Mixed Blessings transforms our understanding of the relationship between Indigenous people and Christianity in what is now Canada.
While acknowledging the harm of colonialism, including the trauma inflicted by church-run residential schools, this book challenges the portrayal of Indigenous people as passive victims of malevolent missionaries who experienced a uniformly dark history. Instead, it illuminates the diverse and multifaceted ways that Indigenous communities and individuals across Canada have interacted, and continue to interact, meaningfully with Christianity from the early 1600s to the present.
Ranging widely across time and place, these insightful case studies explore how and why some Indigenous people – including Louis Riel and Edward Ahenakew – historically aligned themselves with Christianity while others did not. It also plumbs the processes and politics involved in combining spiritual traditions and reflects on the role of Christianity in Indigenous communities today.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Mixed Blessings of Encounter / Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton
Part 1: Communities in Encounter
1 Reading Rituals: Performance and Religious Encounter in Early Colonial Northeastern North America / Timothy Pearson
2 Managing Alliance, Negotiating Christianity: Haudenosaunee Uses of Anglicanism in Northeastern North America, 1760s-1830s / Elizabeth Elbourne
3 A Subversive Sincerity: The I:yem Memorial, Catholicism, and Political Opportunity in S'olh Téméxw / Amanda Fehr
Part 2: Individuals in Encounter
4 "The Joy My Heart Has Experienced": Eliza Field Jones and the Transatlantic Missionary World, 1830s-40s / Cecilia Morgan
5 Between García Moreno and Chan Santa Cruz: Riel and the Métis Rebellions / Jean-François Bélisle and Nicole St-Onge
6 Rethinking Edward Ahenakew's Intellectual Legacy: Expressions of nêhiyawi-mâmitonêyihcikan (Cree Consciousness or Thinking) / Tasha Beeds
Part 3: Contemporary Encounters
7 Aporia, Atrocity, and Religion in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada / Siphiwe Dube
8 Decolonizing Religious Encounter? Teaching "Indigenous Traditions, Women, and Colonialism" / Denise Nadeau
9 Autoethnography That Breaks Your Heart: Or What Does an Interdisciplinarian Do When What She Was Hoping for Simply Isn't There? / Carmen Lansdowne
Conclusion: Reflections on Encounter / Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton
Index
