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Reviews of Books
Gender, Religion, and American Encounters
Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Northern Illinois University
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Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. By Allan Greer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 272 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).Weiblich und fremd: Deutschsprachige Einwandererinnen im Pennsylvania des 18. Jahrhunderts. By Christine Hucho. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005. 587 pages. $95.95 (paper).Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. By Jon F. Sensbach. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 318 pages. $22.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).
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Both opportunity and tension arose when Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans met each other on the spiritual mission fields of the Americas. How men and women experienced these encounters differently and how gender inflected their encounters remain important, understudied topics. But these books provide valuable insight into the details and larger issues surrounding them. All three illuminate important aspects of colonial experiences regarding gender and religion for various ethnic-religious groups—French Canadian and Mohawk Catholics, Pennsylvania German Lutherans, Moravians, and Schwenkfelders, and Caribbean mulatto and African Moravians—a motley crew that represents a significant portion of Atlantic peoples and encounters in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. |
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Mohawk Saint, Allan Greer's microhistory of the late-seventeenth-century interactions between a Mohawk woman and two French Jesuits who chronicled her life as well as the Christian legends that arose after her early death, points to significant aspects of French Catholic life and cultural conversion (or the lack thereof) in a colonial setting. Greer calls Catherine Tekakwitha the best-documented Indian in all of colonial North and South America and uses her Jesuit biographers (or hagiographers after her death) to trace her growing reputation in Canada and beyond throughout the eighteenth century and even to this day. In 1677 Tekakwitha moved to Kanawake, a Christian Iroquois community across the river from Montreal, and became a central figure in a pious, celibate cult of Iroquois women. Greer describes bizarre scenes of Tekakwitha and other women flagellating themselves into erotic ecstasy. After her death in 1680 at age twenty-four, locals began attributing healing miracles to Tekakwitha. Eventually, her reputation spread to French colonists throughout the Saint Lawrence region, and even the pious in France became interested. Greer describes this process of hagiography and the path to sainthood at length; Tekakwitha was beatified in 1980 but still is not a fully canonized saint in the Catholic Church. Jesuits and others admired Tekakwitha because, without being threatening, she defied the binary notions of male/female and civilized/savage that shaped European views of colonial relations. Whereas Europeans usually viewed Indian women as sexually charged and available, Tekakwitha was celibate, refusing the advances and to some extent the control of men. Further, she refused to take part in an infamous episode of cannibalism during a terrible winter when she was with a group of Iroquois facing starvation. In short Tekakwitha was more devout (hence more civilized) than the Europeans, and the miracles that followed her death proved it in the minds of the faithful. |
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Greer emphasizes similarities between Iroquois and French culture and religion, arguing that their common ground concerning religious beliefs, ceremonies, customs, and medical practices facilitated the movement of individuals such as Tekakwitha between religions. He even questions whether conversion took place. The Iroquois readily adopted European trade goods, which did not undermine their culture. Instead an evolution in material culture followed, as European trade stimulated wampum production. For example, Tekakwitha sewed with European cloth and a steel needle, but she used traditional methods and motifs. Moreover, collective ritual action led by shamans characterized many Iroquois medical practices, and there was a collective aspect to French healing methods as well, with family and midwives often attending a sickbed with prayers at the critical point, though otherwise Europeans often isolated their patients for individual treatment. |
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