Indigenous Peoples and Christianity

The momentous encounter of Europeans and Indigenous peoples had shattering consequences for the worldview and identity of both groups. The encounters raised a host of existential questions that seemed to demonstrate the inadequacy of each culture's traditional religious models of the world. This course explores the effects of contact from early 17th-centruy encounters in Canada and North America into the residential schools of the 19th and 20th centuries. The course explores the effects of contact: contrasting prescriptive Christian ideals of conversion with the descriptive reality of mutual change and influence.