Comment: Native American Women's Responses to Christianity

Abstract

This collection of articles brings together the kind of specific information that provides the basis for a synthesis of larger issues, both methodological and substantive, that will allow scholars to compare and contrast the attitudes of missionaries and the responses of Native Americans in ways that show patterns of interaction based on denominational and gender lines. These articles provide an important overview of the varieties of religious experience among Native North American women. They add to the rich store of historical information concerning the impact of Christianity on specific tribes that will contribute to discussions of the complex question of what constitutes native conversion to Christianity. Methodist, Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Mennonite missionaries attempted to convert Heiltsuk, Carrier, Tlingit, and Hopi people to their own forms of Christianity. The missionaries were both male and female, which led to different strategies of interaction with potential converts, and native men and women thus encountered Christianity in different ways. The articles offer important insights into the impact of Christianity on the lives of native women and on women's responses. It is also important that these articles, focused as they are on native women's responses to Christianity, were brought together originally in a session organized at a meeting of a professional society by two men, Sergei Kan and Michael Harkin. Their role shows us that gender relationships are not the province only of women scholars; they are a crucial part of cultural relationships in any situation of contact between different people. The articles reveal some interesting themes that are not directly related to conversion, the usual focus of such a session. The first theme is a methodological one, the absence of women's voices in the telling of