Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad

by Alvyn Austin (Editor), Jamie S Scott (Editor)

Christian missions and missionaries have had a distinctive role in Canada's cultural history. With Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples , Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott have brought together new and established Canadian scholars to examine the encounters between Christian (Roman Catholic and Protestant) missionaries and the indigenous peoples with whom they worked in nineteenth- and twentieth-century domestic and overseas missions. This tightly integrated collection is divided into three sections. The first contains essays on missionaries and converts in western Canada and in the arctic. The essays in the second section investigate various facets of the Canadian missionary presence and its legacy in east Asia, India, and Africa. The third section examines the motives and methods of missionaries as important contributors to Canadian museum holdings of artefacts from Huronia, Kahnawaga, and Alaska, as well as China and the South Pacific. Broadly adopting a postcolonial perspective, Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples contributes greatly to the understanding of missionaries not only as purveyors of western religious values, but also as vehicles for cultural exchange between Native and non-Native Canadians, as well as between Canadians and the indigenous peoples of other countries.

330 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2004

About the author

Alvyn Austin was assistant professor of history at Brock University, St. Catharine's, Ontario.

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad (2005) Austin and Scott bring together ten other researchers to investigate the role of missionaries and missionized in Canadian and transnational relationships to highlight the “complex encounter between missionaries and converts” (p. 4). In the first section, four authors focus their attention on missionary work in Canada. For example, Myra Rutherdale in “Mothers of Empire” highlights the metaphor of motherhood in the work of Anglican missionary women among the Indigenous peoples of the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and British Columbia. Indeed, rather than cultivating a sense of cross-cultural sisterhood, the women constructed a maternal relationship with Indigenous women in which they took on the “superior” role, holding held the responsibility of “mothering” them into civilization. Motherhood was critical in extending discourses of authority to white Anglican women. The second section moves overseas, a critical field of missionizing for Canada considering that in relation to their population and resources, the nation sent out more missions than any other country (p. 4). Expanding on foreign missions, the third section highlights how the items brought back from overseas and local missions informed congregations and the nation at large about the “other.” For example, Barbara Lawson examines Rev. Robertson’s collection from the Pacific Islands to demonstrate how missionaries “used objects to authenticate experiences in distant locales and to establish a visual impression of ‘heathenism” (p. 256). Indeed, highlighting “traditional” items could be used to spark interest in the missionary movement and reinforce Canada’s role as a paternalistic colonizer. Lawson importantly reminds readers that collections, such as Robertson’s rather monolithic and curated group of “traditional” items, may be misleading if read uncritically. In all, this collection contributes to examining missionaries’ complex roles in colonizing, encountering, imperialism, and Canada’s national identity formation.