The Ojibwe Renaissance: Transnational Evangelicalism and the Making of an Algonquian Intelligentsia, 1812–1867

Abstract

Between the War of 1812 and the emergence of a self-sufficient Canadian Methodism in the 1850s, the combination of geopolitical instability, transatlantic evangelicalism, indigenous and settler enthusiasm for religious revival, and the ideas of romantic nationalism produced a distinctly Ojibwe Christianity. This Christianity is known to us primarily through the letters, journals, and publications of a small group of Algonquian-speaking intellectuals educated in American colleges who mobilized the ideology and institutional networks of the Protestant missionary project to mount a vigorous challenge to the encroachments of settler colonialism occurring on both sides of the Great Lakes. Ojibwe Christians participated in a movement to transform the world into a multiracial Christian commonwealth, a movement within which they could remain committed to a historiographical and nation-building project meant to establish an autonomous, or at least semiautonomous, Indian polity within the imperialist state.In the spring of 1838, the Ojibwe missionary Peter Jones (Kahkewahquonaby) took a break from the rigors of a fund-raising tour in southwest Cornwall to visit the remains of a "Druidical temple" called Carn Brea. 1 The region was a hotbed of Methodist revivalism and he had preached to standing-room only crowds in Camborne, Gwennap, and St. Ives Smith (1987). 2 He was so impressed by the piety and generosity of the Cornish that he described the region as the most Methodistical he had ever visited. But at Carn Brea, Jones had the chance to get away from packed chapels and to wander quietly among ancient stones on a grassy hilltop. He was a man obsessed with how the history of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Great Lakes, and the Indians of North America as a whole, were to fit into the grander and universal history of Christianity. His brief respite from the draining schedule of endless teas, speeches, and sermons offered a valuable opportunity to meditate on this task. For Jones the tension between the personal experience of his Christianity, and the theatrical account of his conversion from savagery that the British so enjoyed, was painful. He once described the feathers and buckskins he wore to entertain white audiences as an "odious Indian costume" (Wyatt 2009). Yet here, on the hills of Cornwall, was tangible evidence that Europeans also had a dark, uncivilized past. The locals had once offered human sacrifices to their gods in such places, Jones recorded in his journal, and he was shown the hollows in the rocks where the blood of the poor slain creatures had been collected. "Surely," he ended his entry, "God has done much for England" (Jones 1860, 398).Jones belonged to a generation of Algonquian intellectuals who came of age in the years after the War of 1812, and the ironic relativism of this anecdote is illustrative of their attitudes toward British and American colonialism. Their published writing suggests that American Review of Canadian Studies, 2015 Vol. 45, No. 1, 71-92, http://dx.