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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 806-809



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Book Review

Spiritual Encounters:
Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America


Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America. Edited by Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 304 pp., introduction, epilogue, index. $25.00 paper.)

This edited volume, Spiritual Encounters, is a refreshing new look at an old question: What impact did religious encounters with Christianity have on native peoples? The contributions show that a myriad of possible encounters and reactions were feasible. Here, original essays from some of the foremost scholars on colonial religious interactions in the Americas are brought together. The ten essays provide a fascinating and comparative look at the different styles and reactions to colonial religious encounters in Spanish, English, and French America.

Griffiths’s insightful introduction tackles the central question of whether the concept of “conversion” should be the lens through which scholars examine Indian/European spiritual encounters. Griffiths and Cervantes challenge the traditional notions of conversion as the focal point of examining religious change throughout the Americas. The collection shows that the traditional view of the one-way transformation of indigenous religions by Christian conversion is an inadequate way of examining religious encounters. The book’s central theme focuses on the reciprocal interaction between natives and Christian missionaries.

The ten essays fall into three different categories or themes. Essays by David Murray, William B. Hart, Louise M. Burkhart, Cynthia Radding, and J. Jorge Klor de Alva deal with the introduction of Christian concepts to Amerindian societies. A second section of three essays by Osvaldo F. Pardo, Nicholas Griffiths, and Alejandra B. Osorio deals with the interaction between European and native concepts of disease and healing. Essays by Iris Gareis and Lance Grahn make up the third and final section, [End Page 806] examining the impact of coercion on the encounters and conversion of the native peoples of the Americas.

Murray deals with the introduction of Christian concepts in French and English northeastern America in “Spreading the Word.” He shows that both Catholic and Protestant missionaries were involved in a complex network of cultural, economic, and linguistic exchanges with the mostly Algonquian-speaking peoples of northeastern America. He concludes that the missionaries could not control the native meanings of the Christian concepts that they introduced, and by trying to erect “bridges between the two religious they inadvertently compromised their message.”

Hart’s essay, “The Kindness of the Blessed Virgin,” looks at the concepts of the Virgin Mary and how these were understood in the native context. He concludes that indigenous reinterpretations of the Virgin Mary enabled her to play a special role as a bridge or gateway between Christianity and native religion for converts among the Huron and the Iroquois in seventeenth-century New France. Burkhart’s essay, “Here Is Another Marvel,” continues her previous studies of Nahua Christianity by similarly examining how the Virgin Mary was represented to the Nahua by miracle narratives and how the natives’ understanding of the Virgin was shaped and changed by these texts. Burkhart concludes that the Nahua reinterpreted the Virgin as more than an intercessor with God. While attributing to the Virgin personal powers of her own, the Nahua maintained some of their own pre-Columbian ideas of the supernatural.

Radding’s essay, “Cultural Boundaries between Adaptation and Defiance,” examines indigenous reactions to the Spanish mission communities of northwestern New Spain. She explores how the native peoples appropriated Christian symbols such as the cross and specifically the rosary, placing them within the contexts of their own sacred landscape. She concludes that the native’s adaptation of Christian symbols served to connect them to preexisting locations of spiritual power through a duality of adaptation and defiance. Klor de Alva’s interesting article, “Telling Lives,” examines the tricky nature of acculturation in terms of the rite of confession and the sacrament of penitence. Klor de Alva contrasts the pre-conquest Nahua beliefs in the soul with the Christian concept of the “free will.” He concludes that these two diametrically opposed visions...

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