Franciscans and American Indians in Pan-borderlands Perspective

Adaptation, Negotiation, and Resistance

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2835344
AutoresSean F Mcenroe (Southern Oregon University, autor correspondente)
Ano2019
Volume99
Fascículo4
Páginas721-723
Data de publicação2019-11-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-7787197
OpenAlexW2982667322
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6

Franciscans and American Indians in Pan-borderlands Perspective is a valuable and complex collection of essays by writers from a wide range of fields and specialties. Edited by Jeffrey M. Burns, director of the Academy of American Franciscan History, and Timothy J. Johnson, a well-known scholar of Saint Francis and the Franciscan order, this collection is shaped by the expertise of church historians but is not heavily focused on theological questions or on the order itself. Rather, the collection is a study of the cultural encounters occasioned by missionary activities and mission spaces. The volume has its roots in a 2014 conference on the Franciscan borderlands held at Flagler College, and its essays—which are much more than just brushed-up conference papers—continue the dialogue among the participants. The book's 20 chapters are compact, clearly written, and nicely contextualized by an accessible and thought-provoking introduction.Many of modern scholars' interests in missionary frontiers are inspired by questions raised early in the twentieth century by US frontier historians. Franciscans and American Indians in Pan-borderlands Perspective employs a vastly expanded set of methods to chip away at these persistent questions, drawing on archaeology, art and architectural history, linguistics, and cultural geography. Yet, the concentration of topics by culture and region remains distinctly Boltonian: Florida, California, and New Mexico dominate the book, though a few thought-provoking chapters explore other parts of the Americas. Mark Christensen's piece on colonial-era Maya texts and Constanza Ceruti's on native Andean religious leadership provide glimpses of very different indigenous environments. Helmut Flachenecker's chapter explores broad comparisons among Franciscan missions in Ireland, along the Silk Road, and in New France. Gert Melville, in an effort to reconstruct early native perspectives on missionaries, mines well-known early sources from the Caribbean and South America. The balance of Franciscans and American Indians in Pan-borderlands Perspective treats North America.It is difficult to do justice to the book's enormous amount of regional and site-specific scholarship on the traditional Boltonian borderlands. David Hurst Thomas's opening chapter introduces Franciscan frontiers in California, New Mexico, and Florida, offering a good starting point for the narrower studies that follow. Five chapters treat the Mocama, Guale, and Yamasee zone of today's Florida and Georgia. George Aaron Broadwell and Timothy J. Johnson both use pastoral writings to explore Franciscans' early relationships with Timucuan peoples in Florida. Johnson analyzes the writings of Fray Francisco de Pareja in relation to European print culture and New World linguistic frontiers. Broadwell uses word counts of Timucuan confession manuals and catechisms to identify unnamed indigenous coauthors who helped missionaries to produce native-language materials.A cluster of chapters reveals the native economies and native diplomatic systems that surrounded Franciscan missions in Florida and Georgia. Denise Bossy's and Elliot Blair's chapters use documentary records such as visitas to understand migration and subsistence in relation to missionary aims of congregación and reducción. The Bossy chapter is especially impressive in its reconstruction of native diplomatic systems, helping us to more fully grasp environments in which Franciscans operated within rather than apart from indigenous politics. A chapter by Keith Ashley based on excavations at Santa Cruz de Guadalquini, along with one coauthored by Richard Jefferies and Christopher Moore on Sapelo Island sites, demonstrates how the mixed methods of historical archaeology may be used to greatest advantage. Gathering physical and textual evidence on fortification, cultivation, and the exchange of goods, these scholars are able to confirm or call into question common written narratives of diplomacy, settlement, and acculturation. Matthew Liebmann's essay on Franciscan sites in New Mexico's Jemez Valley is more synthetic in its approach but equally attentive to the opportunities for correlating discoveries in neighboring scholarly fields. He draws on documentary history and archaeology to show how Franciscans responded to Pueblo rebellions with changes to their mission architecture and pastoral practices.This volume's California studies favor archaeological methods. Kent Lightfoot, an influential scholar in the field, contributes a think piece on local geography that categorizes sites of cultural exchange based on landscape and “soundscape” at small scales of distance. Chapters by Lee Panich and Tsim D. Schneider explore some of the same questions through their analysis of archaeological excavations in northern and southern California. Their work correlates documentary records with data on burial, residence, and the distribution of trade goods to reconstruct cultural and economic relationships among mission populations, seasonal residents, and nonresident Indians. We are left with a clearer picture of early California frontiers in which soft boundaries between colonial and native spaces left room for physical mobility and selective cultural appropriation.Most of the chapters in this volume are based on traditional academic research and are written for an academic audience. In several cases, though, the book experiments with a broader range of offerings. Stephanie Righetti-Templer's chapter on dialogues between Franciscan missionaries is shaped by modern notions about theology and cultural identity. Marie Christine Duggan's piece on California immerses itself in our contemporary dialogues about slavery and freedom to consider how mission labor should be represented in secondary education. A chapter coauthored by Thomas Sheridan and Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa presents today's politically informed memories of the Hopi past in relation to the documentary history of colonial New Mexico. Not all these chapters will satisfy the expectations of academic readers focused on clear empirical rules and the notion of significant academic findings. But the inclusion of these chapters offers other benefits to the reader, among them a chance to think long and hard about the interaction between our scholarship on the past and our cultural experience in the present. The issue is addressed explicitly in the writing of Andrew Galvan and Vincent Medina, who describe their deliberations about how best to commemorate and contextualize Indian burials at missions that have become important sites for public history.Finally, the book includes the personal voices of living Franciscans Theresa Chato and Blane Grein, who live and work in Navajo communities. Scholars of Native American history have long cautioned us against the trap of terminal narratives. The inclusion of contemporary Franciscan voices in these chapters reminds us that the same lesson applies to the study of a living and evolving religious order. The stories of both Native Americans and Franciscans continue hand in hand down to the present

Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Creole language · Environmental ethics · Frontier · Maya · Negotiation · Order (exchange) · Resistance (ecology) · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Archaeology and Natural History · Classics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy