Neylan, Susan
2003 The Heavens are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.Reviewed 30 Jun 2003 by:
Raymond A. Bucko <bucko@creighton.edu>
Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, USAMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Protestant churches - Missions - British Columbia - Pacific Coast - History - 19th century
Tsimshian Indians - Missions - History - 19th century
Tsimshian Indians - Religion - History - 19th century
ABSTRACT: This work examines religious conversion and adaptation among the peoples of the Canadian Northwest Coast in light of the continuity of Christianity with their traditional religious practices. The text focuses particularly on the role of Native preachers and Native catechists in mediating religious and cultural transformation and continuity.
The Heavens Are Changing provides a complex and highly nuanced analysis of Christianity in what is now called British Columbia during the Victorian era (1857-1901). Author Susan Neylan, assistant professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, acknowledges the role of outside missionaries in the conversion process as well as the role of Canadian government policies but stresses the importance of Native agency in the acceptance and spread of the new religion.The Tsimshian (Coast and South Canyon), Gitxsan, and NisgaÆa were not totally unfamiliar with Christianity due to Native prophetic preachers who preceded the missionaries. Native religious practices had strong parallels in the spirituality of Evangelical Protestantism, as professed and practiced by the Methodist, Salvation Army, Anglican, and Free Church traditions. Thus the ideas and beliefs brought by the missionaries were not entirely culturally unique or unfamiliar to these people. Like their Christian interlocutors, Native religious systems stressed supernatural spiritual transformation, direct religious experience, finding the light, and the interrelationships among religion, politics and social status.
Neylan faces the thorny issue of religious conversion head on. She rejects the notion that Christianity was simply forced on Native populations, nor does she assume Natives simply feigned conversion. Her own careful research acknowledges a genuine and sincere acceptance of Christianity by these peoples without omitting the effects of the social, political and economic inequalities between Natives and Non-Natives. As the author astutely observes and verifies in her own work, colonial hegemony is never total. Native peoples were not and are not passive victims to outside forces. They shaped their own history and, as the author meticulously demonstrates, created an indigenous version of Christianity in dialogue with the evangelical traditions introduced to the area, sometimes within these traditions and sometimes apart from them.
The most important part of the authorÆs work is her careful reproduction, contextualization, and analysis of testimony by indigenous missionaries--Natives who, on their own or under Mission sponsorship preached, and wrote about their conversions and dedication to their faith. The author examines how First Nation people such as Paul Ligeex, Arthur Wellington Clah, Philip McKay, and David Sallosalton understood their own conversions and interpreted the new religious and material culture of the Whites. Neylon also discusses issues raised by other scholars of this era and issue of conversion itself, stressing her main thesis that Natives themselves accepted, promoted and shaped Christianity. She does not treat Christianity as epiphenomenal but as central to many Native peopleÆs identities and, in many ways, continuous with their previous religious identities.
Outside European missionaries stressed conversion as a total transformation, religious and cultural, and a radical break from the past. Native writers also employed these metaphors, but Neylon shows that Native people transformed Christianity as well, and retained much of their own traditional culture. The Natives adopted Victorian style single-family dwellings, but matrilineal clans continued as the main source of social and political organization and Natives cited Christian principles to defend their rights to land and to sovereignty.
Neylon concludes the work by briefly examining the effects of later legislation such as the Indian Act, the anti-potlatching laws that prevented public feasts and exchanges of wealth so vital to the continuity of Northwest cultures, and the loss of lands. These attacks by the Canadian government on Native culture and sovereignty eroded Native culture, but the author points out that Native society survived and continues to survive and creatively deal with the outside world.
The Heavens Are Changing is itself intellectually transformative. It banishes the mythology of the Native as victim, without denying the reality of victimization, by demonstrating Native efficacy in balancing conversion with continuity of Native culture. The author writes in a clear lively style, includes fascinating photographs, carefully cites all references, and provides a very useful bibliography. She also strives throughout the work to carefully and respectfully present both Native perspectives and the ideas of other scholars along with her own thoughtful analyses. This work is an admirable model of balanced and insightful research on the politically and academically charged area of religions conversion, and would satisfy any scholar or layperson interested in history, anthropology, missiology, religion, cultural and religious transformation, and sociology.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Bucko, Raymond A.
2003 Review of The Heavens are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. Anthropology Review Database. June 30. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=2176, accessed February 9, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)