1741-1873 by Jason Allen

468 Pages·2012·2.85 MB·English

An Account of the Origins of Christianity in the Fraser-Skeena Headwaters and

North Pacific Littoral: 1741-1873

by

Jason Allen Redden

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of the University of

Manitoba in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Religion

University of Manitoba

Winnipeg

Copyright © 2012 by Jason Redden
Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnohistorical account of the advent of Christianity, how it
was taught and practiced, on the upper Fraser-Skeena watershed and adjacent North
Pacific littoral between the years 1741 and 1873. The region was a focal point of
sustained international colonial and commercial attention, and missionaries of various
European Christianities played an important role in the introduction of Christianity in the
vast socio-geographical space. However, they were not the only teachers and
practitioners. Lay Christianities, that is, Christianity as practiced by the various workers
in the maritime and continental fur trades, and later by Russian, Spanish, British,
Canadian and American colonists were perspicuous features of the social field. While the
presence of lay Christianities is often underdetermined in the North American historical
and ethnographic records, I argue it figured significantly into the quality of social
relations between newcomers and peoples Indigenous to the region. Indigenous peoples
were initially interested in Christian form and content. Later those interests were
augmented by Indigenous prophets interested in indigenizing Christianity; a task which
entailed ensuring that Christianity originated locally. When the Hudson‘s Bay Company
emerged as the chief commercial operator in the region at the close of the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, Indigenous Christianity was mobilized as a religion of resistance
against the Company‘s incursion into local social spaces and in the ensuing struggle with
both the Company and Christian missionaries.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisors, Professors Dawne McCance and Chris Trott, as
well as my committee members, Professors Kenneth MacKendrick, Lisa Alexandrin and
Adele Perry, for their patience and valuable advice over the course of this project. I
would also like to thank my external examiner, Professor Susan Neylan, for her gracious
and helpful feedback in writing and at defence time. I would also like to acknowledge the
financial support of the University of Manitoba through the University of Manitoba
Graduate Fellowship and the J. G. Fletcher Award.
Special thanks are also due to a few others. Thanks to Nicole Goulet for her
editorial assistance during the final stages of this thesis and for her good encouragement.
Thanks to Rob Penner for all the coffee. Thanks to Ken MacKendrick for keeping me on
the map. Thanks to Lisa for her patience and for about every other thing she did to help
down that last leg. Thanks to my mom, Sally, for letting me go, as Ella used to say, with a
couple of bucks now and again. And, one more thing, thanks for being out there, Thom
Parkhill.
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Table of Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... ..iii
Maps .....................................................................................................................................v

Chapter 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................1

Chapter 2. Prophet Religion in the Ethnology and Ethnohistory of the Rocky
Mountain West .................................................................................................11

Chapter 3. The Social Field and Inner Orbit: Fraser-Skeena Headwaters in the Late
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries .....................................................78

Chapter 4. Outer Orbit: Ocean and River (1707-1858) ...................................................120

Chapter 5. Outer Orbit: Prairie, Mountain and River (1731-1821) .................................183

Chapter 6. Christianity in the Inner Orbit: the Fraser-Skeena Headwaters
(1821-1873)....................................................................................................226

Chapter 7. The Bini Traditions: Prophet Movements, Myth and the Indigenization of
Christianity ......................................................................................................292

Chapter 8. Bini, Prophet Movements, Ritual and Social Formation ...............................364

Chapter 9. Conclusion ......................................................................................................426

Appendix ..........................................................................................................................433
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................437

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Maps

Map 1. Inner Orbit: Fraser-Skeena Headwaters ………..……………………………… 89

Map 2. Outer Orbit: North Pacific Littoral ..………………………………………….. 134

Map 3. Outer Orbit: Mountain, Prairie and River ………………..…………………… 216

Map 4. Inner Orbit with Fur Trade Posts .………..…………………………………… 229

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Chapter 1
Introduction

In nineteenth century North America, Indigenous emergent religions, sometimes
termed prophet religions, with clear Christian influences blossomed on the edges and in
the corners of the geo-political map. In the Northwest, on the North Pacific littoral and at
the headwaters of the major rivers that drained into the Pacific, the Fraser, the Columbia,
and the Skeena, such religions emerged only after a long history with Christianity.1 The
presence of Christianity among the peoples Indigenous to those spaces is not traced to the
missionary vanguard but to a long history of relations with near neighbours and
newcomers that stretched back to at least the seventeenth century (prior to the first
quarter of the nineteenth century, with few exceptions, the newcomers were engaged in
some capacity with the either the maritime or continental fur trade). There were lay or
folk versions of Christianity in the Northwest that piqued the interest of the Indigenous
inhabitants in the social identities of the newcomers to the land. Thus, when the
nineteenth-century prophet religions emerged, the leaders of those movements addressed
a local audience that was already familiar with Christianity.
The prophet religions were in the most general way an indigenization of
Christianity; they were an effort to give Christianity a local origin. The process of
indigenization can also be appreciated as an attempt at social formation, or the
construction of group boundaries within a changing social field. Boundaries were altered

1 Often times such religions are represented as coalescing around individuals variously termed as
prophets, visionaries, or shamans. With all respects to ethnographic difference there remains a family
resemblance among such figures, they are harbingers of change recognized within a community as
possessing a privileged capacity for anticipating the future.

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as the prophets reached out to their neighbours uniting them as a group under the banner
of an Indigenous Christianity. Their reach was assisted by a radically equalizing motif
that the prophets perceived within Christianity. The leaders of the movements proclaimed
that Christianity was not exogenous and that the foreigners did not have special rights to
the gospel. The prophets rejected European notions of history, religion and justice
without rejecting Christian morality and the Christian ecstatic experience. By centering
Christianity in a social field, making it the hub of all social orbits, participants in the
emergent religious movements stitched together the local Indigenous residents (the
Babine, Sekani, Witsuwit‘en, Dakelh and Gitksan) and European newcomers in a
meaningful way that preserved the priority of their own local versions of Christianity.
When the missionaries came and told their story of Christian origins, a story that harked
back to the time of Jesus and the apostles, the people responded with their own story of
Christian origins that did not look to the Jesus of the past but to their prophets of the
present.
It follows from what I have just written that my view of prophet religions is
basically consistent with what Vittorio Lanternari had termed almost half a century ago
the ―religions of the oppressed.‖2 The notion of a religion of the oppressed is a major
achievement of religion‘s documentary record.3 In such treatments, where religious
discourse and practice are said to serve as effective rallying points against schemes of
domination, the tensions among groups are often depicted in terms of a struggle over

2 Vittorio Lanternari, Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults, trans. Lisa
Sergio (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).

3 See Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia (New
York: Shocken Books, 1968); Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York:
Vintage Books, 1969); and Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: a Study of Millenarian Activities
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969).
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material resources. In that depiction, non-material resources are often undervalued not
necessarily because they are less relevant but because they are harder to quantify. It is no
surprise, then, that in the Americas, where prophet movements have been taken as
exemplary religions of the oppressed, deprivation theory has been a powerful explanatory
tool. The use of deprivation theory is not unique to the academic study of religion;
explanations of religion in terms of denial of resources are also germane to the disciplines
of history and anthropology. While the articulation of non-material resources is a
challenging enough analytical task, the difficulty is compounded in religions of earlier
periods where the historical and ethnographic data is quite thin. The interpretive
challenge in my analysis, if not to procure more new data, is to amplify what is known by
illuminating the social field in which such religions emerged so as to clarify the group
dynamics and the relation of nay given group to others in the social field. In this
dissertation, I am critical of deprivation theory and its application to North American
prophet movements. The criticism is not rote. I offer it to distinguish my own alternative
analytical venture, which considers the social reasons for the emergence of prophet
movements. Treating the religious discourse and practice attendant to such movements as
activity in the interest of social formation within a social field is, I argue, a useful
analytical manoeuvre.
Non-material resources such as justice, respect, dignity, equality, prestige and
honour, difficult to quantify and to qualify, were yet satisfied by the mobilization of
religious discourse and practice. My agenda, an illumination of the social motivations of
such movements, is similar to what Joseph Jorgensen accomplished in his masterful
treatment of the Ute Sun Dance. Jorgensen argued the Sun Dance is a redemptive
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movement geared toward individual (pace societal) transformation. Participation in the
Dance offered dancers who were restricted to reservations and confined by oppressive
colonial policies and attitudes a sense of happiness, respect and self worth. The Ute Sun
Dance community, which included all those involved with the dance not only the
dancers, was a community with its own criteria for group membership and its own system
of mores.4 What Jorgensen argues for the individual can be extended to the group; the
religious movements of the Northwest were efforts in social formation and in identity
formation so as to secure the integrity of the group and for its participants a ―space in
which to meaningful dwell.‖5 The movements refused the incongruous image of the
―Indian‖ without religion (i.e. Christianity) presented to them by others within the social
field, resisted the intrusion of the Hudson‘s Bay Company into local social spaces, and
asserted an Indigenous Christianity. While traders and missionaries often interpreted
Indigenous Christianity as a failed effort, it was never that Christianity failed, but that
Christianity failed to manifest itself in a certain way. Participants in the prophet
movements at the time of their emergence, and those who remembered them years later,
viewed them as successful efforts at creating an Indigenous Christianity and proudly
claimed that Christianity was as at home in Northwest as it ever was anywhere else.
The structure of the dissertation reverses the introductory line I just set out. In
chapter 2, I introduce some of the analytical terms integral to my analysis: prophet,

4 Joseph Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

5 Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith‘s definition of religion, ―Religion is the quest, within the bounds of the
human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate ones ‗situation‘ so as to have ‗space‘
in which to meaningfully dwell.‖ Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 291. Cf. Kenelm Burridge‘s definition: ―The redemptive process indicated by the activities,
moral rules, and assumptions about power, which, pertinent to the moral order and taken on faith, not only
enable a people to perceive the truth of things, but guarantee that they are indeed perceiving the truth of
things.‖ Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1971), 6-7.
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prophet movement, social field and social formation. I also survey – taking the
scholarship on the Prophet Dance and the Ghost Dance as examples – how prophet
religions and the indigenization of Christianity have been represented in the ethnological
and ethnohistorical records. I argue that common to all representations is an idea of
religion, specifically new religions, as crisis phenomenon, as epiphenomenal (i.e. as a
consequence of certain material conditions, namely, ethnological deprivations such as
epidemics and natural disasters). While such interpretations are analytically useful, they
can underdetermine the social motivations that inform religious activity.
In chapter 3, I erect scaffolding for my larger argument that the prophet religions
of the upper Fraser and Skeena watersheds were efforts in social formation motivated by
social interests. To that end, I introduce the geographical region and corresponding social
field. The latter task entails a description of the various component groups Indigenous to
the field as well as their near neighbours, namely, those on the adjacent coast and the
more southerly Fraser-Columbia Plateau. I refer to the geographical region at the heart of
my analysis, the upper Fraser and Skeena watersheds, as the inner orbit or inner sphere of
influence. I use the term ―orbit‖ to describe this field because it suggests motion, relations
in motion; that connotation outweighs, in my opinion, the comparative disadvantage of
the technical meaning of the term as a cycle around some fixed point. There is no
objective centre within the region but there is a movement of people, material and ideas
throughout it. I refer to the orbit as ―inner‖ because the region is the analytical focus of
my investigation; it was in that region where Christianity was indigenized. Each group
occupying that space had close relations with at least two other groups in the inner orbit.
For example, in the early nineteenth century the Babine had close relations with the
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