Mourir et renaitre: La reception du christianisme par les Inuit de l'Arctique de l'Est canadien (1890-1940) (review)

Finally, in this excellent study, we have an extensive examination of conversion to Christianity among an indigenous people in Canada, one that will serve for many years as a touchstone for similar studies. This work offers historians new dimensions and categories with which to explore the phenomenon of a relatively rapid conversion to Christianity by 1930 in Canada's North. It is also a detailed and insightful study of Inuit society and the particular processes of conversion in three principal regions: Baffin Island and Keewatin (Nunavut), and Nunavik (Arctic Quebec).

The author uses not only European documentation but also interviews with more than forty elders. It is this deliberate questioning of the partipants, of how and why conversion came about, that brings to this study a credibility and a nuanced approach missing in many other northern histories. Moreover, the author incorporates ample citations, translated into English, of this testimony to illustrate and support his arguments.

Laugrand begins with the premise that conversion is a rational act, and he rejects a number of claims that represent the conversion of Native peoples as pragmatic, superficial, or both. In contrast to the destruction of society, often equated with conversion, he sees this period as a time of spiritual renaissance. One of his most important contributions is the distinction between direct and indirect zones of missionary influence. Both Catholic and Anglican missionaries were few in number, so they tended to locate at major posts. Although they also travelled to outlying areas, they were unable to reach most settlements. Laugrand incorporates these areas into the indirect zones, and he compares developments there to those in the direct zones. The study of these indirect zones is the most telling. Here, Inuit converted to Christianity, usually collectively because of the influence of leaders or shamans who first introduced them to it. The rapid conversion is explained first by the influence of Native proselytizers, and then by lay preachers. Both the Catholics and the Protestants had different strategies with which to draw in the Inuit, but it did not matter what methods were employed to introduce Christianity or who did the introduction. The Inuit converted to whichever religion arrived first.

The last third of this fine study is a structural analysis of why the Inuit converted. Many of the shamans applied oppressive rules, such as strict taboos about food types or ritual injunctions. Christianity offered fewer restrictions and also introduced new ideas, so the Inuit began creating alliances with the new Christian spirits, which they saw as beneficial. Laugrand is adamant that this conversion was an Inuit-generated one and that each element was submitted to a process of reinterpretation he casts as 'cultural negotiation,' thereby rejecting the supposition of syncretism. He found that the significant ceremonies of the shamans and their taboos disappeared in a relatively short time.

It is here in the analysis that I find the only real fault with this book. Although there are excellent studies of conversion to Christianity in Africa, for example, Laugrand does not use them comparatively in his study. By drawing on this larger literature, the reader would have seen that this rapid conversion was not confined to the Arctic. Rather, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and we should perhaps be looking more to the conjuncture of the times and the 'message' in Christianity for an explanation. Concomitantly, Laugrand's study is one that should be read by the Africanists and others, for he demonstrates this similar conversion not in a colonial settler society but in a very different government bureaucratic one. Also, he has an important message for all historians and anthropologists to consider, for he claims that the study of...