In this overview of the earliest Jesuit missions to indigenous peoples throughout the colonial Americas, Cushner conceives of the Jesuits as the actors, and the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas as those acted upon. His assertion is that “in the encounter or collision of Christianity with Native American religions … Christianity prevailed” (4), and that “the purpose of this book is to explain and interpret how one belief system replaces another” (3). In his introduction, three interpretive themes are presented: coercion, the devil, and agriculturalist versus hunter-gatherer. These themes are not taken up again until the book's conclusion.
The first chapter, “Two Worlds Meet,” briefly summarizes Native cultural attitudes and religious orientations and goes on to describe, in greater detail, European cultural values in general and Jesuit worldviews and strategies in particular. The following chapter focuses on encounters between the Jesuits and the Calusa of Florida. The next chapter provides an overview of various Jesuit missions in Sinaloa, Mexico, from 1594 through the 1620s. As the book's central concern is missions and missionaries, the Spanish chapters overlook Native resistance movements and fail to attend to the hybridities that emerged from these colonial contexts. Acaxee, Yaqui, Mayo—the names of these nations never appear in the book, as all native groups are subsumed into the European category of “Indians.”
After a brief transition titled “Conquest, Pacification, and Conversion,” the subsequent chapters focus on the Jesuit missions established among the Aymara at Juli in Peru, and the establishment of reducciónes for the resettlement of the Guarani in Paraguay. A chapter titled “Art, Architecture, and Theatre” compares and contrasts Jesuit structures in Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Paraguay. The two final chapters focus on Jesuit missions in New France and in Maryland.
The author's greater comfort with the history of Spanish colonialism and his comparative lack of familiarity with the French colonial context is signaled in the first few pages of the book, wherein the Wendat (Huron) “Feast of the Dead” is repeatedly misidentified as the “Day of the Dead.” The two chapters on New France and Maryland are thus, predictably, the weakest portions of the book and reflect a lack of expertise in these areas. It is also here that the author's disengagement from current scholarship becomes most apparent, as he relies on Elizabeth Tooker's oldest works (from 1964 and 1979) for the bulk of his data. Important contributions to scholarship on early Jesuit missions to New France, such as those by Delâge, Pomedli, and Steckley, do not appear in the bibliography.
It is the author's lack of engagement with current scholarship on the concept of conversion in the Americas that most seriously compromises this book's potential for use in the classroom. For example, there is no acknowledgment of Kenneth Morrison's most current work. It could be argued that an oversimplification of the complexities of colonial encounters between Jesuit missionaries and indigenous peoples made the histories of these encounters more accessible to a general readership. However, this strategy ultimately does a disservice to all, and to the material under study.
