The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. By Susan Neylan. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Pp.xvii + 401, ISBN 0-7735-2573-4)

In a broad sense, the purpose of Susan Neylan’s study of Protestant Christian missions “in their first generation on the North Pacific Coast of British Columbia (1857-1901)” and her specific focus on “Native roles in Christianization” (5) is to challenge the often superficial dichotomies that inform much scholarship in the field of Aboriginal studies. More specifically, Neylan attempts to detract from a Euro-Canadian focus on Aboriginal victimization: focusing on “the discourses of conversion and of Native Christianity” (9) and on “the religious ‘middlemen’” (15), Neylan concludes that “broadening our understanding of Tsimshian Christianity is important to our knowledge of Canadian cultural and religious history” as “too little emphasis has been given to Aboriginal contributions to the Christian experience” (271). Recognizing nineteenth-century Tsimshian Christians as active proponents in a cultural/religious exchange, Neylan challenges the language of much post-colonial discourse and the ideologies upon which it is dependent, an awareness she underscores in her introduction: “Because much of the documentary record replicates the creation of ‘other’, objectification, and (mis-)representation, historians have, often inadvertently, perpetuated the process [of colonization] by building their historical interpretations based on Euro-Canadian records alone” (5). The book has nine chapters. “The Spiritual Dimensions of Tsimshian Culture” deconstructs the notion that “Euro-Canadian missionaries converted First Nations to Christianity without Native participation in the process” (27). Though Neylan does not note, as do a number of Aboriginal scholars and spokespeople, that many Aboriginal nations were ecumenical before Christianity was introduced in North America (Métis author Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians, published in 1969, deserves worthy mention), she provocatively suggests that “the significance of transformation and of experiential forms of spirituality… predisposed Tsimshian towards certain aspects of Protestantism, not because they were ‘new’ but because they were familiar” (28). Moreover, she convincingly argues that “Christianity was not received for it religious messages alone” (44), positing that Christianity was, in fact, astutely used for Tsimshian financial and cultural advancement. “‘Driftwood’ on Their Shores and the Mission to Convert” is “a survey of the patterns of Christian missionization on the North Coast of British Columbia” (45), and the strength of this chapter is that it enters a new question into scholarship. Neylan suggests that the focus should not be whether or not the Tsimshian became Christians but whether conversion “represent[s] a replacement of Native religions at all” (64). “Proselytizing from within: The Native Christian and Catechist” problematizes the rhetoric of historical interpretation and traces the latter’s emphasis on the utterly transformed Tsimshian Christian to Euro-Canadian conceptualizations, thereby implicitly suggesting the worth of relying on Aboriginal records (as Neylan does) to interpret history. “‘Until the Gospel Came and Lifted Her’: Perspectives on Christian Native Women and Families” “examines how this missionary imposition influenced Tsimshian women who converted to Christianity” (105) in a manner different than it influenced Tsimshian men; Neylan concludes that Christianity, in fact, “offered women new ways to maintain and expand pre-existing roles within their communities” (106) while, at the same time, conceptualizing women “according to Victorian models of femininity and domestic and maternal duty” (106). Native men “were primarily recognized for what they did as mission workers” (106). “Native Missionaries” and “The Self-reflections of Arthur Wellington Clah” are paired chapters “exploring missionization from the Native perspective through some of the textual sources they produced” (129). The first focuses significantly on “Tsimshian Christians [who] often inverted the images and metaphors of this hegemonic script, using it to critique the very missionaries who used it and the missionization process itself” (128-29); the second, an examination of the journals of Arthur Wellington Clah, attempts to assess literary tropes …