Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad

Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad. Edited by Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. viii + 327 pp. $65.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Lately, Canadians have become ashamed of their missionary past. High profile court cases involving abuse by missionaries in institutions and in Aboriginal communities, the public reaction to an exhibit on Canadian missionary work in Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum in the early 1990s, tendeo to give Canadians the sense that they knew all there was to know about Christian missionaries in Canada's past, and what they knew was that they were bad. Fortunately scholars, like those whose work is included in Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous People: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad, have begun to bring this past out of the dark corners of Canadian consciousness and to subject it to more probing and nuanced analysis.

This collection of essays shows that the history of Canadian missions is both more complex and more significant internationally than many recognized. The book is divided into three sections dealing with home missions, the foreign field, and material histories of mission work. Certain themes dominate, including the imbrication of Christian missions with imperialism, the tensions surrounding indigenizing Christianity, and the prominence of Canadian missionaries on the world stage. This latter point, along with the quality of the scholarship presented herein, and the importance of its subject matter, recommend...