The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity

Keith Thor Carlson is an assistant professor of history at the
University of Saskatchewan.

The Heavens Are Changing is an important addition to a growing body of
historical literature aimed at reassessing our understanding of the
newcomer–Native relationship. An outgrowth of the author’s Ph.D.
dissertation at the University of British Columbia, the book is a
penetrating study of the encounters between the Tsimshian people of
Canada’s north Pacific coast and Protestant Christian missionaries in
the critical later half of the 19th century. This was an era when
Aboriginal people of this region were struggling to make sense of the
first serious incursions into their lands by Euro-Canadian newcomers who
intended not simply to trade furs and/or extract mineral resources and
then leave, but rather to stay and in so doing engage in economic and
social activities that threatened indigenous land use patterns,
governance, and autonomy in the widest sense of those words. Neylan
shows us how the Tsimshian people negotiated this challenge through a
complex process of resistance, accommodation, and innovation that made
full use of traditional indigenous social mechanisms, as well as Western
theology and ideology. The end result, she argues, was a syncretic
blending of Tsimshian and Christian beliefs and ritual and the emergence
of not merely Christian Tsimshian, but “Tsimshian Christianity.”

Though their approach and methods differ, Neylan’s work nicely
complements those of anthropologists Michael Harkin (The Heiltsuks:
Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast) and Sergei Kan
(Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity
Through Two Centuries). Working in the same general geographic region,
all three scholars have shown that dichotomies between “convert” and
“traditionalist” cannot account for Aboriginal hermeneutics in the
face of Christian encounters. “Conversion” was not an abandoning of
indigenous beliefs. Rather, it was a process whereby Aboriginal
epistemology selectively embraced certain Christian symbols, beliefs,
and rituals, resulting in the emergence of new, yet still indigenous,
cultural expressions.

If The Heavens Are Changing has any weaknesses it is principally in the
form of what might be considered sins of omission, rather than
commission. Neylan’s discussion of the Tsimshian use of Christianity
focuses principally on the way it empowered Aboriginal people in their
struggles with newcomer society. Readers are provided only glimpses of
the way in which Protestantism was deployed within Tsimshian society and
between Tsimshian people. As a result, one is left wondering if perhaps
processes similar to those identified by Kirk Dombrowski (Against
Culture: Development, Politics and Religion in Indian Alaska) among
neighbouring Alaskan Native communities were at play. There, apparently,
Christianity was sometimes used by formerly disadvantaged members of the
community to work “against culture.” Additionally, it might also
have been useful, if only to suggest how the Tsimshian were or were not
unique, to have drawn some comparisons with the extensively documented
history of Christian-Native syncretism among the Salish of Puget Sound
as revealed through the rise of the contemporaneous Indian Shaker
Church.

These quibbles aside, Neylan’s contribution is significant, and her
book deserves to be on the shelf of anyone studying North American
Native–newcomer history or religious history.