Perishing Heathens: Stories of Protestant Missionaries and Christian Indians in Antebellum America by Julius H. Rubin (review)

When I was in third grade, the nuns in my school used to share with us little booklets with stories and pictures of saints. The vast majority of the women included were virgin martyrs. They lived lives of piety and purity, witnessed for their faith, and died young. (The loveliest, in my young opinion, was St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose name I chose for my confirmation, naturally.) Sociologist Julius H. Rubin's Perishing Heathens gives us, in his tales of some of the American missionaries of the early nineteenth century and their Indian converts, what we might think of as the Protestant evangelical version of my Catholic saints. And unless you're keen about suffering for the kingdom of God, it's not a pretty picture.

Accounts of American missions as the triumph of cultural imperialism generally leave out the parts about the careers of young evangelical missionaries that frequently ended in depression, bankruptcy, mental illness, and early death. Missionary service chewed them up and spit them out. Meanwhile, the sons and daughters of increasingly dispossessed peoples received educations that often left them alienated from their worlds of origin and unwelcome in their new homes in Christendom. Like their missionary counterparts, many also died young, depressed, and broken. The great evangelical missionary expansion drew idealistic young people who believed they were called to change the world as well as "heathen" who encountered a world that was already changing beyond recognition and that required of them some mastery of white Protestant cultural codes. Rubin shows us the enormous discomfort and suffering these dislocations entailed on both sides as they tried to use Christianity to remake their worlds, albeit in different ways. His stories, tales of heroism by the standards of evangelical culture of the time, rely heavily on memoirs published in periodicals.

Rubin's common thread running through the stories of whites—through that of David Bacon, missionary to the Michigan Ojibwes, of "Miss D," sent to the Osage of Arkansas Territory, and to the larger cast of characters whose stories filled the pages of religious periodicals—is that a new type of "evangelical personhood" arose in early nineteenth century America. It had two aspects: first "an unattainable absolute individualism" that hinged on "piety that rotated from despondency to repentance to the blissful possession of the Holy Spirit in a mystical illuminism"; and second, surrender and subordination to ideal "communities that were devoid of conflict, in perfect integration" (189). Rubin sees these two ideals as inherently opposed, a utopian project that could not help but produce a problematic ending.

It was this conflicted notion of what it meant to be human that young evangelical missionaries tried to impart to their pupils. The second half of the book focuses on the evangelized and what happened when those who were mainly looking to obtain cross-cultural skills ran into an evangelical buzzsaw designed to reshape their sense of self. Evangelicals envisioned that their Indian converts would form the core of communities on the evangelical model: that is, Indians would act as transformative agents for Indian communities, just as (most) white evangelicals would do for white communities.

The results, at least in the instances Rubin shares, were often as disastrous (in worldly terms, at least) for the students as their would-be mentors. "K" of the Osage died an early death of consumption, although not before displaying the characteristics of a model Christian Indian in her own life. Catherine Brown of the Cherokee displayed some agency as a "Writerly Indian" before succumbing to the proverbial death of the sacrificial missionary victim in her early 20s, as did Sister Margaret Ann Crutchfield, who outlived an abusive husband and actually managed to establish a Cherokee Christian Community in Georgia before dying about 1820 at the age of 37. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, an Ojibwe Méti, married a white Indian agent who largely deserted her...