Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange

Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange. Edited by Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May. First Nations and the Colonial Encounter series, ed. David Cahill. (Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2010, Pp. xi, 207. $79.95.)

This volume's two introductions and twelve case studies present a variegated blend of approaches that bear on central problems related to mission history. Considering the aims of its parent series on encounters between indigenous and colonizing cultures, this blend is apropos though disparate and scattered. Moments of contact were themselves impromptu and sudden, and the format here lends well to the syncopated intrusions of colonizers on the status quo of indigenous societies. Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange positions itself as a deconstructive piece in the debate over how to compose a history related to colonialism. It gives a dual response: one, to earlier narratives that projected a triumphalist or Whiggish interpretation of Christian mission and the other to more recent critiques of mission that have highlighted missionaries' complicity in advancing colonies and empire. The editors seek to call attention to the complexities of the interplays between missionaries and missionized....