Religion Mixed with Politics: The 1836 Conversion of Mang'osid of Fond du Lac

Abstract

After suffering a humiliating political defeat in I836, Mang'osid, a Minnesota Ojibwa leader, converted to Christianity. This article examines incidents that precipitated conversion and continuing importance of Ojibwa political concerns in shaping villagers' response to conversion. The article concludes with observations regarding play of forces involved in an act of conversion, which apparently bore little relationship to message of Christianity and were instead related to Ojibwa political concerns. The conversion of Native Americans to Christianity continues to yield important insights into dynamics of intercultural dialogue and exchange between Native Americans and Euramericans. As recent studies by Axtell, Jennings, McLoughlin, Morrison, Ronda, and Salisbury attest, conversion and missionization efforts reveal themselves to be complex processes in which both Indians and Euramericans were active participants.1 That conversion attempts should be complex is unsurprising; Christian missionaries, with their linked program of conversion and civilization, profoundly challenged Native American societies at every level. Native Americans were asked to accept not simply a new religion but a new and radically different culture and society as well. Also unsurprising is fact that tribal political divisions often emerged after some portion of a native population embraced Christianity, with its concomitant acceptance of new social norms and behavioral standards. In his early and influential treatment of Euramerican Protestant conversion efforts, Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., describes the development of a tribewide split along Pagan and Christian lines in numerous Native American societies.2 Political divisions based on acceptance or rejection of Christianity were practically inevitable, Ethnohistory 37: z (Spring I990). Copyright ? by American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I8oi/90/$I.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:35:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Conversion of Mang'osid of Fond du Lac I27 Berkhofer argues, because Euramerican missionaries demanded from their converts wholesale rejection of every aspect of their traditional cultures. Such radical culture change was bound to fuel opposition from tribal members, who continued to value their own culture. Berkhofer also articulates important idea that missionaries made very limited headway while societies retained their political autonomy. As long as Indian tribal members enjoyed a traditional way of life free from outside interference, their reaction to missionaries was one of simple repudiation.3 It was not until peoples experienced the loss of political that missionaries were able to exert significant influence on even a portion of group. Most recent studies of conversion and missionization have focused on peoples who typically passed through earlier stages of . . . domination, underscoring contention that missionary success indeed depended on the disintegration of some native social forms.4 As a result of this focus on tribal peoples who had already experienced significant erosion of their political and social autonomy, scholarly understanding of those societies that entertained missionaries while retaining much of their social integrity is limited. Even Berkhofer, in his development of four basic of native responses to missionization and conversion efforts and to political schisms they engendered, pays relatively little attention to first of these sequences, which occurs, he indicates, in still-autonomous communities. The native-oriented Indians persecuted missionary to cause his voluntary withdrawal, Berkhofer notes. Once successful in ousting missionaries, community reintegrated itself, suffering, evidently, no long-term effects from its brief exposure to missionaries and their message of religious and social change. Although Berkhofer acknowledges that process of driving out missionaries could be socially disruptive, even violent, he nonetheless perceives that process as a straightforward one. Since tribal societies were highly integrated because people shared common values and goals, this sequence was not characterized by complexity that attended three later sequences that occurred once autonomy was lost. Anthropological theory lends further support to Berkhofer's idea of a relatively simple process of rejection. Anthropologists call contact under these conditions [of tribal autonomy] 'nondirected' or 'permissive,' Berkhofer observes. Independent tribal peoples, even though they might have experienced much contact with European or Euramerican societies, still adopted customs and artifacts of other peoples as they chose.5 This paper examines experience of Minnesota Ojibwa comThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:35:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms