Conflicted ABCFM Mission to the Dakotas, 1835-1862

Introduction

INTRODUCTION 3 Introduction In Old Rail Fence Corners, a compilation of Minnesota settlers’ remem­ brances, Mrs. John Brown tells a story about an encounter between Sam­ uel Pond, an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) missionary, and a Dakota man. Brown writes, “Mr. Pond once met a Shakopee Indian on the trail and neither would turn out for the other. They ran into each other ‘bump.’ [The] Indian said ‘Ho.’ Mr. Pond said, ‘Ho.’ Each continued on hisway.”Ofcourse,itislikely that thisencounter did not happen as told. Whether true or not, the story is an important allegory that highlights several aspects of missionary interaction with the Dakota. Most times, the missionaries and Dakotas walked on parallel paths, both com­ mitted to their own ways, never coming together or truly understanding the other. Throughout the history of the mission, however, both sides continu­ ously bumped into each other, faced resistance, and then continued on. After their meeting, Pond and the Dakota man were probably each moving in the same general direction as they had before, but their overall trajectory might have changed as a result of the contact. While the Protestant mis­ sionaries never shed their evangelical identities or stopped believing that all Dakotas needed to adopt Christianity and change their culture, interaction with the Dakota pushed the missionaries in unintended, and frequently un­ welcomed, directions.1 WhatfollowsisthestoryoftheABCFMDakotamissioninMinnesotafrom 1835 to 1862. A chronological history of the Dakota mission sheds light upon the dual themes of change and conflict embedded in this mission’s history. As the missionaries worked to Christianize and civilize the Dakotas, they themselves changed in ways that caused both internal and external stress and conflict. Simply put, antebellum missionaries were not supposed to change; indeed, the very nature of missionary work in the early nineteenth century was designed to be unidirectional, with superior missionaries ministering to and changing supposedly inferior heathens. The Dakota 4 CONFLICTED MISSION missionaries were painfully aware that the reality of life on the Minnesota frontier did not match the heroic image portrayed by the evangelical press. To maintain the façade, they did their best to hide these changes from their sponsoring organization, the government, and even each other. Focusing on examples of change and conflict within the Dakota mission both adds to and challenges the commonly accepted view of antebellum missions to American Indians. Recently historians have argued that mis­ sionaries were changed by the very people they came to convert. Mission­ ary religious beliefs, cultural assumptions, and relations with antebellum society were challenged and occasionally altered as a result of the mission process. Conversion—broadly defined—was not a one-way process. As Jay Riley Case noted, missionary work “also involved cooperation, negotiation, conversation,reassessment,andtransformation,fromallparties.”Theexpe­ rience of the Dakota missionaries adds a further dimension to this scholar­ ship, illustrating how interaction with native peoples changed the mission­ aries in both small and more substantive ways.2 While these histories add new insight into the process of cultural and religiousexchangeforbothnativesandEuro-Americans,scholarsoftenpor­ tray change for the missionaries as unthinking. Historians use words such as “unconscious,” “beyond their control,” “inadvertent,” “unwitting,” “un­ recognized,” and “unknowing” to underscore that change was unwelcome, unanticipated, and counter to the natural order of how Indian–missionary relations were supposed to proceed. For example, historian Richard Pointer argues that interaction with Native Americans impacted colonial mission­ ary David Brainerd’s “emotional and spiritual health, sense of calling and ministerial worthiness, preaching style and content, [and] understanding of missionary success.” However, Brainerd “could not acknowledge such borrowing, even to himself, given typical Christian fears of being tainted by any type of pagan idolatry.”3 The Dakota missionaries had a different experience; the changes that occurred after years of interaction with the Dakotas were not unconscious, unrecognized, or uncontested. Indeed, their actual experience with the­ Dakotas led to internal turmoil for the missionaries and created external conflict with the ABCFM, the federal government, and eventually Minne­ sota settlers, which increased over the course of the mission. Indeed, con­ flict was one of the defining features of the Dakota mission during its thirty-­ year existence in Minnesota. INTRODUCTION 5 Much of this conflict arose because the Dakota missionaries—in their own minds and in the collective evaluation of the antebellum public— failed to live up to the ideals promoted by the evangelical press. During the antebellum era, an assertive evangelical press published and distributed materials...