Susan Neylan. The
Dust Heavens are Changing: Nineteenth Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian
Christianity.
A Review:
This book gives a complex and often technical look at
Christianity during the nineteenth century in what is now British
Columbia, as Euro-Canadian missionaries brought their
religion to the native Tsimshian people. Susan Neylan analyzes the role of
evangelical sects as well as the policies of the Canadian government, which
created a context for Tsimshian conversion. But she stresses the important role
played by the First Nation peoples themselves, and the agency those peoples
employed as they accepted and actually altered the Christianity that spread
throughout the region.
The
Tsimshian had cultural beliefs that closely paralleled Christianity in
surprising ways, Neylan argues, especially in relation to the Evangelical-style
Protestantism brought to British Columbia
by the Methodists, Anglicans and the Salvation Army. Native traditions among
the Tsimshian people stressed the supernatural ability of Light, the growth of
personal spirituality through communion with the supernatural, and the
necessity of direct religious experience. Thus, Christianity offered native
people a recognizable cosmology in which they could take part. In may ways,
natives of British Columbia
co-opted what they liked about Christianity, and internalized it.
This book examines and rejects the
“common wisdom” that suggests Christianity was simply forced upon native
populations. Neylan finds that many Tsimshian genuinely accepted Christianity,
despite the power inequalities that might suggest they were forced into such an
acceptance. Her book is a scholarly examination of the impact of colonization,
and she notes that hegemony in such situations is never complete nor static,
but rather a changing, negotiated “dialogic” relationship. Tsimshian people
shaped their own version of Christianity as it suited the context of their
lives.
Neylan
concludes her book by looking at the effects of Canadian legislation such as
the Indian Act, which prevented traditional feasts and certain exchanges that
were integral to Northwest cultures. These attacks by the Canadian government
on native sovereignty eroded native culture, but she points out that native
culture survived, though in a changed form.
Neylan, throughout the book, presents Native
perspectives objectively, and, for the most part, her approach succeeds.
However, in her attempt to maintain a scholarly distance it seems at times that
she separates herself to fully, and her prose tends to become dry and tedious.
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