Reading Log #2

  1. In “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions” by James P. Ronda, Ronda presents the issue of Christian missionary work in Native American life and the effects it brought to them. Historian’s believed Christian missionaries were “dedicated”, “self sacrificing people”, and “humble servants” “who attempted to save [Native Americans] from land-hungry settlers”. However, historians quickly changed their views and began believing missionary work as a “revolutionary enterprise, designed to bring about a radical transformation of Indian culture”. This transformation of the Native American culture required the Natives to become more “European in all aspects of life- ‘sex, marriage, economy, government, and religion’”[1].

This article sheds light on the Canadian past by bringing forth controversial issues that may have been not cared about in the past. It also gives us information and incite on how and why our life is like today.

  1. This argument is convincing because the use of passages in the article help to support it. For example, the biggest issue would have to be about the Christian religion and the beliefs of the missionaries compared to the Native Americans. Missionaries were trying to force their religious beliefs of heaven and hell onto the Native Americans. The missionaries believed in a world with God above and a fiery world with the Devil below. Whereas the Native Americans believed in neither, but an afterlife “spent in morally neutral surroundings”, such as the ‘“village of souls” populated by the spirits of the dead which resembled life on earth’[2]. These two conflicting ideas of life after death made a great deal of conflict between the two groups.

Another example of conflict between the missionaries and the Native Americans was the “question of baptism” and how the missionaries believed that you should be baptised at the moment of death or if they were sure you were going to die soon. Many Native Americans began to believed in baptism and that it may restore your health, but when the smallpox epidemic began to spread their positive views of baptism turned and began to believe that the ‘“missionaries had a secret understanding of the disease” and used baptism to spread it[3]. This other religious issue was another way that the missionaries and the Native Americans had a strained relationship.

This article contributes to the wider historiography on the topic by explaining some background information on the issues we are facing nowadays, for example, the uneasy relationship between the Aboriginals and the government.

  1. How far back did the issues between the missionaries/Christians and the Native Americans begin?

Did many Native Americans turn towards a more European lifestyle and forget about their own traditions and beliefs?

Did any of the missionaries feel bad about the way they treated the Native Americans? Did any of them stop doing missionary work or stop doing missionary work with Native Americans?

 

Endnotes:

[1] James P. Ronda, “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions”, The William and Mary Quarterly (1977): 66-67.

[2] James P. Ronda, ‘We Are Well As We Are’, 70.

[3] James P. Ronda, ‘We Are Well As We Are’, 72.

Bibliography:

Ronda, James P. “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Missions”. The William and Mary Quarterly 34:1 (January 1977): 66-82.

Link to the article:

http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.tru.ca/stable/pdf/1922626.pdf

My reflection on this article:

The reason why I chose to include this reading log into my ePortfolio was because it shows one of my interests that I have in History, which is Indigenous issues and some religious views. This article was interesting because it put into perspective what we are facing nowadays with Indigenous issues and the church and Government. It give us background information of where these issues originated from and how progressively over time they got more controversial and eventually have effected our country in many different ways. This article also contributes to my main argument of my ePortfolio; History is more then just facts and information, but the interpretations of others. This articles shows not just the facts and information of the issues, but the interpretations of the Native Americans and the Christian Missionaries in this time, when they encountered each other. Both groups had a certain interpretation or idea of what life should be like, and these interpretations were not viewed equally by the opposite group.