Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada eds. by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton (review)

The phrase "mixed blessings" signals that Indigenous experiences of Christianity in Canada should be seen as highly diverse, with long-term consequences that were sometimes beneficial and sometimes damaging. This theme is explored in an introduction and nine independent essays touching on a variety of periods, Indigenous nationalities, and historical figures, and reflecting different authorial points of view. Twelve authors have contributed; only two identify as Indigenous.

Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada originated in a conference at the University of Saskatchewan in 2011. The conference was particularly timely, the participants knew, since Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had just begun to take stock of the legacy of the country's Indian residential schools. Indeed, the TRC saw the influence of Christianity as mixed, as Siphiwe Dube argues, the churches had run residential schools as instruments of repression and cultural assimilation, but Christian faith and caring were helping many of the survivors find healing and comfort. Dube notes that some Indigenous critics of the TRC denied any positive benefit of Christianity at all, and were dismayed that the TRC had invited the churches to participate and that its work was being shaped by Christian notions of repentance and forgiveness.

The subtitle of the book is a problem, as Amanda Fehr recognizes explicitly in her chapter, and as other writers acknowledge implicitly. It assumes a binary opposition between Christianity and Indigeneity, making "encounter" necessary. But did such a binary opposition ever exist? Christianity did not always come from outside the Indigenous context. Many elements of Christianity were already part of Indigenous spiritualities. Indigenous Christian evangelists and teachers often preceded the Euro-Canadian missionaries. Indeed, sometimes Jesus appeared to Indigenous peoples independently of the Europeans, as he did to the Stó:lo of British Columbia, as Fehr observes. The authors also reject other simple binary oppositions such as political and spiritual, colonizers and victims. In this postcolonial approach, the editors understand their work as following "an interpretive shift well underway in the United States."

Two chapters take us to the Great Plains. Tasha Beeds shows how Edward Ahenakew (1885–1961) of Saskatchewan bridged Cree and Church of England. Fluently bilingual, he both published Cree stories and preached sermons as an Anglican priest. He was also a leading advocate for Indigenous rights through the League of Indians, until his English bishop stopped him.

Jean-François Bélisle and Nicole St.-Onge rescue Louis Riel (1844–85), the rebel leader of two uprisings in the Canadian prairies, from the interpretation of English Canadian historians that his religious commitments were esoteric at best, if not lunatic. Riel's political agenda to protect Métis land rights should be joined to, not separated from, his millenarianism and his religious vision for civil government. This vision, so far from being idiosyncratic, was linked to a transnational conservative Roman Catholic movement, and it squared with the Métis experience of the Catholic Church.

Like most if not all collections of essays, this one is uneven in quality, but overall it succeeds in challenging the generalizations and stereotyping that have dominated many past narratives of Christian Indigeneity in Canada.