Missions, missionaries, and Native Americans
Subtitle: long-term processes and daily practices
By: Maria F. Wade.
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Gainesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 301
ISBN-13: 9780813032801
Subjects: Indians of North America -- Missions -- History; Indians of North America -- Social life and customs; Indians of North America -- Religion; Franciscans -- Missions -- North America -- History; Jesuits -- Missions -- North America -- History; Missions, Spanish -- North America -- History; Culture conflict -- North America -- History; Christianity and culture -- North America -- History; North America -- Religious life and customs; Spain -- Colonies -- America -- History
Description: "Missions are memory sites for many descendants of colonial populations and for colonized Native Americans. As such, Spanish missions enshrine complex and contested memories for those whose long-term histories are implicated in the process of mission-building and conversion. From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Spanish missionaries traveled to America to convert Native Americans to Catholicism. Here, Franciscan and Jesuit dogma often conflicted with the pragmatic issues of the survival of both secular and missionary settlements. With cogent analysis of archaeological records, Maria F. Wade addresses the long-term processes of development of the mission as an institution in Florida, northern Mexico, Texas, and southwest California." "The missionaries who traveled to New Spain were prepared to wage a battle against evil. They had honed their conversion skills in the trials of the Inquisition against heresy, witchcraft, and on the tribulations of the Europeans afflicted with disease, poverty, and famine. The four geographic areas studied here represent stages (early, middle, and late) in the approach to conversion, all of which were influenced by Hapsburg and Bourbon political and military objectives. Vital to their efforts was the definition of the boundaries between good and evil, a demarcation that engendered conflict and proved a particularly trying point of conversion. Missionaries working in these regions generally encountered Native spiritual practices that did not fit idolatrous definitions. Thus, under the pressures of duty to God and country, these missionaries came to feel trapped by the very system they created." "Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans provides in-depth information on varied missionary ambitions and native peoples' responses to evangelization and conversion, with an ethnohistorical and archaeological perspective on the structure and daily activities of early mission life."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: pt. 1. Good and evil : a battleground; title: The religious and the spiritual : Europe and the Americas; title: The Franciscans : men of the cloth; title: The Jesuits : diversity of spirits; title: pt. 2. Southern Florida : Jesuits and Franciscans; title: Northeastern Mexico : Franciscans and Jesuits; title: Texas : the Franciscans and their method; title: Baja California : Jesuits and Franciscans; title: Alta California : Franciscans; title: Daily schedules and yearly calendars; title: pt. 3. The city of God : religious practices; title: The city of man : economic practices; title: Conclusion: A summa of many parts.