanwhile, tends to revise and question the Jesuits' previous status as exceptional missionaries. In a suggestive but short chapter, Dominique Deslandres argues that seventeenth-century Jesuits were functionally incapable of identifying with natives, while Luca Codignola's contribution draws from an impressive range of sources in the Vatican Archives and elsewhere to claim that Catholic missionaries seldom felt any sympathy with the Indians—even if their superiors in Rome occasionally did. Finally, Christopher J. Bilodeau's fascinating portrait of Wabanaki mission towns in New France focuses on Jesuit attempts to police Indian behavior. The essay uses familiar sources from the Jesuit Relationsquietly to counter the traditional portrait of the adaptable Jesuit. Bilodeau's protagonist, Jacques Bigot, lives up to his name. He showed little inclination to compromise with the Wabanaki on moral or cultural matters, even as the Indians themselves constructed their own version of Catholicism that often diverged from priestly instruction.

The volume contains many fascinating essays, but taken together, they raise more questions than they answer. Aside from Anthony G. Roeber's introduction, none of the authors attempts any comparative analysis, and some of the essays read as conference papers barely expanded or revised to suit the purposes of the volume. In addition, the range of topics is a bit mystifying. The volume purports to compare missionary endeavors in the mid-Atlantic region, but some of the essays range as far as New France and Cherokee Country. Also, the decision to include Moravians and Catholics—who rarely interacted with each other and did not work with the same native groups—is never really explained, nor is the related decision to exclude most other Protestant missionary groups like the Puritans. In sum, this is an...