Theology Today - Vol 43, No. 2 - July 1986 - BOOK REVIEW - Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes toward American Indians, 1837-1893

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Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes toward American Indians, 1837-1893
By Michael C. Coleman
Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 1985. 222 pp. $25.00.

For several decades, a vigorous study of American Indian missions, exemplified by the work of such scholars as Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. and Henry Warner Bowden, has been undertaken from sociological and anthropological perspectives in which "history has begun to replace hagiography." Michael C. Coleman, in Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes toward American Indians, 1837-1893, adopts this approach. A graduate of University College, Dublin, his doctoral work, resulting in this book, was done at the University of Pennsylvania. He is now lecturer in English at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland.

Coleman claims to have outdone other scholars in a more penetrating and comprehensive study of ethnocentrism and to have extracted a "clashing double-image" of Indian life that "underlay and reinforced the missionaries' cultural intolerance: Indian forms of 'heathenism,' in

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the perceptions of the Presbyterians, both repressed tribal members and simultaneously allowed them anarchic freedom."

For the study, he had access to the American Indian Correspondence, a collection of some 14,000 letters written by missionaries of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions during the period of the board's responsibility for work among the American tribes. His sample was the correspondence of thirty-two missionaries and board secretaries, weighted almost entirely toward those who worked among the Choctaws (Oklahoma) and the Nez Perces (Idaho). The names that occur most often are those of Robert J. Burtt, John Edwards, and Alexander Reid among the Choctaws; Henry Cowley, Sue and Kate McBeth, and George Deffenbaugh among the Nez Perces; and John C. Lowrie, of Mission House in New York. The study is limited to the period of the foreign board's responsibility, 1837-1893.

The missionaries, according to Coleman, were in fact "radical revolutionaries," in that they were determined to bring fundamental change to the Indians, exchanging tribal culture for that of Protestant Americans. The dynamic was the missionaries' "ethnocentrism," defined in Berkhofer's words as "judgment of one people's qualities by another in terms of the latter's own ideals and standards." This ethnocentrism, extreme in every case except that of John Edwards, had two sources, American values and mores and, since they were Old School Presbyterians, the old "Princeton Theology."

These "radical revolutionaries," in seeking the adoption of American values and mores, insisted on such matters as the primacy of the individual over the tribe; private property and an agrarian, settled economy, as opposed to collective ownership and hunting; sex roles that put the man on the farm and the woman in the house; domesticity in marriage and the raising of children; formal schooling, both academic and vocational; and new concepts of work and time. All these, the author contends, were offenses against the dignity of the Indians and the worth of their culture.

The "unbending but erudite conservatism" of the old Princeton Theology compounded the situation. A "scientific theism" with one foot planted in Calvinism and the other in Baconian Enlightenment, the theological stress was upon total depravity, a doctrine of election that still allowed for vigorous evangelism, and justification by individual faith through the renewing and sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit. To the missionaries, in practice, this meant a sifting evangelism whose results were tested by holy living. Yet, it also meant ministries of education, medicine, and political advocacy, together with the development of indigenous church leadership. Interestingly, although no woman would have been invited to teach in an Old School Presbyterian seminary (or even to study in one), the theological training of Nez Perce leaders was in the hands of Sue McBeth, a role not totally uncommon for a woman missionary, and one that she fulfilled with distinction.

The results of these policies, Coleman contends, were total contempt

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for Indian culture and separation of Christian Indians from the rest of' the tribe, on the one hand protecting them from corrupting influences, but on the other hand promoting factionalism and tribal breakdown. There was, however, little racism, defined (Berkhofer again) as "an understanding of human diversity mainly or solely in terms of racial differences (and moral judgments thereon) and an explanation of that diversity entirely or mainly in terms of racial inheritances." Rather, "inferiority" was assumed to be environmentally caused, and to be eradicated through "piety, learning, and industry," case by case and individual by individual, for the uplifting of the people by the power of the gospel.

Coleman understates himself when he says, "I do not accept the moral and cultural judgments which the missionaries … conveyed with their inherently ethnocentric vocabulary." In fact, his scorn is expressed in repeated derogatory characterizations of missionary attitudes and in generalizations often too sweeping to be drawn reliably from the data he cites. He is misled by the assumption that Indian cultures might have been preserved and cherished intact in the American westward movement.

The advent of the complex of traders, explorers, government agents, the military, missionaries, settlers, and marauders simply rendered Indian cultures dysfunctional. Cultures faced with such intrusive ele

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ments have to change significantly to survive in the new environment. Many of the data that Coleman uses to document his charge of ethnocentrism may as easily be used to support the theory that the missionaries served as indispensable brokers in guiding the Indians to the understandings, tools, skills, and faith by which survival might be possible-through schools, language, the church, indigenous leadership, and political advocacy. What emerges is a picture of persons who in a number of cases spent their lives getting at the complexities of the problem in order to work at it effectively. Later, a mutually appreciative cultural pluralism might be possible, but only on the basis of strong functional coexistence. The latter was the problem as they saw it.

Other scholars will be grateful to Coleman for pointing them to rich sources, for the detailed exposition of his research methods, and for his excellent notes and bibliographies.

D. Campbell Wyckoff

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey