Abstract
This is an ethnography by a recently trained and already established Canadian anthropologist. Firmly rooted in the “Americanist” tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, it is also self-reflexive and highly interdisciplinary. Thus, the stated primary purpose is to document the author’s interactions, from 2004 to 2016, with members of two linked communities of approximately 800 Cree speakers in Trout Lake and Peerless Lake, roughly midway between the Peace and Athabasca Rivers, in northern Alberta. However, it is also a historical work (including two dedicated historical chapters), and further displays the author’s involvement in the well-established multi-disciplinary network of “Algonquianists” (with two partial chapters already published in Papers of the Algonquian Conference; two other chapters have been tested in Anthropologica). Finally, methodologically the book is heavily oriented towards discourse analysis, which means that the approach to contemporary Cree religion is largely uncomplicated by awkward philosophical or political questions – say, about lines dividing religion from other categories such as “spirituality” or “medicine.” Instead, religion is approached as linguistic and otherwise performative social practice.
So, what does this book have to say to scholars of religion? The answer is: plenty. For one thing, it doesn’t get caught up (as above) in fruitless discussions about lines dividing religion proper from culture, ethnicity, and so forth. Furthermore, while acknowledging the importance of the transformation of material conditions in northern Alberta in the last half-century, the author studiously avoids what religionists commonly decry as “reductionism.” Thus, the author explicitly rejects easy equations of the allure of highly participatory and affective religion (in this case, Pentecostal Christianity) with the motive of psychic escape from chronic poverty and immiseration. Yet, the author also integrates the advent of resource extraction, and especially automobile-friendly roads, into his account of the co-transformation of missionary Christianity and Cree lifeways over more than a century. Thus, in a spot-on adaptation of E.P. Thompson’s famous Marxian rediscovery of “agency,” the author concludes: “Cree Pentecostals were present at their own making” (288). This signals that this is not yet another under-theorized description of (an)other religion. Indeed, the author’s self-positioning is at once carefully “-etic” and critical (i.e., properly social scientific), as well as sympathetic and humane (i.e., “humanistic” in the old-fashioned sense). Certainly, it is not the work of an advocate or wannabe. Indeed, his main conclusions (see below) may well irritate both “neo-traditionalists” within the two communities (since 2010 usually known collectively as Peerless Trout First Nation, PTFN), who reject all Christianity as alien to authentically Cree ways, as well as Pentecostals in PTFN, who deny the legitimacy of any influence other than that of Holy Spirit in their new, post-conversion lives. Nevertheless, the author states his conclusions loudly and clearly, especially via his notion of “transformative continuities”: in PTFN Pentecostal Christianity is Cree (and, statistically, a great majority of local Cree are Pentecostal Christians). Thus, the gradual and complex historical processes described here do not mark the disruption of anything like a Cree tradition otherwise un-involved with Christianity; nor is this a simply fable of instantaneous conversion and sudden culture loss.
In support of his arguments the author presents a wide range of data from both fieldwork as well as from published Cree sources. In addition, the author plumbs the depths of accounts by local missionaries as well as the holdings of several missionary church archives, from which he has extracted not just textual sources but also the occasional arresting photographic image. Here it must be remarked, however, that the image detail on the cover has been combined with the book’s title (possibly by the publisher rather than the author) in a way that is somewhat misleading. Elsewhere, the author explains the 1939 photograph as depicting a traditional practitioner named Cutwing and his wife, which suggests that the cruciform symbol on his drum is unlikely to be a cross communicating Christian identity. In any case, the data are arrayed in five substantive chapters, two of which cover the historical particularities of Christian missions when PTFN was still very remote, far from major regional waterways and before resource road building. The transition from the “ambulatory” missions of both Anglicans and Catholics (esp. Fr. Roger Vandersteene, O.M.I., who was based in Wabasca, many hundred kilometers away) to the influence of resident evangelical missionaries from the Christian and Missionary Alliance (esp. the couple Clarence and Ruth Jaycox), marked a denominational shift coinciding with Cree concentration and settlement into villages at Trout Lake and Peerless Lake. These two historical chapters set up three chapters more directly reliant on the author’s own participant-observer fieldwork, addressing the most recent situation following a second denominational shift from North American evangelical Christianity to a Pentecostal practice that is local and Cree. One of Westman's main conclusions is that is it this, the third wave of Christianity, which has been most effective (or, by some measures, “successful”) in the lives of local Cree people. Although missionary predecessors, especially Vandersteene and the Jaycoxes, made great efforts to learn Cree, and although Vandersteene, especially, is recognized for his efforts to produce a Catholic Christianity that was significantly adapted to Cree culture (well before Vatican II, it should be noted), Pentecostal Christianity alone can be understood, according to the author, to be authentically Cree and fully “indigenized.” This means that Cree is now not only the preferred language of praise leadership and worship, but the only fully acceptable one. This means that the “spiritual gifts” of Pentecostalism are prized in equal measure with skillfulness in both musical performance and verbal arts, each highly valued in Cree culture. This means that many practical needs met by established local churches—say, in terms of recovery and therapy—are less helpful in accounting for the broad appeal of Pentecostalism in these communities than what other scholars of Christian indigenization commonly call the “good fit.” That is, Pentecostal Christianity supplies values and practices already addressed in non-Christian Cree culture: leadership by spiritual adepts, embodied rituals/ecstatic practice, world enchantment, and healing as-spiritual warfare with malign spirits. These are things, moreover, that were largely unattainable through participation with either mainline Anglican and Catholic or evangelical Christianities in earlier phases of missionary effort. Thus, of course, the transformations of Pentecostalism also mark a continuity in – or perhaps even a repair to—the traditions of the PTFN Cree.
In sum, this is a rich study, and its length is certainly warranted. Like many monographs it grew out of a PhD dissertation. Unlike many dissertations-turned-books, however, it appears to have first ripened over time and then been transformed with focus and determination, during the enforced isolation of COVID-19 lockdown. The result is stylistically coherent and better in all respects than the average published PhD dissertation. The high quality of this work has also been recognized by the University of Nebraska Press, long a leading publisher in this area. On the downside, however, I was irritated by overuse of some terms with little analytical or explanatory purchase (e.g., polysemic), culminating in that most tired analogy to jazz improvisation to capture agentive participation in creative innovation within rigid constraints (although, here, at least, it was deployed by somebody who clearly knows something about music).
Finally, having already noted its many interdisciplinary qualities, it might seem mean to remark on what this book did not address, or what is not to found in the wide-ranging bibliography. Yet, religionists, and those immersed in the sub-fields of Christian or Pentecostal studies in particular, may be surprised at the near absence of feminist perspectives on Pentecostal conversion (there are many). Indeed, it may be the case that the author was simply not oriented to the burgeoning field of global Christian or global Pentecostal studies (though he is clearly attuned to studies of other indigenous North American Pentecostal movements). This field is really split into two parts, one treating migrant communities and the mobility of Pentecostalism, and the other, treating indigenous communities and the particular dynamics of indigenized Pentecostalism. Here, it would have been nice to know what the author thinks of conceptual work by colleagues working in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. After all, though the Cree Christianity of PTFN is fully indigenized and demonstrably local in many respects, the people of Peerless Lake and Trout Lake now also share a variety of religion with nearly one fifth of global Christians.