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The Practice of Native American Christianity

Michael D. McNally

Church History / Volume 69 / Issue 04 / December 2000, pp 834 - 859

DOI: 10.2307/3169333, Published online: 28 July 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/

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How to cite this article:

Michael D. McNally (2000). The Practice of Native American Christianity.
Church History, 69, pp 834-859 doi:10.2307/3169333

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 The Practice of
Native American Christianity
MICHAEL D. MCNALLY

The fields of Native American religious traditions and American

religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture.1
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 consider-
ations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christian-
ity—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 scholar-
ship 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 Vec-
sey'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.2 This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native

I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to include here some materials that
will appear in Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
1. I am indebted to Devon Anderson, Ann Braude, Joel Martin, Michelene Pesantubbee,
James Treat, Christopher Vecsey, 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 (November, 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.
2. James Treat, ed., Native and Christian (New York: Routledge, 1995); Jace Weaver, ed.,
Native American Religious Identity (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998); Christopher Vecsey, The Paths
of Kateri's Kin (South Bend, Ind.: University Notre Dame Press, 1997) and Where the Two
Roads Meet (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); George Tinker,
Missionary Conquest (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Sergei Kan, Memory Eternal: Tlingit
Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries (Seattle, Wa.: University

Michael D. McNally is assistant professor of history and philosophy at Eastern

Michigan University.
© 2000, The American Society of Church History
Church History 69:4 (December 2000)

834
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 835

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 communi-
ties imagine their religious lives.
What unites the new scholarship and makes it so refreshing is how
each study shifts the focus away from missionaries and their inten-
tions to what native peoples made of the Christian tradition, in turn
equipping us to appreciate the complexity and variety of ways of
being both native and Christian. Perhaps the clearest message we get
from this new literature is a chastening of any impulse to generalize or
theorize about native Christianity, except to say that being both native
and Christian, in whatever manner, poses a problem that lies consis-
tently at the core of native Christian reflection and practice. In this
respect, the form of the new work follows its content. Shying away
from a master narrative about the unitary sweep of Catholicism in
Indian country, Vecsey pieces together a patchwork of particular
stories, vignettes about native Catholics. Weaver and Treat compile
collections of essays by different native Christians, recording a full
range of voices in a debate about the problematics of native Christian
identity, with little interpretive overlay. Kidwell immerses readers in
the complex and detailed realities that brought nineteenth century
Choctaws to make of Christianity a resource in the effort of communal
survival, linguistic preservation, and cultural continuity. Kan identi-
fies the distinctive contours of Russian Orthodoxy that rendered this
form of missionary Christianity and not that of the region's Presbyteri-
ans a strategic medium for the ongoing articulation of Tlingit religion
and culture.
Refreshing as it is, the new literature begs something of a paradigm
shift of interpretation—or at least a more fruitful interpretive pos-
ture—to suit it. For the new material prompts a language that can help
scholars dramatically rethink the place of Christianity in Native Ameri-

of Washington Press, 1999); Ann Fienup-Riordan, 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); Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and
Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818—1918 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press,
1995); Homer Noley, First White Frost: Native Americans and United Methodism (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1992); Achiel Peelman, Christ is a Native American (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis,
1995); Michelene Pesantubbee, "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. See
"Baptism and Alliance: The Symbolic Mediations of Religious Syncretism," Ethnohistory
37 (1990): 416-37 and "Discourse and the Accommodation of Values: Toward a Revision
of Mission History," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1985): 365-82.
836 CHURCH HISTORY

can religious histories—not simply as an indication of acculturation,

but as a potential resource in native struggles to act as agents in a
history otherwise conditioned by domination.
To that end, I will here briefly identify some limits of the rather
wooden framework by which scholars have broadly understood na-
tive Christianity, predisposed as we are to interpret Native American
religious change in terms of exchanges between "belief systems." The
earlier work of nineteenth-century historians of missions and turn-of-
the-century anthropologists alike practiced a kind of tunnel vision,
focused entirely on either missionary Christianity or Native American
cultures at the expense of the other. Such a view was complicated by
social anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s who sought to document,
and often to deplore, the rapid culture change they witnessed over
time in the communities to which they returned over their careers.3
This more sustained attention to the cultural changes undergone by
the native communities came in the 1970s to characterize the emergent
field of ethnohistory, in which historians brought the tools and lan-
guage of cultural analysis to bear for better historical writing on
Native American histories.4 But the attention directed to culture change
was still by and large encumbered by static notions of religions as
systems of belief and of cultures as systems of meaning.
Until only recently, the religious story of contact between Euro-
Americans and native peoples had been seen in terms of the "colli-
sion" of two ostensibly well-bounded systems of belief: Protestant or
Catholic "Christianity" on the one hand and tribe-specific traditions
on the other.5 The domination of the one and the resistance of the other
were said to play each other out in a one-directional process of
"acculturation." In this more formulaic understanding of culture

3. See, for example, Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herskovits, "Memoran-
dum for the Study of Acculturation," American Anthropologist 38 (1936): 149-51; Accultura-
tion in Seven American Indian Tribes, ed. Ralph Linton (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith,
1940, 1963); and Melville Herskovits, Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact (New
York: J. J. Augustin, 1938).
4. See, for example, Robert Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1965); James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial
North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Carol Devens, Countering
Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900 (Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press, 1992); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians,
Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina
Press, 1975); William McLoughlin, Cherokees and Christianity 1794-1870: Essays on Accul-
turation and Cultural Persistence, ed. Walter Conser Jr. (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia
Press, 1994).
5. An exception to the rule may be the work of Ken Morrison, "Baptism and Alliance: The
Symbolic Mediations of Religious Syncretism," Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 416-437 and
"Discourse and the Accommodation of Values: Toward a Revision of History," Journal of
the American Academy of Religion 59 (1985): 365-82.
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 837

change, Christianity's gains were unequivocally the losses of tradi-

tional religions. Similarly, the persistence of traditional religions sig-
naled a lack of inroads on the part of Christianity. The relative rate of
acculturation was seen to indicate the level of resistance on the part of
traditional religion to the steady workings of the acids of accultura-
tion. Acculturation was so real that a number of studies by students of
anthropologist A. I. Hallowell in the 1950s were even trying to quan-
tify the level of acculturation across native communities in varying
proximity to Euro-American settlements by using Rorschach inkblot
tests.6
Now, to be sure, sustained attention to acculturation marked an
appreciation for native people whose lives did not resemble the old
ethnographic quest for the holy grail of "purer" precontact cultures.
What is more, acculturative studies by anthropologists, historians, and
ethnohistorians drew needed attention to the very real violence of
missionization, colonization, and culture change, for nowhere could it
be said that native people were completely in the driver's seat when it
came to assimilation and culture change. But neither were they passive
recipients of someone else's historical actions, and herein lies the
problem: the structural forces of "culture change" eclipse the historical
agency of native people in their negotiation and renegotiation of
culture over time.
In our effort to recover a fuller sense of native peoples' agency in
their encounter with missions, colonialism, and Christianity, what if
we were to recalibrate our analysis in terms of practice rather than
belief? What if we were to train our eyes and ears on the religious
practices of native Christians to see how Christianity came to change
native traditions and how native traditions came to change the Chris-
tianity proffered to, or forced upon, them? I want to suggest that a
framework oriented to religious practice can more ably encompass the
varieties of native Christianity and more nimbly discern the capacity
of native Christianities to negotiate tradition and change within the
difficult circumstances of colonization. Indeed, this approach could aid
in a richer understanding of the religion of the missionaries as well,
though I want to focus these remarks on the native side of the

6. See A. Irving Hallowell, Culture and Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 1955); Victor Barnouw, "Acculturation and Personality among the Wisconsin
Chippewa," Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 72 (1950); Stephen T.
Boggs, "Culture Change and the Personality of Ojibwa Children," American Anthropolo-
gist 60 (1958): 47-58; Bernard J. James, "Social-Psychological Dimensions of Ojibwa
Acculturation," American Anthropologist 63 (1961): 721—46. For a collection of viewpoints
of acculturative studies, see Deward E. Walker Jr, ed., The Emergent Native Americans: A
Reader in Cultural Contact, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1972).
838 CHURCH HISTORY

encounter, since it seems the evidence of our having missed the point
of native Christianity is the more dramatic.7

I. VIGNETTES OF OJIBWE CHRISTIANITY

First, I want to sketch the contours of native Christianity as freshly
appreciated by recent scholarship and to do so with dispatch by
turning to several examples of Christianity as it could be found among
Ojibwe communities in Minnesota, communities with whom I have
had some first-hand experience in the past nine years.8 I borrow the
vignette structure from the chapter entitled "The Varieties of Ojibway
Religion" in Vecsey's Paths ofKateri's Kin.
Each of these stories is worthy of recounting in far more detail. My
purposes here are simply to sketch, through the brief recounting of
four, how many varieties there were of Ojibwe Christianity. The first
two stories sketch an older, conventional understanding that Native
Christianity be seen as a straightforward outcome of the contest
between missionary culture and traditional native cultures.

Perhaps the most predictable trajectory of Ojibwe Christianity is

represented in the life of George Copway, an Ojibwe man who con-
verted to Methodism in 1830 and became a circuit preacher. Copway,
or Kahgegagahbowh as he was known in Ojibwe, was a prolific
interpreter of his people's culture to a non-Indian readership and a
vocal advocate of their interests, at least as Copway saw those inter-
ests, for he believed Ojibwe people would best be served in the context
of religious conversion to Christianity and cultural assimilation. "Edu-
cation and Christianity are to the Indian," Copway proclaimed, "what
wings are to the eagle; they elevate him; and these are given to him by
men of right views of existence enable him to rise above the soil of
degradation, and hover about the high mounts of wisdom and truth."9
And yet, Copway used the very language of Christianity to criticize

7. This fuller evaluation of the missions encounter is most ably modeled by John and Jean
Comaroff in their multivolume study of the "dialectics" of missionary encounters in
southern Africa. See Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991,1997).
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.
9. George Copway, The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation
(London: Charles Gilpin, 1850), as cited in Gerald Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa
(Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 62.
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 839

the injustices waged on his people in its name. Copway insisted that
"communities can be governed by the pure rules of Christianity," but,
he added, with "less coercion than the laws of civilized nations, at
present, imposed upon their subjects.... A vast amount of evidence
can be adduced to prove that force has tended to brutalize rather than
ennoble the Indian race."10
"With all the wholesome and enlightened laws; with all the advan-
tages and privileges of the glorious Gospel, that shines so richly and
brightly all around the white man; the poor ignorant Indians are
compelled, at the point of the bayonet, to forsake the sepulchres of
those most dear to them, and to retire to a strange land, where there is
no inhabitant to welcome them!!! May the day soon dawn, when
Justice will take her seat upon the throne."11 One might infer that the
65 percent of Minnesota Ojibwes estimated to have been baptized by
1900 simply followed Copway's trajectory of rather straightforward
cultural conversion.12 But even the predictability of Copway's trajec-
tory ends here. The apparent confidence and stability of Copway's
commitments to Protestant Christianity in his writings were later
belied by a considerable restlessness toward the end of his life. After a
falling out with the Methodists, Copway left the ministry to undertake
short careers as a Union Army recruiter and as a healer in Detroit.
Shortly before his death in 1863, he became (re)baptized and died a
Roman Catholic.13

A second vignette is important as an indication of those Ojibwes

who made conscious choices not to participate in the beliefs and
practices associated with Christians. This one is actually an apocry-
phal story that circulated widely and rapidly in the oral traditions of
many native peoples and concerns an Indian convert whose visionary
experience of the afterlife persuaded him to abandon Christianity.
Sherman Hall, a missionary affiliated with the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, told of the following threat to his

10. Copway, as cited in Vizenor, 20-21.

11. George Copway, Life, Letters, and Speeches, ed. by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Donald
Smith (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1850]), 151.
12. J. A. Gilfillan, "Miscellaneous Lots of Notes" (1911), as cited in Vecsey, The Paths ofKateri's
Kin, 222. The 65 percent Christian population, Gilfillan estimated, was comprised of 10
percent Protestant and 55 percent Catholic.
13. Donald Smith, "Kahgegagahbowh: Canada's First Literary celebrity in the United
States," a biographical introductory essay to George Copway, Life, Letters, and Speeches,
ed. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Donald Smith (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska
Press, 1997 [1850]), 48-49.
840 CHURCH HISTORY

efforts there on the Southwestern shore of Lake Superior.

One day an Indian, of whom we entertain some hope that he has not
listened in vain to the Gospel invitation, came to our house, and said
that the chiefs had reported the case of a pious, or in their dialect, a
praying Indian, who dies far away to the North. He had prayed a
long time. On his death, he went to heaven, but was refused admit-
tance on the ground that no praying Indians were admitted there. He
then went to the place where the white people go, but was not
received. He next went to the place where the Indians go, but was
there told he had been a praying Indian, and had forsaken the
customs of his fathers, and they would not receive him, and ordered
him away. After these repulses he came back again to this world, and
assumed the body which he had before inhabited.14
Missionaries like Hall were frequently confronted with this story, as it
spread like fireweed in the documentary record. The vision conveyed
a bitter truth that native converts, no matter how well they conformed
to what missionaries considered "civilized," were destined never to be
viewed as quite white. Color mattered in this story. So, too, did
religious affiliation, and the story traces the outlines of an emerging
critique of native Christianity within many sectors of the Ojibwe
population. That resistance is part of the story of native Christianity,
too.
But complete cultural conversion of the Copway sort or whole-
hearted rejection of Christianity were but two of many possible
trajectories. And while seeming to be opposites, the two indicate a
religious all-or-nothingism that may have been more the exception than
the rule in the religious idiom of Ojibwe tradition. As the following
vignettes suggest, the rule was more along the lines of a posture
toward religious hybridity that was in keeping with traditional ways
of life.

My own research focuses on the historical workings of a tradition of

hymn-singing that illustrate the significant, if subtle, presence of
religious hybridity within the boundaries of mission churches.15 Among
the Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe, people of Minnesota, translations of

14. Sherman Hall to David Greene, 17 October 1834, Papers of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, reproduced in Grace Lee Nute Collection, box 3,
folder 7, Minnesota Historical Society.
15. A longer treatment can be found in Ojibwe Singers (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000) and in Michael McNally, "The Uses of Hymn-Singing at White Earth, 1868-1988:
Towards a History of Practice" in Lived Religion in America, ed. David Hall (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997).
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 841

Protestant hymns into the Ojibwe language were promoted by nine-

teenth-century evangelical missionaries as sharp tools in their cam-
paign to root out the Indianness of Ojibwe people and to dissemble the
communal structures, indigenous ideas, and seasonal rhythms that
governed indigenous lifeways. But with time, the translated hymns
took on a life of their own in the oral tradition. For many Ojibwe
people today, the ritualized singing of these hymns, usually at all-
night funeral wakes, has become emblematic of who they are as a
distinctive people with distinctive values. This appears to be the case
regardless of whether those gathered at a wake identify as Christian.
The elders who travel the north woods to sing these hymns are neither
emissaries for evangelical Christianity nor singers of hymns per se.
Instead, they are known as "Ojibwe Singers," respected as elders who
sing "Ojibwe songs."
The story did not begin this way. In the mid-1800s, missionaries
promoted translated hymns as part of a concerted effort to instill,
through the medium of sung texts, Anglo-American Protestant ways
of valuing self, land, and community. Educational theorists of the day
taught that hymns were effective didactic tools for inculcating values
in children. Missionaries carried that logic into their work among
peoples whom they considered to be like children. Of course, mission-
aries were ever frustrated that the cultural revolution never came as
fully as they hoped. But whenever they heard native hymn-singing,
they considered it nothing less than the "sound of civilization." "I am
deeply touched by their singing," wrote Minnesota's Episcopal bishop
while on a visit to the White Earth reservation in 1881: "The wild
Indian voice is harsh. Nothing could be more discordant than their
wild yell and hideous war song. The religion of Christ softened this;
their voices became plaintive, and as they sing from the heart their
hymns are full of emotion. All sing, and you are taken afar to think of
the multitude no man could number."16 The bishop was right in many
respects. Singing gained momentum when Minnesota Ojibwes were
concentrated in the 1870s and 1880s within the confines of reservations
and where disease and dispossession increased dependence on the
mission and Indian Agent for survival. Under such circumstances,
hymn-singing mattered in the same way that cultivating land mat-
tered, that keeping Sabbath mattered, that cutting one's hair mattered.
The hymns proceeded according to Western tunes and involved the
conspicuous absence of the drum, the sine qua non of traditional
Ojibwe sacred music.
Yet, as some Ojibwes came to embrace it, hymn-singing was no mere

16. H. B. Whipple, in Minnesota Missionary 4/10 (1881): 5.

842 CHURCH HISTORY

performance of civilization. Under the religious leadership of elders,

in candle-lit shacks and wigwams far from the mission house, perfor-
mances were ritualized to make room for the practice of alternative
values. The songs came within the province of certain singing groups,
which resembled societies affiliated with particular drums. The hymn
repertory became associated with certain occasions, especially funeral
wakes and evening prayer meetings, held nearly every night in
reservation villages. Hymns were sung slowly, like laments, more the
chanting of syllables really than the conveying of the discursive
meanings of the texts themselves.
In these contexts, hymn-singing seemed less about the performance
of other people's songs than about the way of life required of those
who were entrusted by the community with the task of singing them.
Hymn societies became primary social networks through which age-
old values of reciprocity, subsistence, and the seasonal round were
negotiated within the demands of the new life on the reservation. In
the twentieth century, with the coming of English-only boarding
school education and the continued consequences of the dispossession
of land, language, and culture, Ojibwe hymn-singing took on new
significance, while becoming increasingly "traditional" as a mourning
practice, even for those who did not identify as Christian.
Although this is but one story told all too briefly, one trajectory
among many that the Christian tradition has taken among various
native peoples, it is no isolated instance. As Jace Weaver reminds us,
hymns were sung on the Trail of Tears, on the gallows at the execution
of Little Crow and his cohort in the wake of the 1862 Dakota uprising
in Minnesota, and by a group of Christian Delawares who played by
the missionaries' rules and voluntarily removed themselves to San-
dusky, only to be massacred upon their return to the East to harvest
their crops in 1782. Such stories show how the contradictions of
colonization mingle strangely to produce what a Lakota nun has called
the "terrible irony" of being native and Christian.17

A fourth trajectory reflects this terrible irony in the story of another

Minnesota Ojibwe whose visionary experiences took Catholic forms
and stories and folded them into an Ojibwe religious idiom. According
to an Episcopalian missionary, Abitagezhig was a Pembina Band
Ojibwe prophet who embroiled Catholic, Protestant, and non-Chris-
tian Ojibwes in a movement centered around his declaration that he

17. Jace Weaver, "From I-Hermeneutics to We-Hermeneutics/' in Native American Religious

Identity, ed. Jace Weaver (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1998), 1-3.
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 843

himself was "the Son of God, come anew, complete with stigmata, to
save the world." The missionary reported that Abitagezhig "desired to
be approached only with Divine honors, by people on their hands and
knees" and "pretended to know the thoughts of those who came to
him."18 According to Catholic missionaries, however, Abitagezhig was
a Catholic Indian who brought more Ojibwes into the Catholic church
through his teachings and through a hybrid dance that came to him in
a vision. In the Prayer Dance, "men danced with rosary beads around
their necks; drummers used an instrument blessed by a Catholic
priest; the women chanted Catholic hymns." 19
But even the Catholic missionaries were made ill at ease by Ab-
itagezhig's success at making converts through these indigenous
means. Vecsey notes that while "Indians sought and received baptism
and then proceeded to perform their Prayer Dance, another priest
caught sight of them in their Catholic regalia. He slashed the drum
with a knife and railed against their 'Catholic' movement." 20

II. NEW MATERIAL BEGS A PARADIGM SHIFT OF INTERPRETATION

Existing language in the scholarship on American religious history

and Native American religious traditions as yet offers little guidance in
making sense of the hybridity demonstrated in Abitagezhig's Prayer
Dance, nor sufficient scope to encompass the range of native Christiani-
ties seen across these four vignettes, a hybridity that became as much
the rule as the exception in nineteenth-century native religious histo-
ries. What we have, on the one hand, are shelves of yellowing histories
depicting the epic struggles of missionaries and the eventual triumph
of Christianity. On the other hand, we have valuable correctives, like
George Tinker's Missionary Conquest (1993), an important book that
appraises the missionary project in light of the cultural genocide that
has come as a consequence of missionary-supported and -directed
policies of assimilation, language dispossession, and land allotment.
Either way though, native Christianity winds up being understood
largely as an outcome of history rather than as a part and parcel of it, a
derivative of missionary intentions, rather than a complex process
shaped by both missionary and native Christians. An interpretive
paradigm of acculturation can be seen at work here, sometimes in

18. J. A. Gilfillan, "Indian Deacons at White Earth/' Protestant Episcopal Church, Diocese of
Minnesota Papers, box 3, Minnesota Historical Society. See also Minnesota Missionary 4 / 7
(1881) and Alban Fruth, A Century of Missionary Work Among the Red Lake Chippewa
Indians 1858-1958 (Red Lake, Minn.: St. Mary's, 1958), 15-16.
19. Vecsey, The Paths ofKateri's Kin, 223.
20. Vecsey, The Paths ofKateri's Kin, 223.
844 CHURCH HISTORY

subtle ways. Again, acculturation came to refer to the teleological

process through which a dominant culture eventually displaces, dis-
solves, or outlasts the resistance of an indigenous culture. Changes in
worldview, most notably changes in religious belief that came as a
result of missionary activity, were among the central indices of accul-
turation. When viewed through the lens of acculturation, the ways
that native people have actively inflected Christianity appear simply
as patinas thinly covering the deeper processes eroding "traditional"
cultures from the inside out.
At best, hybrid religion has been seen in terms of the language of
"syncretism," where aggregations of unlikes are held together more by
circumstance than by their own cultural logic and thus prove unstable
and of only fleeting consequence. As with those aggregate stones one
occasionally encounters on the lake shores in Ojibwe country com-
posed of many different kinds of rocks, one sees the parts jammed
together, but one sees neither the logic nor aesthetic of the between-
ness. It would be like saying that Afro-pop or reggae music are signs of
cultural confusion and instability rather than creativity and fluidity.
Alternatively, some have come to understand such material in light of
the concept of "inculturation," where the Christian faith is made fresh
through its incorporation into the worldviews and liturgical practices
of indigenous cultures.21 Interestingly, the concept of inculturation has
emerged in the thought of normative Roman Catholic thinkers who
embrace interreligious dialogue with native communities as part of
their own mission efforts and as such carries the promise of being
connected with the life of native Christians. Yet "inculturation" has
emerged more as a prescriptive term of postconciliar Catholic missiol-
ogy than as an autonomous expression of indigenous Christian thought
or as a descriptive term used in historical or ethnographic interpreta-
tions of native Christianity. In general, in the work of identifying
modes of resistance to the colonization and dispossession of history,
native Christianity in any form bespoke accommodation, not resis-
tance.
By suggesting that we could benefit from a more fluid interpretive
language, I do not mean to imply that colonization, dispossession, and
racism are no longer relevant to the history of missions and native
Christianity. Quite to the contrary, such processes have structured the
field on which native people and missionaries interacted and still do
shape the field on which native Christians interact with larger Chris-

21. See Achiel Peelman, OMI, Christ is a Native American (Ottawa: Novalis-Saint Paul
University, 1995); Carl Starkloff, SJ, A Theological Reflection: The Recent Revitalization of the
Tekakwitha Conference (Great Falls, Mont.: Tekakwitha Conference National Center, 1982).
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 845

tian communions. Neither do I wish to overstate the reach of Native

American agency within those structures, since that risks dismissing
the plain facts of material, cultural, and spiritual dispossession as a
matter of Indian consent. Such a view would do interpretive violence
to the historical material and, more troubling still, rub salt in the
wounds that the missionary legacy continues to inflict on so many
native people today. I would suggest, though, that the structures of
colonization and missionary intentions could not completely deter-
mine the story and that native people were far more than passive
recipients of this history.
We therefore stand in need of an interpretive shift away from
missionary intentions to some other paradigm that can better appreci-
ate the finer workings of religion and culture. The signs and practices
of the Christian tradition, variously presented by various Euro-
American Christians to various native communities under various
material and social circumstances, are better understood as part of the
process of culture change rather than as a product of that change. This
is because those signs and practices—especially the practices—became
a medium through which many native people exercised their own
agency within the tight confines of history and through which some
articulated resistance as well as accommodation.
It is curious that until recently we have largely missed such an
obvious point. Students of African American religious history have
long recognized that although the mission to slaves was in part an
extension of a power system that upheld slavery, the Christian tradi-
tion became a resource with which African Americans tapped into
sacred power; fashioned a meaningful, shared culture; and criticized
the moral contradictions of a slaveholding Christian society. Why has
the possibility that Native Americans could find similar resources in
the Christian tradition been so consistently overlooked in the field of
native religions? In part, I think, it is because scholarship on native
Christianity has absorbed unaware some key assumptions of the
missionaries on whose documents it has relied for its data. When
absent of meaningful interchange with native Christian communities,
archive-bound scholarship has taken for granted a notion of religion
that is out of step with what most native people practice as a more
all-embracing lifeway. This view of religion has clouded our under-
standing of Native American religious change in at least two ways.
First, like missionaries, scholars have drawn conventional bound-
aries around and between religions as systems—boundaries that have
not always been recognized by native people. Missionaries not only
considered Christianity to be a well-bounded system; they also policed
those boundaries against the encroachments of syncretism or the
846 CHURCH HISTORY

lapses of "backsliding." Of course, reflecting a wide range of theolo-

gies, missionaries differed widely in the extent to which they policed
those boundaries. Some condemned native traditions; others provision-
ally accepted native traditions as pedagogically useful forerunners to
Christian supercession; still others, like the Russian Orthodox mission-
aries described by Sergei Kan, actively sought common ground be-
tween indigenous practices and those of Christianity in order to
advance their message. But in any event, most missionaries agreed
that Christianity was an all-embracing system of belief, the integrity of
which relied on its exclusive claims to truth.
While few historians or anthropologists have incorporated the mis-
sionaries' belief in the exclusive truth of Christianity into their scholar-
ship, many have nevertheless made the assumption that religions in
general are systems of belief—coherent, self-referential wholes that
offer orientation in the world because they offer singular, mutually
exclusive frameworks of meaning. This might be analogous to reason-
ing that, since language structures reality and since languages are
self-referential wholes, then effective functioning in the world requires
the operative use of only one language at a time.
Small wonder, then, that missionaries and interpreters alike have
had such difficulty comprehending the logic of such hybrid native
religious practices as Abitagezhig's, for such practices violated the
integrity of putative boundaries between religious systems. Whether
provisionally tolerated or flatly condemned, hybrid practices un-
nerved missionaries. They still keep scholars guessing as to how to
make sense of them. Significantly, such boundary crossings were not
so unnerving to Indian people. Indeed, one wonders whether native
people perceived them as boundary crossings in the first place. They
recognized differences among religious traditions, of course, but the
boundaries were often of a very different kind. For example, to affiliate
with one Christian community or another was typically a consequen-
tial social fact, a clear marker of one's social identity. Among our four
vignettes of Ojibwe Christianity, this is most clearly illustrated in the
story of the native Christian who envisioned his very rejection at the
gates of heaven. Not surprisingly, baptisms of Ojibwes appeared more
often as the fruits of collective actions by kin networks than they did as
the conversion and profession of individual souls. Of those who did
seek baptism as individuals, most were Ojibwes whose strong kinship
bonds had already been disrupted by the violence of history, especially
widows and orphans. Indeed, factionalism frequently developed along
such lines of religious affiliation. But as John and Jean Comaroff point
out in a recent volume on missions and culture change in Southern
Africa, the social boundaries that came to define these affiliations in
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 847

indigenous communities seldom reflected the complex inner life of

religious identity among peoples whose spiritual proclivities are char-
acterized by what the Comaroffs call an "ethos of religious relativ-
ism."22
Although Native American religious traditions differ in so many
ways from the indigenous traditions of southern Africa studied by the
Comaroffs, they do share this ethos of religious relativism. They tend
to be concerned less with the falsehood of other traditions than with
the truth and power that the sacred will not be exhausted by any
particular comprehension of it. Although it would be misleading to
wholly ignore the transcendent referents of Ojibwe religion, it has been
said that traditional Ojibwe religion is less concerned with the precise
nature of the divine than with how to access the divine powers that
animate life. As Christopher Vecsey wrote in an earlier work, "survival
in this life, this existence, was the Ojibwas' ultimate concern."23
Indeed, for this reason, many traditions have remained remarkably
open to the possibility that new truths, new visions, new ceremonies,
could come to them in time. In some early encounters with Christian
missionaries that were less encumbered by the dispossession of land
and culture, there is considerable evidence that native people gave
audience to the Christian tradition in this spirit, listening respectfully
to the new stories and participating in the new ceremonies according
to the familiar religious ethos of intertribal exchange. Joseph Epes
Brown referred to this dynamic memorably, if awkwardly, as "non-
exclusive cumulative adhesion," whereby tribal religions quite natu-
rally came to incorporate the narratives, beliefs, and practices of
neighboring communities.24 But such unwieldy neologisms are not
necessary for us to understand native religions on their own terms.
Shifting the interpretive focus from beliefs to practice will equip us to
recognize the remarkably pragmatic posture these religions appear to
take toward tradition, innovation, and religious exchange, without
trying to force the logic of that practicality into some other kind of
model of religion.
A second, and related, way that scholarship has been impoverished
by missionary assumptions concerns the relationship between the
inner life and the outer life of the religious. For their part, missionaries
construed the outer forms of religion as more or less reliable indicators

22. John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2 (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1997).
23. Christopher Vecsey, Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 1983), 4.
24. Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian (New York: Crossroad,
1989), 27.
848 CHURCH HISTORY

of inner leanings. Of course, at this point it is necessary to draw some

important distinctions, for missionaries were anything but a unified
lot. Indeed a thorough and grounded understanding of any particular
instance of native Christianity requires a thorough and grounded
understanding of the particular missionaries in each encounter. In the
service of laying claim to a broader change of interpretive posture,
though, a number of generalizations will suffice. Roman Catholic and
Russian Orthodox missionaries carried to the mission field their empha-
sis on the sacramental dimension of the faith and were thus more
inclined to extend the faith in the presence of sacramental objects and
through corporate liturgical practices like baptism, holy communion,
and prayers for the dead. By contrast, Protestant missionaries, with the
exception of high-church Episcopalians and perhaps others, brought
to the mission field an understanding of the Christian faith as a matter
primarily of inward convictions, of the inner life, and hence empha-
sized the scriptural, creedal, and catechetical dimensions of the faith.
To be sure, even these Protestant missionaries came to appreciate
how outward practices could offer effective means for cultivating that
inner life, but they were joined by Catholic and Orthodox missionaries
in their scrutiny of those practices for evidence of inner transforma-
tion.25 When the inner and outer did not fully correspond, as they
often did not, the more generous missionaries construed the result as
an uneasy, unstable position to be disciplined and trained; but more
typically missionaries interpreted such disjunctions as insincerity or
backsliding. The latter was the view taken by Sherman Hall, an
American Board missionary among Ojibwes on the southern shore of
Lake Superior in 1834. "An Indian is as unstable as water," Hall
declared. "He will profess to wish for instruction today, but tomorrow
he may be engaged in a heathen dance." 26
Thankfully, scholars have not shared Hall's investment in the inner
transformation of the people he viewed as his charges, nor have we
shared his judgment that native people were "unstable," but scholars
generally have been, like the missionary, perplexed by the fluidity—or
seeming incoherence—of the behavior of native Christians we encoun-
ter in historical texts. As recent critics of the field have argued,

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.
26. Sherman Hall to Laura Hall, 4 February 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.
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 849

religious studies scholarship has incorporated an emphasis derived

from Protestant Christian thought on religion as systems of belief and
meaning.27 As a consequence, outward aspects of religion like ritual
action have been construed principally as symbolic expressions of
inner conceptualizations and therefore derivative of them. We often
find ourselves reading ritual action as though it were a sort of text
containing a narrative meaning that can be confidently interpreted.28
As the new literature shifts the focus away from missionaries to
native Christians, then, how can we proceed to extricate our interpre-
tive framework from these two missionary assumptions? First, I think
we can take more seriously the simple, though hardly simplistic, claim
that native traditions are better described as lifeways rather than
religions. That, in turn, will bring us to appreciate the generativity of
outward practices in native Christianity.

III. THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

In travels over the past six years among Ojibwe communities in
Minnesota, my inquiries as a self-described "religionist" have met
with considerable consternation. I have been reminded—on too many
occasions to overlook—some version of the following: "We don't have
a religion, we have a way of life." This sounds so commonplace,
perhaps even cliche, that some readers will doubtless roll their eyes
upon seeing it here in print. Indeed, one could say that the more
devout practitioners of any religious tradition could and do rightfully
call their tradition a way of life. But the more time I spend with Ojibwe
people and the more I try to interpret the dynamics of Ojibwe religious-
ness in scholarly language, the more convinced I am that coming to
terms with such a remark is one of the key presenting problems of any
inquiry into Native American religious traditions. For this, I submit, is
as sophisticated a remark as any about the conventions peculiar to
Western theorizing. What is more, I am convinced that putting reli-
gious practices, rather than religious beliefs, in the foreground can
help make more sophisticated sense of the claim that native traditions
are not religions, but ways of life.

27. See, for example, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
28. This understanding of ritual, widely embraced by historians and students of religion, is
best articulated by Clifford Geertz in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," and
elsewhere in Geertz's collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic
Books, 1973). For a critical review of this and other understandings of ritual, see
Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
13—66 and Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston:
Beacon, 1989).
850 CHURCH HISTORY

Readers who have been in similar proximity to native communities

may not roll their eyes at this claim, but neither are they likely to raise
their eyebrows. What might give us more pause is the suggestion that
an adequate understanding of native Christianities must also take this
presenting problem fully into account. Rather than looking for how
something familiar—Christianity as "religion"—has been translated
into the vernacular languages and cultures of native communities, we
ought to consider how both the form and content of the Christian
tradition have been transposed and performed in the context of an
entirely different religious idiom, where religion is not recognized as a
discrete segment of culture, but an integrative force in the entirety of a
lifeway, an idiom where narratives, songs, and ceremonies with roots
in a number of different religious traditions can be held within view as
potential resources for living.
For example, were we to follow Joseph Epes Brown's lead, we might
see how a given native tribal religion comes to accrue Christianity in
its process of "non-exclusive cumulative adhesion." But the awkward-
ness of Brown's language bespeaks its underlying misapprehension of
the process, for Brown's notion of a solid mass to which new traditions
"adhere" as it rolls along appeals to a metaphor of solidity to convey
the stability of such a tradition. Perhaps there was something to that
remark by missionary Sherman Hall that a native Christian is "un-
stable as water" when he goes back and forth between indigenous
traditions and the practices of the mission. But Hall was mistaken in
judging this fluidity to be "unstable," for by another logic, the fluid is
the more opportunistic and enduring of states. The key shift in
religious idiom here from solid to fluid, I submit, is a shift from system
to bricolage, from belief to practice.
In their treatments of what distinguishes native Christianity from
other forms of North American Christianity, both Jace Weaver and
James Treat quote Cherokee theologian William Baldridge: "Doing
theology is a decidedly non-Indian enterprise. When I talk about
Native American theology to many of my Indian friends, most of them
just smile and act as if I hadn't said anything. And I'm pretty sure that
as far as they are concerned I truly hadn't said anything." 29 In his book,
Weaver goes on to document the emergence of a postcolonial Native
American literature, through which native elites inflected Amer-
European genres of literature with the conventions of the oral tradi-
tion, especially with what Weaver calls its "communirist" pragmatic
activism. Weaver, like Treat before him, offers insightful guides for

29. Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American
Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1.
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 851

reading how the George Copways of the world wrote about their own
reconciliation of the native and the Christian in their identity.
My own remarks here can be construed as a parallel attempt to
appreciate how nonelite native people—the vast majority of native
Christians who were not resolving their religious identity primarily in
the form of writing or narrative—nonetheless inflected the cultural
practices of the colonizers in order to enact indigenous ways of
valuing land, community, and the sacred. This task is all the more
difficult as it requires a move from the familiar terrain of texts to the
shifting ground of actions and behavior. It also risks becoming coloniz-
ing, since instead of simply presenting the thought of native Christians
themselves in so many words, paying attention to practices requires
translation and interpretation in order to come to meaningful terms
with what has been articulated directly in practices. Nevertheless, it
does, I think, help us to identify, within those often oppressive spaces
of the missionary encounter, the sometimes subtle ways that the
majority of native Christians came to assert themselves in the shaping
of their world.
Fortunately, we do have some resources to interpret these practices,
especially the ritual theory rooted in the work of social theorist Pierre
Bourdieu.30 To Bourdieu, scholarly understanding of practices does
not come easily because practices proceed according to a logic all their
own, a pragmatic logic that foregoes the quest for consistent, system-
atic meaning on which discursive endeavors like theology rely in favor
of more tangible, practical results. But it is for this very reason that
religious practices are equipped to do all kinds of important cultural
work, especially in the tight spaces of colonization.
Because practices can "go without saying," it is difficult for the
powers that be to discipline their meanings. Because the detailed
elaboration of a practice's meaning in so many words is unnecessary
(even impossible) in their performance, practices are nimble, capable
of holding together a wide range of meanings and uses. To take an
example from Sergei Kan's study, the elaborate Russian Orthodox
practices that ritualize death, mourning, and the ongoing relations
between the living and the dead became compelling practices indeed
for Tlingit people whose own elaborate funerary practices and recipro-
cal exchanges with ancestral kin had been central to their traditional
lives.31 Within the confines of these shared performances of Tlingit

30. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987 [1972]); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. California Press, 1984); Catherine Bell,
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice; John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2.
31. Kan, Memory Eternal, 404-54.
852 CHURCH HISTORY

Orthodoxy, though, there were at play a host of different, perhaps even

contradictory, meanings. That the respective belief systems to which
these practices referred in Russian Orthodoxy and Tlingit tradition
could vary so did not go unnoticed by Orthodox clergy as they
directed catechetical efforts to interpret the proper meanings of the
performances. But by their very logic of practice, these religious
actions could not be fixed airtight in meaning or performance, no
matter how hard missionaries might have tried to rein in the range of
those meanings and those performances. Religious practices, then,
demonstrate a remarkable capacity for negotiating differences in the
social field and can sometimes traverse putative boundaries between
religious systems. Moreover, because practices have a certain taken-for-
granted quality to them, they are equipped to smuggle in all sorts of
new (or old) ways of configuring what is real and of value in the world
and, in our case, of clearing room for the practice of indigenous ways
of valuing land and community.
Just as they are flexible in terms of the range of meanings at play, the
outward practices of religion are, in turn, quite suitable to improvisa-
tions that are themselves significant to the cultural and religious
exchange between missionaries and native peoples. Here the value of
practices lies less in the inner multivocality of symbolic acts than it
does in the formal inflections of the outward practices themselves.
People make practices their own not simply by assigning to them their
own inner meanings but by performing them in ways that render the
practices relevant and coherent (and perhaps beautiful) to them. But
again, coherence here has less to do with the consistency of meaning
interior to the practices as with a kind of formal coherence. Here the
logic of practice allows for the suspension of contradictions or inconsis-
tencies that might obtain if one were to spell out theologically what the
meanings of their practices are for them. "Practice has a logic which is
not that of logic," Bourdieu writes, "if one is to avoid asking of it more
logic than it can give, thereby condemning oneself either to wring
incoherences out of it or to thrust upon it a forced coherence."32
This logic of religious practices proves especially useful for colo-
nized people trying to lead lives of integrity on their own terms within
the spaces surveyed, structured, and policed by people with power
over them. With the systematic logic of theology in the background
and the logic of practice in the foreground, religion here is not
considered solely in its aspect as a project of making meaning, but also
in its aspect as a project of making do.
In light of this interpretive posture toward practice, the dilemma of

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

THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 853

being both "native" and "Christian" can be seen to have been config-
ured most often in terms of practice rather than in terms of belief. That
is, the problem of a native and Christian identity has not generally
been a theological one in the sense that Baldridge's remark makes clear.
Rather, it seems for many if not most native Christians to have been a
practical problem, a problem of practice. Without question the problem
has been, for some, a wrenching theological dilemma, and doubtless
increasingly so as more and more native people have attended to such
problems in a manner that would be more recognizable to those of us
who make a life's work of resolving contradictions and inconsistencies
in our disciplined thinking and writing. But if Baldridge's widely
quoted remark rings true, that is because for many native people the
terms of the identity are configured in practice.
This shift to practice is not just theory-speak for its own sake. It will
bring our interpretive language much closer to the ground on which
native communities have engaged the Christian tradition in their
lifeways. Because Ojibwe has no term that cleanly translates the
modern western meaning of religion, it is revealing to inquire how
Ojibwe people came to express the concept of Christianity when
missionaries introduced it as a belief system.33 The answer is key to
our purposes here: the word in Ojibwe is Anami'aawin, prayer or
praying, and those Ojibwes who identified as Christians called them-
selves by the related word Anami'aajig—those who pray. Actually the
root word is a substantive form of the verb and could be rendered as
"that which we pray" or "how we pray." What is significant here is the
stress on the practice of prayer, not on its content, its object, or the
system to which it refers.
Of course it is not simply just one of many ways of praying. It
remains difficult to ascertain whether the term Anami'aawin had ap-
plied to other pre-Christian ritual forms of prayer prior to the coming
of Christian missionaries, since the earliest Ojibwe language dictionar-
ies were authored by missionaries themselves in the nineteenth cen-
tury, but Anami'aawin was clearly no generic term for prayer, since it
came to distinguish things Christian from things not-Christian. Presum-
ably, it harked back to earliest seventeenth-century encounters with
Jesuit missionaries. Hence Anami'aajig, those who pray, came to refer
to those who affiliated with Christian groups, Anami'aa-nagoma to
Christian songs or hymns, Anami'aa-wiidigendiwin to Christian mar-
riage, and Anami'aa-giizhigad to the Sabbath day. But while one cannot
say that this way of praying is just like any other way of praying, what

33. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith's famous treatment of the emergence of the modern Western
notion of religion in The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985).
854 CHURCH HISTORY

counts here is that Christianity is not marked as a system or even a

body of beliefs. In Ojibwe idiom, the term conscripted to refer to the
Christian tradition refers itself to a practice, a way of praying.
The Ojibwe tradition is not unique in its practice orientation. Nei-
ther is it particularly revolutionary to claim here that practice is at the
heart of Native American religiousness. As Sam Gill, William Powers,
Gary Witherspoon, and many others have shown persuasively, indig-
enous traditions are fundamentally concerned with the transformative
powers of performative language, art, and thought.34 That is, when
properly performed under the right conditions, ceremonies, songs,
sounds, gestures, and dance steps do not merely give expression to the
inner matters of feeling and meaning, but are believed capable of
transforming the self, the community, and the cosmos. Here, the outer
is not derivative of the inner, but potentially generative in its own
right. Gill reflects on the broad implications for a decidedly text-
oriented religious studies field:
It seemed to me that the difficulty I had in approaching the study of
Navajo prayer and religion was fundamentally a problem of the
character of the data. I thought it was because Navajos do not write
that I had to make allowances.... I now believe this is not the most
fundamental issue. Rather it is our own interpretive emphases ... on
text at the expense of context; on code at the expense of behavior; on
meaning and proposition at the expense of use, relevance, and effect.
We have looked primarily to the authoritative basis for religious
practice rather than to the immediate effects and powers of the
performance of religious acts. In a sense we have denied that reli-
gious actions are of value when we have considered them principally
as an encoding of some underlying system of meaning.35
To recognize the centrality of religious action, here by Gill and else-
where by others, is valuable indeed. But it needs to be carried an
important step further, for while Gill and others help us appreciate
how performative utterances and gestures can work to transform the
world through the suspension of historical time, we can also come to
appreciate how religious practices often serve as resources for negoti-
ating culture change in the realm of historical time, especially in
colonizing circumstances. To Bourdieu, the power of language and

34. Sam Gill, Sacred Words: A Study of Navajo Religion and Prayer (Westport: Conn., Green-
wood, 1981) and Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to Religion
(Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1987); William K. Powers, Sacred
Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota (Norman, Okla.: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1986); and Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1977).
35. Sam Gill, Native American Religious Action, 151.
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 855

symbolic gestures may include an indigenous conviction about the

raw power of their performance, but such performances do not take
place in social and historical vacuums. One must also come to terms
with the relative social power of the ones doing the performing.
Because hegemony— and resistance to it—are more routinely exer-
cised in and through the subtle cultural practices and beliefs that
define what is real and of value in the world than through the
conspicuous exercise of political or military force, practices come to be
very powerful media for both domination and resistance. Here, "sym-
bolic power" is the "power of constituting the given . . . of making
people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the
world, and thereby, action on the world and thus to the world itself."36
An adequate understanding of Native American religious practices,
the practice of Native American Christianity among them, must also
take into account the relative power in the social realm of competing
visions for defining the world.
How might the practices of Anami'aawin, or its equivalent in other
native contexts, be seen as a medium for culture change rather than as
a result of it? Putting practice first changes the question from "What
was missionary Christianity and how did it differfrom the traditional religion
it displaced?" to "What did native peoples make of Christianity?" Here the
ambiguity in the expression make of is intentional, for it conflates the
verbs "to construe," "to evaluate," and "to do," mingling belief, value,
and practice. Our interest will involve not only what Christian signs
have meant to native people in translation, but what cultural work
they have done in practice. To further demonstrate what I think is
useful about this approach, allow me to return our attention to the
example of Ojibwe hymn-singing.
To understand how Ojibwe hymns emerged from a missionary past
that most Ojibwes associate with their dispossession to become em-
blematic, for some, of a distinctive Ojibwe identity, I looked first to the
hymn texts. My late Ojibwe teacher, Larry Cloud Morgan, and I
contrasted native language texts with English originals, in order to
trace the workings of a theological sovereignty that we suspected had
emerged from the sizeable translation gap between English and Ojibwe.
We had assumed that the broad appeal of the hymns relied on the
extent to which they offered distinctively Ojibwe meanings to the
Christian tradition. We knew, for example, that it would be a far stretch
in the Ojibwe language to convey fully the notion of sin as it exists in
the texts of the English originals, since the Ojibwe worldview consid-

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

ered the state of nature as one of ideal harmony and balance rather
than as one of fundamental fallenness. To be sure, we found some
intriguing nuances of meaning in the translations, but where we
expected to find the hidden transcripts of subversive meanings, we
found prayerful attempts to render the meanings of the original texts.
How, then, did Ojibwe hymns become something more than a
musical expression of accommodation to the missionary agenda? To
trace that story, we were directed beyond the hymn texts to the
practice of singing them, from translation of texts to ritualization of
performances, from considering the discursive meanings of Christianity
to considering what Ojibwe people made of the tradition in their idiom
of religious practice.
Historically, the real action began in the 1880s, when Minnesota's
Ojibwe bands were prodded or coerced to relocate to the White Earth
Reservation in the northwestern part of the state. A land that encom-
passed both the thick woods and wild-rice-rich lakes to which the
Ojibwe's seasonal round was acclimated, as well as fertile prairie,
White Earth was to be an experiment in cultural reengineering at the
behest of the Episcopal mission and the Indian Bureau. Remarking on
the life of their Ojibwe charges once relocated to White Earth, Episco-
pal missionaries wrote increasingly of a tradition of native hymnody
which they found profoundly moving and notably regularized in
performance. Reading these missionary documents in light of Cather-
ine Bell's notion of ritualization, whereby communities make room for
the extraordinary within ordinary actions through the outward and
regularizing techniques of ritual practice, one can identify a distinctive
social context of singing: discrete societies of singers led by respected
elders; marked associations of the hymn repertory with funeral wakes,
sickbeds, and other settings involving illness and grief; a consistent
structure—strophic alternations of singing and ceremonial speech;
and a distinctive performance tradition—slow, a cappella laments based
more on the chanting of syllables than on the conveyance of discursive
meaning.
That said, the missionary songs of course involved European tunes,
and the absence of the drum was most conspicuous to people for
whom the drum was pivotal to any traditional interchange with the
spirits. In the reservation era, when so much hinged on one's reputa-
tion with missionaries and Indian agents who controlled resources
needed to survive, hymn-singing mattered. Hymn-singing took its
place beside a host of practices in everyday life on which missionaries
focused energies in their epic attempt to remake a people and a
culture. Those Protestants engaged in the civilizing mission tried
to implant their conceptions of what was real and of value through a
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 857

reformation of manners. Hymn-singing mattered for the same reasons

that cultivating land, keeping Sabbath, wearing dresses, and cutting
one's hair mattered. Missionaries welcomed hymn-singing. They also
did their utmost to discipline it along with other inflections that
Ojibwe Anami'aajig were making in the Christian tradition. Some
worried that evening prayer meetings were eclipsing public worship
in importance. Some sought to regularize the singing with accompani-
ment and musical training.
But on the field of culture, there was only so much missionaries
could do to discipline native practice. Although missionaries boasted
of how Ojibwe singing graced Sunday morning worship, their letters
indicate that the music was truly at home elsewhere than the mission
chapel. Its soul developed at the margins of the reservation, where the
Anami'aajig gathered almost nightly to eat, sing, and piece together a
collective living based on traditional values of reciprocity. Hymns
accompanied every community gathering and set the tempo for a new
way of life on the reservation. Firmly rooted in traditions of kinship,
communal property, and subsistence, the Anami'aajig nonetheless
adapted to the demands of what amounted to refugee life on a
shrinking land base that could no longer support a seasonal round.
In these tight confines, ritualized practices began to accomplish
what translation never could. On the one hand, ritualized practices
folded the missionary songs into an integrative way of life. On the
other, these practices helped cast the dramatic changes to that way of
life, necessary as they were to keep it viable on the reservation, in the
familiar light of Ojibwe tradition, ensuring a sense of continuity and
integrity. Ritualized hymn-singing here became a way to render Chris-
tianity as Anami'aawin and thus to integrate Anami'aawin into an
Ojibwe way of life. Practices could begin to do this cultural work
because, unlike discursive thought, they were remarkably capable of
holding the contradictions of reservation life in tension, not necessarily
resolving those contradictions, but making room for a variety of
meanings to be at play at once.
This kind of cultural work had implications over time as well. A
continuity of form of hymn-singing can be traced through the twenti-
eth century to the present day, but amid changing circumstances,
Ojibwe singers have put the tradition to new uses, new meanings.
With the devastating loss of Ojibwe as a functional language in the
wake of English-only boarding school education, the sung language of
the hymns has been renewed with accrued meanings. They are no
longer simply chanted syllables, but daring expressions of the Ojibwe
language. Nonetheless, because so few who hear the songs at wakes
are fluent in this language, the associations are unspecific. They are
858 CHURCH HISTORY

experienced not so much as detailed enumerations of the principles of

Ojibwe religious thought as resonances of an indigenous language
profoundly connected with the land and with Anishinaabe people-
hood and powerfully associated with evidence of cultural survival
when survival was not supposed to happen.
The integrative posture toward Anami'aaivin revealed through the
story of Ojibwe hymn-singing was thoroughly consistent with an
Ojibwe approach to the religious. Ignatia Broker tells of her own
Ojibwe grandmother's return after a season of missionary education at
the White Earth boarding school. The young girl was instructed by her
own grandfather that the point was to integrate the Christian teach-
ings and traditional Ojibwe teachings: "The [missionaries] do not
know what we believe and they will not learn what we believe. If they
did, it would indeed be much easier. But you must remember all the
good our people have known and taught. Compare it to what you are
now learning. Do not be ashamed of the good that we have taught and
do not be ashamed of the good to be learned. Our way of life is
changing, and there is much we must accept. But let it be only the
good. And we must always remember the old ways. We must pass
them on to our children and grandchildren so they too will recognize
the good in the new ways." 37
If one listens for the sometimes subtle ways that the practices of
Anami'aawin integrated the Christian tradition into this religious idiom,
one appreciates how missionaries and their intentions were not the
only forces of agency in this cultural exchange. Missionaries erected
boundaries around Christianity as a belief system and tried to main-
tain those boundaries by disciplining the meanings of Christianity
among Ojibwe Anami'aajig, but the practice of Anami'aawin did not
always recognize those boundaries and served, on occasion, to subvert
them. For some Ojibwes, the integrative practice of Anami'aawin was
enough to claim the Christian tradition as their own. The practice of
Anami'aawin was an instance of neither pure resistance nor pure
accommodation, but a real world mix of the two in the struggle of a
people for whom making meaning and making do had become part and
parcel of the same religious project.
I recognize that, to many, my remarks may sound far too hopeful
about the historical agency of native Christians. Indeed the recent
studies on which I have depended have also disclosed important ways
that Christianity continues to be a colonizing force in the experience of
native people, a source for continued dispossession rather than empow-
erment, a force for fragmentation rather than integration. Indeed, for

37. Ignatia Broker, Night Flying Woman (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1983), 94.
THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 859

many, it has become the religion—the mutually exclusive system of

belief—that missionaries sought to make it, one which tolerates no
integration with indigenous traditions.
That, too, is part of the story. But it is, I submit, not some inevitable
unfolding of native Christianity. Rather, it has to do with the contingen-
cies of a history of colonization that shaped and still shape native
Christianities. Ojibwe Christians struggled, and many still struggle, to
integrate Anami'aawin into a traditional way of life. This has become an
increasingly difficult thing to do, given the political, economic, and
ecclesiastical structures that constrain native communities from deter-
mining for themselves how tradition will incorporate change. In an
ironic sense, perhaps these difficulties make the practice of Anami'aawin
today an even bolder exercise of religious sovereignty.