Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau

by Christopher L. Miller

In his provocative ethnohistory, Christopher Miller offers an innovative reinterpretation of relations between Native Americans and Christian settlers on the Columbia Plateau. Miller draws on a wealth of ethnographic resources to show how culturally-derived perceptions and systems of rationality played more of a determining role in the interactions between these two groups than did material forces. Initially, Plateau Indians and the American missionaries who came to convert them perceived each other as crucial to the fulfillment of their own millennial destiny. When these views were contravened, relations quickly and fatally soured. In explaining this devolution, Prophetic Worlds provides a novel and insightful rendering of the cultural understandings that underwrote the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of life on the Plateau.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

174 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1985

About the author

Christopher L. Miller is professor in the Department of French and the Program in African and African-American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

[Gerardo Herrera · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a quick read. The story is very well organized and gets to the point right away. There were times when the narrative got a bit boring. Some information was very detailed and unnecessary. Other than that, the book was good.