Christianity, Missionaries and Plains Cree Politics, 1850s–1870s

--Description taken from "Christianity, Missionaries and Plains Cree Politics, 1850s–1870s"-- Beginning in the 1990s, much of the historiography of missionary-Indigenous interaction in 19th-century Canada and the British Empire has explored how Indigenous leaders made very active and conscious use of the missionaries and Christianity in the framing and shaping of their politics, particularly in their political interactions with the colonial state.1 This interpretive shift represented a revision of older histories that had tended to ignore Indigenous agency in the history of encounters with missionaries, and instead either uncritically celebrated, or categorically condemned, missionaries for their ability to shape and assimilate Indigenous societies into Christian-European cultural frameworks.2 While there is no consensus in this revisionist approach about how Indigenous communities used Christianity on their own terms, most scholars would now agree with what Elizabeth Elbourne, in her study of the Six Nations, argues: that Indigenous communities and leaders were able to "manage" missionaries and Christianity in ways that mitigated the pressures of colonialism and assimilationist policies, and were even sometimes beneficial to leaders and communities.3