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Reviews
Creating Christian Indians: Native Clergy in the Presbyterian Church
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By Bonnie Sue Lewis
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University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 304 pages. $34.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Linda K. Pritchard
Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti
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| Scholars will recognize this study as a welcome addition to the New Indian History, in which Native Americans are actors in a complex, varied, and changing cultural dance. First-contact religious studies originally focused on the physical vulnerabilities of white missionaries surrounded by "savages." More recently, they stressed the destruction of Native religion and culture by missionaries. By focusing on converted Native ministers between 1865 and 1935, Bonnie Lewis discovers a "middle ground" where Native Americans created an authentic Christian Indian culture, neither totally Indian nor Euro-American Christian. Lewis notes that membership in Protestant denominations rarely comprised more than 10 percent of the Native population, but those groups willing to ordain Native clergy had more success. |
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The author studied Presbyterian clergy in two tribal groups, the Nez Perces in the Pacific Northwest after the murder of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in 1847 and the Dakotas in the Great Plains after the Dakota war in 1862. Sources included Presbyterian official records, fifty letters in English from Nez Perce pastors to the three women missionaries who educated them, and letters from ordained Dakotas. Lewis argues that by adapting Christianity to indigenous pathways, Native clergy ( sixty total, about half from each tribe) accomplished much more in less time than white missionaries. The story shifts back and forth between the missionaries — white women in the case of the Nez Perces, and largely white men for the Dakotas — and the converted male Indians ordained by the Presbyterian Church. |
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The book is organized topically, generally corresponding to chronology. The first and second chapters trace the conversion of Christian Indians in the two tribes, including the social and economic context of important revivals, and the growing role of Native preachers. The middle chapters focus on the development and successes of Presbyterian Indian ministers within each tribal arena. Not surprisingly, congregations usually reflected "band" membership, or localized groups of related families, and Native clergy mirrored older tribal leadership models of orators, teachers, healers, and mediators. Official ordination was central to Native success, because it provided the mantle of authority to the tribal community and denominational officials. |
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The final chapters illustrate how second-generation missionary demographics created differential tensions for Christian Nez Perces and Dakotas. Two sisters and their niece consecutively prepared all the Native Nez Perces for the ministry. As women, they could not be ordained, resulting in ongoing gendered struggles for authority with ordained Native clergy. The Dakota missionaries, however, were ordained sons of the original missionaries (at least one had an Indian mother). They worked alongside Native pastors as collaborators instead of competitors. This relational difference produced two models of organizational polity. With prodding from the missionaries, the General Assembly created a parallel, self-governing Dakota Presbytery in 1867. Native Nez Perce clergy only succeeded in establishing an informal Joint Session within their Euro-American dominated presbytery, and their voices were diminished in 1932 when the presbytery closed their mission school. |
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While traces of its origin as a dissertation linger, the book is clearly written with well-crafted arguments substantially enriching Native American and American religious historiography. The primary audience for this book will be seminary and university scholars and students. They may have some minor quibbles: whether a systematic analysis of Native backgrounds and career paths (listed in the appendix) would have added to the study and perhaps a desire for more detail about the first two decades of the twentieth century and some attention to the role of Christian Native women. Non-scholarly audiences may be disappointed that the author does not spend more time on the Indian preachers themselves. She paints a rich but fragmented picture of their experiences. The book ends with intriguing hints at the next challenge for Christian Indians, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs mandated more Indian self-governance and religious freedom. For historians of religion, this book is an important companion to other first-contact studies. Mission churches are a fixture in American religion, and comparing dominant-minority religious leadership in immigrant and non-mainstream communities is fruitful. |
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