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. ii 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. iii 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 iv 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 v 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. 1 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). 2 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.