"From the 1600s through the 1800s, Spanish missionaries came to America to convert Native Americans. [The author] provides in-depth information on their efforts, their varying missionary ambitions, and native peoples' responses to evangelization and conversion efforts. She also provides an ehthohistorical and archaeological perspective on the structure and daily activities of early mission life."--back cover.
"Missions are memory sites for many descendants of colonial populations and for colonized Native Americans. As such, Spanish missions enshrine complex and contested memories for those whose long-term histories are implicated in the process of mission-building and conversion. From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Spanish missionaries traveled to America to convert Native Americans to Catholicism. Here, Franciscan and Jesuit dogma often conflicted with the pragmatic issues of the survival of both secular and missionary settlements. With cogent analysis of archaeological records, Maria F. Wade addresses the long-term processes of development of the mission as an institution in Florida, northern Mexico, Texas, and southwest California." "The missionaries who traveled to New Spain were prepared to wage a battle against evil. They had honed their conversion skills in the trials of the Inquisition against heresy, witchcraft, and on the tribulations of the Europeans afflicted with disease, poverty, and famine. The four geographic areas studied here represent stages (early, middle, and late) in the approach to conversion, all of which were influenced by Hapsburg and Bourbon political and military objectives. Vital to their efforts was the definition of the boundaries between good and evil, a demarcation that engendered conflict and proved a particularly trying point of conversion. Missionaries working in these regions generally encountered Native spiritual practices that did not fit idolatrous definitions. Thus, under the pressures of duty to God and country, these missionaries came to feel trapped by the very system they created." "Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans provides in-depth information on varied missionary ambitions and native peoples' responses to evangelization and conversion, with an ethnohistorical and archaeological perspective on the structure and daily activities of early mission life."--BOOK JACKET.
This fascinating probe into U.S. mission history spotlights four cases: Junipero Serra, the Franciscan whose mission to California natives has made him a candidate for sainthood; John Eliot, the renowned Puritan missionary to Massachusetts Indians; Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Jesuit missioner to the Indians of the Midwest; and Henry Benjamin Whipple, who engineered the U.S. government's theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux.
Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of mission enterprises and how native peoples actively incorporated Spanish colonialism into their own landscapes. An innovative reorientation spanning the northern limits of Spanish colonialism, this volume brings together a variety of archaeologists focused on placing indigenous agency in the foreground of mission interpretation.
As Protestantism expanded across the Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most evangelists were not white Anglo-Americans, as scholars have long assumed, but members of the same groups that missionaries were trying to convert. Native Apostles offers one of the most significant untold stories in the history of early modern religious encounters, marshalling wide-ranging research to shed light on the crucial role of Native Americans, Africans, and black slaves in Protestant missionary work. The result is a pioneering view of religion’s spread through the colonial world. From New England to the Caribbean, the Carolinas to Africa, Iroquoia to India, Protestant missions relied on long-forgotten native evangelists, who often outnumbered their white counterparts. Their ability to tap into existing networks of kinship and translate between white missionaries and potential converts made them invaluable assets and potent middlemen. Though often poor and ostracized by both whites and their own people, these diverse evangelists worked to redefine Christianity and address the challenges of slavery, dispossession, and European settlement. Far from being advocates for empire, their position as cultural intermediaries gave native apostles unique opportunities to challenge colonialism, situate indigenous peoples within a longer history of Christian brotherhood, and harness scripture to secure a place for themselves and their followers. Native Apostles shows that John Eliot, Eleazar Wheelock, and other well-known Anglo-American missionaries must now share the historical stage with the black and Indian evangelists named Hiacoomes, Good Peter, Philip Quaque, John Quamine, and many more.
In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas gather emerging and leading voices in the study of Native American religion to reconsider the complex and often misunderstood history of Native peoples' engagement with Christianity and with Euro-American missionaries. Surveying mission encounters from contact through the mid-nineteenth century, the volume alters and enriches our understanding of both American Christianity and indigenous religion. The essays here explore a variety of postcontact identities, including indigenous Christians, "mission friendly" non-Christians, and ex-Christians, thereby exploring the shifting world of Native-white cultural and religious exchange. Rather than questioning the authenticity of Native Christian experiences, these scholars reveal how indigenous peoples negotiated change with regard to missions, missionaries, and Christianity. This collection challenges the pervasive stereotype of Native Americans as culturally static and ill-equipped to navigate the roiling currents associated with colonialism and missionization. The contributors are Emma Anderson, Joanna Brooks, Steven W. Hackel, Tracy Neal Leavelle, Daniel Mandell, Joel W. Martin, Michael D. McNally, Mark A. Nicholas, Michelene Pesantubbee, David J. Silverman, Laura M. Stevens, Rachel Wheeler, Douglas L. Winiarski, and Hilary E. Wyss.
Lightfoot examines the interactions between Native American communities in California & the earliest colonial settlements, those of Russian pioneers & Franciscan missionaries. He compares the history of the different ventures & their legacies that still help define the political status of native people.
In this absorbing history, Henry Warner Bowden chronicles the encounters between native Americans and the evangelizing whites from the period of exploration and colonization to the present. He writes with a balanced perspective that pleads no special case for native separatism or Christian uniqueness. Ultimately, he broadens our understanding of both intercultural exchanges and the continuing strength of American Indian spirituality, expressed today in Christian forms as well as in revitalized folkways. "Bowden makes a radical departure from the traditional approach. Drawing on the theories and findings of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, he presents Indian-missionary relations as a series of cultural encounters, the outcomes of which were determined by the content of native beliefs, the structure of native religious institutions, and external factors such as epidemic diseases and military conflicts, as well as by the missionaries' own resources and abilities. The result is a provocative, insightful historical essay that liberates a complex subject from the narrow perimeters of past discussions and accords it an appropriate richness and complexity. . . . For anyone with an interest in Indian-missionary relations, from the most casual to the most specialized, this book is the place to begin."—Neal Salisbury, Theology Today "If one wishes to read a concise, thought-provoking ethnohistory of Indian missions, 1540-1980, this is it. Henry Warner Bowden's history, perhaps for the first time, places the sweep of Christian evangelism fully in the context of vigorous, believable, native religions."—Robert H. Keller, Jr., American Historical Review
Presents fresh insights into the relationships between missions and indigenous peoples, and the outcomes of mission activities in the processes of imperial conquest and colonisation. This book focuses on missions across the British Empire (including India, Africa, Asia, the Pacific), within transnational and comparative perspectives.
