Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples

Representing Religion at Home and Abroad

Edited by Alvyn J. Austin & Jamie S Scott
Categories: History, Indigenous History, Canadian History
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Paperback : 9780802037848, 330 pages, October 2005
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Table of contents

PART 1: THE HOME FIELDS

  • Jamie S. Scott, York University. 'Cultivating Christians in Colonial Canada'
  • Myra Rutherdale, Simon Eraser University. 'Mothers of the Empire: Maternal Metaphors in the Northern Canadian Mission Field'
  • Gail Edwards. University of British Columbia. 'The Picturesqueness of His Accent and Speech: Methodist Missionary Narratives and William Henry Pierce's Autobiography'
  • Susan Neylan. Wilfrid Laurier University. 'Eating the Angel's Food: Arthur Wellington Clah - An Aboriginal Perspective on Being Christian, 1857-1909'

PART 2: OVER THE SEAS AND FAR AWAY

  • Alvyn Austin, University of Toronto. 'Wallace of West China: Edward Wilson Wallace and the Canadian Educational Systems of China, 1906-1927'
  • Margo Gewurtz, York University. 'Their Names May Not Shine: Narrating Chinese Christian Converts'
  • Ruth Compton Brouwer, King's College, University of Western 0ntario. 'Shifts in the Salience of Gender in the lnternational Missionary Enterprise During the lnterwar Years'
  • A. Hamish Ion, Royal Military College. 'Missions and Empires: A Case Study of Canadians in the Japanese Empire, 1895-1941'

PART 3: BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

  • France Lord. 'The Silent Eloquence of Things: The Missionary Collections and Exhibitions of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in Quebec'
  • Barbara Lawson, McGiil University and the Redpath Museum. 'Collecting Cultures: (Canadian Missionaries, Pacific Islanders, and Museums'
  • Arthur Smith, Royal Ontario Museum. 'Curios from a Strange Land: The Oceania Collections of the Reverend Joseph Annand'
  • Linfu Dong, 0cean University, Qingdao, China. 'Finding God in Ancient China.: James Mellon Menzies, Sinology and Missions'

Description

Christian missions and missionaries have had a distinctive role in Canada's cultural history. With Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples, Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott have brought together new and established Canadian scholars to examine the encounters between Christian (Roman Catholic and Protestant) missionaries and the indigenous peoples with whom they worked in nineteenth- and twentieth-century domestic and overseas missions.

This tightly integrated collection is divided into three sections. The first contains essays on missionaries and converts in western Canada and in the arctic. The essays in the second section investigate various facets of the Canadian missionary presence and its legacy in east Asia, India, and Africa. The third section examines the motives and methods of missionaries as important contributors to Canadian museum holdings of artefacts from Huronia, Kahnawaga, and Alaska, as well as China and the South Pacific.

Broadly adopting a postcolonial perspective, Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples contributes greatly to the understanding of missionaries not only as purveyors of western religious values, but also as vehicles for cultural exchange between Native and non-Native Canadians, as well as between Canadians and the indigenous peoples of other countries.

Reviews

This interdisciplinary collection is a valuable contribution to the field of mission studies, and to the fields of native, religious, and cultural studies more broadly.

- Jennifer Bonnell, History of Education Program, Department of Theory and Policy Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto