Christian missionaries began their work of converting the native peoples of the Americas soon after the beginnings of the European invasion, both in the north and in the south. Indeed, the missionization of native peoples in the Americas was the foundation for one of the primary European conquest strategies. In both mission and political-military documents this strategy was referred to as pacification.
The church or missionary responses to European and American colonialism took two general forms. One type of response, based on the view that immigrant America was the New Israel, overtly helped build the theological foundation for the political doctrine of Manifest Destiny and called for the extermination or removal of Indian communities to make room for white immigrants.
The other response, although sometimes very critical of European or Euro-American dealings with Indians or blacks, lived out its own Manifest Destiny agenda; it was most common among missionaries. Critics of colonization were openly opposed to the brutal military conquest of native peoples, preferring the gentler conquest of conversion. For them this meant conversion to what they assumed was a superior culture and its set of values and societal structures as much as it meant conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ. For instance, both Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) and Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822-1901) in different ways earned great reputations as defenders of Indian people, yet both are implicated in the cultural destruction of Indian tribes. The Catholic Las Casas first devised the famed reducción paradigm for missionary conquest, while the Protestant Whipple engineered the U.S. government's theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux people, which finally broke the resistance of Sioux and other Indian peoples in the upper Midwest.
In the case of Las Casas and Whipple, as with most of the missionaries among Indian peoples, the lasting devastation they caused was done with the best of intentions, albeit with a controlling dose of European paternalism. That is, they would have claimed that what they were doing was for the good of the Indian people for whom they were concerned, yet in the final analysis they always acted as the paternalistic overseer, making decisions on behalf of Indian peoples and implementing them politically.
Las Casas wrote extensively, criticizing the atrocities committed by his Spanish countrymen against Indian people in the Caribbean, Mexico, and the rest of Latin America. Yet out of a perceived need to protect these Indian people and to replace the abusive and deadly encomienda system, he created a mode of evangelism that ultimately dislocated Indian people from their families and from their culture, relocated them in carefully controlled mission compounds, and immersed them in European values and social systems. This new mission strategy, called the reducción, continued to be the preferred Catholic method of evangelizing in all colonial contexts around the world and was redesigned and implemented by Protestants in seventeenth-century New England and later in Africa and other colonial settings.
More than three hundred years after Las Casas devised reducción, Whipple began his efforts, sure that he was acting in the best interests of the Sioux and that the only hope of their survival lay in reducing their land holdings, thus compelling a more sedentary existence that would allow a more effective imposition of European-style agriculture. His hope was that once their land holdings had been significantly reduced, the Sioux would be forced to abandon their traditional communitarian existence and patterns of community movement and adopt nuclear-family—style farming. Nor was it merely coincidental in Whipple's mind that excess land could and would then be opened up for white settlers. He envisioned these new immigrant farmers as appropriate neighbors and role models for the newly pacified Sioux peoples.
Neither Whipple nor Las Casas understood his role in the process of pacification that enabled, simplified, and enhanced the ultimate conquest of those tribes. Thoroughly blinded by their immersion in their own culture and their implicit acceptance of the illusion of European superiority, these apostles of the church, and indeed virtually every missionary of every denomination, functioned in one way or another as a participant in an unintended evil. Las Casas and Whipple served two different denominations, derived from two different European traditions. Both had genuine good intentions regarding the fate of Indian peoples, and yet both participated in the cultural, political, economic, and social demise of those same peoples.
In 1769 Junípero Serra, the Franciscan founder of the European presence in California, came with an army cohort and official orders from the Spanish vice regent to begin his missionary conquest of native peoples in California. In an analogous way, the lay Presbyterian missionary Sue McBeth arrived among the Nez Perce peoples in 1873, just when the United States needed help in the pacification of that native nation. The final success of the U.S. military in putting down Chief Joseph's valiant resistance in 1877 was aided by McBeth's efforts to keep her converts close to the Presbyterian Nez Perce mission community and out of the battle.
Beginning in 1828, Congregationalist missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston—along with the initial support of Moravian, Baptist, and Methodist missionaries, all of whom were working with them among Cherokee peoples in northern Georgia—took a courageous stand against the state of Georgia and the president of the United States on the issue of Indian removal. The state of Georgia, wanting to extend its claim of territorial sovereignty and pressing the issue of states' rights, had hoped that the election of Andrew Jackson as president that year would finally allow the state to work toward the removal of Indians from its territory. The Jackson administration had conceived a plan to move all Indian peoples from their aboriginal territories to a place designated as "Indian Territory," west of the Mississippi River.
Siding with the Cherokees and arguing that Cherokee sovereignty should take precedence over state sovereignty, these missionaries insisted that their progress in the project of civilizing (and converting) the Indians was such that citizens of the United States and of the state of Georgia had a moral obligation to respect Cherokee occupation and ownership of their original lands. The Congregationalist missionaries continued to resist Georgia's legislative attempts to remove them from Cherokee territory and to remove the Cherokees as well. For their acts of civil disobedience in defense of the Cherokees, two of these missionaries (Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler) were sentenced to hard labor in the Georgia state penitentiary.
While this resistance to Cherokee removal certainly indicates a moral integrity and courage on the part of the missionaries, a closer reading indicates that they too participated in their own version of Manifest Destiny: they linked their defense of the Cherokees to the success they had seen in civilizing and converting them and indicated that the continued success of the missionizing venture depended on helping the Cherokees maintain their territorial integrity. Worcester in particular argued that the pacification effort had already demonstrated success and that there was no moral legitimacy for the removal policy.
This collusion between the missionaries and the political-military institutions of the colonizers in order to achieve the important conquest goal of the pacification of Indian peoples occurred repeatedly as the European invasion moved across the Americas in both the north and the south. While this strategy often resulted in an official alliance, it was always present on a de facto basis. Hernando Cortés insisted on the conversion of Indian peoples as an officially integrated strategy of his conquest of Mexico, and in 1524 the first contingent of Franciscan missionaries arrived there. John Eliot began his outreach to the Massachusetts peoples in 1646 under the aegis of the Massachusetts General Council and Governor John Winthrop. Shortly after the formation of the United States, Congress passed the first of a series of laws establishing the Civilization Fund, earmarked for the support of Christian missionary schools among Indian peoples. For instance, the Jesuit province of St. Louis was started with moneys from this fund in 1823. And by 1869 the Grant administration's so-called peace policy attempted to reform the federal government's Indian Service by replacing all its civil-service Indian agents with denominationally appointed churchmen. As a result, Indian country was divided up between the various denominations, accounting for many of the denominational commitments of various tribes today.
In looking at this missionizing history, it is important to keep in mind that the Indian peoples themselves participated in the process. As the reality of conquest became apparent to each native nation, American Indian peoples received Euro-American missionaries somewhat readily, doing so either as individuals and families or as whole tribal communities. The reasons for this are complex.
Of primary importance among Indian peoples of North America is the inherent and enduring cultural value of openness to the spirituality of others and a long tradition of borrowing from one another. Openness to the missionaries must be understood initially in this context. Indian people often expressed surprise as they discovered that the new spirituality of the missionaries called on them to abandon their traditional ways in favor of a wholesale adoption of the European way, since their previous experience had always been one of adding to and not replacing their own spiritual ways.
Additionally, many Indian peoples felt the power of the conquest as such an overwhelming force that conversion to the conqueror's religion seemed the only way to maintain the existence of their communities and families. Though the Flatheads of Montana had little understanding of Christianity, they acknowledged the power of the invading colonizers and apparently hoped that by inviting missionaries into their midst they too would come to experience the increase in both spiritual and political-military power that European ceremonial expertise might bring to them. Thus in the 1840s the Flatheads, interpreting missionary spirituality in terms of their own experience of traditional spirituality, expected the missionaries to be the more spiritually potent counterparts of their own spiritual performers. On the other hand, by the 1870s the Oglala leader Red Cloud was more experienced in colonial contact. He determined that the survival of his people was dependent on their learning as much as possible about Euro-American ways, and he thus invited missionaries to come to the Lakotas and start schools for Indian youth.
More common was an Indian conversion to Christianity over a period of time, during which a community's traditional culture and spirituality were constantly eroded. Church and state colluded from the founding of the United States to discourage, disallow, and even punish certain aspects of traditional culture, culminating in government policies in the 1880s outlawing specific Indian tribal rituals. Under constant pressure from both missionaries and government officials, many communities experienced the steady loss of their older ceremonies until very little was left for them except the new spiritual arrangements under the leadership of the missionaries. Mission and government schools consciously attempted to further separate Indian children from their cultural values, particularly their ceremonial traditions. Through the use of ridicule, physical and psychological abuse, and an insistence on the primacy of European-based explanations of the world, mission and government schools hoped to engender in Indian children a belief in the superiority of European ways and a turning away from the traditions of their peoples. Traditional songs, stories, explanations of reality, and ceremonies eventually fell into disuse among Indian peoples. Today, having found missionary religion to be no panacea for the ongoing state of colonialism, many of these communities have been spending much time and energy in attempting to revive, restore, preserve, and relearn the old customs and ceremonies.
In other areas, Indian peoples gave some surface acknowledgement to the imposed mission religion but still managed to preserve their own spiritual integrity and ceremonial structures. Perhaps the most pronounced example of this is the Pueblo cultures, where Catholicism and traditional ceremonies coexist. Although the two religious ways remain distinct, Pueblo peoples quite often participate in both.
A few reservations managed to withstand much of the missionary pressure and have until now, held on to many of their old ceremonial ways. The Navajo people, for instance, are only now feeling the intensity of missionary efforts to separate them from their traditions and to convert them both culturally and spiritually to various forms of Christianity—usually of the more conservative and fundamentalist sort.
Whatever the personal or ecclesiastical intentions of the missionary efforts among Indian peoples may have been, this evangelical outreach had deep political and social consequences both for the colonizer and for the colonized.
See also
Religion.
Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Charles McGloughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
George E. Tinker
Osage
Iliff School of Theology
