Methodist Mission Research Articles

Racial Identity and the Civilizing Mission: Double-Consciousness at the 1895 Congress on Africa

AbstractThe Congress on Africa was held in Atlanta, Georgia, in December 1895 as part of a campaign to promote African American involvement in Methodist missions to Africa. Held in conjunction with the same exposition where Booker T. Washington delivered his famous Atlanta Compromise address, the Congress in some ways shared his accommodationist approach to racial advancement. Yet the diverse and distinguished array of African American speakers at the Congress also developed a complex rationale for connecting the peoples of the African diaspora through missions. At the same time that they affirmed the need for “civilizing” influences as an indispensable element for racial progress, they also envisioned a reinvigorated racial identity and a shared racial destiny emerging through the interactions of black missionaries and Africans. In particular, the most thoughtful participants in the Congress anticipated the forging of a black civilization that combined the unique gifts of their race with the progressive dynamics of Christian culture. These ideas parallel and likely influenced W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double-consciousness. At a time when the missionary movement provided the most important source of awareness about Africa among African Americans, it is possible to discern in the proceedings of the Congress on Africa the glimmerings of a new pan-African consciousness that was destined to have a profound effect on African American intellectual life in the twentieth century.

The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840 (review)

Reviewed by: The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840 Thomas Bartlett The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840. By Irene Whelan. [History of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora.] (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 347. $60.00.) This is a significant book that breaks new ground in its description, analysis, and contextualization of Protestant and Catholic hatred (not too strong a word for it) for each other in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Ireland. It makes a valuable contribution to an understanding of the origins of what was to become the endemic sectarianization of Irish society. And it offers an important perspective on the phenomenon of anti-Catholicism in Britain and the United States in the later nineteenth century. The book's main theses are based on a very extensive study of the main documentary archives—notable use being made in particular of the Methodist Missionary Society papers—and also of the published religious ephemera produced by the contending parties. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the emergence of an Irish Catholic identity in the nineteenth century and in Protestant-Catholic relations in that period not only in Ireland but in the Anglophone world. Dr. Whelan examines the emergence in Ireland in the last decade of the eighteenth century of a strong Protestant evangelical movement which took as its objective the conversion of the priest-dominated Irish Catholics. This was a task that had been talked about and even acted upon fitfully since the late sixteenth century, but the results had been, to say the least, disappointing. By 1790 Ireland was infinitely more "Catholic" than she had been two hundred years earlier. This stark fact was a standing reproof to the Protestant Ascendancy that had governed Ireland since the seventeenth century, but until the late eighteenth century there had been for some time a weary, and indeed wary, acceptance that it might not be possible or indeed advisable, to do anything about it. In the 1790's, however, the shattering experience of polarized community relations and religious mayhem culminating in the 1798 rebellion—widely depicted as a sectarian civil war—forced a re-think. One lesson from the rebellion was that Protestantism could never be safe while the mass of the people remained in thrall to their priests, and hence a strong evangelical movement embracing not just Methodists but also key personnel in the Church of Ireland was got under way. This was to culminate in the 1822 declaration of the absolute necessity for a "Second Reformation" by the newly installed Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, William Magee. The Catholic Church, experiencing a resurgence in the early nineteenth century, and under the redoubtable leadership of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin fought back against what it saw as a declaration of war. It was no coincidence that this confessional conflict in the 1820's overlapped with the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Daniel O'Connell. Each drew upon the other, each sharpened the bitterness with which the debates and the elections were conducted, and when the contest ebbed religion and politics were inextricably [End Page 990] linked for the forseeable future. The "Bible War'' may have peaked in the 1830's, as Dr. Whelan argues, but it continued diminuendo for many decades and arguably formed the crucible of modern Irish Catholic identity. By the 1830's to be Irish was to Catholic and, in Ireland, to be Catholic was to be Irish, a synchronicity which had not been the case in the mid-eighteenth century, but which was to persist by and large to the present day. Thomas Bartlett University College Dublin Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

New Light on an Old Scandal? Sex and Corporate Politics at the Norway House Methodist Mission of 1846

Did he do it? The question has hung like a dense fog over the history of the Methodist Mission at Rossville, near Norway House, Manitoba since the events of 1846. Reverend James Evans, the first superintendent of the western missions, the inventor of the Cree syllabic and the pioneer of the Rossville Press, was accused of sexual misconduct by three young Native women. Since then, several generations of church historians have come to varied conclusions about the truthfulness of these charges. A document recently recovered from files at the Pratt Library, Victoria University Archives, University of Toronto, mentioning a “deathbed confession” made by a Native woman to a subsequent Methodist minister posted at Norway House may shed new light on this cold case of sexual misconduct.

"We Have Allmost Every Religion but Our Own": French-Indian Community Initiatives and Social Relations in French Prairie, Oregon, 1834-1837

MELINDA MARIE JETTE "we have allmost Every Religion but our own" French-Indian Community Initiatives and Social Relations in French Prairie, Oregon, 1834-1837 DURING THE EARLYSUMMER MONTHS of1834, theFrench Canadian men who had settled in the area of theWillamette Valley now known as French Prairie, likely in consultation with their Indian wives, discussed the need for religious and educational training for their growing families. By July, theyhad decided to send a letter to thenearest Roman Catholic ecclesiastical seat at Red River in the Canadian Northwest, asking that priests be sent to theirnascent community. Dated July5,1834, the Willamette settlers'first letter to Joseph Provencher, known as the Bishop of Juliopolis, probably did not reach theRed River colony until the fall orwinter of 1834.1 Having received no news from the bishop by the early spring of 1835, the French Canadians sent a second letter, repeating their request for priests and "promising to do all in their power to help them survive." They pledged twentyminots of grain per family to support the priests, "which themembers ofthe company there saying that they can easily deliver," since the Willamette Valley was a "beautiful country where one plants and harvests nearly year-round, and fishing there is in abundance."2 The French Canadians' petition forCatholic priests was not to bear fruit until 1838. In a curious turn of events, however, while the French Canadians were busy drafting their first letter to Bishop Provencher, the first party of Christian missionaries was already on itsway to Oregon. Headed by the Reverend Jason Lee, a small group of American Methodist missionaries joined Nathaniel Wyeth's second expedition to the West and arrived at Fort 222 OHQ vol. 108, no. 2 ? 2007 Oregon Historical Society This map, produced by the Oregon StateHighway Commission in the1960s, isa modern renderingofFrenchPrairie and thesurroundingareas in the1830s.French Prairie was originally thehome of the AhantchuyukKalapuyans but,as this map demonstrates, it became prime area for non-Kalapuyan colonization and re settlement following theFrench Canadians' retirement from theregionalfur trade. Jette, Community Initiativesand Social Relations inFrench Prairie 223 Vancouver in mid-September 1834.3 The Methodists subsequently established theirmission in theWillamette Valley; but, hampered by organizational problems, bouts of poor health, and their own cultural biases, theymade no significant attempts to convert the local Kalapuyans toChristianity during their first three years there.4 Jason Lee and his colleagues were more successful with their French Indian neighbors. Given sectarian tensions between Catholics and Prot estants in both theUnited States and Canada during the early nineteenth century, the Catholic French-Indian families were surprisingly hospitable to theAmerican Protestants during their first few years in the Willamette Valley5 During themid-i830s, theyworked together to solve local problems in French Prairie, reaching across cultural divides ? even in times of ten sion and conflict ? and demonstrating a commitment to ethnic, religious, and community solidarity.6 Because the early French Canadian settlers and theirNative wives were nearly all illiterate and left fewwritten records, their role in early Oregon history has long been obscured.7 A fresh examination of the surviving docu mentary record, including some previously untapped Canadian sources, however, reveals a complex story inwhich the French-Indian families in French Prairie used all themeans at their disposal ? including tieswith Methodist missionaries ? to advance their own community interests.8 FRENCH PRAIRIE SETTLERS initially came intocontact withAmerican missionaries when Jason and Daniel Lee spent September 19 through Septem ber 26,1834, touring the Willamette Valley to reconnoiter a site for their new mission. French Prairie, theoriginal territoryof theAhantchuyuk Kalapuyans, was named after the French-Indian families who settled there. Located in the mid-Willamette Valley, French Prairie isbounded by the Willamette River to the north and west, the Pudding River to the east, and what remains of Lake Labish (lac labiche) to the south. The Methodist missionaries firstvisited the French-Indian families living inAhantchuyuk Kalapuyan territory, staying with Joseph Gervais and Yiamust Clatsop and their children, who lived on a farm about tenmiles southwest of Campement de Sable (Champoeg). Also living at theGervais home were Yiamust's sisterCeliast and her husband Solo mon Smith,who was then a schoolteacher to the local French-Indian children. The families whom themissionaries met at...

Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania (review)

Reviewed by: Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania Kirsteen Murray Helen Betha Gardner . 2006. Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania. Dunedin: Otago University Press, pp. 204, Pb, £18.98. Gathering for God examines the career of Rev George Brown who servedas Methodist Missionary in Oceania and later general secretary of the Australian Methodist Overseas Mission for forty-eight years. It examines Brown's early life and conversion; his role as a missionary in Samoa, Duke of York Island and New Britain; his interests as a collector of ethnographic information and artefacts; and his contribution to public life in Australia. Of particular interest is the chapter devoted to an examination of the controversial incident in the Bismarck Archipelago in 1878 in which Brown led an armed raid of retaliation against villages which he believed to be responsible for the killing and dismemberment of indigenous evangelists. Brown's party exacted revenge by attacking and burning villages killing between ten and hundred men. This was, as Gardner notes, an incident unprecedented in missionary experience in the Pacific. Her meticulous dissection of Brown's own accounts and of Methodist and wider public responses to his actions, provide a fascinating snap shot of colonial and racial attitudes of the period. Further light is shed on Brown's attitudes through an examination of his newspaper articles in the 1880s on the subject of the desirability of the annexation of New Guinea. Brown's ethnographic and collecting interests [End Page 200] are also considered including correspondence with his contemporaries in the field of anthropology. The book is illustrated with numerous photographs taken by Brown himself and Gardner provides a conclusion which traces the fate and curatorial interpretation of Brown's artefacts in the years since his death in 1917. This is a very readable book with a clear narrative line that will be accessible even to those who are not familiar with mission history in Oceania. The life of George Brown provides an intriguing introduction to many issues of the period and will prove very useful for students. Brown himself is placed inside a cabinet of curiosities and at the head of each chapter a line drawing of a pith helmet stands as an unelaborated comment, perhaps on his own character or perhaps on the times in which he lived. Kirsteen Murray University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2007 Edinburgh University Press

‘Black and white, a significant contrast’: Race, humanism and missionary photography in the Pacific

Taking the example of ‘Studies in black and white’, a genre of photographs taken around the end of the nineteenth century by Methodist missionaries in the Pacific, this article seeks to go beyond conventional analyses that scrutinize colonial photography for forms of domination. I argue that these photographs, and the context in which some of them were published, reveal a complex interplay between two contradictory principles: on the one hand, a Christian humanism, articulating a vision of commonality and equality, and on the other, paternalism, articulating a vision of superiority and inequality .

Educating the "Native": A Study of the Education Adaptation Strategy in British Colonial Africa, 1910-1936

This essay discusses how examinations were used as an strategy beginning in 1910 when British examinations boards were invited to assist with the conduct of secondary school examinations in colonial territories in Africa. Although adaptation covered all aspects of formal schooling, this study focuses on secondary education because of its importance as the highest level of education available, and its significant impact on colonial society at the time. Much of recent literature on the adaptation question has focused on the various levels of schooling beyond basic village education in rural areas. (1) The essay examines the responses, particularly in Nigeria, to the suggestion that secondary education should be adapted to local needs, and the results of the adaptation efforts, culminating in the introduction of the Overseas School Certificate Examination for Nigerian candidates in 1936. The foundation of Western education in Africa was laid by Christian missionaries who were eager to use literacy training to introduce Christianity and win converts to their religion. (2) The missionaries also used Western education to train as catechists, messengers, and other positions needed to assist them in realizing the social and economic development and transformations desired by the European missionaries and their agents. Merchants and traders also required qualified personnel to handle their business transactions. Thus after considerable consultations between the Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded by the Church of England to promote evangelization, and the local merchants and traders, the first secondary school in Nigeria, the Church Missionary Society Grammar School, was founded in Lagos in 1859. (3) It is by no means surprising that the first secondary school in Nigeria was established by the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Its secretary from 1841 to 1872, Henry Venn, firmly believed in the development of adequate human resources, and that the school must be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating, and should employ African personnel. (4) The African commercial and business elite also required personnel that was well-trained and equipped to handle political and economic transactions between and outsiders involving record keeping and correspondence regarding the exchange of European and African goods and services. (5) also gradually began to recognize the advantages and the attractions of post-primary education, especially the increased salaries and wages, and improved conditions of service. Historian Andrew Paterson has observed that in South Africa, Africans perceived education to be an alternative source for economic security in a time of land dispossession. (6) In a quick succession, additional secondary schools were established by the CMS in various parts of Nigeria, and by other missionary organizations, including the Baptist Mission, the Catholic Mission, and the Wesleyan Methodist Mission, beginning in the 1870s. The Qua Iboe, the Primitive Methodist Society, established secondary schools mostly in Eastern Nigeria starting in 1922. Secondary schools also gradually began to spring up in various other parts of Africa, as community colleges, high schools, and secondary grammar schools, often in cooperation with Christian missions that provided the teachers, the curriculum, and the necessary contacts; however, the local communities provided the buildings and raised funds for these educational services. (7) This was the background to the establishment of various mission schools in Africa. In Nigeria, for example, ethnic-based secondary schools such as Oduduwa College, Ile-Ife; Edo College, Benin City; and Imade College, Owo began to sprout up to attend to the various needs of communities and individuals eager to take advantage of the new opportunities for advancement and promotion in the new society that emerged with the coming of the missionaries and the colonial administrative bureaucracy. …

Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aborginal Peoples in Canada before 1960 (review)

Reviewed by: Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aborginal Peoples in Canada before 1960 Carole Gerson Brendan Frederick R. Edwards. Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aborginal Peoples in Canada before 1960. Lanhan, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2005. 225 pp. The story of First Nations' relationship with European modalities of print and language is complex and dispersed. Bibliography offers one essential cornerstone: Joyce Banks's Books in Native Languages in the Rare Book Collections of the National Library of Canada grounds us in the onslaught of print by which Europeans sought to convert and contain Aboriginal Canadians, while James Danky and Maureen Hady's Native American Periodicals and Newspapers, 1828–1982 continues the story with many examples of Indigenous communities creating their own print resources. Paper Talk, approaching the topic through First Nations' attitudes toward and access to reading, provides a different entrance. Its "plot" is the unfolding of a struggle over the powerful medium of print, as Aboriginal communities sought its benefits without utterly yielding to the agendas of church and state. [End Page 208] The result of thorough research in government archives, supported with copious notes and references, Paper Talk is a valuable compact resource on the history of Aboriginal literacy in Canada. It begins with an introduction to prevailing indigenous pre-contact sign systems such as wampum belts, petroglyphs and pictographs, winter counts, and pictorial birchbark scrolls. Presenting Canada's First Peoples as inclined to forms of literacy before the arrival of Europeans, Edwards deals carefully with the delicate issue of the origins of the scripts known as M'ikmaq hieroglyphics (first described in the seventeenth-century by Récollet missionary Father Christian LeClercq) and Ojibwe and Cree syllabics, whose attribution to the Methodist missionary, Reverend James Evans, is under some dispute. With both languages, Edwards notes, Evans enjoyed considerable assistance from educated Native advisors. Once established in 1840, the Cree system spread quickly, due to the fact that it "drew on shorthand, as well as symbols already in use among the Cree" (51). For missionaries, Native literacy was inseparable from conversion; Edwards informs us that in the records of the Department of Indian Affairs, "the earliest report of a library in any Aboriginal community" is a Sabbath school library conducted in 1864 by the Wesleyan Methodist Society for the Saugeen Chippewas at French Bay on the Bruce peninsula (49). For the Department of Indian Affairs, Native literacy was one component of a larger program of control and improvement, in which only salutary texts were recommended. Hence recreational reading received little support, and the libraries of the Indian day schools contained few attractive titles. Some Native elders regarded Western literacy with suspicion, linking reading with idleness and loss of traditional skills. However, Edwards is more interested in tracing the stories of Native individuals and groups who sought to encourage reading and establish libraries but were thwarted by a bureaucratic and short-sighted system that, under the administration of Duncan Campbell Scott, lacked sympathy and imagination. Throughout the volume, figures emerge who are dedicated, fascinating, and often heroic. Especially valiant is Charles A. Cooke, a Mohawk clerk and translator who spent more than thirty years (from 1893 to 1926) working for the Department of Indian Affairs. His efforts render Edwards's account of the first quarter of the twentieth century brighter than the following period, although his proposal for an inclusive circulating collection of Native records, to be known as the "Indian National Library," was limited by Scott to a small disorganized body of material restricted to government employees. Cooke also produced one of the first newspapers in the Mohawk language (Onkweonwe, 1900), compiled important linguistic [End Page 209] data on Iroquois personal names, and in his last years assisted Marius Barbeau and others at the National Museum of Canada. Another lost cause documented by Edwards is the 1901 attempt of Joshua Adams, the Dominion Government Indian Lands Agent at Sarnia, to enable the members of the Aamjiwnaang community to create a free circulating library on their Reserve. However, the Department of Indian Affairs refused to envision anything beyond the books in the day school that they already administered. It was up to...

Hallowed treasures: sacred, secular and the Wesleyan Methodists in New Zealand, 1819–1840

John Wesley, the eighteenth century reformer, preached that regarding money, his Methodist followers should “gain all you can, save all you can and give all you can”. Methodist attitudes required user reflection and careful recording to ensure good use of money. This attitude towards the pecuniary challenges the sacred–secular dichotomy suggested by Laughlin (1988) and Booth (1993). The early Methodist missionaries in New Zealand provide an example where acculturation demands tempted men with a strong sacred focus to eschew secular accounting for their mission. Steeped in Wesley's writings, Methodist culture and the Bible, however, their letters and diaries included regular stocktakes of barter goods and ledger accounts, suggesting economic accountability. When one missionary misappropriated mission money for personal ends, he was ostracised. Wesleyan Methodist missionaries’ dependence on their supporters required commitment to mission and stewardship of the mission's ‘hallowed treasures’, but not a sacred–secular bifurcation which denigrated accounting tasks.

"Trophies" for God: Native Mortality, Racial Ideology, and the Methodist Mission of Lower Oregon, 1834-1844

GRAY H. WHALEY "Trophies" for God NativeMortality,Racial Ideology,and the MethodistMission ofLowerOregon, 1834-1844 IN 1831, A GROUP OF NEZ PERCE and Flathead Indiansreversedthe familiar storyof theAmerican West by venturing eastward from theColum bia Plateau to St. Louis, theAmericans' "gateway to the West." Unfortunately, St. Louis residents did not recordmuch information about the Indians'visit east.According to one account by theChristian Advocate published two years later,however, theNez Perce and Flatheads had requested instruction in the Bible. This belated claim caused a considerable stir. Many Americans were swept up in a religious revivalmovement now known as the "Second Great Awakening." These evangelical Christians believed that theHoly Spirit could livewithin them ifthey adhered to a doctrinal view of theGospel, made the Word central to all their thoughts and actions, and exhorted the benefits of such a life to fellow Christians and non-Christians alike. Ideally, they could convert theworld to this true faith and begin the new millennium. In the excitement over theNez Perces' and Flatheads' supposed call for the Bible, theMethodist Mission Society attempted the expensive proposition of a mission in the little-known and distant "lower Oregon Country"?the vast expanse surrounding the lower and middle Columbia River of present-day Oregon and Washington ? and dispatched Rev. Jason Lee. In 1834,Lee situated his initialmission station upriver fromWillamette Falls, a comfortable distance from Fort Vancouver, theHudson's Bay Com pany establishment near the confluence of theWillamette and Columbia Rivers. His Willamette Valley location was far from the lands of theNez Perce Research for thisarticlewas supported by theOregon Historical Society'sDonald J. Sterling,Jr., Memorial Senior Research Fellowship. 6 OHQ vol. 107, no. 1 ? 2006 Oregon Historical Society OHS neg.,OrHi 46192 A sketchof the WillametteMission House, established byRev. JasonLee in 1834 and Flathead, but he chose it largely for its suitability for amission colony and an agricultural school. In the first decade, a more substantial central station was established nearby at present-day Salem and other stations were added at Clatsop near themouth of theColumbia River,Willamette Falls, Nisqually on Puget Sound, and The Dalles on themiddle Columbia. Despite the "clarion call" heralded by the Christian Advocate, Lee did not find aNative population clamoring for the Bible. Instead, theMethod ists encountered people reeling frommalaria epidemics that had begun in 1830. Their population continued to decline significantly for years because of inadvertently introduced diseases forwhich they had no immunities or effective treatments. As a result of the cataclysmic demise of theNative population, Lee adjusted his expectations: while themajority of Indians were doomed, some could be saved to take their place inChristian America as "trophies."1 Generally, however, their "blood" would only be preserved Whaley, "Trophies" forGod 7 through "amalgamation" (interracial marriage).2 Still, he never lost faith in themission's goal of "saving" theNative people of Oregon. Lee's faithwas not shared by all themissionaries. Other problems for the mission effort resulted because most Indians were simply disinterested in substituting a new religion and way of life for their own, and their several languages and dialects frustrated themissionaries who spoke only English. The Indians' demographic collapse and frustrations with limited conver sions weakened the resolve of some missionaries, particularly those of the "reinforcement" of 1840. Within a couple of years, thesemissionaries sought to close theMission, arguing that Indians would be replaced by Euro Americans. The view that Christians were destined to possess American lands and that Indians were destined to disappear dated back toPuritan New England in the 1600s.3 Two hundred years later, the history of the eastern United States and emerging beliefs about race added weight to it.By 1843, critics of theOregon Mission believed thatNative extinction was inevitable and, unlike Lee, that themission was a lost cause. Both Lee and his detractors drew on racialism, the growing body of folk beliefs and pseudo-science that attempted to explain perceived differences among peoples by their inherent physical traits.By the late 1700s, human dif ferences once thought tobe ethnic or cultural (i.e., Christian versus heathen or civilized versus barbarian) came to be seen as fixed by biological "race." Lee's racial beliefs were relatively benign insofar as he still saw a future for Indian people...

Making Neo-Britons: The Transatlantic Relationship between Wesleyan Methodists in Britain and the Canadas, 1815–1828

The question of what it meant to be a Methodist was a complicated one in early nineteenth-century Upper and Lower Canada. There were two groups of Methodists in the Canadas between 1815 and 1828: British Wesleyans and members of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States. The relationship between these two groups has been analysed primarily from an institutional point of view: British missionaries came to Upper and Lower Canada and attempted to impose their politically and doctrinally conservative ways on the more liberal Methodist Episcopals.1 The British Wesleyans, so it is argued, were not very successful in this endeavour. They had no significant impact on Canadian Methodism during this period, or, any impact they did have was negative - leading to division and stunting the growth of the denomination in the Canadas.2 This picture is not incorrect; it is, however, incomplete. It ignores the cultural transformation that occurred among the British Wesleyans in Upper and Lower Canada between 1820 and 1828. Historians of Methodism in Canada, and of religion in general, have tended to downplay the complex nature of transatlantic British identity in the early nineteenth century. In 1974, J.G.A. Pocock called for a complete rethinking of the concept of British history. It was best conceptualised, Pocock argued, as the story of the interrelations of the three kingdoms and cultures of England, Scotland and Ireland. This new British history, Pocock stated, should also include the relations between the United Kingdom and its settler communities across the Atlantic and the Pacific from the seventeenth century onwards. Canada, in Pocock's view, was a part 'of an expanding zone of cultural creation and conflict' emanating from the British Isles. Canadians, like Australians and New Zealanders, were also Britons, though their relationship with the home land was anything but uncomplicated. While the great outpouring of English, Irish and Scottish emigrants to Canada in the nineteenth century fixed that settler community into a larger, north Atlantic and imperial context, this does not mean that cultural formation among Britons in Canada was a 'simple one-way imperial success story'. It was full of ambivalences, leading to the creation of 'a diversity of interacting and varyingly autonomous cultures' within the larger framework of Britishness.3 Carl Berger made a similar point four years earlier, arguing that, from Confederation onwards, British imperialism was a form of Canadian nationalism. Canadian intellectuals took great pride in the achievements of the British empire and glorified Canada's role in that grand enterprise. However, some went so far as to argue that, at some not too distant point, Canada would take up the leading role in the empire, usurping the central position of tired, old England. In making his argument, Berger, unlike Pocock, was careful to note the role that a sense of Protestant mission played in the creation of this world view.4 Historians of religion and cultural formation in Canada have been slow to take up the insights of either Pocock or Berger.5 This article is an attempt to integrate Canadian religious history with the new British history. To do so we will use the insights of Pocock and Berger to analyse the interactions between the Wesleyan leadership in Britain, primarily the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, and their missionaries in the Canadas between 1815 and 1828. Here we find an example of the interplay between local and transatlantic contexts, between politics and culture that lies at the heart of the new British history. The British Wesleyan missionaries and laity in Upper and Lower Canada forged a new identity as a result of the changing nature of the relationship between the Wesleyan Methodists in Britain and the Methodist Episcopals in the United States. By 1828 they had become neo-Britons. Hand-picked by the British Methodist hierarchy,6 the first Wesleyan missionaries in Upper and Lower Canada were well schooled in the conservative political stance of their church leadership. …

Colonising with Christianity?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Casey Blanton, ed, Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa 1875 to 1925, Daytona Beach Community College, Daytona, 1995, p 5. Alison Nordstrom, ‘Early Photography in Samoa’, History of Photography, no 15, 1991, p 277. Ibid. Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874–1914, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1989, p 128. Nordstrom, ‘Early Photography in Samoa’, op cit, p 272. Nicholas Thomas, ‘Colonial Conversions: Difference, Hierarchy and History in Early Twentieth Century Evangelical Propaganda’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, no 34, 1992, pp 366–89. Alan Bishop, ‘Western Mathematics: The secret weapon of cultural imperialism’, in Bill Ashcroft et al, The Post‐Colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, London, 1995, pp 71–6. Ibid, p 73. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, Peregrine Books, Great Britian, 1979, p 132. Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, in Bill Ashcroft et al, op cit, pp 29 – 35. Ibid, p 29. Ibid. Nicholas Thomas, ‘Colonial Conversions’, op cit, p 367. Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, op cit, p 30. R H Tawney, ‘The Bearing of Christianity on Social and Industrial Questions’, International Council of Missionaries, no 5, 1928, p 165. Brian Stanley, ‘Nineteenth Century Liberation Theology: Nonconformist Missionaries and Imperialism’, Baptist Quarterly, no 32, 1987, p 5. Ibid. Langmore, Missionary Lives, op cit, p 123. Ibid, p 122. Ibid, p 124. Ibid, p 130. Ibid. J Garrett, ‘The Conflict Between the London Missionary Society and the Wesleyan Methodists in mid‐19th Century Samoa’, Journal of Pacific History, no 9, 1974, pp 65–80. George Brown, Pioneer Missionary and Explorer: An Autobiography, Methodist Missionary Society of Australia, Sydney, 1904, p 115. Ibid, p 116. Alison Nordstrom, ‘Wood Nymphs and Patriots: Depictions of Samoa in National Geographic’, Visual Sociology, no 7, 1992, pp 49–59. Ibid. Brown, Pioneer, Missionary and Explorer, op cit, p 115. Ibid. Ibid. There is a wealth of material on these negotiations in government papers at the Public Record Office, London; and the Archives of the International Missionary Council and Council of British Missionary Societies, Geneva. Ibid, p 116. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove, New York, 1996, p2. Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, op cit, p 29. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, USA, 1991. Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories of Oceanic Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995. Peter Bellwood, The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People, Thames & Hudson, London, 1987, p 73. Ibid, p 74.

Völkner and Mokomoko: ‘Symbols of Reconciliation’ in Aotearoa, New Zealand

On 2 March 1865, the Revd Carl Sylvius Völkner, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, was hanged from a willow tree close to his own church and mission station at Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. John Hobbs, who had arrived as a Methodist missionary in New Zealand in 1823, reported on ‘the very barbarous Murder of one of the best Missionaries in New Zealand’ and noted that Völkner’s death marked ‘a New Era in the history of this country’. Völkner was the first European missionary of any denonomination to be killed in New Zealand since missionary work began in 1814.

Dealing with "defectives" Foster Kennedy and William Lennox on eugenics.

Between 1936 and 1960, two prominent American neurologists, Foster Kennedy of Cornell and William G. Lennox of Harvard, wrote and spoke in favor of eugenics. In the pursuit of eugenic ends, these accomplished clinicians urged upon their colleagues and the public to adopt a program of sterilization for the “feebleminded” and euthanasia for the “hopelessly unfit.” Foster Kennedy (1884–1952), whose name attaches to the syndrome he described in 1911 of ipsilateral optic atrophy, contralateral papilledema, and anosmia that may be caused by frontal lobe tumors, achieved substantial professional, social, and financial success. Chief of Cornell’s neurology service at Bellevue Hospital until his death, Kennedy was president of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases in 1938 and president of the American Neurologic Association (ANA) in 1940. In the index of the ANA’s centennial anniversary publication, his name appears more times than anyone else’s save Harvey Cushing’s. Given to a bit of flamboyance, Kennedy and his opinions were often noted in the New York Times ( NYT ), and he gave occasional radio talks on various subjects. William G. Lennox (1884–1960), whose name along with Gastaut’s denotes a syndrome of encephalopathy with atonic, tonic, and absence seizures, was born to a wealthy family. Lennox aspired from a young age to be a Methodist missionary, an ambition he fulfilled after he graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1913 and completed a residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1916. Four years later, when his younger daughter developed epilepsy, Lennox left his post in China, returned to Boston, and devoted the remaining 40 years of his life to the study of epilepsy. A productive researcher, this quiet, determined champion of those with epilepsy authored 4 books and more than 200 articles, garnering the Lasker Award, among other honors. A serious student of genetics, …

Reading the Reverend George Brown's Samoan Photographs

The Reverend George Brown (1835–1917), an Australian Methodist missionary, produced approximately nine hundred photographs of Pacific people and places between 1876 and 1903 during his residences in the islands. Of these, three hundred images were produced in Samoa. The importance of these photographs lies in their original purpose — to present an understanding of native people and a process of conversion to a European audience. Virginia-Lee Webb has recognized the personal character of Brown's Samoan photographs, the sense of esteem for the subject presented in the photographs.1 Alison Nordstrom has positioned the photographs in the wider context of colonial images of the Samoa.2 Richard Eves draws attention to the ambiguity of the images, the appeal to common humanity in the photographs alongside a claim to native difference from the ‘civilised’ European.3 Here the personal character of Brown's subjects will be understood as a consequence of his desire to represent a common humanity with the European in the image of the islander. In so far as they aim to describe a personality and impart an individuality and humanity to the subject the photographs can be classified as portraits. While they make claims to common humanity, the portraits are informed by the study of the races of humankind. The ethnographic character of Brown's portraiture will be understood as a direct influence of contemporary science. The portraits echo stereotypical imagery of the late nineteenth century where the common tropes of the exotic are invoked as Brown attempts to make sense of a subject that was new and often bewildering. The references to Pacific stereotypes and the ethnographic character of Brown's Samoan portraits coexist in constant contention with a humanistic message in the images. This paradoxical union of claims to racial difference with statements of common humanity is fundamental to the interpretation of George Brown's photography.

"White" Americans in "black" Africa: black and white American Methodist missionaries in Liberia, 1820-1875

"White" Americans in "black" Africa: black and white American Methodist missionaries in Liberia, 1820-1875

A 19th century climate chronology for the Kalahari region of central southern Africa derived from missionary correspondence

AbstractUnpublished materials written by missionaries based at London Missionary Society and Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society mission stations across the Kalahari region have been used as the primary source for the construction of a historical climatic chronology for central southern Africa for the period 1815–1900. Data from these unpublished documents were supplemented by analyses of published material written by various hunters and explorers (as well as missionaries) who travelled beyond the immediate areas of missionary activity. Key features of the climate chronology are the identification of six drought episodes and seven periods of above‐average rainfall which affected various parts of the region. Major dry periods occurred in 1820–27, 1831–35, 1844–51, 1857–65, 1877–86 and 1894–99, of which the droughts in 1844–51, 1857–65, 1884–86 and 1894–99 were the most widespread. Wetter periods are identified in 1816–17, 1829–30, 1851–52, 1863–64, 1874–75, 1889–91 and 1899–1900, with the most widely distributed wet conditions occurring in 1889–91. In order to ascertain the reliability of the chronology, the document‐derived climate sequence has been compared with available meteorological data for the study area (from Barkly West for the period 1883–1900) and shows good general agreement.The results of this study have been compared with historical climate chronologies for the former Cape Province of South Africa. This comparison reveals that large areas of the southern African subcontinent experienced dry conditions in 1826–27, 1832–35, 1848–1851, 1858–60, 1861–63, 1877–81, 1884–86 and 1894–99, with the dry phases of the early 1850s, 1858–60, 1861–63 and 1894–99 possibly extending beyond the northern border of present‐day Botswana. Wetter phases affected much of the subcontinent in 1829–30, 1851–52, 1863–64, 1874–75, 1889–91 and 1899–1900, with 1874–75 and 1889–91 associated with reports of flooding from central Botswana to the eastern Cape. The causal mechanisms of patterns of climatic variability are unclear, but 19th century drought periods in the Kalahari show a close coincidence with the timing of moderate to strong El Niño–southern oscillation events Copyright © 2002 Royal Meteorological Society

Sacred Soil in Kadavu, Fiji

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I consider historical and ethnographic evidence to explain how ‘sacred soil’ becomes an intelligible and palpable reality in Kadavu, Fiji. I begin by describing the fundamental Fijian cultural division between lotu (Methodism, or Christianity more broadly) and vanua (people and land), and argue that these entities are fruitfully considered as Bourdieuan fields whose competition is culturally generative. Examining historians' well‐known work on precolonial land alienation and colonial land tenure codification in Fiji, I note that Methodist missionaries helped add to indigenous Fijians' senses that their land was diminishing or even disappearing. In addition, I examine data from recent fieldwork in Kadavu, particularly discourse about soil's and land's importance and descriptions of a Methodist ritual called the masu sema (‘chain prayer’) in which soil's investiture with mana (efficaciousness) is particularly apparent. Having shown how ‘sacred soil’ becomes both an intelligible and palpable reality, I then argue that we should consider the creative force of friction between lotu and vanua in indigenous Fijian social life generally.

The Legacy of William Shellabear

William Shellabear (1862-1948) was one of the pioneer Kealy. The Kealy family had close ties withBrethren, Baptist, and Methodist missionaries to British Malaya, yet he is Wesleyan churches and introduced Shellabear to St. Matthew's betterknownamongMalayMuslims thanamongChristians. His Anglican Church, then served by a former Church Missionary editions of classical Malay literature are still in print, and his Society missionary to India. Shellabear quickly found himself studies of the Malay language and orthography are still in use by exposed to a Christian society in which evangelistic and mission­ linguists. His Christian works in Malay did not find a place in a ary commitments were more important than maintaining sectar­ church, which came to be dominated by ethnic Chinese and ian differences. After a three-month period spent working in Indians who spoke English or their own vernacular languages. isolation on the Isle of Wight, during which he reflected on his Nonetheless, Shellabear left a Christian legacy in Malaya. spiritual state, and with the urging of Fanny Kealy, the sixteen­ From 1891 to 1948 he introduced and guided changes in attitudes year-old daughter of John Kealy, Shellabear made a definite toward Malays and Islam, which made it possible for Methodist commitment to Christ. A short time later he beganto court Fanny missionaries to relate positively to Malays while maintaining the and under her influence gave up smoking and drinking. By the integrity of their evangelistic outreach. These changes involved time he received orders to ship out to Singapore in 1886, he and first a reevaluation of Malay culture, and then of Malay religion Fanny were engaged to be married, and he had become an and spirituality. In an era in which Christian-Muslim relations enthusiastic witness to Christianity among the other soldiers. and Malay religious aspirations were dominant themes of an all­ In Singapore Shellabear began to learn the Malay language too-strident Christian discussion, the legacy of a missionary who in order to lead a group of Malay soldiers, and it became his most could retain both his integrity as an evangelist and the respect of important pastime. Dissatisfied with the missionary commit­ those whom he sought to convert is worthy of study. ment of the Anglican church in Singapore, he became part of the

The Challenge of Race Relations: American Ecumenism and Foreign Student Nationalism, 1900–1940

American missionary movements in the nineteenth century contributed to the increasing numbers of foreign students in the United States. Many of those foreign students came from non-western societies where American missionaries were active. The missionaries encouraged and helped young natives of other lands to come to the United States for Christian education with the belief that American education was a vital process for training indigenous leaders for Christianity. Missionaries of different denominations tended to recommend students to the educational institutions they were affiliated with. For instance, Methodist missionaries directed the students to educational institutions of the Methodist Church; the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Catholics, and other denominations did likewise.William Wheeler, Henry King, and Alexander Davidson, eds., The Foreign Student in America (New York: Association Press, 1925), 270. They hoped that the students, upon completion of their studies, would go back to their homelands to assume leadership in spreading Christianity.