From Parkman to Postcolonial Theory: What’s New in the Ethnohistory of Missions?

One hundred and thirty years after its original publication (1867), Francis Parkman’s classic book on the Jesuit mission in Canada has been reissued by the University of Nebraska Press, augmented by a preface that contextualizes Parkman’s work and stresses the lingering legacy of his writings. Indeed, Parkman still serves well as the starting point for a survey of recent publications on the interaction of American Indians and missions. By current standards, Parkman’s book is, of course, seriously flawed, as is made clear by Conrad E. Heidenreich and José Brandao in the introduction, because of his racist view of Indians as savages basically unfit for civilization, his open disdain of French colonialism as the product of an absolutist state, and his nineteenth-century perspective that “men make history,” which led Parkman to portray the Jesuits as larger-than-life characters who single-handedly struggled to shape the course of history. Yet these obvious and historically explainable shortcomings aside, Parkman has left a legacy of a Eurocentric approach that continues to haunt the historiography of missions to this day. Historiography in his tradition typically relies only (or mainly) on missionary documents and tends to neglect Indian historical narratives as well as comparative data and models from anthropology, focusing exclusively on the Euro-American side of the mission experience and allocating to the Indians only supporting roles as individuals or groups who passively accept or reject Christianity, leaving their interests and goals in negotiating colonialism in the dark.

This is exactly what an ethnohistory of missions should try to avoid. Rather, it should explain why and how Christianity was appropriated or rejected by an American Indian group, why and under what conditions Christianity was successful in the struggle for truth, which ultimately was a struggle for power. An ethnohistory must transcend Parkman’s perspective by giving a voice to the Indians as historical actors. The six remaining books in this essay are subject to critical scrutiny in view of this goal. I also suggest that an ethnohistorical analysis should view the mission as a historical process, shaped by a dialectic of structural frameworks and local action that transforms cultural imaginaries, then cultural praxis, and, finally, cultural and historical realities. In practice, this means looking at three main aspects of the mission: (1) its structural context, (2) the ideologies and agendas of the missionaries and Indians, and (3) the practical accomplishment of conversion or resistance in everyday interaction. I follow this framework in the course of this review essay.

Missions can be usefully categorized in a number of ways, but the most obvious still remains their differentiation by denomination (Catholic or Protestant), due to the fundamental differences of the two faiths in the framework of belief and missionary practice. These books can conveniently be divided into three on Catholic and three on Protestant missions. On the Catholic side, Christopher Vecsey’s far-reaching survey (volume two of a three-volume work) describes the spread of Catholicism among the Indians of northern North America from the Atlantic seaboard to the Northwest Coast; Franz-Joseph Post’s German dissertation mines the same territory as Parkman, focusing on the competition between missionaries and indigenous religious specialists among the Huron, Iroquois, and Montagnais; and Robert C. Carriker offers yet another biography of Father Pierre-Jean de Smet (to whom he prefers to refer by the English version of de Smet’s given name). On the Protestant side, Isabel Crawford’s book is the autobiographical narrative of her years as a missionary among the Kiowa in Oklahoma (1893–1906); Brett Christophers tells the story of an Anglican missionary among the Nlha7kapmx/Thompson, employing an explicitly postcolonial theoretical framework. Bernd Peyer’s book does not actually deal with the mission but with the way early Indian intellectuals accommodated the colonial situation by appropriating Christianity and putting it to their own specific uses.

The mere historical facts surrounding each of the mission endeavors described are fairly well known, so none of the authors has been challenged with first establishing a historical context. Not all present a detailed discussion of Euro-American colonialism of which the mission undisputedly forms an integral part. Christophers, Peyer, and Post, especially, strive for a thorough description of the colonial backdrop against which Indians and missionaries interacted. Vecsey, whose aim is obviously descriptive rather than analytical, spends little time on a general theoretical framework, and Carriker’s de Smet acts completely outside of any larger colonial context.

A closer look at the discussion of Indian and missionary ideologies and agendas reveals that Parkman’s spirit is still alive and well in that most authors tend to neglect the Indians’ cultural perspective and goals in the mission encounter. Post must be applauded, however, for specifically contrasting the religious ideologies of Jesuits and Indians and detailing their struggle for control of the spiritual realm. Focusing on “a conquered people’s creative accommodation to social change” (1), Peyer portrays four representatives of an “Indian proto-elite” that employed Christianity to show their people a path out of the colonial situation. The goals and strategies of these individuals—the Mohegan Samson Occom (1723–92), the Pequot William Apess (1798–1839), the Cherokee Elias Boudinot (ca. 1804–39), and the Ojibwa George Copway (1818–69)—are outlined in relation to their biographies and the different colonial circumstances, presenting an admirably clear picture of Indian intellectuals struggling for their own interests and for what they believed to be their people’s road to salvation. Vecsey, whose declared aim is to “document the ways in which American Indians . . . have adopted Catholic forms, adapting them to their own culture and at the same time modulating themselves to the demands of the new religious complex” (xi), in general succeeds well in achieving a balanced account of missionaries’ strategies and Indians’ reasons for accepting conversion. Still, his treatment of different case studies is very uneven in time-depth and detail. Moreover, quite surprisingly for a survey of this character, the case studies stand side by side without any effort made to compare or generalize. The Anglican mission discourse of John B. Good is engaged by Christophers in a critical discussion, making good use of various approaches employed to analyze power relations ranging from Foucault to postcolonial theory. The book is much weaker on the Indian side, however, sketching some ideas about their motives but never really entering into an in-depth discussion of their cultural ideology. Carriker, as already noted, focuses exclusively on de Smet, so we learn a lot about his ideas and motivations but nothing about the Indian converts or resisters moving in his shadow.

The microhistorical praxis of mission and the negotiation of colonialism by the Indians in everyday life are addressed in some manner in all of the books, but only Crawford’s autobiographical narrative focuses exclusively on the mission as day-to-day experience. Many missionary documents are widely scattered and often still hidden in local archives. Therefore, it is important that records like Crawford’s story are made accessible to researchers and the public. Christophers also makes extensive use of Good’s records and other contemporary documents to highlight the missionary’s approach to everyday interaction with the Indians. Post draws on the Jesuit Relations to tell the story of the Jesuits’ and Indians’ confrontation in elaborate detail.

The major risk involved in reconstructing history exclusively from written sources left behind by the colonizers lies in the possible telling of a hegemonic history that obscures the Indians’ active participation in shaping the historical trajectories it narrates. Particularly missionary narratives are prone to distort the record in favor of their own view of truth, since this was exactly the goal the missionaries set out to accomplish—conquering the Indians’ souls through changing their perception of truth. This risk cannot be avoided, of course, since usually complementary contemporary sources from the Indians’ perspective are lacking, posing a problem that needs somehow to be addressed by historiography. Although some postmodernists argue that colonial documents are generally unable to give a voice to the colonized subaltern, I believe that this problem can be at least substantially alleviated by sound and critical scholarship. From an ethnohistorical perspective, representations of the missionary encounter must be judged by their ability to transcend the hegemonic bias of the documents and do justice to the Indian as a historical actor. Like any other form of colonial praxis, the mission should be understood as shaped by the dialectical interaction of colonizers and colonized on the local level, yet within a global structural framework.

Parkman tells the story of the Jesuit mission in a very straightforward manner, “as it really happened,” from Jesuit sources, almost completely ignoring the Indian perspective. Looking at the two recent studies dealing with the same geographical area, it becomes apparent that the ethnohistory of missions has taken some big steps forward. It has moved in two broad directions: The Paths of Kateri’s Kin contextualizes the Huron and Iroquois missions, which form the largest part of the book, within the wider framework of Catholic missions, thereby showing how the missionaries’ success depended as much on local conditions and the local Indians’ response as on their own strategy. Although ultimately following Parkman in making the spread of the mission (to which the Indians reacted) the focus of his story, Vecsey’s book still stands as a unique example of detailed description of the Indians’ encounter with Catholicism in a broad scope.

Post, while examining the same regional context as Parkman, strives for a much more balanced account of the missionaries’ and Indians’ ideologies and interests that clashed in the struggle for “spiritual conquest.” He supplements the source material by consulting comparative anthropological data on religious specialists, thus drawing a fairly comprehensive picture of two opposing religious systems and the people who confronted each other in their names. The specter of Parkman is still visible, as demonstrated by Carriker’s uninspired biography of de Smet, which centers around the heroic figure of the missionary, leaving the Indians—who are now and then even described in Parkman’s derogatory nineteenth-century terms as “renegades” (191) or “the most destructive bands of Sioux” (213)—on the margins of history.

While Father Peter John De Smet may be easily put aside as outmoded scholarship, the case with Positioning the Missionary is much more complex. Christophers embraces various strands of postmodern theory, often overloading his prose with fashionable rhetoric, and has obviously done thorough archival research. His central question is posed in the introduction: “How, exactly, can we think of Good’s mission as colonizing? . . . In what specific sense were evangelism and moral instruction the strategies of a colonizing power?” (xix).

Christophers approaches this question with a thorough examination of the Anglican mission discourse as imbedded in the larger colonial discourse. To be fair, this is obviously the aim of the book (as the title itself makes unmistakably clear), but it is still somewhat disappointing that Christophers’s postcolonial theoretically informed approach does not pay more attention to the colonial subjects. The Nlha7kapmx’s motives for welcoming and in the end abandoning the missionary are, in fact, discussed. Very early in the book, Christophers even suggests an interesting general explanation for their acceptance of Christianity: “My own feeling is that the Nlha7kapmx deemed Christianity a source of spiritual replenishment—though by no means a substitute for traditional belief—and a practical means of facilitating life in colonial British Columbia” (16).

The Indian side is never treated as fully as the missionaries’, however. Moreover, the Indian perspective is never examined in the context of their own culture. A look at the bibliography confirms that Christophers has made little use of ethnographic or comparative anthropological literature to shed light on the Indians’ actions. In the end the book leaves a rather ambivalent impression of an opportunity missed to position the Indian alongside the missionary. Christophers’s postcolonial rhetoric fails to get him far beyond Parkman. His analysis of the missionary ideology is much more convincing and theoretically informed, but it still centers around the missionary’s goals and actions, relegating the colonized to the background.

This kind of criticism certainly cannot be leveled against Peyer, whose book takes precisely the opposite perspective, focusing on the way the Indian protagonists acted within their colonial contexts and strove to adapt or to change their own and their people’s destinies. The Tutor’d Mind succeeds admirably well on several levels of contextualization. It situates the four main biographical narratives within the wider historical processes of U.S. colonialism, especially the colonization of indigenous discourse and of the development of indigenous literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It also outlines the concrete local and colonial conditions that shaped the individual writer’s life and work. Peyer makes clear how Christianity must be understood not just as a dominant discourse forced on Indian cultures but as a set of symbols that Indians appropriated and manipulated in the pursuit of their own interests. The book is an exemplary exercise in ethnohistory, demonstrating that research on the impact of Christianity does not always have to focus on the missionary.

So how much progress has the ethnohistory of missions made since Parkman’s days? As this essay reveals, there is no simple, unambiguous answer to that question. First, the books reviewed bear witness to a burgeoning interest in the topic across a broad variety of disciplines, from history (Brandao, Carriker, Ellis, Post) to anthropology (Peyer), the history of religion (Vecsey), and geography (Christophers, Heidenreich)—a fact that gives hope for a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue in the future. Undoubtedly, our knowledge of the microhistory of missionization has increased immensely since Parkman’s writings, as well as our comparative view of related missionary fields and strategies in different areas of North America. The books discussed also suggest that there are two main directions of research that particularly merit further exploration:

1. 1. There could be a stronger focus on sound theorizing, of critically evaluating the meaning of key concepts along the lines of anthropological theory and comparative contextualizing. For example, the central concept of “conversion” is not subject to any serious reflection by any of the authors. Post is the only one who at least establishes a criterion for “Christianization” (the establishment of a Christian community of worship under the spiritual monopoloy of a priest).

2. 2. Closely related to this demand of theory, future research should pay closer attention to Indians as historical actors: What did conversion mean to them? What were their reasons for accepting or rejecting it? How was it accomplished in everyday praxis? How did it relate to indigenous social reality?

These and other books demonstrate that the ethnohistory of missions in North America continues to be a highly important and by no means exhausted field of research. Important progress has been made. It is hoped that more important progress lies ahead.