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In the borderlands of northeastern North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hunger forced colonists and Native Americans to eat substances they found disgusting. This article reads captivity narratives and missionary accounts to argue that disgust fundamentally tested, transgressed, and reified cultural boundaries in the borderlands, shaping the archive of early American foodways. In doing so, this article historicizes the concept of disgust and its formation in early America and examines how colonial disgust formed perceptions of Indigenous food supplies. English and French settlers recorded their disgust with Indian food and claimed that Indigenous peoples could not even conceptualize disgust. The rhetorical aims of this literature of disgust shaped the colonial written archive, which records far fewer incidences of Native disgust. Nevertheless, these same sources document Native experiences of revulsion at colonial foodways and the foodways of other Native nations, which complicates the colonial narrative of the absence of Indian revulsion. A case study of fermentation and decay in Native and colonial foodways demonstrates that colonists saw Native fermented foods as rotten and thereby understated Native Americans' food supplies, contributing to an imperial discourse on Indigenous poverty, food systems, and land use that sought to justify colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catharine Ely, daughter of a French father and Ojibwe mother, moved to the Ojibwe Village of Fond du Lac (currently Duluth, Minnesota) with her Anglo-American missionary husband, Edmund, in 1835. Having spent ten of her eighteen years boarding at a mission school, Catharine had adopted the domestic ideals and parental principles of American evangelical Protestantism; her approach to mothering, captured by her diary, was quite different from that of the local Ojibwe women. By exploring the contrasting cultural understandings of motherhood present in each community, we glimpse a new facet of the resistance Ojibwe people offered to Edmund and Catharine's plans for their conversion, and to the United States' larger colonial venture in the Upper Midwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the differences between material culture, objects and things by considering an 1833 edition by The American Tract Society of the eighteenth-century diary entitled "The Life of Rev. David Brainerd," a missionary to Native Americans, held in the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Topics include the book's inscription, its modified binding, and its function as a memorial. .

An essay is presented on American's attempts to "civilize" Native Americans through Christian Friends' (Quakers') missions in the early U.S. Republic from 1783 through circa 1825, including its relationship with imperialism. The role that missions played in Native American economic development, including missions role in agricultural development, is discussed.

This article focuses on plural marriages, using them as a means to illuminate the intersections of domesticity and masculinity among Algonquin, Montagnais and Miami-Illinois peoples in early colonial New France. Among many Native American cultures, including those under discussion here, polygyny was part of a larger system, one that privileged larger household and kinship networks over individuals. Focusing on plural unions reveals a great deal about the critical importance of the labours of wives to male status. It provides insights into the significance of households in forging relations both between Native American peoples and between French and Native people. It also elucidates differences between and among Algonquian-speaking people in this area, thus illuminating early colonial encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada's Iron Creek meteorite, a 320 lb (145 kg) Group IIIAB medium octahedrite iron, was long venerated by the First Nations in Alberta as their sacred Manitou Stone, but it was taken without authority from them by Methodist missionaries in 1866. That began the meteorite's long odyssey, as it was transferred first to the Methodist Mission in Victoria (now Pakan) Alberta; then to the Red River Mission in Winnipeg, Manitoba; then to the Wesleyan Methodist Church's Mission Rooms in Toronto, Ontario; then to Victoria College in Cobourg, Ontario; then to the campus of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario; then to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto; and finally to the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Alberta Museum) in Edmonton. In recent years, a First Nations movement to repatriate the meteorite to a place near its original find site has been initiated. As of now, the meteorite remains on display at the Royal Alberta Museum's Syncrude Gallery of Aboriginal Culture, where it is a prized showpiece. The present paper explores the curious history and cultural significance of this fabled meteorite, its long odyssey, the issues surrounding the claims for its repatriation, the Royal Alberta Museum's present policy, and a possible way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers whether the Jesuit missionary activities in New France in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries were based on the establishment of missionary reserves for Amerindians in colonial Paraguay during the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. It explores the historiography of early modern Jesuit missions, considering epistemological issues embedded in histories of the period. Books discussed include the 1900 biography "Samuel de Champlain" by Gabriel Gravier, the 1872 history "Glimpses of the Monastery" by Marie de l’Incarnation, and the 1976 history "Friend and Foe" by Cornelius Jaenen.

An essay is presented on the history of the Wyandot Indians at the Upper Sandusky reservation in Ohio during the period of the Early American Republic. It examines the Wyandot diaspora and Wyandot hybridity, and it comments on Wyandot responses to American expansionism. The issues of Wyandot collective memory and agency are explored. The author also addresses the influence of Christian Evangelicalism and the work of Methodist missionary James Finley.

A biography of Anglican missionary Stanley Eaton Higgs is presented, focusing on Higgs' autobiography "That They Might Have Life: An Autobiography by the Late Reverend Canon Stanley E. Higgs." It comments on his missionary service at the Lytton Indian Mission in Lytton, British Columbia. The author examines Higgs' interactions with the Nlha7kápmx Indians and suggests that his autobiography has been underused in the study of indigenous-settler relations.

Background: This paper challenges the dominant story of Protestant and Catholic conflict by illustrating the critical role that mission schools played in creating denominational consensus in the West. Focus: Protestant and Catholic missionaries cast aside their differences as they worked toward common goals to "civilize, " Christianize, and "Americanize" natives on reservations like Rosebud. United as whites against indigenous "others," these predominantly female missionaries forged new, interdenominational conceptions of American identity through their work in western mission schools. Research Design: The article offers historical analysis and interpretation. Conclusions: Despite a long historiography emphasizing conflict between these groups, this study of a Protestant school and a Catholic school on Rosebud at the turn of the twentieth century provides new perspectives on the Americanization process at the center of schooling during this period. This examination of missionary education adds to our understanding of educative efforts among Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by illustrating how religion, and religious denominalionalism, operated on the frontier. Against a long history of missionary work in the West and denominational conflict in the East, Protestants and Catholics alike affirmed their own "American" identity through their work on Rosebud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1820, Osage chiefs traveled from southeast Kansas to St. Louis to ask Bishop Louis DuBourg to visit their villages, promising that "he could pour waters on many heads." Through their experience with French traders, the Osage had come to trust Catholic priests; thus, as Protestant clergy began to petition the government for the right to establish missions on Osage lands, the chiefs turned to the "Chief of the Black Robes." By negotiating a relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, the Osage hoped to preserve their identity as "Children of the Middle Waters." The author examines the ensuing relationship between the Osage and the Jesuit priests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to contact with Europeans, California Indigenous peoples maintained a culture of three genders: male, female, and joya. Spanish missionaries and soldiers, however, viewed joyas as practicing "the execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies" and reported that "we place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will disappear with the growth of the missions. The abominable vice will be eliminated to the extent that the Catholic faith and all the other virtues are firmly implanted there, for the glory of God and the benefit of those poor ignorants." I argue that what Spaniards saw as a religious duty was actually a form of gendercide, the destruction of an entire third gender, and explore the various strategies employed to accomplish this gendercide. Ultimately, this gendercide—while severely destructive to boüi joyas and the indigenous community—was unsuccessful, and I further argue that we are experiencing a renaissance oí joyas in the form of two-spirited indigenous peoples.

The motivations for relatively rapid incorporation of Native Californian populations into the Spanish mission system are the subject of anthropological and historical debate (e.g., S. Cook 1976; Coombs and Plog 1977; Duggan 2000; Guest 1979; Hackel 2005; Jackson 1999; Larson, Johnson, and Michaelsen 1994; Milliken 1995; Sandos 1991, 1998, 2004). The ecological hypothesis is one of many explanations offered. Advocates of this hypothesis maintain that environmental push factors such as drought, depletion of native food sources by the grazing of livestock, and environmental changes induced by the construction of irrigation systems and pull factors such as the potential food sources provided by the missions were motivating reasons for the rapid incorporation of native peoples into the Spanish mission system of Alta California. This hypothesis has predominantly been used by scholars to explain Chumash baptism in southern California missions (Coombs and Plog 1977; Jackson 1999; Larson, Johnson, and Michaelsen 1994), but has more recently also been used to discuss Esselen and Costanoan/Ohlone baptisms at Mission San Carlos (Hackel 2005). In this paper, I examine the validity of the ecological hypothesis for Salinan Indian baptism at Mission San Antonio de Padua using documentary and archaeological evidence. Salinan Indians at Mission San Antonio were influenced by only some environmental push and pull factors, and only at specific times during this culture contact period. As economics, culture, and environment changed through time at Mission San Antonio, the reasons that Salinan peoples chose baptism may also have been dynamic. This conclusion emphasizes that the reasons Native Californians chose baptism are geographically, temporally, and culturally contingent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares two missionary grammars written in the middle of the 17th century, Horacio Carochi’s (1579–1662) Arte de la Lengua Mexicana con la declaración de los adverbios della (1645) and John Eliot’s (1604–1690) The Indian Grammar Begun: or, an Essay to Bring the Indian Language into Rules (1666). Although published only 21 years apart, the two works differ in both context and theoretical underpinnings. These differences are manifested both in the type and depth of analysis undertaken by each author. Indeed, Carochi’s analysis goes much deeper and offers a more complete description of the language treated. While this can be attributed in part to Carochi’s own linguistic ability, the quality and completeness of his grammar is due in large part to the existence of a tradition of scholarship concerning Nahuatl in New Spain, a tradition that is strikingly absent in New England of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier article (Pharo 2007), the author investigated how Spanish ethnographer-missionaries and missionary-linguists of the Colonial period translated the concept of ‘religion’ into various indigenous Mesoamerican languages. In the present article, he concedes that “assorted Mesoamerican notions may well together, as a family of concepts, be subordinated to the abstract superior concept of ‘religion’. Other relevant modern Spanish concepts like ‘sagrado’, ‘creencia’, ‘ritual’ and ‘costumbre’ etc. can thus be studied in the dictionaries.” In particular ‘costumbre’ (“custom”, “habit”) proves to be a central word among present-day Mesoamericans, not only to circumscribe their own religious practice, but also to designate ‘religion’ as well. As a result, the author, this time, analyses Spanish concepts associated with religion — but not exclusively with Christianity, i.e., neutral religious notions are the object of the analysis — translated into Nahuatl and Yucatec as recorded in colonial period dictionaries. The general hypothesis is that the dictionaries, in particular the Vocabulario (1555 and 1571) by the Franciscan Alonso de Molina (1514–1585), constituted a pedagogical strategy of transculturation at this early stage of the mission, not a radical linguistic attempt at acculturation, in order to transmit the unfamiliar Christian notions (such as conversion) to the natives of Mesoamerica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On a trouvé des bagues iconographiques (bagues jésuites) au cours de fouilles archéologiques dans le territoire que les Français dénommèrent la Novelle France. On a fait la supposition que ces bagues datent les sites, d'abord en utilisant leurs motifs dans un modèle "drift." Ce modèle n'a pas reussi, et il faut faire attention à d'autres attributs metallurgiques en même que les motifs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historical Studies is the property of Canadian Catholic Historical Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents an in-depth account of the missionary travels of the Anglican minister Benjamin Ingham to colonial Georgia in the 1730s and provides discussion evaluating the level of influence which the voyage produced. Details are given relating the logistics of the trip, highlighting the friendship of Ingham to other notable Anglicans of the era, particularly his friendship with Charles and John Wesley. The trip's failed goals towards establishing missions to the Native Americans of Georgia are discussed. The ideological influences of the Georgian excursion on Ingham's preaching and personality are examined, including the impact of his friendship with Moravians and the frustrations of frontier life. Mention is also given to the ways in which Ingham's visit continued to effect the religious life in Georgia in the decade after his departure.

The article presents an historical exploration into the Moravian missionary and Native American convert population of the Great Lakes Region in the late 18th-century. Details are particularly given highlighting the impact of the massacre of the Moravian Gnadenhutten settlement of Ohio on the community's future challenges. The pressures faced by the Moravian community from the changing and conflicting governments of the U.S. and Canada, as well as from the Native American tribes are analyzed. The group's migration into Canada but continued conflicts is also discussed. Comments are given tracing the community's difficulties back to the Gnadenhutten incident.

The article presents an examination of the work that missionaries Narcissa and Marcus Whitman conducted at the Waiilatpu mission in Oregon. It reevaluates the work of Protestant missions in Oregon Territory during the 1830s and 40s, explores the role that gender played in encounters between missionaries and Native Americans and examines differences between how male and female missionaries coped with the stress of the job. It explores the barriers they encountered in their efforts to inspire cultural and religious transformation among the Cayuse Indians and the events of the massacre at Waiilatpu.

Copyright of Historical Studies is the property of Canadian Catholic Historical Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay analyzes and assesses a variety of forms in which feminist theory has been brought to bear on the ethnohistory of Christianity among Native North American women: feminist political economy; race, class, and gender as interrelated systems of inequality; the social construction of gendered selves, particularly as analyzed through personal narratives and biographies; and postmodern and poststructural theories of disciplinary institutions, embodied practices, and resistance.

The Heiltsuk village of Bella Bella converted en masse to Methodism in 1880. It was the beginning of a process of missionization that affected all aspects of Heiltsuk life. Heiltsuk women were the primary objects of missionary efforts to modify behavior. Their responses to the missionaries included elements of both accommodation and resistance. Women forged a new synthesis of Heiltsuk and Methodist values and practices in the face of stressful changes in their world.

Utilizing archival as well as ethnographic field data, this essay traces the history of the Tlingit women's conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Their initial limited exposure to Orthodoxy, which occurred during the Russian-American Company era and was structured by larger trading, military, and socioeconomic relationships between the Russians and the Tlingit, is contrasted with their massive conversion to Orthodoxy in the 1880s, two decades after the purchase of Alaska by the United States. While examining the various political, social, and religious aspects of that conversion, the essay also explores the native women's own interpretations of Orthodoxy, which has remained the favorite denomination of the more culturally conservative segment of the Tlingit community throughout the twentieth century.

Several vital issues of method and approach arise in this special issue on Native women and Christianization. The foregrounding of gender, our questions about how best to conceptualize Native-Christian interactions, and the problems of hearing and adequately presenting the voices of the past involve us in a morality play that began a long time ago and still continues.

New findings on early Franciscan missions in Florida highlight the close relationship between Spanish colonization and missionary activities, as conversion of native people to Catholicism made them willing laborers for the Spaniards. An estimated 140 missions were established during the 17th century, when Florida was under Spanish control. Research indicates that the mission system in Timucua province was reorganized following an Indian rebellion in 1656, after the Indian population had been severely reduced by a series of epidemics.

Anthropologists have long been interested in missionization, acculturation, and political subjugation of traditional peoples. In recent years scholars have generated voluminous amounts of data on Spanish colonialism and its effects on the native population of the Americas. This article specifically examines the missionization of the Chumash occupying the coastal region of central California. Although the abandonment of Chumash villages occurred over a 40-year period, the vast majority of the Chumash people - over 85 percent - migrated to the missions between 1786 and 1803. We suggest that the decision to move to the missions may have been based on a desire to minimize risk and was considered an acceptable alternative under the pressures of several interrelated catastrophic events: the period between 1780 and 1830 was characterized by high climatic variability, several years of droughts, and significantly elevated sea surface temperatures. This was a particularly difficult period of high subsistence risk, and the traditional Chumash buffers of trade and political alliances failed under intense pressures of missionization. Compounding these conditions were European diseases that decimated the Chumash people. Primary sources used for this research include mission documents and registers produced by Franciscan missionaries between 1786 and 1834. Information on paleoenvironmental conditions is derived from high-resolution dendrochronological and marine sedimentary records.

Moravian missionary efforts among the Lenape and related nations began in Pennsylvania during the 1740s and continued in Ohio until the early nineteenth century. The church established thirty-two North American […]

Though European Christian Missionaries were active on a number of fronts in eastern North America during the seventeenth century, the areas where their presence was most decisive in shaping the […]

This is a story about what both eighteenth-century clerics and twentieth-century historians have judged a dismal failure: the first generation of Protestant missionary activity among the Mohawk Iroquois. That activity […]

Shamanism, a key element of the precontact Tlingit culture, was seen by Christian missionaries as one of the worst manifestations of paganism. A relentless campaign waged against the shamans by the missionaries, with the help of military and civil authorities, succeeded: by the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Tlingit had converted to Christianity, and by the 1930s most of the shamans had disappeared. In their effort to reconcile Christianity and the 'traditional culture,' modern-day Tlingit elders construct various interpretations of shamanism. The article examines these accounts as indigenous history and as ideological statments that challenge the notion of the inferiority of the aboriginal Tlingit religion to Christianity.

This article studies the meaning baptism had for Jesuits and Canadian Montagnais. It outlines changing Jesuit policy for baptizing Native Americans; weighs the economic, political medical, and social variables behind the emerging Montagnais view thap baptism offered a way of coping with historical crisis; assesses the shared religious and ideological ground which resulted; and, finally, demonstrates that individualistic Catholicism undercut the goal of soidarity that the Montagnais sought.

Presents information on the publication of `Indian Converts' by Experience Mayhew in 1727 which documented the religious conversion of the Native population on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Reassurance to his Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) benefactors; Examination of the documentation; What the textual representations of `Indian Converts' reflect.

An introduction is presented which discusses topics within this issue including 19th century missionaries to the Odawa and Ojibwe Indians, French-American settlements near Fort Detroit during the colonial and early Republic periods of the U.S., and U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Romney.

Jean M. O’Brien, Cameron Blevins, Glenda Goodman, and Patrick M. Erben comment on Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly’s article, “Singing Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives,” and its digital companion site on the OI Reader. The Forum concludes with Wheeler and Eyerly’s reply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educating Dakota Children in Missionary Homes, 1835-1862 In 1839, Mary Riggs, a Protestant missionary living in Minnesota, wrote to her mother about an incident involving a Dakota mother and her […]