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The Canadian Historical Review 85.1 (2004) 150-152



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Women and the White Man's God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field. Myra Rutherdale. Vancouver: UBC Press 2002. Pp. 224, illus. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper

As recent scholars have begun to investigate more aspects of the history of Native-Christian relationships, they have begun to look at geographic areas that are academically underdeveloped, such as Canada's north. But as Myra Rutherdale notes, 'the histories of missions in northern communities have largely focused on men.' Rutherdale ably proves the necessity of examining the role of gender in the mission context, but, unlike her predecessors, she focuses exclusively on female missionaries who worked inside Canada. She looks specifically at the roles of Anglican women in northern British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories between 1860 and 1940 and their relationships with Aboriginal peoples.

This geographically and denominationally specific focus makes Rutherdale's work essentially a case study in colonial relations rather than one that attempts to encompass the white, Christian, Canadian women's experience in general. Using the methodology of Homi Bhabha, Rutherdale focuses on the contact zone itself, placing importance [End Page 150] on the local context, and moves beyond the dichotomy of colonized/colonizer. This approach works particularly well, conveying her argument that, in the colonial context, these women's relationships with Aboriginal women never followed any one pattern. As Rutherdale contends, this diversity occurred because 'notions of race, both of Whiteness and Aboriginality, were constructed and reconstructed in Anglo-Canadian missionaries as relationships were forged and varying needs were met.' However, Rutherdale is careful to avoid glorifying these Anglican women, as she does not discount how they embodied colonial ideals in the mission settings. Instead, she contends that these women's activities represent the 'ambiguities of the mission experience.'

To access the experiences of these women in the contact zone, Rutherdale uses their private writings, including journals to themselves and letters to families back home, as well as the public records intended for home audiences. The use of both private and public sources provides Rutherdale with excellent material that exemplifies the ambiguities of missionizing, as they often reflect the contradictions the women felt towards the Native communities. For instance, she notes that Charlotte Selina Bompas, a bishop's wife, viewed the appearance of Aboriginal women with disgust and saw them as 'Black and grimy.' Yet, as Rutherdale ably demonstrates in the chapter on 'Motherhood and Morality,' Bompas, like most other female missionaries, had tender feelings towards the young children left in her care. This particular chapter also illustrates how all of the women, even those who were single, were expected to adopt traditional maternal roles despite the fact that they were outside a domestic context. Yet the boundaries of gender were not inflexible: in the section on gender relations in the mission field, Rutherdale examines how the duties of these women often went beyond the gender norms of this period.

The most engaging part of Rutherdale's work is the chapter that discusses Aboriginal responses to the missionaries and to Anglicanism. As she points out, Aboriginal Christians supported their own women's auxiliaries and ministries and created a Church Army. While it is useful for Rutherdale to examine how the missionaries were received by Native communities, this chapter also raises questions that could be addressed in a future work beyond the scope of the present study. Were Aboriginal women more receptive to these missionaries than men? Did the response to Christianity differ between nations as a result of cultural factors? Did adherence to Christian teachings change status within the traditional community?

Overall, Women and the White Man's God is a comprehensive case study of how gender, religion, and Aboriginal identity reacted and related [End Page 151] to each other in the context of Canada's colonial setting. This book is an important addition to the literature in these areas because of its insistence on moving away from the paradigms of colonizer and victim...

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