The Heavens are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. By Susan Neylan. (Native & Northern Series 31. Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003, $ 76,00. Pp. xvii + 401, ill., photographs, diagrams, maps, ISBN 0-7735-2327-8, cloth.)

The Tsimshian have lived at the West coast and Skeena and Nass drainages of northern British Columbia long enough to develop a distinctive expression of West Coast culture and to enrich that expression from traditions transmitted by other natives. The traditional heart of the Tsimshian way was the development of the self. The ancestral kin of aristocrats encountered supernatural figures, as myths described and rituals portrayed: in this way, Chiefs received status and power. Individuals of any class, visited by vision and trials of the spirit, might actively achieve a Shaman’s vision, status and power to heal. A complex of danced rites, some acquired as the ideas that embodied them travelled from the South, provided means for those who could afford to mount them to pass through public, programmed transformations with supernatural aid, personified by supporting dancers. This novel compression of the earlier modes was not like the chiefly rites, defined by class, inheritance or a passive role in process; nor, like shamanistic initiation, was it private, idiosyncratic in form, or requiring the isolated action of the protagonist. Thus the Tsimshian valued and pursued spiritual power. Spiritual power related, of course, to social power, and it was conferred and recognized — imagined — by the whole community. To the Tsimshian came bizarre strangers with puzzling ideologies, and a daunting conviction of their own personal and cultural superiority. The chief ideologues were Christian missionaries, whose ideas were laden with complexities not obvious to all those who brought them: complexities not only of the original religious structures, but of millennia of theological controversy, Hellenistic conceptual terminology squeezed into first Latin, then modern linguistic paradigms; of wonder stories, wisdom, profound ethical challenges, luminous mystic vision; of grim patriarchy and vicious when not murderous lust for political power, even empire. The stiff-necked Victorian missionaries did not experience all these consciously, but they were shaped by them regardless, and the lusts of empire were there in plain view. These strangers came to stay. Susan Neylan’s thesis examines historical elements and processes of the resulting interaction, and aims to interpret the relations of the two societies unswayed by romanticized views of the supposed superior merits of either culture. The missionaries in their time saw themselves as the champions of light; they are vilified in ours as the pimps of empire. The Natives saw themselves as the people of the land; they were conflated by the newcomers into noble savages, or scorned as feeble and quislings. Neylan argues for a far more subtle view. The missionaries arrived, confident in their spiritual aims and authority. The Natives, correctly perceiving these issues would not evaporate, relied upon their own potent tradition and its heritage of adaptation to integrate the new spirituality by aligning it with their own perceptions and values. Thus they translated the powerful Euro-Canadian message into applications that the Tsimshian knew, to rectify and equalize the necessary interface. Christian history abounds with such interactions, usually damaging; it does not surprise us that conflict arose. But in this West Coast context, the surprise is rather that the two traditions shared enough in common concepts that the Tsimshian were able to imagine themselves into adaptive roles (and, too rarely, the missionaries sometimes broke through to positive understanding of their clients). The ideological similarities had components of historic transmission or of psychological archetypes or of cerebral hardwiring; or of who-knows-what: these are not the concern, but rather the question of the process the two spiritualities underwent. Neylan points out that two eventualities may occur: Reproduction, in which one ideology replaces another (much as a virus rewrites genetic code); or Transposition, …