When we think about conversion, we tend to think that people have left one system of belief and moved into another system of belief, and that’s really not how it played for most Native people. Most were—and are—happy to keep multiple systems of belief going at the same time. For Native people, efficacy really was the bottom line in terms of spiritual practice. There’s plenty of evidence to think that Native people looked at Christians, and looked at the process of colonization, and imagined that there was some form of efficacy around Christianity. So you tend to get syncretic kinds of
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