The Transition to Christianity and Modernity among Indigenous Peoples (original) (raw)
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Indigenous Engagement with Christianity: A Review Essay
2018
Mixed Blessings , Defining Metis , and Perishing Heathens all move scholarly dialogue past mere indictment of the colonizer’s religion toward the possibilities of Indigenous refusal, acceptance, adaptation, and politically motivated use of Christianity. Read together, these three books function like a primer on the possibilities and pitfalls involved in studying often tense and ambiguous moments of interreligious and cross-cultural encounter. This review offers an overview of each text and then highlights ways in which all three situate themselves in relation to Indigenous perspectives, address the difficulty of accessing Indigenous history through archival sources, and contribute something significant to the field of Indigenous studies.
Review: Mixed blessings: indigenous encounters with Christianity in Canada
Mixed Blessings is a collection of essays written by a variety of authors with wildly different backgrounds. The result of a workshop on Indigenous encounters with European religion, the volume seeks to explore the gray area not commonly explored in these encounters-namely, how Christianity was adopted and used by Indigenous individuals in order to communicate with colonizers. Despite this common theme, the topics vary widely, starting at the roots of colonialism in the seventeenth century with essays by Elizabeth Elbourne, Timothy Pearson, and Amanda Fehr, who all discuss the use of ritual and ceremony as a means of engaging power. Beginning in the seventeenth century and concluding in the nineteenth, the three authors together give a startling portrayal of how First Nations adapted to colonial Christianity, changing it in order to communicate their own wants and needs, while at the same time expressing their frustrations at how colonial officials were behaving toward Indigenous communities.
Post-Contact Indigenous Christianity: Double mistaken identity and primitive evangelism
Religious conversion in the Americas was a long and ambiguous process that was predominantly carried out by Christian purists looking to promote the most authentic form of Christianity free from superstition and abnormalities. However, translation between culture and language of religion produced what can be referred to as ‘double mistaken identity’ which explains the ambiguity of religious translation and the complexities of religious appropriation. Blending of Native and Christian religions allowed for a shift in Spanish perception of religion by suggesting a unification of the religions through the idea of primitive evangelism, the idea that Christianity existed in the Americas before colonization and ironically sought to valorize Christianity as the one true religion. Although Spanish friars attempted to document Native conversion to Christianity as a relatively instantaneous process of purification, it is clear that conversion was an ambiguous process that occurred over a long period of time.
2002
The transition to Catholicism in Pelly Bay is usually described as a successful conquest of a pagan terra nullius, a process in which Inuit played only a passive role. In fact, there was already a nucleus of Catholics in Pelly Bay when the first missionary arrived. Inuit invited him to come and stay with them. This article describes the early years of the transition to Catholicism, as well as some religious, political and economic factors that played a part in this process. Missionary sources reveal that Inuit were by no means passive consumers, but active participants with their own interests and agendas. The missionaries appear to have been more concerned with the containment of the westward expansion of Anglicanism than the survival of paganism. Although the missionaries assumed leadership roles in many fields, they were often not aware of the extent to which Inuit continued traditional practices outside the scope of the missionaries. Moreover, many traditional practices were int...