The broad thesis of this project is that Native American Christians possessed and exercised power in the conversion process. This power implies some degree of agency. This thesis is held in contradistinction to conventional wisdom which asserts that Native Americans were passive victims of missionary and colonialist agendas for assimilation, of which, significantly, the Christian enterprise and preaching in particular were centerpieces. In the historiography surrounding Native American history, becoming Christian was tantamount to no longer being Indian. Native peoples who were part of the church were defined by what they were not: not quite Indian, not quite Christian, not quite white. Because agency in the conversion process was denied them it was easy for popular and academic cultures to imagine the Indian as “mute” or, worse, when engaged in Christian witness, merely aping missionary and colonialist rhetoric from previous centuries.

This project, along with others in the fields of cultural anthropology and theology, revisits and revises this rather too simple thesis. By engaging in a thick description of Indian Christians and the contextual settings in which they preached one discovers Native American clergy and preaching elders refashioning the gospel in ways that are to be contrasted with the messenger culture’s gospel of assimilation. The methodology employed in making this argument is related to Tillich’s correlational approach to theology and, more recently, David Tracy’s revised critical correlational method. Out of this tradition, Don Browning speaks of a thick description of practice that funds new horizons of theological meaning. In other words, practice is not the receptacle into which theory drops its wares, but it is, instead, generative. In this vein it is argued that the oral-aural cultures of indigenous peoples refashioned the gospel in ways that subverted, contested, and accommodated a gospel preached through the “technologies of distance” employed by colonizing powers. In contrast to the colonizers and missionaries, Native American Christian witness embodied values of immediacy over distance, community over radical autonomy, folk wisdom over formal erudition. These characteristic traits may be discerned in the primarily oral-aural cultures that continue to shape the distinctive witness of Indian Christian communities throughout North America and Alaska.

The Indian Christian voice, if attended to seriously, has the potential to reshape not only our experience of the gospel but also the seminary itself. Seminaries continue the legacy of the Euro-American assimilationist agenda where Native American students are told to leave their cultures at the door. As such, the Indian Christian witness challenges mainstream theological education, which is all but enslaved to technologies of distance, with the culturally and doctrinally significant oral-aural environment of proclamation, the central act in Reformed worship