Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

This well-organized, well-written, and well-illustrated collection is
divided into three parts. The first part, “Home Fields,” focuses on
missionaries and converts in Western Canada and the Arctic. Part 2,
“Over the Seas and Far Away,” spotlights missionary activity in East
Asia, India, and Africa. Part 3, “Bringing It All Back Home,” views
missionary work from an anthropological/archaeological perspective.
While abroad, missionaries gathered local artifacts, in part to use as a
hook in their fundraising appeals back home, but more often at the
request of local museums that wished to build their collections. Part 3,
incidentally, is the only section in which Roman Catholic missionaries
have a presence.

I was particularly struck by Linfu Dong’s essay, “Finding God in
Ancient China: James Mellon Menzies, Sinology, and Mission Policies.”
With better professional training than his peers, Menzies desired most
of all to preserve for the Chinese the artifacts he found in China.
After being evacuated in the midst of civil war, he returned to North
Henan only to discover that his collection of over 5,000 books had been
wilfully destroyed and that, even worse, the artifacts that he had spent
his life collecting had been smashed to bits around them.

All 12 essays in the book were written by scholars, many from different
academic disciplines. The editors have provided meticulous
cross-references throughout the collection so that readers may
appreciate that each essay is part of a greater whole. In so doing,
Austin and Scott have avoided the pitfalls associated with an edited
collection, and have in fact presented us with a book that is a model of
its kind.