Christianity, Westward Expansion, and Indigenous Peoples
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Christianity, Westward Expansion, and Indigenous Peoples
Christianity played a complicated and often consequential role in the expansion of European and later United States control across Indigenous homelands. From the Spanish mission systems of the Southwest and California to Protestant missions in the Pacific Northwest, Great Plains, and Indian Territory, Christian institutions frequently accompanied territorial expansion, settlement, and government efforts to transform Indigenous societies.
Missionaries often understood their work primarily as religious evangelization. They sought converts, translated religious texts, established churches and schools, introduced European agricultural practices, and attempted to reshape family life, clothing, education, labor, and worship. Yet missionary activity took place within broader systems of colonization and territorial expansion. Missions could become outposts of settlement, sources of geographic information, centers of agricultural production, and institutions that helped extend colonial or federal authority into Native homelands.
The historical record also shows considerable variation. Missionaries belonged to different denominations, operated under different governments, and disagreed among themselves about federal policies and treatment of Native peoples. Indigenous responses were equally diverse. Native communities resisted conversion, selectively adopted Christian teachings, blended them with existing spiritual traditions, formed Native-led congregations, became ministers and catechists, or used Christian institutions for their own social and political purposes.
Missions and the Expansion of Colonial Power
Christian missionary activity in what became the United States began long before nineteenth-century American westward expansion. Spanish Catholic missions throughout present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas combined evangelization with imperial expansion.
Spanish authorities viewed missions as both religious and colonial institutions. Missionaries attempted to convert Indigenous communities to Catholicism, while mission settlements also supported Spanish territorial claims. Missions introduced European crops and livestock, organized Indigenous labor, taught Spanish cultural practices, and contributed to the establishment of permanent colonial settlements.
The consequences for Indigenous communities could be profound. Native peoples experienced disease, population disruption, forced labor, restrictions on traditional religious practices, changes in settlement patterns, and pressure to abandon Indigenous languages and cultural traditions. At the same time, Native peoples did not simply accept these programs. Resistance ranged from maintaining ceremonies in private to leaving missions, refusing missionary authority, and participating in armed uprisings.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 became one of the most significant examples of Indigenous resistance to Spanish colonial and religious control. Pueblo communities rebelled against Spanish political authority, labor demands, and suppression of Indigenous religion. Similar conflicts occurred elsewhere in the Spanish borderlands.
California Missions and Indigenous Communities
California's mission system became one of the most prominent examples of the connection between Christian evangelization and colonial expansion. Franciscan missions attempted to convert Native Californians while consolidating Spanish authority along the Pacific coast.
Mission residents were taught Catholic doctrine and European agricultural practices and were often expected to adopt new patterns of work, residence, dress, marriage, and social organization. Native labor supported mission agriculture, livestock production, building construction, and other economic activities.
Modern scholarship and Indigenous historical interpretation have emphasized that Native Californians retained significant cultural agency. Archaeological evidence and Native testimony show the continuation of traditional food practices, basketry, songs, dances, family relationships, spiritual beliefs, and connections to ancestral homelands.
Resistance also occurred. The 1775 Kumeyaay attack on Mission San Diego, the 1785 movement associated with Toypurina at Mission San Gabriel, and later revolts involving mission Indians demonstrate that conversion and colonial authority were repeatedly contested.
Indigenous people sometimes publicly participated in Catholic mission life while privately preserving older traditions. Native religious and artistic ideas could also become incorporated into mission environments, creating complicated forms of cultural continuity and religious adaptation.
Protestant Missions and the Pacific Northwest
During the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries became important participants in American expansion into Oregon Country and the Pacific Northwest. Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and other missionaries established missions among Indigenous peoples decades before large-scale American settlement transformed the region.
Jason Lee's Methodist mission in Oregon illustrates the changing relationship between evangelization and settlement. Initially focused on missionary work among Native peoples, Lee increasingly supported American migration and political control of Oregon.
Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding similarly established missions among the Cayuse and Nez Perce. Their programs included preaching, schools, farming, literacy, translation, and efforts to alter Indigenous cultural practices.
The arrival of growing numbers of American migrants profoundly changed these relationships. Missions sometimes became stopping places for settlers traveling west, while missionary correspondence and reports helped portray Oregon as an attractive destination for American migration.
Tensions grew as settlers entered Indigenous territories and disease devastated Native populations. At Waiilatpu in 1847, several members of the Whitman mission were killed by Cayuse men following a severe measles epidemic and years of increasing tension. The event subsequently became part of American political and religious narratives supporting greater U.S. control in the Pacific Northwest.
Modern interpretations place the conflict within a broader context of disease, migration, cultural misunderstanding, competition over land, missionary expectations, and Indigenous resistance to growing settler expansion.
Christianity, Indian Removal, and Indian Territory
Christian missions also became intertwined with the forced relocation of Indigenous nations from the eastern United States.
Missionaries worked among Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, Chickasaw, and other Native nations before the removal era. Some missionaries promoted cultural assimilation through Christianity and formal education, while others opposed specific state and federal actions against Native communities.
The dispute surrounding Samuel Worcester illustrates these tensions. Worcester and other missionaries challenged Georgia laws restricting their activities in Cherokee territory. The resulting Worcester v. Georgia decision became a major legal episode in the conflict over Cherokee sovereignty.
Following forced removal, missionaries often moved west alongside Native communities or reestablished churches and schools in Indian Territory. Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Moravian, and other denominations created extensive networks of missions and educational institutions in what became Oklahoma.
Native Christians were central to these developments. Indigenous ministers, translators, teachers, and congregations helped create Christian traditions that were increasingly shaped by Native languages and communities rather than exclusively by outside missionaries.
Choctaw-language hymns and Native-led Methodist congregations illustrate how Indigenous peoples could adopt Christianity without simply reproducing European or American religious culture.
Manifest Destiny and Religious Ideas
During the nineteenth century, some Americans interpreted territorial expansion through religious ideas about providence, national destiny, and civilization.
Manifest Destiny was primarily a political and cultural concept supporting continental expansion, but Christian language sometimes reinforced it. Some ministers, missionaries, writers, and political advocates described American territorial growth as part of a providential mission.
Such ideas could portray American settlement, Protestant Christianity, agriculture, private property, and Euro-American social institutions as signs of progress. Indigenous cultures and religions were consequently sometimes characterized as obstacles to be transformed or displaced.
Religious justifications for expansion were never universal among Christians. Christian individuals and denominations disagreed over Indian Removal, warfare, treaty violations, slavery, federal Indian policy, and the treatment of Native peoples.
Nevertheless, the overlap between missionary activity and territorial expansion meant that Christianity became deeply entangled with the political and economic transformation of Indigenous homelands.
Grant's Peace Policy and Christian Administration of Reservations
The relationship between Christianity and federal Indian policy became especially direct during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant's Peace Policy attempted to reduce corruption and conflict in federal Indian administration partly by assigning reservation agencies to Christian denominations and religious organizations. Quakers, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other groups became involved in administering agencies, schools, and missions.
Supporters hoped Christian organizations would create more humane administration and replace warfare with education, farming, and religious instruction.
The policy nevertheless remained closely connected to assimilation. Federal officials and missionaries often expected Indigenous peoples to abandon traditional religious practices, adopt Christianity, become farmers, learn English, and conform to Euro-American social expectations.
Christian administration of reservations therefore combined humanitarian aspirations with policies designed to transform Indigenous societies.
Education, Mission Schools, and Boarding Schools
Education became one of the most powerful instruments of Christian missionary and federal assimilation programs.
Mission schools existed throughout the nineteenth century, but the development of the federal Indian boarding-school system greatly expanded efforts to separate Native children from their families and cultures.
Government agencies cooperated with Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Quaker, and other religious institutions in operating schools. Children could be sent far from their communities and required to speak English, wear Euro-American clothing, adopt new names, participate in Christian worship, and learn occupations favored by federal authorities.
Traditional Native languages, ceremonies, clothing, spirituality, and family relationships were often discouraged or prohibited.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School became one of the best-known examples of the system. Its educational philosophy sought extensive cultural assimilation rather than simply academic instruction.
Modern federal investigations and Indigenous-led research have documented the widespread involvement of both governmental and religious institutions in the boarding-school system. Native organizations continue to investigate school records, deaths, missing children, burial sites, and the multigenerational consequences of forced assimilation.
Indigenous Resistance and Religious Survival
Indigenous peoples repeatedly resisted efforts to replace their religions and cultures.
Resistance took many forms. Communities sometimes rejected missionaries outright, abandoned mission settlements, continued ceremonies secretly, challenged colonial authorities, maintained Native languages, or incorporated selected Christian practices into older religious traditions.
Religious adaptation could also produce new traditions. The Native American Church, for example, developed as an Indigenous religious movement incorporating elements that could coexist with selected Christian concepts while maintaining a distinctly Native spiritual framework.
In other communities, Catholicism or Protestant Christianity became deeply rooted while Indigenous languages, ceremonies, and community identities continued alongside Christian worship.
The history therefore cannot be understood simply as a process in which missionaries converted Indigenous peoples and Native religions disappeared. Conversion was often partial, negotiated, contested, or transformed through Indigenous interpretation.
Native Christian Leadership
Native people increasingly became ministers, teachers, translators, catechists, and church leaders.
Enmegahbowh, an Ojibwe Episcopal priest, became an important nineteenth-century Indigenous Christian leader during a period of warfare, treaty conflict, displacement, and expanding American settlement in Minnesota.
Black Elk provides another complex example. The Lakota spiritual leader later became Catholic and worked as a catechist while remaining closely associated with Lakota spiritual traditions.
Among the Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, Nez Perce, Dakota, Lakota, Ojibwe, and many other peoples, Native Christians gradually created congregations in which Indigenous languages and leadership became increasingly important.
These developments complicate interpretations that treat Christianity exclusively as an outside institution imposed upon Native peoples. Although missionary Christianity was frequently connected with colonization and assimilation, Native Christians also reshaped churches from within.
Mormon Settlement and Indigenous Peoples
The westward migration of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints created another distinctive relationship between Christianity and Indigenous peoples.
Early Latter-day Saint theology assigned particular religious significance to Indigenous peoples, whom church members often associated with peoples described in the Book of Mormon. Early missionaries therefore sought relationships with Native communities as part of the church's religious mission.
After Latter-day Saints migrated to the Great Basin, however, large-scale settlement placed Mormon communities in direct competition with Indigenous peoples for land, water, food, and other resources.
Church histories acknowledge that settlement displaced Native communities despite early hopes for peaceful coexistence. Missionary activity, trade, warfare, negotiation, and settlement consequently became intertwined as Latter-day Saint communities expanded throughout the Intermountain West.
Indigenous Agency and the Limits of Assimilation
A major theme of modern historical scholarship is Indigenous agency.
Older historical narratives often portrayed Native peoples primarily as passive recipients of missionary activity. More recent research emphasizes that Indigenous communities made their own decisions about missionaries and Christianity.
Some communities invited missionaries for strategic reasons, including access to literacy, trade, diplomacy, schooling, or political alliances. Others rejected missionary teachings or accepted only selected elements.
Native converts could reinterpret Christianity through Indigenous languages and cultural concepts. Native ministers and congregations could also challenge outside missionary authority.
Even institutions designed for assimilation did not completely erase Indigenous identity. Native communities preserved languages, ceremonies, kinship networks, ecological knowledge, artistic traditions, and spiritual practices despite intense pressure.
Christianity and Settler Colonialism
The historical relationship between Christianity and American expansion is increasingly studied within the broader framework of settler colonialism.
Settler colonial expansion involved more than migration into new territory. It frequently required transferring Indigenous land to settlers, restricting Native sovereignty, reorganizing economies, suppressing resistance, and attempting to transform Indigenous societies.
Christian institutions sometimes participated in these processes by promoting settlement, operating schools, administering reservations, or defining Indigenous religions and social customs as practices that needed replacement.
At the same time, Christianity cannot be treated as a single institution with one historical role. Missionaries sometimes criticized violence, defended Native treaty rights, opposed removal, learned Native languages, documented Indigenous cultures, or remained with Native communities during periods of displacement.
The same denomination could contain both assimilationists and advocates for Native rights.
Understanding this history therefore requires examining particular missions, communities, denominations, government policies, and Indigenous responses rather than assuming that all missionary relationships were identical.
Continuing Legacies
The interaction between Christianity and Indigenous peoples remains a living issue rather than merely a nineteenth-century subject.
Tribal governments, churches, historians, museums, federal agencies, and Native organizations continue to investigate boarding schools, missionary archives, land transfers, treaty violations, religious suppression, and the recovery of Indigenous cultural traditions.
Some Christian denominations have examined their historical participation in boarding schools and assimilation programs. Indigenous communities continue efforts to recover languages, ceremonies, traditional knowledge, family histories, and records concerning children removed to mission and boarding schools.
At the same time, Christianity remains an important part of religious life in many Native communities. Native churches, Indigenous clergy, Catholic communities, Protestant congregations, and Christian traditions shaped by Native languages and cultures demonstrate that the modern relationship between Christianity and Indigenous identity cannot be reduced solely to the history of missionary colonization.
Conclusion
Christianity and westward expansion became deeply interconnected during several centuries of colonial and United States expansion across Indigenous lands. Catholic missions accompanied Spanish colonization in the Southwest and California, Protestant missionaries established institutions across the Pacific Northwest and Great Plains, and Christian denominations became involved in Indian Territory, reservation administration, and federal education programs.
Missionary activity sometimes encouraged settlement and helped extend colonial or federal influence into Native homelands. Christian institutions also participated in assimilation programs that attempted to replace Indigenous languages, religions, education, family structures, and cultural practices.
Yet this history was never a simple encounter between missionaries and passive Native populations. Indigenous peoples resisted missionary authority, defended their religions, selectively adopted Christian teachings, blended religious traditions, established Native-led churches, translated Christian texts into Indigenous languages, and transformed Christianity according to their own communities and experiences.
The relationship between Christianity, westward expansion, and Indigenous peoples is therefore best understood as a history of evangelization, colonization, conflict, adaptation, resistance, cultural persistence, and religious transformation. Examining these overlapping experiences provides a fuller understanding both of American expansion and of the continuing diversity and resilience of Indigenous religious life.
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General Overviews: Christianity, Manifest Destiny, and Westward Expansion
Reviews recent scholarship examining the religious dimensions of Manifest Destiny, settler colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and Christian interpretations of American territorial expansion.
Reviews Richard Twiss's Indigenous Christian theology and discusses the historical relationship among Christian missions, the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, boarding schools, and Native cultural suppression.
Examines Catholic and Protestant missionary activity in the American West and describes how missions promoted Christian conversion while also encouraging settlement, agriculture, and American expansion.
Primary-source religious defense of Manifest Destiny illustrating how some late nineteenth-century Christians interpreted territorial expansion and American power through a theological and providential framework.
Provides a broad overview of U.S. westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, territorial acquisition, migration, and the resulting encounters between expanding American settlement and Indigenous nations.
Examines the consequences of the Lewis and Clark Expedition for Indigenous peoples as maps, commercial information, migration, resource extraction, and later settlement accelerated American expansion into Native homelands.
Discusses Civil War-era western expansion, federal settlement policies, military campaigns, railroads, and the growing displacement and marginalization of Indigenous peoples in western territories.
Surveys ways Christian missionaries shaped western expansion through missions, schools, farms, written reports, migration networks, and efforts to convert and culturally transform Indigenous communities.
Pacific Northwest: Oregon, Columbia Plateau, Cayuse, and Nez Perce
Interprets the Whitman Mission as a turning point involving missionary Christianity, disease, American immigration, conflict, reservation policy, and the colonization of Columbia Plateau peoples.
Reconsiders the Spalding-Allen Collection from a Nez Perce perspective and describes missionary efforts to discourage traditional clothing and cultural practices as incompatible with Christianity.
Discusses conflicts between Cayuse spirituality, land management, missionary Christianity, agriculture, Manifest Destiny, and historical narratives that later portrayed the Whitmans primarily as martyrs.
Reexamines the Whitman tragedy using archival evidence and connects missionary conflict, measles, cultural misunderstanding, Calvinist Christianity, Indigenous fears, and Manifest Destiny.
Provides an accessible account of the Whitmans' efforts to convert and culturally transform the Cayuse and their eventual shift toward supporting white migrants arriving in Oregon.
Examines Marcus Whitman's missionary career, deteriorating relations with the Cayuse, increasing settler migration, disease, the 1847 killings, and their political importance in establishing U.S. authority in Oregon.
Analyzes the Whitman killings within the contexts of religion, disease, immigration, Protestant-Catholic rivalry, Indigenous resistance, and Manifest Destiny on the Columbia Plateau.
Describes the 1840 migration of Methodist missionaries to Oregon and shows how missionary expansion increasingly overlapped with American migration, settlement, and political interest in the Pacific Northwest.
Profiles Methodist missionary Jason Lee, whose original goal of converting Native peoples increasingly shifted toward encouraging American settlement and annexation of Oregon.
Examines the Methodist Wascopam Mission at The Dalles, Native conversion, religious syncretism, and the interaction between missionary Christianity and Columbia River Indigenous communities.
Profiles Catholic missionary Modeste Demers and his extensive efforts to evangelize Indigenous peoples across Oregon Country and the broader Pacific Northwest.
Examines Marcus Whitman's missionary work among the Cayuse, conflicts over religion and land, his support for American migration, and the connection between missionary activity and Oregon settlement.
Profiles Narcissa Whitman's religious motivations, missionary work among the Cayuse, cultural misunderstandings, attitudes toward Native lifeways, and experiences during growing American migration to Oregon.
Uses Jason Lee's diary to trace Methodist missionary ambitions, attitudes toward Indigenous peoples, and Lee's growing belief that white settlement could strengthen Protestant influence in Oregon.
Explains how missionary reports encouraged migration to Oregon by portraying the region as fertile and promising, linking evangelization with the beginnings of large-scale American settlement.
Explains the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the story that inspired Protestant missions to Oregon, and missionary expectations about converting western Indigenous nations.
Describes Whitman's work among the Cayuse, his promotion of American immigration, cultural conflict at Waiilatpu, and the consequences of expanding settlement for Columbia Plateau peoples.
Surveys Protestant and Catholic missionary activity among the Nez Perce and the varied ways Nimiipuu people accepted, rejected, or adapted Christian teachings.
Examines Henry and Eliza Spalding's mission among the Nez Perce, including preaching, schooling, agriculture, translation, and efforts to reshape Native cultural practices.
Profiles missionary Asa Smith and his difficult experiences among the Nez Perce while also documenting his important linguistic work on the Nimiipuu language.
Presents Indigenous perspectives on the Walla Walla Valley and explains how missionary settlement, unfulfilled agreements, treaties, immigration, and warfare transformed Native control of the region.
Summarizes the rapid growth of Oregon Trail migration through Cayuse territory and the transformation of Whitman's mission from a conversion project into a way station supporting settlers.
Provides a Nimiipuu-centered history emphasizing traditional governance, homeland, treaties, sovereignty, and the long-term effects of American expansion into Nez Perce territory.
Presents a tribal account of the missionary era, including fur-trade Christianity, Whitman and Spalding, Catholic missionaries, and changing relations between Indigenous peoples and newcomers.
Uses nineteenth-century observations of Oregon to examine missionaries as early American institutions in the region and their changing relationship to Indigenous conversion and settler expansion.
Cherokee Missions, Indian Removal, and the Trail of Tears
Describes Brainerd Mission, its schools and churches among the Cherokee, missionary opposition to aspects of removal, and the mission's closure during the forced Cherokee migration west.
Surveys Moravian, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other missions among Georgia's Native peoples and examines how missionaries became entangled in disputes over Cherokee removal.
Summarizes Moravian work among the Cherokee, including missionaries who traveled west during removal and established churches and mission stations in what became Oklahoma.
Examines Brainerd Mission's educational and Christian activities among the Cherokee and the changing relationship between missionaries, Cherokee leaders, Georgia authorities, and Indian Removal.
Historical study of early Christian missionary efforts among the Overhill Cherokee and the changing relationship between Native communities and colonial religious institutions.
Explains Indian Removal and the forced movement of Native nations west of the Mississippi, providing essential context for missionary work that followed displaced communities into Indian Territory.
Explains how missionaries Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler challenged Georgia laws targeting missionaries in Cherokee territory, culminating in the landmark Worcester v. Georgia decision.
Describes divisions within Cherokee society over Christian churches, mission schools, cultural adaptation, land retention, and the growing pressures that eventually produced forced removal.
Provides historical context for the forced Cherokee migration to Indian Territory and the federal policies that displaced communities in which Christian missions had operated.
Describes Cherokee removal through Arkansas and the role of missionaries such as Daniel Butrick, who traveled west with Cherokee communities and continued mission work in Indian Territory.
Summarizes the Indian Removal Act and forced migration of Cherokee and other Native nations to western territory, providing context for the transplantation of eastern Christian missions westward.
Provides an overview of the approximately 2,200-mile Trail of Tears and the forced relocation of more than 16,000 Cherokee people to Indian Territory.
Traces Moravian missionaries who accompanied Cherokee Christians west during forced removal and established new mission communities in Indian Territory after the Trail of Tears.
Indian Territory, Oklahoma, and Kansas Missions
Choctaw-authored history of Wheelock Church, missionaries Alfred Wright and Cyrus Kingsbury, removal to Indian Territory, mission schooling, and the growth of Choctaw Christian communities.
Examines Methodist missions in the Choctaw Nation and emphasizes the central role of Native translators, ministers, camp meetings, and Choctaw-led Christian congregations.
Explores how Choctaw Christians and missionaries translated Christian concepts, composed Choctaw-language hymns, and created forms of Christian worship rooted in the Choctaw language.
Explains the American Board's missions among Cherokee, Choctaw, Osage, and other peoples and how missionary institutions expanded into Indian Territory following federal removal.
Surveys Christianity among Native peoples in Oklahoma, including mission stations, Native ministers, schools, post-removal churches, and Grant's church-administered Peace Policy.
Describes St. Patrick's Mission at the Anadarko Agency and Catholic missionary efforts among Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Osage, Potawatomi, and other Native communities in Indian Territory.
Surveys Native education in Indian Territory, including tribally controlled schools, Christian mission schools, boarding institutions, federal assimilation policies, and disputes over language and cultural instruction.
Examines education among the Mvskoke after forced removal, including resistance to Christian missionaries and the later establishment of Presbyterian, Methodist, and other mission schools.
Traces Methodist missions among Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and other Native communities and the development of an Indian Mission Conference in Indian Territory.
Surveys Oklahoma religious history and describes missionaries who accompanied displaced Native nations west, established schools and churches, translated religious texts, and trained Indigenous ministers.
Examines Chickasaw partnerships with Protestant denominations in operating boarding schools that combined academic instruction with Christianity, domestic training, English-language education, and cultural assimilation.
Describes Choctaw education before and after removal and the role Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Christian missions played in establishing schools in Indian Territory.
Traces Presbyterian missions among removed Native nations, including missionaries who accompanied Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole communities westward.
Surveys Catholic missionary expansion into Indian Territory and the establishment of missions and schools among Osage, Potawatomi, Quapaw, Choctaw, Kiowa, Comanche, and other peoples.
Examines Baptist missions among Native nations in Indian Territory, including Native preachers, Plains missionary work, Bacone College, and missions among Wichita and Kiowa communities.
Describes Union Mission, an early Protestant mission to the Osage that became one of the first permanent Euro-American institutions in what became Oklahoma.
Profiles Methodist missionary John Jasper Methvin and his work among Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache communities during the late nineteenth-century expansion of reservation missions.
Profiles Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy, whose religious work was closely connected with plans to establish a western Indian Territory for Native nations removed from eastern states.
Profiles Muscogee minister John McIntosh, a Native Christian missionary who preached among Wichita and other Plains peoples during the reservation era.
Examines the Mennonite Post Oak Mission among the Comanche and its relationship with Native communities, federal Indian programs, education, domestic training, and Quanah Parker.
Studies everyday life in Choctaw missions and analyzes how Christian education, English-language instruction, gender roles, Native leadership, and cultural adaptation interacted in Indian Territory.
Traces Christianity and mission schools among the Choctaw from the early nineteenth century through removal and the rebuilding of religious institutions in Oklahoma.
Historical study of Presbyterian missions among Osage, Wea, Piankeshaw, and other Native peoples in Kansas and adjoining sections of Indian Territory.
Examines Presbyterian churches among Choctaw and Chickasaw communities, including mission stations, Native religious leaders, schools, preaching circuits, and Indigenous participation in Christian congregations.
Examines Mission Neosho, one of the earliest Protestant missions in Kansas, and its unsuccessful attempts to convert and culturally transform nearby Indigenous communities.
Primary missionary account documenting Presbyterian plans to establish churches and schools among the Muscogee Creek people after their removal to Indian Territory.
Describes a major collection of Presbyterian missionary correspondence documenting work among Cherokee and other Native nations and the expansion of Presbyterian missions into western Indian territories.
Surveys Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other missions established among Native nations removed to Kansas and explains how missions contributed to non-Native settlement of the territory.
Uses missionary religious objects to explain Christian missions in Indian Territory and attempts to transform Native education, dress, work, language, worship, and daily life.
Great Plains, Upper Midwest, and Reservation Christianity
Examines a contemporary dispute on the Wind River Reservation involving Christianity, Arapaho ceremonies, tribal sovereignty, and the continuing historical legacy of earlier campaigns against Indigenous religions.
Studies Episcopal missions among Native peoples during nineteenth-century western expansion, focusing on education, assimilation, Henry Whipple, Enmegahbowh, Ojibwe communities, and Dakota peoples.
Provides biographies of Indigenous Episcopal leaders, including Enmegahbowh, and illustrates the increasing role of Native clergy within churches originally established by outside missionaries.
Surveys Episcopal mission expansion among Dakota and Lakota communities, Native-language religious translation, boarding schools, reservation churches, and Indigenous clergy.
Describes how Odawa communities faced pressure to become Christian, attend Euro-American schools, change clothing and occupations, and suppress traditional religious practices in order to resist removal.
Traces Episcopal missions among Ojibwe communities, including St. Columba Mission, Enmegahbowh, reservation churches, mission schools, and development of Native Christian leadership.
Profiles Enmegahbowh and explores the role of an Indigenous Episcopal priest during a period of warfare, displacement, treaty violations, and expanding American settlement in Minnesota.
Examines Navajo participation in Christian Reformed missions through Edward Becenti and J. C. Morgan, emphasizing Native translation, leadership, Bible translation, and individual choices surrounding conversion.
Examines Christian mission history among Lakota communities on Pine Ridge and Rosebud and evaluates both constructive relationships and harmful assimilationist elements of missionary activity.
Surveys religion on the Great Plains, including Indigenous traditions, Catholic and Protestant missions, settler migration, conversion efforts, and the interaction between Christianity and Native spiritual traditions.
Examines nineteenth-century Christian missionaries among Great Plains tribes and emphasizes both missionary assimilation programs and Indigenous adaptation, resistance, selective conversion, and Native Christian leadership.
Explores the Native American Church and the ways Indigenous communities incorporated selected Christian beliefs into Native religious traditions rather than simply abandoning earlier spiritual practices.
Examines Protestant and Catholic missions among Dakota and Ojibwe communities and the ways Native ministers and congregations adapted Christianity within Indigenous cultural settings.
Profiles Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk, including warfare and reservation life, his conversion to Catholicism, work as a catechist, and continued connection with Lakota religious traditions.
Presents the history of Holy Rosary Mission on Pine Ridge, including Red Cloud's request for Jesuits, Lakota involvement, Catholic education, boarding-school practices, and later cultural revitalization.
Describes Holy Rosary Church at Pine Ridge and the collaboration of Lakota people, Jesuits, and Franciscan sisters in developing a Catholic mission community.
Traces Catholic missionary work on the Standing Rock Reservation from the nineteenth century, including Benedictines, reservation churches, schools, and relationships with Lakota and Dakota communities.
Documents Episcopal mission activity at Pine Ridge beginning during the Grant Peace Policy and provides archival information on Native Episcopal congregations and schools.
Discusses missionary Christianity among the Kiowa and compares it with the rise of the Native American Church as Native communities confronted reservation pressures and cultural change.
Federal Indian Policy, Peace Policy, Boarding Schools, and Assimilation
Provides a detailed federal historical summary connecting missionary education, the Civilization Fund Act, Christian institutions, compulsory religious instruction, boarding schools, and assimilation of Native children.
Examines the ideological assumptions behind federal Indian boarding schools and their efforts to transform Native children through education, Christianity, English-language instruction, and cultural assimilation.
Investigates the extensive U.S. boarding-school system, including federal contracts with Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Quaker, and other religious organizations and the relationship between education and Native land loss.
Investigates Catholic-run Indian boarding schools through archival records and Native testimony, highlighting both coercive assimilation and complex later relationships between tribes and Christian institutions.
Examines the historical involvement of Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Quaker, and other Christian denominations in government-supported Indian boarding schools.
Describes Indigenous-led research into hundreds of boarding schools and documents the governmental and religious institutions responsible for operating them and removing Native children from their communities.
Provides a Native-centered account of boarding-school history and explains how government and Christian institutions attempted to replace Indigenous languages, religions, cultures, and values.
Reviews the history of federal Indian boarding schools and the assimilation policies that suppressed Indigenous languages, religions, cultures, and community relationships.
Examines the relationship among Christianity, federal Indian policy, assimilation, Native resistance, and survival, with particular attention to Grant's Peace Policy and missionary administration of western reservations.
Surveys the legal history of Native religion and Christianity, including missionary programs, federal civilization policies, Grant's Peace Policy, boarding schools, and restrictions on Indigenous religious practices.
Examines Carlisle within the transition from western Indian wars to federal assimilation policies and explains the parallel roles of government schools and Christian missionary organizations.
Analyzes Grant's Peace Policy and the prominent role of Quakers in administering reservations, showing how religious concepts of peace intersected with federal expansion, military force, and Indigenous dispossession.
Summarizes scholarship on Catholic Indian boarding schools in Dakota Territory, including the Peace Policy, federal assimilation goals, reservation missions, religious education, and Native responses to mission institutions.
Explains Grant's Peace Policy, including the assignment of reservation agencies to Christian denominations and the administration's goals of Christianization, assimilation, citizenship, and western settlement.
Discusses missionary education as an early instrument for teaching Christianity and Euro-American culture to Indigenous peoples and its later connection with federal assimilation policies.
Traces the development of Indian mission schools and boarding schools, including federal financial support for church organizations and attempts to separate Indigenous children from traditional cultures.
Provides federal research on the Indian boarding school system, including government partnerships with Christian institutions, assimilation policies, religious organizations, student deaths, and surviving historical records.
Explains the development of Carlisle and the broader boarding-school system intended to assimilate Indigenous children by separating them from family, culture, language, religion, and community.
Explores Protestant women's organizations that funded missionaries, religious education, scholarships, and assimilation programs among Indigenous communities throughout the American West.
Explains Grant's Peace Policy and the federal decision to place reservation administration in the hands of Christian organizations expected to promote farming, schooling, Christianity, and cultural assimilation.
Provides an Odawa perspective on mission schools and federal boarding schools, describing restrictions on Native languages, ceremonies, clothing, family relationships, and religious traditions.
Discusses Native histories of removal and assimilation and notes the role missionary boarding schools played in separating Native children from languages, cultures, families, and traditions.
Latter-day Saint Expansion and Indigenous Peoples
Presents an institutional history of Latter-day Saint relations with Native Americans, including early missions, western migration, settlement conflicts, Native displacement, missionary programs, and reservation outreach.
Explains theological ideas that shaped early Latter-day Saint missions to Indigenous peoples and later missionary relationships with Native communities throughout the American West.
Describes Latter-day Saint expansion across the Intermountain West and acknowledges that settlement frequently displaced Native peoples despite religious hopes for peaceful coexistence.
Explains the church's earliest mission to people identified as “Lamanites” and connects missionary theology to westward movement, Indigenous diplomacy, and early Mormon settlement.
Examines Mormon migration to the Great Basin, early assumptions about western land, Indigenous use of the Salt Lake Valley, and plans for relationships with western Native nations.
Spanish Borderlands: Texas and General Mission Systems
Studies Indigenous interpretations of Christian sacraments in Spanish borderland missions and emphasizes Native agency in responding to missionary attempts to replace existing religious practices.
Examines the Tigua community at Ysleta following the Pueblo Revolt and the continuing combination of Catholic Christianity with Indigenous identity and traditions.
Surveys Franciscan missions in New Mexico and California and examines the combination of Catholic evangelization, Spanish imperial expansion, Native labor, cultural change, and Indigenous resistance.
Explains the intertwined religious and colonial purposes of San Antonio's missions, including Christian conversion, Spanish territorial claims, cultural transformation, labor, and Indigenous communities.
Surveys the San Antonio missions and the conversion and acculturation of Indigenous peoples as Spain expanded its political, religious, and economic frontier northward.
Examines daily life in Spanish missions and links Christian conversion, labor discipline, cultural transformation, economic expansion, settlement, military security, and Indigenous resistance.
Explains how missions, presidios, roads, and settlements worked together to Christianize Indigenous peoples and secure Spain's northern frontier against competing imperial powers.
Reconstructs daily life at Mission San José and describes religious instruction, labor, language change, renaming, agriculture, and cultural transformation experienced by Indigenous mission residents.
Focuses on Indigenous South Texans who formed most of the mission population and examines why families entered missions and how mission life altered their cultures and economies.
Describes San Antonio's mission complexes as institutions intended both to evangelize Indigenous populations and establish self-supporting Catholic communities loyal to Spain.
Examines the Ysleta Mission and the Tigua community's long history of combining Catholic Christianity with Indigenous cultural traditions after displacement from New Mexico.
Provides a broad account of Catholic missions in the Spanish borderlands, including Indigenous conversion, coercion, disease, resistance, cultural blending, and the long-term development of Hispanic Catholic communities.
Summarizes the purposes of Spanish missions as religious, educational, economic, and colonial institutions intended in part to convert Indigenous South Texans to Christianity.
Surveys relations between Spanish missionaries and Texas Indigenous peoples, including conversion campaigns, resistance to mission discipline, disease, warfare, alliance, intermarriage, and colonial settlement.
New Mexico and Pueblo Missions
Examines Pueblo labor in mission construction, Spanish exploitation, suppression of Indigenous religion, revolt, later Catholic conversion, and the survival of blended Pueblo and Christian traditions.
Examines Fray Francisco Letrado's negotiations with Pueblo leaders and adaptation of Native rooms into an early Catholic mission complex at Gran Quivira.
Introduces Native residents, missionaries, settlers, archaeologists, and preservationists associated with the Pueblo and mission communities of central New Mexico.
Describes the Quarai Pueblo mission and its unusual combination of Catholic structures and a Pueblo kiva, illustrating interaction between Native and Spanish religious traditions.
Examines the history and later preservation of Gran Quivira, where Pueblo communities, Franciscan missions, and nineteenth-century American western exploration intersected.
Traces Spanish missionary expansion into the large Pueblo community of Las Humanas and the construction of San Isidro and San Buenaventura churches.
Surveys Abó, Quarai, and Gran Quivira and highlights the physical juxtaposition of Native pueblos, Indigenous religious structures, and Spanish Catholic missions.
Introduces the intertwined history of Ancestral Pueblo communities, Spanish Franciscan missionaries, mission churches, kivas, later settlement, and preservation in central New Mexico.
Provides background on Pueblo communities and seventeenth-century Franciscan missions, explaining why missionaries established churches within existing Native population centers.
Describes Spanish attempts to impose Catholicism on Pueblo communities, suppression of Indigenous religion, forced conversion, colonial labor demands, and the resistance that culminated in the Pueblo Revolt.
Explores the road connecting Spanish settlements and missions and its importance to Christian conversion, colonization, trade, migration, cultural exchange, and imperial control in New Mexico.
Examines the alliance of Spanish Crown and Catholic missionaries in colonizing Pueblo lands, missionary expansion, labor demands, religious suppression, and the Pueblo Revolt.
Describes Franciscan missions at Pecos Pueblo, conflicts between church and colonial officials, Native resistance, the Pueblo Revolt, and later Spanish reconquest.
Explores the Pecos mission and Franciscan efforts to convert Pueblo peoples within Spain's wider strategy of settlement, labor extraction, religious change, and territorial control.
Describes Catholic mission activity at Santo Domingo Pueblo, Indigenous resistance to Spanish rule, destruction of mission churches during the Pueblo Revolt, and later mission restoration.
Traces Franciscan missionary activity at Taos Pueblo, Indigenous complaints and resistance, suppression of Native religion, and Taos's important role in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
Examines Catholic missions at Isleta Pueblo and the tensions created by religious suppression, labor demands, colonial expansion, revolt, displacement, and later reconstruction.
Discusses missionization at San Ildefonso Pueblo and the role of Tewa communities in resisting Spanish religious and colonial demands during the Pueblo Revolt.
Contrasts Pueblo spiritual traditions with Spanish Christianity and examines Indigenous resistance to forced religious and economic changes culminating in the Pueblo Revolt.
Examines the Franciscan mission at Abó Pueblo, including Pueblo cooperation, Catholic conversion efforts, mission construction, Indigenous religious spaces, disease, drought, and abandonment.
Provides detailed history of Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Quarai and explores Catholic conversion, Pueblo culture, Native religious persistence, and Spanish colonial expansion.
Examines Mission San Gregorio de Abó and Franciscan efforts to bring Catholicism to Tompiro Pueblo communities while extending Spanish colonial institutions into the Salinas Valley.
Explores the relationship between San José de los Jémez Mission and Gíusewa Pueblo, documenting early Franciscan evangelization and interactions with Jémez communities.
Explains how the archaeological remains of Pueblo settlements and Spanish mission churches document cultural interaction, religious change, and adaptation during colonization.
California Missions, Indigenous Resistance, and Cultural Persistence
Provides an overview of California's twenty-one missions, their role in Catholic conversion and Spanish territorial expansion, Native labor, disease, and the mission system's long-term consequences.
Book-length scholarship on California's missions examining Franciscan evangelization, Indigenous experiences, coercion, labor, cultural transformation, resistance, and the complex process of Christian conversion.
Explores California's Spanish mission system and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries to Christianize Indigenous peoples while restructuring Native labor, settlement patterns, language, and everyday life.
Provides a Native-centered examination of California missions that emphasizes Indigenous labor, religious conversion, cultural survival, resistance, and problems with romanticized mission narratives.
Presents a Chumash perspective on the Spanish mission period and examines conversion, colonization, family history, Indigenous spirituality, cultural disruption, and survival.
Introduces California's mission system as both a Spanish colonization project and a campaign of religious conversion while emphasizing Native resilience and historical perspectives.
Collects ten primary-source studies on Native experiences in California missions, including rebellion, religious survival, cultural persistence, family life, art, food, and ceremony.
Examines the 1775 Kumeyaay revolt at Mission San Diego and the effects of Spanish encroachment, missionary activity, disruption of food resources, and abuses within the mission system.
Uses Toypurina's testimony to examine the 1785 resistance movement at Mission San Gabriel and Native objections to Spanish occupation, mission authority, and religious conversion.
Explores Native-created artwork at Mission Dolores and how traditional California spiritual and artistic imagery persisted within a Catholic mission environment.
Examines the killing of Father Andrés Quintana at Mission Santa Cruz through the testimony of Native participants and the context of punishment, coercion, and mission authority.
Uses missionary records and archaeological evidence to show how baptized Native Californians continued traditional food practices despite missionary attempts at cultural transformation.
Examines the paseo system that allowed some baptized Native Californians to return temporarily to ancestral homelands and maintain family, ceremonial, and cultural connections.
Uses Chumash basketry to illustrate the persistence of Indigenous technology, environmental knowledge, artistic expression, and cultural identity during the mission period.
Examines Estanislao's 1828 revolt and alliances among baptized Native Californians who left missions and resisted Spanish-Mexican mission authority.
Uses the writings of Luiseño scholar Pablo Tac to document Native music, dance, religious traditions, language, and cultural continuity within the California mission system.
Examines Chumash marriage and family practices to show how Native Californians maintained private cultural traditions while publicly participating in Catholic mission life.
Provides an accessible collection of primary evidence concerning Native resistance and persistence in California missions, including revolt, art, homeland visits, basketry, music, and dance.
Explains how Native Californians used temporary mission leave to reconnect with ancestral villages and preserve important family and cultural traditions.
Uses Pablo Tac's writings to show how Luiseño songs, dances, elders, language, and ceremonial practices survived within and beyond Catholic mission communities.
Arizona and O'odham Missions
Traces Tumacácori from Father Kino's arrival through O'odham resistance, Spanish military expansion, Franciscan administration, disease, Apache conflict, Mexican independence, and eventual U.S. acquisition.
Provides a chronological account of missionary expansion in southern Arizona, including Jesuit missions, the 1751 O'odham revolt, Franciscan succession, military protection, and the Gadsden Purchase.
Examines the construction and use of Tumacácori's Franciscan church and the integration of Latin, Spanish, and O'odham languages within Catholic mission worship.
Describes the establishment of San José de Tumacácori, its movement following the 1751 revolt, Franciscan construction, and changing relationships between missionaries and O'odham communities.
Provides a chronological list and historical context for Jesuit missionaries serving O'odham communities in the Pimería Alta before Spain expelled the Jesuit order in 1767.
Profiles the succession of Jesuit and Franciscan priests responsible for the Tumacácori, Guevavi, Calabazas, and Sonoitac missions.
Provides an accessible overview of how Catholic missionaries introduced Christianity, Spanish language, European crops, livestock, buildings, and new social practices into O'odham communities.
Explores San Xavier del Bac and the relationship among Jesuit and Franciscan missions, Spanish colonization, Tohono O'odham communities, Catholic conversion, farming, and permanent settlement.
Describes Father Kino's early mission activity at Tumacácori and the consequences of the 1751 O'odham uprising against Spanish colonial expansion.
Examines the early Jesuit church at Tumacácori, Father Kino's missionary activities, O'odham responses, and the 1751 rebellion against Spanish colonial settlements.
Explores mission life from multiple locations at Tumacácori and discusses O'odham religion, Catholic worship, labor, agriculture, Spanish settlement, and later cultural blending.
Presents O'odham history before and during Spanish mission colonization and describes changes in agriculture, settlement, religion, material culture, and relationships with newcomers.
Examines the Spanish military response to the 1751 O'odham revolt and illustrates how missions, presidios, Native soldiers, and colonial expansion became closely linked.
Describes Jesuit and Franciscan missions in the Pimería Alta and their attempts to convert Indigenous peoples to Christianity and Spanish colonial lifeways.
Traces San Cayetano de Calabazas, where O'odham people were relocated into a mission community that later experienced warfare, abandonment, resettlement, and Apache attacks.
Examines missionary efforts at Calabazas to introduce Catholicism, Spanish language, European agriculture, livestock, and social practices to O'odham residents.
Provides a detailed mission-era chronology including the Jesuit expansion, Pima Revolt, Franciscan takeover, Spanish military presence, disease, settlement pressure, and mission abandonment.
Explains how Spanish missionaries established communities designed to Christianize O'odham people and extend Spanish cultural and political influence across southern Arizona.
Surveys the O'odham communities, missions, Jesuit and Franciscan activity, rebellion, military settlement, and cultural exchanges that shaped the Tumacácori region.
Explores religious services, baptismal and marriage records, O'odham and Yoeme participation, mission labor, Spanish settlement, and the later transformation of the mission landscape.
