Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide by George E. Tinker (review)

98BOOK REVIEWS of universal peace. Part two records Iroquois attempts to apply this ideal in the decades following the establishment of Dutch and French colonies on the Hudson and the Saint Lawrence, as they sought peace with Europeans by incorporating mem into dieir kinship system. In me course of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois earnestly attempted to assimilate Dutch and French colonists, and to instruct them in their obligations and roles in the Iroquois kinship system. Neither group proved receptive. The Dutch at tempted to distance diemselves from Amerindians, whom they perceived solely as commercial partners. The French sent Jesuit missionaries to Iroquoia with the avowed intention, not of bringing the French colony into the Iroquois world, but ofassimilating the Iroquois and converting them into Christian Frenchmen. This portrayal of the Iroquois as cultural imperialists provides an invaluable insight into the dynamics of the Catholic missionary effort in Iroquoia, as Dennis depicts the attempts of a confident and successful native society to assimilate Europeans. Viewed from this perspective, the Jesuit enterprise ceases to be a unilateral venture in -which European missionaries preach to more or less receptive Native Americans. Instead, it becomes a competitive process, in which each group seeks to convert and assimilate the other to an alien way of life. In skillfully portraying me attempts of a confident and successful native society to deal with Europeans on their own terms Dennis has made an important contribution to the literature on the Iroquois, their European neighbors , and the process of evangelization. D. Peter MacLeod Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide. By George E. Tinker. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 1993· Pp. ix, 182. Paperback.) The natural source of life for a given people, explains the author, is the integrity of their native culture, the maintenance of their system of values, their social patterns and structures, the interrelationships that bind them together as a community. Destroy, erode, or undermine this complex ofsocial, political, economic, and cultural characteristics and you effectually damage or even destroy them. Such interference with a given people's way of life is what the author terms cultural genocide. Misfortune of this general character was visited upon many Native American communities at the hands of missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, who, unable to distinguish adequately between the spiritual values of the Gospel and the cultural values of the European or Euro-American way of life they BOOK REVIEWS99 represented, attempted to impart both at the same time to the ill-starred objects of their religious zeal. Inevitably, the fear of the missionaries that the lives of their converts would not conform sufficiently to European standards resulted, for the Indians, in a form of discipline that limited too severely the freedom to which they had been traditionally accustomed. With these principles in mind, the author sketches briefly the careers of four missionaries, two Protestant and two Catholic, who labored during the period previous to the development of the science of anthropology: John Eliot (d. 1690) in Puritan New England; Junípero Serra (d. 1784) in Alta California; Pierre-Jean De Smet (d. 1873) in the Great Plains, Montana, Oregon, and Alberta, Canada; and Henry Benjamin Whipple (d. 1901 ), the Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. Strangely, the author seems rather persistent in questioning the good intentions with which these and like missionaries are generally credited. "A similar breakdown of good intentions," he says, "can be demonstrated for virtually every important missionary in the history ofNative American missions in both hemispheres" (p. 17). The text is occasionally marred by small errors, at least in the case of Junípero Serra, who died in 1784, not 1782, and who was beatified on September 25, 1988, not on July 1 of that year. Pedro Fages, in 1773, was not yet the governor of California; still a lieutenant, he was only commander of the presidios in the new colony. In the early stages of his missionary experience on the Pacific coast, Serra's most important political superior was named Gálvez, not Galvan. And Indian converts, traditionally, were permitted to supplement their ration ofSpanish food with native dishes, which they actually preferred. With respect to the death rate among the...