Native American Missionaries

Native Americans have had an incredibly complicated relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, many were unequivocally opposed to Christian missionaries. After all, evangelists were cultural imperialists and religious idealists who attempted to alter or eradicate indigenous ways of life, traditions, religious leadership, and rituals. Of course, there is great truth to this assertion, as many indigenous peoples in the Americas fundamentally rejected Christianity because of its association with the colonial powers that oppressed them. In the United States today only a small percentage of Native Americans identify as Christian. And yet, many other Native peoples did adopt Christianity, in a range of ways and with a variety of outcomes. In places colonized by French and Iberian powers, indigenous peoples often adopted Christianity or developed syncretic, organic religions that fused indigenous and Christian rituals and beliefs. Indeed, the vast geographic and chronological scope of this article—covering different European imperial powers, distinct indigenous polities, and disparate Catholic and Protestant missionary strategies—makes it difficult to generalize about the success or failure of missionary work. Nevertheless, it is true that some indigenous peoples went even further than just converting to Christianity or affiliating with a particular congregation: many actually became missionaries themselves. Native American missionaries were more common than we might think. Although a select few, such as Samson Occom, William Apess, and George Copway, have gained fame throughout history, many other Native Americans served as evangelists to their own people or the people around them. Living as they did between the colonizers and the colonized, they often struggled with their dual identity as Indian and Christian. They also sought ways to protect and ensure a future for their own people. As such, the history of Native American missionaries is both fascinating and controversial, filled with problematic and politically charged questions. If an Indian became a Christian, were they still Indian? Why did they choose to become an evangelist? Was it for spiritual power, money, or access to imperial authorities? What were the problems and opportunities that came along with being a Native Christian? Perhaps most problematically, how do we even define a “missionary”? While the traditional definition means an ordained member of an ecclesiastical body, many more non-ordained schoolteachers, itinerant preachers, and religious figures engaged in evangelical work. This article focuses on English America and the United States but also includes sections on Canadian/First Nations Indians, Native missionaries in Spanish America, and non-white missionaries in Africa and across the globe. Also, although much of the literature focuses on this topic from a historical perspective, a good deal of it has also been produced by literary scholars. In fact, literary scholars were among the first to articulate the importance and power of the writings of Native American missionaries, and so their work is included here