How Do You Say “God” in Dakota?

Numen ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Siems
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
White American ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Translation Errors

AbstractThis essay explores some of the interpretive problems posed by the missionary work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions among Minnesota's Dakota Indians in the mid-nineteenth century. Since “success” in conversion has often been defined largely in terms of Native American assimilation to white American societal norms, I argue that the Dakotas' acceptance of a Christianity that was preached to them in their own language poses a problem for understanding what “conversion” meant in this case. The difficulty of knowing what Christianity meant to the Dakotas, a difficulty I see as rooted in the problems attendant upon translation, can be illustrated by showing how distorted some of the missionaries' translations of Dakota religious ideas into English were. Their translation errors took two forms: the postulation of a similarity in reference between Dakota and English terms where it did not exist (as with the English words “god” and “spirit” and what the missionaries identified as their Dakota counterparts), or, conversely, the heightening of differences between Dakota and Protestant Christian religiosity (an effect achieved by associating Dakota terms with English pejoratives). I argue that what unites these two differing types of distortive translations is the missionaries' failure to understand the conceptual universe, or “deep structure”, underlying the Dakota language. And since they failed to perceive the holistic character of this conceptual system, the missionaries may have concluded that they had effected conversions among the Dakotas when they had only scratched the surface of Dakota religiosity.

Herman Melville’s Politics of Imperialism: Colonizing and De-Colonizing Spaces of Ethnicity

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel A. Blumenthal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
White American ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
The One

There is, in Herman Melville’s works, a constant struggle to situate the narrative within the context of a racial and ethnic “Other.” Melville’s narrators—almost invariably white, Euro-American males—appear at times in tense opposition to, and at other times in social harmony with, the African, Native American, Polynesian, and Oriental presences in his texts. In essence, Melville situates these non-white characters against the dominantly-raced narrator as racial “Others.” This ethnic “othering” entails a dangerous politics of racial separation, hierarchizing, and colonization, yet simultaneously allows for and even encourages a social critique of nineteenth-century white American imperialist attitudes toward non-white peoples. Indeed, this is what makes Melville such a difficult figure to decipher both literarily and historically. By marking these races as alien and “other,” indeed by striving to “mark” them at all, Melville at once conducts a constructive anthropological study as well as sets the destructive foundation for a race-driven, American imperialist project aimed at alienated and “othered” races. Indeed, Melville constructs for his readership a difficult paradox; his texts on the one hand call for white intervention and colonization of ethnic and racial spaces, and on the other, they illuminate the counter-productivity of such colonization. What, then, was Melville’s relationship to the ongoing imperialist project of nineteenth-century America? To reach an answer to this question we will examine Melville’s political relationship to two Pacific Ocean land groups (the Marquesan Islands and the Sandwich Islands), establish a pattern to his paradoxical imperialist and anti-imperialist philosophies, and finally, construct a model of his international, inter-ethnic political philosophy.

scholarly journals On the Edge of the Civilized World: Cyrus Hamlin and the American Missionary Work in Turkey

Belleten ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 68 (253) ◽  
pp. 671-686
Author(s):  
Himmet Umunç
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
The City ◽  
Civilized World

When the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions appointed Cyrus Hamlin to Istanbul as a missionary, his immediate reaction was one of enthusiasm and joy but his rooted perception of the city was that it was a place "on the borders of civilization." However, the main concern of this paper is to decribe Hamlin's philanthropic achievements as a missionary educator both with reference to the modern theory of philanthropy and within the historical context of the American missionary work in Turkey in the nineteenth century.

A Study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn with reference to Indian Genocide

IJOHMN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
V. Padmanaban
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Native American Studies ◽  
American Government ◽  
White American ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The People ◽  
Indigenous Lands ◽  
Westward Movement ◽  
Wounded Knee

This work is a study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn who is proficient scholar and hails from South Dakotas and Sioux nations and their turmoil, anguish and lamentation to retrieve their lands and preserve their culture and race. Many a aboriginals were killed in the post colonization. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn grieves and her lamentation for the people of Dakotas yields sympathy towards the survived at Wounded Knee massacre and the great exploitation of the livelihood of the indigenous people and the cruelty of American Federal government. Treaty conserved indigenous lands had been lost due to the title of Sioux Nation and many Dakotas and Dakotas had been forced off from their homelands due to the anti-Indian legislation, poverty and federal Indian – white American policy. The whites had no more regard for or perceiving the native’s peoples’ culture and political status as considered by Jefferson’s epoch. And to collect bones and Indian words, delayed justice all these issues tempt her to write. The authors accuses that America was in ignorance and racism and imperialism which was prevalent in the westward movement. The natives want to recall their struggles, and their futures filled with uncertainty by the reality and losses by the white and Indian life in America which had undergone deliberate diminishment by the American government sparks the writer to back for the indigenous peoples. This multifaceted study links American study with Native American studies. This research brings to highlight the unchangeable scenario of the Native American who is in the bonds of as American further this research scrutinizes Elizabeth’s diplomacy and legalized decolonization theory which reflects in her literature career and her works but defies to her own doctrines.

Mid-Nineteenth Century New England Women in Evangelical Foreign Missions: Seraphina Haynes Everett, A Missionary Wife in The Ottoman Mission Field

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Melike Tokay-Ünal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Women’S Perceptions ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Mission Field ◽  
Journal Entries

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.

Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura T. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
First Person ◽  
White American ◽  
Political Turn

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

‘Missionary Regiments for Immanuel’s Service’: Juvenile Missionary Organization in English Sunday Schools, 1841-1865

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 391-403
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
The Church ◽  
School Movement

Juvenile associations in aid of foreign missions made their appearance both in the Church of England and in the Nonconformist churches in the wake of the successful campaign in 1813 to modify the East India Company charter in order to open British India to evangelical missionary work. The fervour which the campaign engendered led to the formation of numerous local associations in support of the missionary societies. In some cases these associations had juvenile branches attached. However, until the 1840s children’s activity in aid of foreign missions was relatively sporadic. Children’s missionary literature was almost non-existent. Such children’s missionary activity as did take place was confined largely to the children of church and chapel congregations; before the 1840s there was little perception of the vast potential for missionary purposes of the Sunday-school movement.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document