Abstract
This fascinating and significant collection of essays arose from a conference with the title: “Can the Native Christian Speak?” Inspired, of course, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's famous question about the “subaltern,” these authors ask whether we can ever accurately hear the voices of those Indigenous people who engaged with Christianity in colonial contexts. The resulting essays provide diverse insights into the sources available for listening to these historic individuals and communities, the challenges involved in interpreting these sources, and some fruitful ways forward. The collection is a vivid example of the creative and respectful work that is being produced within the scholarly community working within the field of “World Christianity.” Arun W. Jones provides a very thoughtful introduction and conclusion, in which he notes that Christianity was, from the outset, a cross-cultural, culturally pluralistic and intercultural phenomenon. Not only have Christian practices and beliefs been taken up across very diverse cultures, which have engaged with each other in both friendly and hostile ways, but also Christian communities “have always relied on other religious and theological traditions, other conceptual worlds, other rituals and social practices for their own identities” (p. 2). While Christian leaders have often decried or (literally) demonised these “proximate communities,” their ways of being provided both foils and models for Christian culture. This volume examines a wide variety of such intercultural encounters and the voices and texts available to understand them. Jones notes that the essays return repeatedly to several themes: different types of translation; what he calls “polyvalent identities” (p. 9); the need to fully understand “European sources” in order to more accurately interpret non-European voices within them and the great variety of actors within colonial contexts. The first section, which I found particularly rich, is titled “Methodological Issues.” Paul Kollman writes about the challenges of researching the experiences of newly evangelised African Catholics. Mrinalini Sebastian draws on Gayatri Spivak's concept of the “Echo” to address the challenge of hearing the voices of “the Native Christian.” Esther Mombo searches for the voice of women in archival sources, using as a case study the life of a Kenyan Quaker leader, Maria Maraga. All of these essays are clear about the deeply problematic nature of missionary-authored sources, shaped as they were by racist assumptions, promotional/fund-raising agendas, and various levels of linguistic and cultural ignorance. Kollman's claim that missionaries were rarely able to represent Indigenous Christians beyond the categories of “loyal co-workers,” “troublemakers” or “backsliders” (p. 20), rang profoundly true to my own experience of missionary sources. Though all three authors recommend abandoning the hope of recovering the fully authentic voices of Indigenous Christians within these sources, they point to the value of understanding the genres and patterns in missionary texts and how we might see Indigenous agency expressed within them. They also emphasise the availability of other sources within and beyond mission archives, which may help us to hear Indigenous voices. Both Kollman and Mombo emphasise the critical importance of visiting sites of missionary activity and talking to descendants and those who live on these sites today. Mombo also makes the related point — to which I return below — that researching and writing histories of missionary encounters can have real and sometimes disruptive consequences for contemporary communities. The second section is titled “Early Colonial Catholicism.” Haruko Nawata Ward writes about identifying the voices of “Kirishitan Women Martyrs” in sources produced by Jesuit missionaries (and co-produced, Ward argues, by Japanese Christian women). Finding the voices of this group of people — a persecuted minority, marginalised within Japanese society because of their Christian identity and by the Jesuits because of their gender — seems an impossible task, yet Ward's reading of mission sources is insightful. Yanna Yannakakis describes Indigenous agency in the context of colonial Christian repression and violence in colonial Mexico, and again discusses the ongoing consequences and memories among contemporary Native people in Mexico. Kenneth Mills provides a close reading of the layers within a Spanish missionary's description of a wealthy mestizo silver broker in colonial Peru. One of the strengths of the volume as a whole — its focus on Catholic converts and encounters — is particularly evident here. As Kollman notes in the first section, Catholic missionaries were less likely than Protestants to collect conversion narratives and other introspective accounts from their converts. Most chapters in this book show how the kinds of sources Catholic missions did produce and collect can still be fruitfully studied. The third section is titled “Christian Nationalisms,” though this title seemed to apply more to some of the chapters than others. The three chapters in this section, which are all excellent, deal with Native American Christian voices from the colonial period until the present (Christopher Vecsey), the periodicals of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (and independent Catholic church in the Philippines) in the early twentieth century (Adrian Hermann) and the extensive writings of colonial Rwandan Bishop Aloys Bigurumwani (J.J. Carney). All three of these chapters support the claim, made by Jones in the introduction, that there are in fact no shortage of sources written by Indigenous Christians in the missionary or colonial archive. Yet, as Gayatri Spivak writes, many of these sources were produced by Indigenous elites rather than the people she sees as true “subalterns.” Carney and Hermann both provide rich insights into the ways that Indigenous Christians in the Philippines and Rwanda negotiated questions of national identity, religious loyalties and decolonisation in the twentieth century. The authors of these chapters were encouraged to reflect on and write about their own experiences as researchers seeking “Indigenous voices.” This reflective aspect of the volume is very valuable, even as it left me with further questions. Esther Mombo writes about how colonial archives can be the focus of contemporary divisions and disagreements; Yanna Yannakakis writes about how some Indigenous people in Mexico resent the beatification of those historic converts who they see as traitors; Christopher Vecsey describes the way contemporary Native American people speak back to the ways both historical missionaries and contemporary scholars interpret their ways of being. I was left feeling convinced that the dominant, European-derived model of the academic historian insulated from accountability to the communities they research, is inadequate to the task with which these histories confront us.