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The Practice of Native American Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Michael D. McNally
Michael D. McNally
Affiliation:
Michael D. McNally is assistant professor of history and philosophy at Eastern Michigan University
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The fields of Native American religious traditions and American religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture. Although there has been a long standing scholarly interest on writing about missions to Native Americans from a variety of viewpoints, recent years have seen the publication of a number of fresh considerations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christianity—or better, native Christianities. Native communities have long woven the stories, signs, and practices of the Christian tradition into the fabric of their lifeways, in rich and resourceful ways, even under the direst of colonizing circumstances. But only recently has scholarship begun to take this fuller texture into account: most recently, Native and Christian (1996), edited by James Treat; Native American Religious Identity (1998), edited by Jace Weaver; Sergei Kan's Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries; Clara Sue Kidwell's Choctaws and Missionaries; and Christopher Vecsey's multivolume study of the varieties of native Catholicism, of which volume two, The Paths of Kateri's Kin (1998), is of most interest here. This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native scholars entering the field and more publications that anthologize a range of native Christian viewpoints into single volumes. It has also to do with more sustained accountability among normative scholars to native communities and the way that consultants in those communities imagine their religious lives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , December 2000 , pp. 834 - 859
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2000

References

1. I am indebted to Anderson, Devon, Braude, Ann, Martin, Joel, Pesantubbee, Michelene, Treat, James, Vecsey, Christopher, and others whose comments helped vivify a previous draft of this article presented at a joint session of the North American Religions Section and the Native American Religious Traditions Group at the American Academy of Religions' annual meeting (11, 1998). For the work on Ojibwe hymn-singing, I am grateful for the guidance of the late Larry Cloud Morgan, Erma Vizenor, and other elders of the White Earth Ojibwe Singers.Google Scholar

2. Treat, James, ed., Native and Christian (New York: Routledge, 1995);Google ScholarWeaver, Jace, ed., Native American Religious Identity (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998);Google ScholarVecsey, Christopher, The Paths ofKateri's Kin (South Bend, Ind.: University Notre Dame Press, 1997)Google Scholarand Where the Two Roads Meet (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999);Google ScholarTinker, George, Missionary Conquest (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993);Google ScholarKan, Sergei, Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries (Seattle, Wa.: University of Washington Press, 1999);Google ScholarFienup-Riordan, Ann, The Real People and the Children of Thunder: The Yup'ik Eskimo Encounter with Moravian Missionaries John and Edith Kilbuck (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991);Google ScholarKidwell, Clara Sue, Choctazvs and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995);Google ScholarNoley, Homer, First White Frost: Native Americans and United Methodism (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992);Google ScholarPeelman, Achiel, Christ is a Native American (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995);Google ScholarPesantubbee, Michelene, “Beyond Domesticity: Choctaw Women Negotiating the Tension Between Choctaw Culture and Protestantism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67 (1999): 387–409. Several article-length studies of Abenaki and Montagnais Catholic practices by Kenneth Morrison are intriguing and bear further elaboration.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee “Baptism and Alliance: The Symbolic Mediations of Religious Syncretism,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 416–37CrossRefGoogle Scholarand “Discourse and the Accommodation of Values: Toward a Revision of Mission History,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1985): 365–82.Google Scholar

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8. The Ojibwe (variously, Ojibway, Ojibwa, Chippewa, or Anishinaabe) people of the Western Great Lakes region are today among the most populous nations in native North America. According to the 1990 census, 106,000 Ojibwes live in the U.S., with as many or more in Canada.Google Scholar

9. Copway, George, The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850),Google Scholaras cited in Vizenor, Gerald, The People Named the Chippewa (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 62.Google Scholar

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15. A longer treatment can be found in Ojibwe Singers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholarand in McNally, Michael, “The Uses of Hymn-Singing at White Earth, 1868–1988: Towards a History of Practice” in Lived Religion in America, ed. Hall, David (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

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18. Gilfillan, J. A., “Indian Deacons at White Earth” Protestant Episcopal Church, Diocese of Minnesota Papers, box 3, Minnesota Historical Society.Google ScholarSee also Minnesota Missionary 4 /7 (1881) and Fruth, Alban, A Century of Missionary Work Among the Red Lake Chippewa Indians 1858–1958 (Red Lake, Minn.: St. Mary's, 1958), 15–16.Google Scholar

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20. Vecsey, , The Paths ofKateri's Kin, 223.Google Scholar

21. See Peelman, Achiel, OMI, Christ is a Native American (Ottawa: Novalis-Saint Paul University, 1995);Google ScholarStarkloff, Carl, SJ, A Theological Reflection: The Recent Revitalization of the Tekakwitha Conference (Great Falls, Mont.: Tekakwitha Conference National Center, 1982).Google Scholar

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25. Sergei Kan's detailed comparison of Russian Orthodox and Presbyterian missionaries in this regard pushes the limits of this generalization most forcefully, for Kan observes that Orthodox clergy recognized and exploited the advantage that their sacramental and liturgical emphasis had over the Protestants from the Tlingit perspective.Google Scholar

26. Sherman Hall to Laura Hall, 4 02 1835, American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions Correspondence, reproduced in Grace Lee Nute Collection, box 3, folder 9, Minnesota Historical Society. The American Board was at the time a joint venture of the churches of the Reformed tradition, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.Google Scholar

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29. Weaver, Jace, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1.Google Scholar

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32. Bourdieu, , Outline of a Theory of Practice, 109.Google Scholar

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35. Gill, Sam, Native American Religious Action, 151.Google Scholar

36. Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Raymond, Gino and Adamson, Matthew (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 170.Google Scholar

37. Broker, Ignatia, Night Flying Woman (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1983), 94.Google Scholar