Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2004
Abstract
By now it's safe to say that we have turned a comer in studies of Indian missions because recent publications have sustained a new perspective on Native Christianity. Previous interpretive ideas - ones shared by this reviewer - assumed a dearth of Indian documentary sources, regarded white values as incompatible with Native ones, judged evangelical efforts to be failures when Indians remained Indians, and dismissed converts as having abandoned the cultural patterns essential to their ethnic identity. But the author of this volume joins a handful of others who point out that Native clergy did not obliterate tribal self-consciousness but rather worked creatively to instill and maintain a new blend of beliefs and institutions in dynamic cultural forms.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:4 (Fall 2004). Copyright © 2005 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.