“Boil them Hearts”

Introduction

This paper, in conversation with scholarship on Protestant missions, the Methodist mission in particular, to the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia in the second half of the nineteenth century, explores the role of Methodist revivalist piety in the conversion of some of Methodism’s first Indigenous evangelists. While Methodism was not the only Christian denomination on the coast during this period – the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (Catholic) and the Church Missionary Society (Anglican) were also active – my interest in Methodism lies in the relation of revivalist piety to a veritable burst of evangelical activity that was largely initiated and sustained by Methodism’s Indigenous lay missionaries. During the first two decades of the mission (the 1860s and 1870s), Methodism extended its reach into all of the larger Indigenous communities on the Northwest coast between Washington and Alaska. As some of the first converts to Methodism, and those most active in missionary work, were Ts’msyen, the Methodist–Ts’msyen relationship has been a focus of much of the scholarly pre-occupation with the Methodist mission to the north Pacific coast. One story that has transfixed the scholarly imagination concerns the invitation the Ts’msyen extended to the Methodists in 1874 to come to the community of Lax Kw’alaams (Fort Simpson and later Port Simpson), which was then one of the largest Ts’msyen settlements. A telling of that story is perhaps a good entrance into the scholarly conversation.

The Method Mission to the Northwest Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century

Methodism, or at least the first Methodist mission, arrived in the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia in 1859 – the year after the onset of the Fraser Gold Rush. The mission consisted of four missionaries from Upper Canada, and it was pitched to its Upper Canadian supporters as a mission to the miners and traders in the burgeoning gold fields and coal camps of the colonies as well as to the Indigenous peoples of what, from the viewpoint of the Upper Canadians, were the two colonies of Victoria and British Columbia (Robson, 1905: 6). Upon arrival at Victoria the missionaries began work at Nanaimo and Victoria on Vancouver Island and at Hope on the Fraser River (Semple, 1996). ¹ In 1869, they converted an abandoned saloon in Victoria into an Indigenous church. It was there that Diiks (also known by her English name Elizabeth Lawson) was converted to Methodism at a revival in the fall of 1872 (Crosby, 1914: 20). Diiks was a high ranking Ts’msyen, originally from Lax Kw’alaams and a member of the well-known chiefly lineage of Ligeexwas. She was first married to Felix Dudoward, a French Canadian tailor with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) at Fort Simpson, and later to Thomas Lawson, a Fort Simpson custom’s officer. After her second marriage she took the name Elizabeth Lawson and a job as a domestic servant in Victoria (Williams, 2006: 104). ² The year after Elizabeth’s conversion, her son Alfred, accompanied by his new wife Kate Dudoward (who, like Alfred, had a Ts’msyen mother of chiefly lineage and a Euro-Canadian father), arrived in Victoria. Shortly after their arrival they too converted to Methodism. Thus, according to Crosby (1914: 21), who opens his missionary reminiscences Up and Down the North Pacific Coast with the story of Elizabeth’s conversion, “she was the means of leading into the light.” In the late summer of 1873 the family of three, without Thomas, who if alive is not mentioned, travelled to the annual revival at Chilliwack, which was initiated in 1869 (British Colonist, 12 September 1872; Crosby, 1914: 22). The missionary Cornelius Bryant, in attendance at the revival, reported that at Chilliwack the three gave stirring accounts of their recent conversions at Victoria (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, November 1873: 333). After the revival, on the way back to Lax Kw’alaams, they visited Methodist headquarters in Victoria and requested that a missionary be sent to Lax Kw’alaams. William Pollard (chairman of the British Columbia District) was receptive to the request, but with no one available to send, he instructed Kate and Alfred to serve as class leaders until he could despatch a missionary. Early the next year, Pollard along with William Henry Pierce, translator and recent convert to Methodism, arrived to assess the situation (Crosby, 1914: 22). In April, Pollard appointed Charles Tate as temporary missionary and directed him to teach at the school and to hold religious services until the arrival of someone who could serve as a permanent missionary (Crosby, 1914: 22). Tate, assisted by Pierce, held the post through the summer until the arrival of Thomas and Emma Crosby in the fall of 1874 (Bolt, 1992: 40–41). The Crosbys remained missionaries at Lax Kw’alaams for a little more than the next two decades.

Conversations: Methodism on the Northwest Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century

In the Methodist tradition, the Dudowards’ invitation has been read as a “Macedonian Call” and the story has been retold by missionaries several times in routine fashion intending dramatic effect: the so-called heathen Dudowards arrived in Victoria in a War Canoe, hoping to fill it with alcohol for resale back home, but after an encounter with Alfred’s recently converted mother they allowed God into their hearts, were converted to evangelical Christianity, and left for Lax Kw’alaams prepared to spread the good news and to wait for the arrival of the Methodists (Tate, nd; Crobsy, 1907). Historians have since been critical of such a biased account and particularly suspicious of the alleged role of Methodism and Methodist missionaries in inspiring conversion. Recent scholarship has instead represented the role of Christianity in such narratives as a guise concealing more fundamental or at least non-religious reasons for conversion. The Dudowards, for example, claimed to convert not necessarily because they were drawn to Methodist religiosity, but because they perceived a Methodist missionary as a useful advocate and adviser, and/or because they were drawn to Christianity as a symbolic resource useful to augment or converge with their own religious prestige.

The mission and Ts’msyen historian Peggy Brock, British Columbia historian Jean Barman, and Indigenous education scholar Jan Hare, for example, draw attention to the Dudowards’ political motivations for conversion, suggesting they converted to amplify their elite prestige at Lax Kw’alaams and to benefit from close contact with a potential colonial liaison (Brock, 2011; Barman and Hare, 2006). ³ Brock (2000: 92) extends the insight to the Ts’msyen on the whole, suggesting that converts were attracted to Christianity because of religious prestige and also the material benefits that they hoped would follow from cooperating with missionaries who, it was surmised, enjoyed a privileged relationship with the colonial state. Brock’s claim makes a lot of sense in the historical context. Coastal peoples had decades of history with Christianity (or Christianities) prior to the arrival of the first missionaries (Redden, 2012); thus, the Methodist conversions in the late nineteenth century may have been less a conversion from Indigenous religiosity to Christianity, and more the swapping of one Christian affiliation with another or the amplification of one’s allegiance so as to secure a more beneficial arrangement. At the very least, converts would have been aware of the political and theological implications (advantages and disadvantages) of initiating or changing Christian affiliations. ⁴ Moreover, Lax Kw’alaams, the largest settlement north of Victoria at the time, had been without a missionary advocate since 1862 when the Anglican William Duncan left to establish nearby Metlakatla. In those twelve years – between the departure of Duncan and the arrival of Crosby – a lot had changed on the coast. As Cole Harris (2002) describes it, by the early 1870s, the period of mercantile colonialism, in which the Hudson’s Bay Company played so dominant a role, was coming to an end and the forces of industrial–settler colonialism were beginning to radically alter the geo-political landscape. Moreover, in 1871 the colony entered the Dominion of Canada and the province began a prolonged and much contested series of land claims negotiations with the Indigenous peoples of the province. The negotiations, or in many cases, as in the work of Commissioner Peter O’Reilly (Brealey, 1997/1998), boundary declarations made by the provincial government, were inseparable from a provincial effort not only to free land for colonial settlement, but also to advance the industrialization of the province’s natural resources, chiefly the agriculture, timber and salmon industries. The effort to dispossess Indigenous peoples resulted in not only the loss of land, but also loss of resources and access to them, as well as leading to the suppression of religious and cultural practices. Efforts on the part of Indigenous people to secure at least a more balanced treatment by the colonial state were vexed by the virtual absence of any substantial political force. However, during the mid-1870s Indigenous elites throughout the province did mobilize and at times acted cooperatively to address relations with the colonial state, and so it is sensible that the appeal to a missionary, who might intercede with the colonial state, was one aspect of that larger effort (Harris, 2002).

The historian of Protestant missions to the Northwest coast, Susan Neylan (2002: 130), in her treatment of conversion, is receptive to such politically strategic motivations for converting to Christianity, but is also concerned with the unique role played by Ts’msyen religiosity. With respect to the conversion of the Dudowards, for example, Neylan suggests that in the Ts’msyen setting, spiritual power was a clan prerogative and not an individual one, and so clan members inherited the powers and paraphernalia of clan heads whether or not they were personally enthused about it or thought it politically useful. ⁵ Thus, once Elizabeth, of chiefly pedigree, converted, all those in her clan were compelled to take up Methodism. ⁶ Moreover, clan acceptance of Christianity was eased, according to Neylan (2002: 131), because the Ts’msyen were curious about all matters spiritual and many “expressed a genuine spiritual fascination with evangelical Christianity.” The enthusiasm was further stoked by a curiosity about the apparent similarities between Christian and Ts’msyen ideas: for example, both religions devoted much elaboration to concepts of the afterlife, light and heaven (Neylan, 2005: 91–92; Neylan, 2002: 37–40). ⁷ Beyond Neylan’s more recent work, related interpretations that treat conversion to Methodism as motivated by both Ts’msyen religious and political concerns are advanced by Clarence Bolt and Michael Harkin. Bolt (1992), in his biography of Thomas Crosby, suggests that the Ts’msyen converted in order to acquire material goods, and expressed an interest in Christian ceremonial and musical life. Harkin (1993), focusing on Heiltsuk conversion to Methodism, argues that Methodism was attractive because it helped the Heiltsuk cope with political and physiological stresses associated with the intense colonial changes of the late nineteenth century. Lastly, Peggy Brock (2000: 90) also remarks that Christianity, an ideology exogenous to Ts’msyen knowledge, was expressed in Ts’msyen ways and reflected Ts'msyen concerns.

Whether an interest in Christianity and missionaries is explained in terms of strategic politics and/or in terms of religious convergence, neither angle seriously considers the influence that Christian religiosity, specifically the appeal of a novel and unique Methodist revivalist piety, might have had on the burst of Indigenous interest in evangelicalism from the 1870s through to the close of the century. While it is true the notion of religious convergence is more considerate of religious motivations for conversion, it is again important to keep in mind that by the 1870s Christianity had already a long presence in Ts’msyen communities. Christianity was doubtless present at Lax Kw’alaams as early as the founding of Fort Simpson in 1831. Employees of both the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Companies were known to introduce Christianity to their Indigenous trading partners, workmates, and wives (Redden, 2012; Podruchny, 2006). Moreover, after 1823, the officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company were required to give instruction in Christianity to the Indigenous peoples on whose lands trading posts were erected (Fleming, 1940: 230). There is also evidence that the Ts’msyen were introduced to Christianity even earlier, as early as the late eighteenth century, in the context of trade with peoples of the interior and through contacts with Spanish Catholic clergy. ⁸ By the time of the Methodist conversions, the two so-called religious systems (Ts’msyen and Christian) are already overlapped. In such a setting, convergence appears less a reason for conversion and more a description of the changing social field, making it, as an analytical concept, less attentive to the possibility of creative initiative and experimentation. Moreover, to suggest an overlap or convergence of religious systems – to assume it must have occurred at some point whether by way of convergence or by some other means – is to presume the existence of discrete religious cosmologies. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has cautioned against treating society as a closed system and the same can be extended to treatments of religion or religious systems. Strathern (1996: 50–51) writes “[t]o think of society as a thing is to think of it as a discrete entity. The theoretical task then becomes one of elucidating ‘the relationship’ between it and other entities. This is a mathematic, if you will, that sees the world as inherently divided into units. The significant corollary of this view is that relationships appear as extrinsic to such units: they appear as secondary ways of connecting things up.”

Strategic conversion and religious convergence exemplify what anthropologists Susan Harding (2000) and Joel Robbins (2007) have identified as the dominant view in scholarly treatments of conversion, in which conversion is explained not as a radical change initiated by supernatural convictions but in terms of more fundamental social or material conditions and/or continuity with past traditions. ⁹ In any event, my intention here is not to be critical of such interpretations as they are perfectly consistent with a long ethno-historical tradition that has emphasized exposing the ideological underpinnings of colonial texts and encouraging that they be read so as to illuminate Indigenous culture, religion, agency, motivations and concerns (Trigger, 1982).

Nineteenth Century Methodist Revivalist Piety

Inspired by Susan Harding’s (2000: 36) observation of contemporary evangelical conversion, that some convert because they “become convinced that supernatural reality is a fact,” and by Tanya Luhrmann’s (2012: 223) more recent claim made in the context of ethnographic work on American evangelicalism, that “people come to faith not just because they decide that the propositions are true, but because they experience God directly,” I am interested in the appeal of Methodism as an affective or devotional religiosity (a specific discursive and experiential orientation to some putative metaphysical reality) instantiated to a large degree in revivalist piety.

The Methodists introduced an enthusiastic Christianity to the coast through a revivalist piety that entailed religious revivals and an affective discourse that represented the converted as possessed of changed hearts and that encouraged the service of Indigenous teachers and evangelists (see Crosby, 1914: 48, 142, 172, 178, 236). While it is true that the Anglican William Duncan, who arrived in 1856 antedating the Methodists, was also an evangelical, he endeavoured to create a sober, predictable and industrious Christianity and did not countenance emotional outpourings, spontaneous or otherwise, of religious sentiment (Usher, 1974). In contrast to revivalist piety, he viewed the sacraments as an efficacious means of grace and configured God not as a figure that might descend to warm hearts but as being distant and hard-nosed. In 1877, while Duncan was away at Victoria, the newly arrived Anglican clergyman Alfred Hall started a fiery revival at Metlakatla that eventually burned beyond even Hall’s ability to manage it. When Duncan heard of the affair, he rushed home, stamped out the enthusiasm, disciplined those involved, and re-imposed his strict Church discipline on the populace. Months later Hall was transferred to Fort Rupert on Vancouver Island (Rettig, 1980). Moreover, William Henry Collison, a well known and well travelled Anglican missionary on the coast during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, makes no mention of the use of revivalist piety in his reminiscences of missionary life, In the Wake of the War Canoe (1981). ¹⁰ In any case, in contrast to Protestants like Duncan, who looked upon devotional religiosity with suspicion, the Methodists embraced revivals and an affective religiosity.

One of the hallmarks of revivalist piety, and perhaps that which sets it most clearly apart from Church of England evangelicalism, was the revival. Revivals, defined by historian of evangelical Christianity David Bebbington (2012: 1) as “stirrings of religious dedication during which conversions took place on a significant scale,” have been a feature of various Protestant religiosities since at least the seventeenth century. The Methodist pattern of revival, according to Bebbington (2012: 10) a more recent variant in relation to Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist patterns, emerged in the late eighteenth century and differed from other patterns for being “lay-led, excitable, Arminian [and] looking for instant conversions.” The historian of Methodism David Hempton (2005: 80) asserts that revivals were a hallmark of Methodism wherever it took root in the British Empire. Hempton describes the Methodist revivals of the nineteenth century as “highly ritualized gatherings, which often resulted in large numbers of conversions or of commitments renewed”; he continues, “it is remarkable how often they show up in the reminiscences of the Methodist faithful as emotionally charged memories of life saving encounters. Outdoor festivals organized around common collective purposes, and enriched by affecting music and ritualized behavior, are literally sensory and sensible experiences for those in search of sociability, entertainment, and community.” According to Phyllis Airhart (1992), writing specifically on nineteenth century Upper Canadian Methodism, revivalism gave Methodism its distinctive piety; revivals, in particular, underscored the importance of conversion as the necessary first step to leading a Christian life and served as venues for the reaffirmation of one’s Christian commitment. The two-pronged emphasis on conversion and reaffirmation noted by Airhart in the Canadian setting is echoed by Bebbington’s (2012: 2) more general, global, characterization of revivals as entailing “mass conversions” and “the raising of churches from an earlier time of quiescence.” The Methodist mission to British Columbia, staffed in its early years by Upper Canadian Methodists, also emphasized the twofold purpose of revivals. The mission to Indigenous peoples certainly aspired to win new converts, but the emphasis on conversion did not eclipse the revival as an occasion for both Indigenous peoples and settlers to re-commit to, or reawaken in, the Christian faith. Crosby, for example, remarked that the Chilliwack revival of 1871 was a “happy season of grace” as “some were converted and wanderers reclaimed” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, May 1872: 220). The Methodist concern with having converts re-commit or re-align with their version of Christianity again betrays the long history that Indigenous peoples had with Christianity in advance of the arrival of Methodist missionaries.

There is considerable mention of revivals in the published Methodist literature pertaining to the second half of the nineteenth century (the period of the late 1860s and 1870s in particular) and in the region’s dominant paper, the British Colonist. Revivals have also received at least a modicum of attention in more recent historical scholarship. ¹¹ When revivals are mentioned in the contemporary literature they are typically described in general terms as joyous, blessed, happy and enthusiastic occasions. Revivals could be relatively short (a few days) or more drawn out affairs (a month or more). Revivals usually entailed daily and evening church services, daily sermons delivered by missionaries or class leaders, periods of collective prayer, personal testimonies of conversion, hymn singing and class meetings. Revivals stirred the Holy Spirit, and the prayers and services facilitated the spirit’s work. At a revival in Haines, Alaska, in 1895 attended by Tlingit and other resident locals, Crosby (1914: 178) remarked: “As the service went on the blessed Spirit of God came down on us. After a short sermon, several got up to testify to the power of grace upon their hearts, and some of the most wicked seemed to be marvellously affected.” At the Chilliwack revival in 1873, Crosby commented that the testimony of Indigenous converts “thrilled all our hearts by their glad witness bearing for Christ” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, 1873: 333). Revivals produced converted and re-committed Christians possessed of hearts affected by the spirit of God.

In addition to revivals, mission literature often includes references to “camp meetings.” Although the two terms (revivals and camp meetings) are at times used interchangeably, they do seem to refer to slightly different events. Noticeable differences concern the events’ timing (camp meetings were more scripted than revivals), location (camp meetings were typically held out of doors in a designated location, whereas revivals could be stirred anywhere), and leadership (camp meetings were typically led by white ordained missionaries, and revivals could be led by Indigenous and white laity or ordained missionaries). Underlining those differences, however, is perhaps a more deeply rooted distinction made in revivalist practice and theology between revivals and revivalism. For some, such as the American historian of revivals William McLoughlin (1959: 11), the distinction between the two was sharp: revivals were “prayed down” and revivalism was “worked up.” The former, according to McLoughlin, ceased to exist after the 1830s when the American evangelist Charles Finney introduced a more calculated revivalism to American evangelicalism and in so doing brought an end to the older, more spontaneous, revivals typical of Whitfield or Edwards. However, other historians, such as Bebbington (2012: 51) and Carwardine (1978: 9), are not convinced the one replaced the other and maintain that both spontaneous and planned revivals persisted in evangelicalism throughout the nineteenth century. In their view, while revivalists employed means or techniques to raise revivals, their success, measured in terms of the converted or re-committed, was highly variable.

In the early British Columbian context, the revival (the spontaneous) and the camp meeting (the planned) also coexisted. While the revival was the theological objective of the camp meeting, a genuine revival never required scripting, so there was always a latent hope that a congregation, community, or entire region would be blessed with a revival at any given time. In 1875, it was remarked in the British Colonist that the Methodists were “encouraging a revival of the old order circuit preachers.” In the same year, Crosby opined that in order for the Ts’msyen to be converted there must be continued “blessed revivals” and “outpourings of the Spirit” (Bolt, 1992: 45). Two decades later, in 1899, while holding Sabbath services for those working the hop fields on the lower mainland, Crosby remarked, “now we pray for revival power, oh, so needed” (Western Methodist Recorder, November 1899: 17), and again in the same year the Reverend Tate at Nanaimo observed that “we are anxiously awaiting a revival.” The next year the Methodist church at Princess Street was holding “special services” in expectation of “a blessed revival of God’s work” (Western Methodist Recorder, January 1900: 11). While revivals could occur at any time or place, their emergence could be facilitated by camp meetings. Because camp meetings had to be “worked up” at a scheduled place and time some were “worked up” more successfully, with success measured in terms of attendance and souls converted or re-committed. Crosby wrote of the 1873 camp meeting at Chilliwack that it “was said by all to be the best camp meeting ever held in BC” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, 1873: 309). This must have been a delight to Crosby, as the 1872 camp meeting was reported to have been not so well attended as previous years (British Colonist, 12 September 1872). In 1899, during the Rev. J.H. White’s tenure at Chilliwack, he lamented that for the last three years the mission work had not proceeded as desired, that the church congregations had been poor, and that they were “looking for a year of revival” (Western Methodist Recorder, September 1899: 14).

In so far as both revivals and camp meetings aspired to bring about “blessed outpourings of the Spirit” among all attendees, the events were neither racially nor ethnically determinate. Although camp meetings were advertised to encourage settler participation, in principle, camp meetings and revivals were open to both white and Indigenous people. However, revivals in what were primarily Indigenous communities were likely to have been more homogenously Indigenous affairs, but even in such cases there was nothing preventing a revival begun in an Indigenous community from spreading outside its place of origin. ¹² Crosby (1914: 346) noted that a revival begun just outside of the Gitga’ata community at Hartley Bay inspired by the Ts’msyen George Edgar and the crew of the mission boat the Glad Tidings subsequently spread up the coast and into neighbouring communities. Interestingly, Susan Neylan (2003: 193) hints that the camp meetings were racially segregated, yet the published Methodist material gives some reason to doubt that claim. The Rev. E. White, for example, remarked that the Chilliwack mission was basically not segregated: “we can for the most part meet the Indians in separate services and keep this work somewhat distinct in our reports; but the two races are so overlapped and intermixed that a complete separation is impracticable.” He adds that “it would be unwise to attempt a division of our colonial and native work” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, November 1870: 121). Moreover, Pollard, writing in advance of the Chilliwack camp meeting of 1871, remarked that “the revival would accommodate both Indians and Whites” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, November 1871: 206).

As with race, both revivals and camp meetings could also be multi-ethnic or multi-national events, and the number of attendees could range from a couple of hundred to several hundred individuals. A revival at Maple Bay (Vancouver Island) in 1869 attracted 350 participants (British Colonist, 26 July 1869), the Chilliwack meeting of 1876 attracted 200 (British Colonist, 8 June 1876), and a revival at Lax Kw’alaams in 1886 had over 700 participants (Brock, 2011: 139). People from all over the coast area participated in revivals and came to attend camp meetings. Crosby (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, August 1873: 309) was particularly pleased to report on the diversity of the Chilliwack revival in 1873: “at our camp-meeting held here, which closed on the 9th inst., many souls were blessed; for it was a soul-refreshing time to all, – and a most pleasing sight to see representatives from tribes, hundreds of miles distant, who were once enemies, and at war with each other, now singing the songs of ‘Zion,’ and worshipping the King of kings together.” Crosby was happy to proclaim that many souls were blessed at Chilliwack, and it was the hoped for blessing of souls, conversion and reaffirmation, that ultimately inspired the camp meetings.

Revivals as Sites of Conversion and Devotional Enthusiasm

Within the Methodist tradition, revivals have shaped an understanding of religious experience and served as perspicuous sites of religious conversion, and so it is little surprise that the highly emotional, dramatic, and life saving events were also sites of Indigenous conversion. When the English Methodist Charles Tate arrived at Lax Kw’alaams in the spring of 1874 he gave a vivid description of a revival he helped to initiate: “I thought this hubbub could not be in order; but when I opened my eyes, and looked into the tear-streaming faces of these hundred of anxious souls, I cried from the depth of my soul ‘Hallelujah!’ The Lord can hear a thousand prayers at one time just as well as one, and the reception service was turned into a very Pentecost” (Bolt, 1992: 45). It is difficult to know if any or how many were converted at the revival described by Tate, but the enthusiasm integral to so many of the proclaimed successful revivals was certainly there. We do know, however, that the early revivals at Lax Kw’alaams produced at least one convert, as Crosby (1914: 166) points to a revival initiated by the Dudowards and others, before the arrival of Tate, as being responsible for the conversion of Philip McKay. In his description of one of the first Chilliwack camp meetings, Crosby (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, November 1870: 141) wrote: “We numbered about 200 on Sabbath. The Indians were in the majority […] At every service the power of God was manifest to save and many striking instances of saving grace was seen among the Indians.” At the same meeting, Crosby (1906: 26) also witnessed the testimonies of the missionaries David Sallosalton and Amos Cushan from the Sneneymexw area, which prompted many “to rush forward to the rude altar of prayer, and then scores of people with one voice sent up their cries and petitions to heaven for salvation.” More than two decades later, W.T. Rush reported from the Nass in 1899 that “the Native population there were caught up in a series of revivals in the spring – many were converted” (Western Methodist Recorder, December 1899: 25).

The role of revivals in conversion is also attested by the fact that many of the better known early Methodist Indigenous evangelists were converted at revivals. William Henry Pierce (1933: 13) “gave his heart to God” at a revival in Victoria in about 1873 and subsequently went to work at a lumber camp in Port Laidlow, Washington, where he started up a temperance society and a regular preaching schedule. Pierce’s preaching eventually led to a revival where “God’s Spirit spoke to the people in such a manner that they could not resist” (Pierce, 1933: 14). It was at Port Laidlow where Pierce (1933: 14–16) converted the Indigenous evangelists George Edgar, Ts’msyen missionary to Haida Gwaii, Klemtu (China Hat) and Txałgiu (Hartley Bay); Arthur Ebstone (Bella Bella Jack), Heiltsuk missionary at Bella Bella; and George Tait, Nisga’a missionary at various places on the Nass River. Amos Russ, credited with opening the Methodist mission to the Haida, was converted at a revival in Victoria (Crosby, 1914: 264; and Tate, nd: 12). As mentioned, Philip McKay, missionary to the Tlingit in Alaska, was converted at an Indigenous led revival in Lax Kw’alaams shortly before the arrival of Crosby. Amos Cushan and David Sallosalton, two of the first Indigenous Methodist evangelists, while not converted at revivals, employed revivalism in their mission work and the latter was particularly active at the early Chilliwack meetings (Crosby, 1906: 26, 32). In a similar vein, the Ts’msyen Arthur Wellington Clah was also not a revival convert (he was one of the first attendees at Duncan’s Fort Simpson school established in the late 1850s), but he adopted a more intimate and affective understanding of Christianity that he would hold for the rest of his life only after attending Methodist class meetings and revivals held at Lax Kw’alaams in the mid-1870s (Neylan, 2005: 91; Brock, 2011: 133). After attending those Methodist events his language about Christianity changed and, according to Brock, his diaries began to include entries that detailed a more personal relationship with God; Clah expressed, for example, that he felt “the Spirit of God upon our hearts” and that during “preaching and praying to Our God Holy Spirits came upon us” (Brock, 2011: 133).

In Neylan’s (2002: 131) monograph on Protestant missions to the Ts’msyen, she remarks that the revivals and evangelical activity more generally resulted in an “internal spiritual transformation” and a “genuine fascination with evangelical Christianity.” In an article on Arthur Wellington Clah’s Christianity (Neylan, 2005: 91), she again refers to “genuine” religion, writing that his diaries indicate a “genuine evangelicalism and indigenized Christianity.” While I am cautious of the latent consequences of using a more theological term, “genuine,” to typify any type of religious expression (are other evangelicalisms disingenuous perversions?), I do think Neylan’s “genuine evangelicalism” functions in a similar fashion to what I am calling revivalist piety in that both point to evangelical Christianity as an exogenous religiosity. Revivalist piety must, of course, be localized wherever it takes root, but that neither vitiates its universal aspirations nor implies its thorough indigenization wherever it does (i.e. its continuity with past traditions). Its universal aspirations most interest me, an interest that is also reflected in one of the basic theoretical tenets of the anthropology of Christianity: evangelical Christianity impresses upon its converts the importance of viewing the present as fundamentally discontinuous with the past. ¹³ For the energetic and well-travelled Indigenous evangelists introduced in this paper, revivalist piety clearly played a role in their conversions and, for some, in their subsequent representation of Christianity as fundamentally different from past traditions. ¹⁴ The revival – a sudden, dramatic, and emotional rebirth that could be dated and witnessed – was just such a precipitous event, able to set a convert out on a new road. In the remainder of the paper I will offer an interpretation to explain why that new road may have been appealing to some Indigenous converts and evangelists by attending to revivalist piety’s affective religiosity, its effort to transcend racial boundaries in the revival/ritual context, and its attempt at constructing an ideal multi-ethnic and transnational community of the saved. I am not arguing that all converts were drawn to each attribute, or to any one for that matter; we can at this date, removed from the events described, only make interpretive ventures. My intention is not to parcel out the motivations of each individual, but to illuminate the attractions of revivalist piety in a changed and changing world.

Attractions of Methodist Revivalist Piety

For some converts there was a strong desire (a felt sentiment as opposed to a rational or moral calculation) to change one’s prior pattern of life and to practice Christianity and some were drawn on that path by the affective sentiments of revivalist piety. While some scholars, as Susan Harding (1991) has shown, represent fundamentalist Christianities as the obverse of liberal modernity, and therefore treat conversion as irrational, refusing to entertain the appeal of claims of the supernatural, doing so restricts one’s analytical frame, narrowing potential interpretations of the data. This is not to deny material reasons for conversion but an inspiration to explore the supernatural claims influential in the conversion and piety of some of our Methodist converts. Moreover, revivalist piety both constituted and circulated emotions within what Sara Ahmed (2004) has termed an “affective economy.” While the converted may experience their emotions as intensely personal they are relentlessly public as they circulate through a social field, in this case, by word of mouth, in print, in sermons, and in prayer meetings, which can afford a feeling of solidarity among those who are imagined as feeling the same things. It was the circulation of emotions that Pierce (1933: 21, 74), for example, observed at revivals and prayer meetings, which so excited and united some converts in an evangelical revivalist piety.

The relation between the personal and the public as described by Ahmed is similarly configured, I think, by Bruce Lincoln (1989: 9) in his treatment of discourse and sentiments of affinity; the latter he describes as “feelings of likeness, mutual attachment, and solidarity” (my italics). The persuasiveness of a public discourse is closely tied to its ability to evoke sentiments of affinity, to appeal to the heart. In the case before us, the discourse of the heart evoked sentiments of affinity prompting conversion or the continued enthusiasm of the committed, and the effects of that discourse in terms of engendering mutual solidarity were put on full conscious display in the revival setting. The distinction highlighted here between the rational and the affective in religious formation and boundary maintenance is significant in the context of an academic conversation which excels at isolating rational (strategic) reasons for conversion but has been less attentive to the affective.

Revivals as sites both of conversion and of sustained enthusiasm with revivalist piety were places where the heart was warmed. Clah described the enthusiastic heart warming at a Methodist revival in 1888: “I have seen our great God’s power sented down upon all Christian who was [at] morning Service. Some were cried at the Spirit of God. Boil them hearts. Our hearts warm like hot water” (Brock, 2011: 141), and at a revival one year earlier Clah wrote that “the Great God open our heart” (Brock, 2011: 163). As has been mentioned, Pierce (1933: 13) gave his “heart to God” at a revival in Victoria in 1873. In the midst of praying for a revival at Nanaimo, Crosby recorded a long testimony given by Amos Cushan in which he confessed: “Since God changed my heart I am not afraid of anybody when I talk about Jesus. He is my chief and I want to please him all the while I live” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, February 1869: 25). Clah writes of attending a Methodist class meeting where he was instructed that “[i]f we give our hearts to God, He will sent His power and spirit. Then we have no more trouble” (Brock, 2011: 133). Crosby (1906: 34) insisted that it was because David Sallosalton’s “young heart was so full of love for [Christ]” that he remained a devoted Christian until his death. The Rev. E.E. White used both “good heart” and “bad heart” language when describing the good death of David Sallosalton’s sister, “She said an angel had spoken to her, and warned her against having two hearts and serving two masters; that she was to have nothing to do with the conjurer [the Indigenous healer]; that Jesus had need of her, and was coming to take her home” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, August 1869: 56). White also related an encounter between David Sallosalton and an Indigenous medicine man where Sallosalton warned him: “if you don’t get a new heart, you will go to hell” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, February 1870: 83). Lastly, on one of Clah’s trading/evangelizing trips with Crosby he described a recalcitrant group on the Nass River: “they [are] all wicked people. Dark heavy hearts. They hided they [their] light. They wants Darkness” (Brock, 2011: 134). ¹⁵

The degree to which heart language pervades statements of conversion and commitment to evangelical Christianity is hard to over-determine. During a revival led by Pierce at Port Essington in 1878, he remarked (1933: 21) that the services “touched and moved their hearts strangely.” While on an evangelistic trip, Crosby writes of meeting Arthur Ebstone at Bella Bella who told Crosby (1914: 143) that “when he prayed with the Bible it gave him a strong heart.” In reiterating a revival witnessed by Emma Crosby, Thomas Crosby (1914: 48) writes, “many of them fell on their faces on the floor, crying to God for mercy […] no one could doubt the mighty change in these hearts.” The alleged experience of God’s spirit felt at revivals, and in the case of Ebstone during prayer, helped to foster a strong emotional attachment to God and to the larger Christian community (Ebstone was happy to meet with Crosby, for he could speak with him about the Bible).

Methodist revivalist piety was oriented toward changing and warming hearts, fostering an emotional attachment to God, feeling the presence of Jesus in one’s life. The intensity of the emotional attachment to one’s new heart and the conviction that unturned hearts were dark hearts helped to articulate membership in a larger Christian community of the saved. Everywhere the Methodist evangelists travelled, they met Christians and non-Christians, those with changed hearts and those with dark hearts; revivalist piety was not conceived as a specific regional or cultural religious expression.

Heart language and revivals are underlined by the Arminian principle of equality under God so wonderfully exemplified by Charles Wesley’s exclamation, “The invitation is to all; For all, for all, my Saviour died!” (Bebbington, 1989: 27), which lies at the theological centre of Methodism. Thus, the ideal community of the saved was a community of souls that were not racially or ethnically determinant. ¹⁶ While the Methodists separated their white and Indigenous missions when writing notices to their Canadian readership, in practice it was not uncommon for revivals and missions to be racially mixed, namely, those held in off-reserve villages at industrial or urban/proto-urban sites (for example, at Chilliwack, Victoria, Maple Bay, and at saw mills, mines, and hop yards). ¹⁷ When Pollard announced the Chilliwack camp meeting of 1871 he wrote that “the revival would accommodate both Indians and Whites” (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, November 1871: 206). While it is true that sermons and class meetings held during camp meetings could be segregated and held at off-setting times, the meeting space was shared and the separate meetings may have had as much to do with linguistic differences as anything else. The majority of settlers were English; some Indigenous people knew English, but many did not, and so services with numerous Indigenous attendees had to be conducted either in local Indigenous languages or in Chinook (a local trade language). While Neylan (2003: 194) considers the possibility that language was a reason for the different services, she concludes that race must also have played a part. Yet, if Indigenous people knew English it was possible for them to speak both to Indigenous people and to settlers. At a Chilliwack camp meeting, David Sallosalton, from Nanaimo, spoke to both whites and Indigenous people; Crosby (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, November 1870: 141) wrote that: “[m]any of our white friends will never forget the exhortations in English, by [Sallosalton].” In addition, Pollard, as cited earlier, forthrightly stated that the division of missions into Indigenous and settler factions was chiefly a matter of convention. Moreover, given that the composition of the provincial population in the wake of the fur trade was very much racially mixed, the integration of the two missions seems consistent with what must have been the reality of the social field. In addition, Pierce’s revivals at Port Laidlow served an un-segregated working class, and it was the manager of the mill (whose background I do not know – it is therefore possible he was non-white as there were certainly Indigenous entrepreneurs in this period) who ultimately approved and encouraged Pierce to preach among all of his employees.

While revivals were racially mixed and Methodist theology and practice, as evidenced in its published literature, could advance the de-inscription of racial boundaries, very little in the direction of racial equality was reflected in Methodist institutional and social structures, and in the attitudes of many individual missionaries outside of the ritual context. For example, Edwards (2005) details the resistance on the part of Methodist officials to the ordaining of Indigenous Methodist preachers in the context of the accelerated racism in the social field in late Victorian British Columbia (Edwards, 2005). Moreover, the entrenchment of racial divisions was clearly reflected in the decision of the British Columbia Methodist Conference to create both a Superintendent of missions focused only on the work among Indigenous and East Asian peoples and a separate category of Native ministers allowed only to minister to Native congregations (Western Methodist Recorder, June 1900: 8).

The dissonance between the revival and the outside world reflects the distinction made in J.Z. Smith’s well known ritual theory between the ideal space of ritual and the lived world of the everyday. Smith (1982: 63) writes that “ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.” The emotional enthusiasm associated with the alleged descent of the spirit of God and its work among the young and the old, men and women, Indigenous and Whites over a number of days set aside for the purposes of revival must have afforded a view of social relations more aligned with the fundamental equality of human souls in the eyes of God. Ritualized perfection, however, seldom extends into the lived world – ritual’s purpose and efficacy may lie in the fact that it does not – and in the context of British Columbia there was a chasm between the ideal, the revival, and the quotidian world outside of it. What most interests me in the relation between the ideal and the real is not whether or not revivals mitigated racial divisions or how racial difference was re-inscribed outside of the revival setting, but that the ideal world as constituted in the revival/ritual offered the possibility of the erasure of racial difference and for that reason was appealing. It was in the ideal space of revival, whether a revival worked up at a camp meeting or the spontaneous revival, that the spirit of God worked to effect conversions and to make all hearts warm (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, 1869: 27), and thus served as a model of and inspiration for a less racially divisive world. ¹⁸

The insistence that all hearts were equal, that ritual had the potential to serve as a model for a better world, is evident in its recollection outside of the revival in the ordinary course of things. Clah and Pierce, for example, looked down upon both Indigenous and white people who did not believe in God. Indigenous people who, in the views of Clah and Pierce, stubbornly held to their old ways were wicked and dark hearted people. In 1886 while evangelizing around Lax Kw’alaams, Clah was unable to interest many in baptism and he attributed his lack of success to the fact that too many people had heavy hearts (hearts that he guessed weighed between fifty and a hundred pounds) (Brock, 2011: 134). Similarly, white people who refused God were following a bad road with dark and heavy hearts. While working with a white prospector who did not believe in God, Clah was appalled: “Makes me so fraiden [afraid] because God knows me[,] an[d] him speaking against Him. Say very near half the people in the world do not believe the Bible no hell and no God no Jesus” (Brock, 2011: 137). Disbelief in God was dark or bad hearted, and bad heartedness was associated with racism. While travelling on a steamer from the north coast to Victoria in the late 1890s Clah became enraged when a crew member woke him in the middle of the night and ordered him to give over his bed to a white man. Clah was furious and referred to him as a “bad sail man” that “makes his heart bad” (Brock, 2011: 227).

In Pierce’s autobiography there is little hint that his Ts’msyen background distinguished him in any significant way with respect to the state of his soul from other missionaries – his Ts'msyen heritage figures into his narrative at the beginning and serves to set the stage for his subsequent conversion experience. A sinful or dark life is a pre-requisite for conversion whether the heart is Indigenous or white. ¹⁹ The content of the sin or darkness is less important than that it serves as the precondition for its repudiation; the most important thing in revivalist piety was that the distance from God be reversed or narrowed. To that end, Pierce consistently represents the past as a time of heathen darkness that must be overcome. For example, in allusion to the work of the early missionaries, Pierce (1933: 91) writes that they were impelled by the love of Christ that had entered their hearts to pull all men out of “heathen darkness” and to change the hearts of others with the simple message that God loved all people. If being Christian required the renunciation of one’s so-called dark past and heathen customs, the claim that one was now Christian could serve as a means of advancing a more equitable treatment in a racialized colonial context. Race relations directly figure into Pierce’s work (1933: 81) when he quotes a letter published in the Missionary Bulletin (1904) that describes a Sunday service led by an Indigenous packer and attended by another packer and their three white employers. In closing the description he writes, “For the Indians to come in contact with white men who cared enough for their Bibles to carry them in their packs instead of whiskey and tobacco was a surprise indeed.” White people were just as apt, if not more than Indigenous peoples, to be distanced from God, and all can be brought closer together whenever that distance is narrowed.

The power of Christianity to bring about an end to past ways and to promise a new future is also nicely articulated by Edward Sexsmith, an Indigenous teacher and assistant to the Methodist A.E. Green at Anspa’yaxw (Kispiox), who in a letter in the Missionary Outlook clearly evinces the power of Christianity to wipe away past darkness: “I wish to tell you that more of the heathen are converted to God, and many more are preparing to renounce heathenism, when the white missionary comes up. The foundation of darkness has been shaking [sic] up by God’s mighty power” (Neylan, 2005: 88). Methodist revivalist piety allowed for the possibility of a vision of racial equality to stand out within a province that at the onset of settler–industrial colonialism was becoming increasingly racialized.

Not only could the revival afford the construction of a community less divided along racial lines, but revivalist piety, as a common ground, could transcend ethnic and national boundaries. For example, the revivals at Chilliwack (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, August 1873: 309), Maple Bay (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, May 1873: 308) and Victoria (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, May 1872: 220) were transnational (in that participants included those of multiple first nations as well as Canadians), cosmopolitan (culturally diverse) and multi-ethnic events introduced at a time when the Indigenous populations of British Columbia were, as a consequence of a narrowing land base and changing economy, becoming rapidly fragmented by out migration and internal division (Lutz, 2008: 163–231). Revivals both facilitated and responded to this deracination as they allowed the space to experiment with religious affiliations, such as with a global Christianity independent of any local instantiation. The Christianity of many of the Indigenous evangelists was very much independent of local space and they carried it with them wherever they went. Indeed, they were consistently repositioned and directed throughout the coast area wherever the Methodists deemed they were needed: David Sallosalton travelled Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland with Crosby, Pierce was stationed in various communities on the coast, and the Ts’msyen Philip McKay was sent as far north as Alaska. Arthur Wellington Clah evangelized on the Nass, Stikine, and Skeena Rivers and travelled as far into the interior of the province as the Omineca Mountains and the Liard River, which drains not into the Pacific, but into the Arctic Ocean (Galois, 1997/1998).

After the gold rush of 1858, the mercantile colonialism of the fur trade was quickly superseded by a new phase of settler and industrial colonialism. Beginning in the 1860s and through to the 1890s large parcels of agricultural land were pre-empted by settlers, Indigenous owned land was whittled down to a fraction of what it once was, and the provincial government began the industrialization of the province’s forests and fisheries (Harris, 2002). These changes facilitated the emergence of an Indigenous working class that was indispensable to the industrial development of the province. As historian John Lutz (2008: 192) observes, “In 1881 […] BC had become one of the most industrialized provinces in the country, and it did so by relying on a workforce dominated by Aboriginal People.” In addition to industrial labour, Indigenous people in the province were employed in the gold and coal mines, at packing and road building, at fishing and sealing, as railway navvies and powder monkeys, and as trappers and traders (Knight, 1996; Lutz, 2008). While the new labour was largely seasonal, it could easily be integrated into Indigenous subsistence patterns, and as Lutz shows in reference to the Nuu-chah-nulth (2008, 200), Indigenous people could, at times, hold a very strong bargaining position in relation to their industrial employers so as to force wage labour to fit around Indigenous subsistence and ceremonial patterns. In any case, the point I wish to make is that Indigenous people moved around a lot to find work, and the more opportunities that became available, the more the movement (Lutz, 2008: 167–194). The lives of Clah and Pierce, in particular, exemplify the labour movement trend as the two travelled throughout their lives between Washington and Alaska and either one or the other (or both) worked at times as storekeeper, packer, constable, trader, boat steward, trapper, mill worker, and missionary.

One effect of the increased migrations brought on by the onset of industrial–settler colonialism was that many Indigenous workers were wrenched out of their local spaces, which attenuated local geographies and social relations. In such a context, revivals served as potentially novel sites for the reconstitution of transnational, or at least multi-cultural or multi-ethnic, identities. In 1899 a group of Indigenous workers, which included members of the Nlaka’pamux, Ts’msyen, Musqueam, and Snuneymuxw First Nations, gathered together at Hulbert’s hop fields on the lower Mainland and remarked “on the great transformation that had taken place in the intercourse of the different tribes with each other since the arrival of the missionaries. They were reminded that previous to the coming of the latter they met each other with knives and rifles, and they were continually at war, but now all was changed” (Western Methodist Recorder, December 1899: 30). In a similar vein, after a Chilliwack revival held two decades earlier in 1873, Crosby (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, August 1873: 309) observed that it was “a most pleasing sight to see representatives from tribes, hundreds of miles distant, who were once enemies, and at war with each other, now singing the songs of ‘Zion,’ and worshipping the King of kings together.” Crosby highlights the role of the camp meeting in bringing about an end to both war and religious diversity. Indeed, part of the force of the Chilliwack revivals is attributed to their capacity for uniting individuals from various communities. That the revivalists intended plural attendance can be surmised from the fact that Chilliwack camp meetings were pitched to a broad audience in the British Colonist at various times in each of the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The city of Victoria and its Methodist mission also served as a beacon that attracted peoples from all over the coastal area (Tate, nd: 4; Pierce, 1933: 13). Outside of Victoria, Indigenous evangelists also crossed cultural and national boundaries. I have already covered Pierce’s revivalist work among the mill workers at Port Laidlow as well as the revivalist work of Philip McKay and Arthur Wellington Clah in Alaska. In addition, Crosby cites (1914: 142) a speech given by a young Tlingit convert, Robert, to various Indigenous groups he had visited, wherein Robert expresses his wish that his audiences would be more like his community and allow the gospel to take “away all the darkness and the bad.” Lastly, Emma Crosby reported that when George Edgar was sent from Lax Kw’alaams to the Haisla at Kitimat one of his first moves was to initiate a revival (Barman and Hare, 2006: 199). Clah, McKay, Edgar and Pierce all conducted revivals among Indigenous nations that were not their own and thus, by virtue of their leadership and participation, the revivals were by definition pan-Indigenous. Another testament to evangelical Christianity’s potential to assist with pan-Indigenous unity, albeit not specifically Methodist revivalist piety, is nicely exemplified by the Anglican missionary William Henry Collison on one of his early visits to the Haida. The Haida responded to his visit with the request that they be enabled to “adopt Christianity because that unites people and makes them friends” (Collison, Original Papers, 17 August 1878). Just how Indigenous converts conceived of the relation between local traditions and a trans-local Christianity is beyond the scope of this essay. There were doubtless different views. I want chiefly to draw attention to the perceived role of Christianity in affording the transcendence of local ethnic and national boundaries.

Revivals in conjunction with the despatch of Indigenous missionaries were wrapped up in a concerted effort to create a multi-ethnic Christian community, as Crosby opined in the Western Methodist Recorder (January 1900: 12): “Oh, for a mighty revival all over the land.” As we saw with race, participation in revivals was not determined by one’s nationality or ethnicity, and as such, revivals offered a vision of a more equitable, participatory and egalitarian world. With the movement of so many Indigenous and white missionaries into and out of the various communities of the north Pacific coast, revivalist piety, as a global or at the very least transnational and trans-ethnic or trans-cultural movement, had a role to play in the constitution of such a vision.

Revivals occurred in newly transnational and multi-ethnic spaces such as the cities (Victoria), towns (Fort Simpson), lumber yards (Port Laidlow), mining sites (Nanaimo), and agricultural operations (Chilliwack) that were very much a product of colonial forces beyond the influence of local Methodism. Yet, while settler–industrial colonialism fractured existing geographical, social, and religious spaces, it also facilitated the conditions for the emergence of a revivalist piety that afforded reflection on the possibility of a new trans-local and inclusive space in which the warm hearted could “meaningfully dwell” (c.f. Smith, 1978: 291). That such a possibility did not in the end come to be is not that unusual in the history of religious change, and particularly where change is envisioned as offering something other than lonesome, crowded, dark, and heavy-hearted migrations.

Closing

Given the scope of this paper it is, of course, impossible to draw any conclusions as to the degree to which revivalist piety was received by all those Indigenous converts and communities throughout the coastal area who had sustained contact with Christianity in this period. However, there is evidence that for most of the early evangelists introduced here, conversion to Christianity did entail a revival experience, a changed heart, and the adoption of the vision of a new future that also necessitated a break from the past. The revivalist piety as spread and practiced by those evangelists helps to account for the burst of evangelical activity among Indigenous converts of the north Pacific coast during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The analysis is not meant to replace any extant account of conversion nor to argue for the primacy of revivalist piety in conversion, but to add another possibility to the multiplicity of ways in which Indigenous peoples experimented with their own religious piety. My overall objective is to enrich current conversations on Methodist missions, both on the Northwest coast and in places elsewhere in the nineteenth century, by considering the role of an affective revivalist piety in the globalization of Christianity. A piety that, in this case, was neither completely allied with the colonial project nor thoroughly indigenized as a local effort of resistance, but was in ways, a part of both.