Content area
Full Text
The fields of Native American religious traditions and American religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture.' Although there has been a long standing scholarly interest on writing about missions to Native Americans from a variety of viewpoints, recent years have seen the publication of a number of fresh considerations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christianity-or better, native Christianities. Native communities have long woven the stories, signs, and practices of the Christian tradition into the fabric of their lifeways, in rich and resourceful ways, even under the direst of colonizing circumstances. But only recently has scholarship begun to take this fuller texture into account: most recently, Native and Christian (1996), edited by James Treat; Native American Religious Identity (1998), edited by Jace Weaver; Sergei Kan's Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries; Clara Sue Kidwell's Choctaws and Missionaries; and Christopher Vecsey's multivolume study of the varieties of native Catholicism, of which volume two, The Paths of Kateri's Kin (1998), is of most interest here.2 This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native scholars entering the field and more publications that anthologize a range of native Christian viewpoints into single volumes. It has also to do with more sustained accountability among nonnative scholars to native communities and the way that consultants in those communities imagine their religious lives.
What unites the new scholarship and makes it so refreshing is how each study shifts the focus away from missionaries and their intentions to what native peoples made of the Christian tradition, in turn equipping us to appreciate the complexity and variety of ways of being both native and Christian. Perhaps the clearest message we get from this new literature is a chastening of any impulse to generalize or theorize about native Christianity, except to say that being both native and Christian, in whatever manner, poses a problem that lies consistently at the core of native Christian reflection and practice. In this respect, the form of the new work follows its content. Shying away from a master narrative about the unitary sweep of Catholicism in Indian country, Vecsey pieces together a patchwork of particular stories, vignettes about native Catholics. Weaver and Treat compile collections of essays by different native...