Missions and missionaries

Tribes affected: Pantribal

Significance: Missionaries and their missions provided American Indians with their first concentrated contact with white culture; missionaries helped implement the policies of assimilation, agrarianism, and cultural extermination

From the 1500’s, when Spanish and French explorers brought Roman Catholic priests to North America, until the 1950’s, missionaries influenced both American Indians and American policy toward Indians. Missionaries taught English, built schools and churches, and created pantribal connections. They also, however, spread disease and forced assimilation and Christianization on Indians. Most missionaries were well-meaning, but their efforts were often (at best) misguided. They were so convinced of the correctness and superiority of their own culture and belief system that they tried to suppress and destroy those of the Indians. Missionary work supported by various denominations continues today, but since the 1950’s, missionaries have been more sensitive than their predecessors about understanding and respecting Indian culture. Missionaries and their missions remain controversial in most American Indian communities today.

Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Century

Missionaries first entered North America through the Spanish Empire in Mexico and through French trading posts in Quebec. The Spanish viewed Christianization as a pillar of conquest and provided state-sponsored Catholic missionaries. These missionaries developed missions in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California. They provided protection, food, and shelter to the weaker tribes, such as the Pueblo Indians, while being constantly threatened by the stronger tribes, such as the Apaches and the Navajos. This system suffered a setback in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, when tribes rose up and chased the missionaries and the Spanish settlers out of New Mexico. The Spanish reestablished the missions within fifteen years.

The French allowed Catholic missionaries into their territory, but they were not state-sponsored as they were in the Spanish Empire. Jesuits attempted to Christianize the Hurons, but instead they brought smallpox, which decimated the tribe. This upset the tribal balance of power, and the Iroquois attacked and killed off most of the Hurons. The Jesuits retreated and simply kept missions at trading posts until the 1790’s.

The English Protestants also saw Christianization of the Indians as part of their role in North America. In the seventeenth century, John Eliot of Massachusetts established praying villages where Indians lived “as white men”: They wore English clothes, learned farming techniques, and became Christians. As disease decimated many of the Northern Woodlands tribes, the remaining members joined the praying villages for survival. The villages appeared to be successful at attracting converts. Though many of the Indian residents did convert, most died from diseases spread by the whites within the praying villages.

David Brainerd, an Eliot student, began a mission among the Cherokees in Tennessee. The Cherokees used the mission to learn English and to learn about white culture. The high attendance rate made the school appear to be a success, which inspired other Protestant groups to send missionaries among the Indians. All these early missionaries—Spanish, French, and English—believed in the power of Christianity, the importance of sedentary farming, and the necessity of extinguishing Indian culture.

Nineteenth Century

Mission work exploded with the development of large missionary societies between 1830 and 1850. Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Catholic societies sponsored hundreds of missionaries, both male and female, to work with Indians. Missionaries built schools and churches to attract Indians to Christianity and white civilization. They expected Indians to convert in large numbers and to support their own missions financially (as the natives of India and Africa had done). Despite these efforts, the Indians showed little interest in converting to Christianity.

In the 1850’s, the missionary societies grew impatient with the lack of progress. They accepted money from the American government to help support their missions. In return, the government demanded that the missionaries increase their efforts to Christianize and “civilize” the Indians. Money was supplied to help assimilate all Indian groups to sedentary farming and Christianity. This method was a general failure, perhaps most conspicuously with Plains and Northwest Coast groups.

By the 1870’s, missionary societies lost patience with the lack of success and cut off funding for missionaries. Individual missionaries became responsible for their own financial support. Many entered into agreements with the U.S. government that tied them to conversion quotas. The government wanted a certain number of “pacified” Indians in exchange for its invested dollars. Additionally, missionaries wrote pamphlets and books about the “wretched condition” of specific Indian groups. These writings influenced public views of the condition of the American Indian. Many of these missionary works formed the basis for anthropological studies of the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Navajo, the Salish, and other native groups.

Despite their funding problems, missionaries continued their program of assimilation, agrarianism, and cultural extermination. The height of this policy occurred during the 1870’s when the government’s “peace policy” allowed missionaries to administrate the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). At this time, residential schools became popular. Missionaries removed Indian children from their parents and sent them away to be acculturated into white society. Missionaries forbade the Native American children to speak their own language, wear their own clothes, or practice any aspect of their own culture. At this point, missionary and government policy coalesced into one united front against Indian culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries had fallen out of favor with the government, which saw their attempts at fostering assimilation as failures. Few Indians had converted to Christianity; most had developed a resentment of missionaries and saw them as agents of cultural genocide.

Missionaries remained part of Indian policy through the 1950’s. They ran schools, wrote reports, and continued to act as agents and intermediaries for the government.

Positive Contributions

Though missionaries generally attempted to destroy Indian cultures and societies in their efforts to help American Indians, they made some positive contributions. First, education and acculturation provided Indian groups with a common language—English. Second, the residential school system provided a common experience for native leaders and gave them the opportunity to meet people from different tribal groups. Finally, education created bicultural natives who understood their own culture and white culture. This development helped many tribal groups in their legal battles against white governments.

Bibliography

Beaver, Robert Pierce. Church, State, and the American Indians. St. Louis: Concordia, 1966.

Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. Salvation and the Savage. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1965.

Devens, Carol. Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Grant, John Webster. Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter Since 1543. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

Kelley, Robert. American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.