Ancestral cites: Citation politics and canonical figures in Protestant communities

Introduction

During my research on a Christian aid program in 2004–2006, I kept hearing a riveting story. It focused on a Malagasy former church member named Eugene Rateaver (1884–1962), a métis Lutheran minister with a French father and Malagasy mother. One version of the story, told to me by retired white American missionaries to Madagascar, went like this: On October 26, 1936, Rateaver was set to depart Madagascar on a steamship from the port town of Ft. Dauphin/Tolagnaro with his white American wife Margaret and three of their four children. But Rateaver did not in fact board the ship and, as missionaries told me, he seemed to mysteriously disappear in the Malagasy countryside after that time. Margaret and the children, on the other hand, began their weeks-long journey back to the US. This event would not perhaps be noteworthy were it not that Rateaver, the only Malagasy-born man to serve as an American Lutheran missionary, had just been excommunicated from the church. Rateaver and his family were permanently leaving Madagascar—their ocean transport paid by the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America (NLCA)—after Rateaver had been found guilty of unethical conduct by twelve of his missionary peers. As I gradually learned, competing stories about Rateaver circulated some 80 years later among white American missionaries and Rateaver’s own US-based descendants. Why had former missionaries in particular spent so much time recounting to me this story of the ship’s departure and what was the significance of Rateaver himself to the community, so many years after this dramatic event?

In this article, I put Christian communal practices that identify influential past figures in conversation with academic efforts to decolonize canons. Among the many approaches to citation showcased in this collection, I pursue the question of what is involved in attempting to transform a canonical conversation by incorporating a previously overlooked past figure. Current conversations about citation have questioned the omission of important figures in the formation of academic canons, due to the historical and ongoing role of institutional whiteness, Eurocentrism, and gender inequalities in shaping and valuing the production of knowledge (Daswani, 2021; Bardolph, 2014; Mott and Cockayne, 2017). Likewise, just as Protestant communities draw upon important biblical passages, theological texts, and theological figures in their ongoing, dynamic interpretations of doctrine, they also refer to significant past leaders as common “touchpoints” who embody the social and sacred history of the church and serve as moral exemplars. ¹ Though the term “canon” itself derives partly from Christian references to the authoritative books accepted as genuine Scripture, I wish to focus here on canonical histories and figures in Protestant communities, a slightly different use of the term “canon.” ² Exploring what happens when Protestant communities socially shift or reassess canonical figures can be an important space in which to understand practices of decolonization on religious communities’ own terms (Tuck and Yang, 2021 [2012]).

Therefore, I take Rateaver’s case as an entry point to closely examine what it means to “cite” or reclaim overlooked ancestors in canonical conversations. In my earlier research on the colonial history of American Lutheran involvement in Madagascar, I found myself steeped in canonical histories about the “building of the church in Madagascar.” Certain events and canonical figures were repeatedly evoked in oral histories; church literature, such as mission magazines and children’s books; contemporary Bible studies and slide shows; and even gravesite visits. I became familiar with a central cast of characters, whose names quickly rolled off of people’s tongues: these figures included late nineteenth-century missionary J.P. Hogstad (whose gravestone I visited in Madagascar with research participants) and Manasoa-based doctor J.O. Dyrnes. Each of these white male clerical or medical individuals had been, to some extent, “canonized.” Their lives were often evoked as moral standards: they had followed a divine call and their lifework, whether in medical clinics or schools, enabled church members to trace the workings of a divine hand in the operation of the mission. As I will describe further, it was in this context that I heard stories about Eugene Rateaver. He was a past figure who was not “canonized” in mission histories but who continued to garner substantial attention nonetheless. As a result, I became especially interested in analyzing his role in the social reproduction of such canonical histories. Did his storied presence signal a process of canonizing new figures as such histories are reworked in Protestant Christian communities? Or did he occupy a different role as a “haunting presence” in relation to this American Lutheran canonical lineage of colonial involvement in Madagascar?

Similar questions rethinking canonical conversations and canonical figures have also featured prominently in the academic communities that I am a part of. This effort has involved critically addressing how intersecting forms of race, gender, and nationality have shaped whose ideas and writing were regarded as the most prestigious and worthy of sustained attention over time, as academic conversations have been formed and reproduced (Smith and Garrett-Scott, 2021). Moreover, scholars have identified several challenges that characterize such efforts to engage with previously elided academic ancestors. First, the process of “rediscovering” past figures can have colonialist and “white-norming” (Gupta and Stoolman, 2022: 786) dimensions, as indigenous scholar Max Liboiron has cautioned (2021). Furthermore, decolonial initiatives that seek to reincorporate academic ancestors should credit areas of expertise that have already formed around those figures. For example, a voluminous literature exists about sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, a figure some describe as recently “re-canonized,” and that knowledge deserves institutional support and visibility (Covington-Ward, 2020; Rabaka, 2010; Marable, 1986; Harrison, 1992). Secondly, what does a surface-level citation of a past figure in academic work look like and what would constitute a more preferable, careful engagement with their ideas and writing? What are the different relations that are possible between current writers and a past figure within academic work? And what kind of engagement could lead to sustained institutional transformation, such that a canonical conversation is fundamentally changed in a deeper way and not only for a short time span? Through the engrossing story of Eugene Rateaver, I begin to take up these questions here. I explore what can be gleaned about ancestors from Lutherans’ encounters with Rateaver, insights that ultimately illuminate cultural variability in what ancestral relations are within decolonization initiatives. ³

This article builds on previous ethnographic and archival work that I have conducted over the past 20 years (2003–present) on transnational connections linking Christians in the US and Madagascar, ranging from Merina Malagasy Christian migration to the Midwest US (Halvorson, 2010) to the global circulation and display of Malagasy Christian art (Halvorson, 2021). Beginning in 2004, my multi-sited research explored how Lutheran Christians in the US and Madagascar sought to redefine the colonial mission legacy through a medical relief program. Since the early 1980s, rather than sending white American missionaries to Madagascar as was previously the case, the aid program has circulated thousands of medical supplies from Minneapolis to Antananarivo, forming a supply chain for Malagasy Lutheran clinics adversely affected by neoliberal reforms. In the US in particular, dominant discourses of aid-giving characterize the circulation of relief aid as a more egalitarian, less “colonial” form of interaction that upholds Malagasy national and religious sovereignty, in contrast with the colonial missions from which the aid program emerged. Diverging somewhat from this appraisal, my research found that Malagasy and American program participants reflected on, debated, and attempted to rework their previous, colonial ties with each other in a variety of ways through their aid activities, using aid materials to reimagine the religious ethics of partnership in the global church. At the same time, the aid program was reinstituting power hierarchies between American and Malagasy church members, such as by introducing American-controlled aid accountability requirements and funding streams (Halvorson, 2018). ⁴

While the aid program became my primary focus, I began to notice that, amid Americans’ efforts to distance themselves from colonial missions, one colonial figure repeatedly became a subject of conversation, often coming up when our visits together were winding down. Several white Norwegian-American retired missionaries to Madagascar in their 70s and early 80s would pause after the audio-recorder had been turned off and then ask me quietly, “Do you know anything about Rateaver?” Rateaver was described to me by these American missionaries as a perplexing figure; several wondered aloud whether he had been wrongly accused of unethical conduct. Was Rateaver a canonical figure-in-the-making, I wondered, someone who was being revisited as missionaries increasingly critiqued the colonial history of involvement in Madagascar? At the time, I had noticed, for example, that, among white former missionaries-turned-aid workers, certain named Malagasy figures had gradually been added to the canonical history of Christian evangelism in Madagascar discussed earlier, especially the nineteenth-century “Malagasy martyrs” persecuted for their Christian practice under Queen Ranavalona I’s reign (1828–1861) and contemporary Malagasy Lutheran doctors. However, I began to see Rateaver as playing a different role in canonical histories of the mission church, as I will explore, and operating as more of a haunting or spectral presence, speaking something into our conversations that felt unresolved and inchoate or about much more than him alone.

My interlocutors understood that I had distant American missionary kin relations, and this likely also led them to ask what information I had. I am a white American Jewish woman with previous Lutheran missionaries to Madagascar on my paternal side. Gabriel Isolany, an American Lutheran minister who escorted Rateaver to the US for college, is my great-grandfather’s brother-in-law; my grandfather—who I never met, as he died before I was born—is listed as one of the twelve American missionaries who voted on Rateaver’s case, though it’s noted in the official record that he “came in at the last minute.” ⁵ His father, my great-grandfather, on the other hand, wrote a letter of support attesting to Rateaver’s character and innocence when he faced charges of unethical conduct. As I learned of my paternal family’s conflicted involvement with Rateaver and even that Rateaver was an adoptive relative of mine (as I will discuss), I realized that former missionaries may have thought that I had some hidden knowledge through my family connections. They also knew that I was doing research in a church archive in a local Lutheran seminary, and wondered what I was finding there. Over time, I worked closely with the church archivist to locate materials about Rateaver. One morning, while sifting through boxes with me in an archival storage facility, the archivist produced a thick, dusty institutional file on Rateaver, and I draw extensively on those records here.

As I began to review the materials I unearthed about Rateaver’s church work and education, my research took another unexpected turn. In 2019, I received an email from one of Eugene Rateaver’s living descendants in California, whom I will call Cathy. At that time, Cathy, an 80-year-old retired teacher and mother of four, had been working on a family history project and spotted my book online. She had no way of knowing that I had repeatedly come across Rateaver in my own research over the previous 15 years. Our initial correspondence has sparked a collaboration with one branch of Rateaver’s family, with whom I have shared the archival materials that I could digitize or copy, including records from the official church file that his family members had never before seen. Cathy picked up the family history project on Rateaver during the coronavirus pandemic. She produced a 30-page manuscript for her children and grandchildren called “The Life and Times of Eugene Rateaver,” often referring to the project in our emails as one that explored the “puzzle pieces” of his extraordinary life. While my research with Rateaver’s family is still in progress, I bring into my later discussion some of Rateaver’s family members’ remembrances of him, comparing their “citation” or referencing of him as an ancestor with that of American Lutheran missionaries.

In what follows, I first discuss two separate scholarly conversations on canonical and ancestral figures and suggest that putting them together can foster a deeper understanding of the social and political life of ancestors in decolonization initiatives. Then, drawing on my archival research, I describe Rateaver’s unusual itinerary through the church, leading up to the moment of his supposed non-appearance at the ocean liner. I consider how, among some former white Lutheran missionaries, he has become a past figure that embodies questions surrounding the racial and political order of the mission church while, for some of his living family members, he is a canonical ancestor demonstrating an important example of activism and courageousness. Finally, I explore what knowledge about Christianity could be regained by carefully attending to Rateaver’s and his family’s ideas and experiences. The article advocates for a citation practice that takes seriously “ethnohistorical” interlocutors as knowledge producers and for the imaginative recovery of lost possibilities. Citing past figures like Rateaver can mean engaging with their written work in an academic way, as I will show, but can also involve a broader, more holistic recognition of the structural conditions of their experiences as well as their influence and legacy in Christian communities.

Putting citation politics and Protestant canonical figures into conversation

I trace in this section two separate conversations on ancestral and canonical figures in order to pursue a central question: What does it mean to reincorporate a past figure into a canonical conversation, in either an academic or Protestant communal sense? Though a small literature has been emerging on ancestors, citation and canon formation (Ahmed, 2017; Mariner, 2022; McKittrick, 2020), scholarly work on ancestors in Christian communities, such as LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant’s (2014: 2) ethnography where “talking to the dead is a longstanding yet under explored spiritual practice,” tell us that ancestralization is a multistranded cultural process that comprises different activities and relations. Paying attention to the variability at play in the cultural work of making and relating to ancestors can lead to interesting implications for cultural initiatives of decolonization, whether academic or religious, and their widely varying qualities and effects.

I begin with recent conversations about the role of previously elided ancestors in transforming academic canons. Considerable debate exists concerning what impact the reincorporation of a past figure should have on a canonical conversation and, in particular, on the prevailing questions and topics that have historically shaped that discussion. Writers like Sara Ahmed (2014), for example, have suggested that, when recognizing how canonical conversations have disproportionately cited and reproduced the intellectual work of white Euro-American men, it may be preferable to rethink an accepted body of canonical theoretical works entirely and adopt a citational practice that only cites works by women and scholars of color. Geographer Katherine McKittrick (2021: 28) has recently argued for a different approach that privileges instead “doing the work of liberation” and potentially cites variously positioned writers; this task focuses less on citation as an act of recognition for an individual and more on how “the practice of sharing ideas” can “resist multiscalar injustices” to produce new kinds of knowledge (28). Still other scholars have suggested that rethinking citation practices means questioning what type of conversation is being staged through a recognized canon. Sociologist Michael Burawoy (2021) has advocated to keep but reinterpret canonical works through the lens of scholars not previously considered part of that conversation. In a discussion of sociological theory, for instance, Burawoy (2021: 550) notes that “incorporating Du Bois into the canon changes the criteria defining the canon, compelling a rereading of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.”

Besides addressing whether or not to keep or restage existing canonical conversations when adding a new figure, recent discussions also highlight an additional concern. Bringing omitted figures into dialogue with canonical lineages also requires care to assess the fit between those conversations and writers’ concepts, written genres, and the relations represented within their own texts. Previously under-cited figures, in other words, are never only a single figure, represented by a single citation. This narrow view of citation reflects a limited and reified engagement with a text and an historical figure. Each cited text is shaped by the genre conventions of academic writing, which involve considerable translation and intertextual comparison of non-equivalent ideas, arguments, and situations, often leaving aside the unique, complex interpersonal relationships, shifting ideas and delicate, imprecise work of relating concepts and written forms. In several senses, then, citation itself mediates different, non-equivalent situations and texts, pressing them into something that seems equivalent.

As a result, part of what we might call a conscientious citation practice for incorporating a past figure into a canonical conversation needs to resist the reification of citation itself: such an effort takes care to unfold, whenever possible, the complex relations embedded within and across texts that produced their arguments. Indeed, as Ahmed, McKittrick, and Burawoy each suggest, in addressing the shortcomings and exclusions of academic canons, a thoughtful assessment of reclaimed past figures’ writing, putting their work into the context(s) of its production and relations, is important to challenge a superficial citational practice. Other writers caution that scholars should avoid what Smith et al. (2021) refer to as a simple stacking of bibliographies with rediscovered figures or an outright claiming of or grafting oneself onto the lineage of past intellectual figures, especially ancestors to whom one has little other relation. McKittrick (2021: 25–26f27) calls this “quick and fast and understudied referencing,” or a citational practice that “signals allusion rather than study.” A more careful citational practice is transformative, not merely additive. And it fundamentally involves the disruption and transformation of academic knowledge-making practices, not only of citation. In the words of the Cite Black Women initiative, it should “let [Black women’s] ideas transform your thinking, and let them lead, not follow, traditional, hegemonic approaches in your field” (Smith et al., 2021: 14). In addition, though one dominant view of the canon is as a conversation or “contact zone” (Mariner, 2022: 217), even “a dynamic unity based on opposing perspectives” (Burawoy, 2021: 551), recent writers on citation have pointed out that canonical traditions are not merely neutral dialogues or events, but fraught with immense material consequences when the value of ideas are effaced.

In this vein, past figures’ omission from important academic conversations has historically limited the circulation and valuation of their ideas, revealing an important link between citation and intellectual property (Mariner, 2022). This omission continues to have a direct impact on what kinds of ideas and figures are considered the most prestigious, familiar, and necessary to cite. Though current citations do not recover lost forms of value and structural support for a past figure’s intellectual contributions, they may resituate those contributions more prominently in canonical lineages and thus help shift what questions and ideas are now valued. Highlighting the value of previously under-cited work, some writers have described such citations as a moral-economic recognition of indebtedness (Ahmed, 2017: 17). Acknowledging this debt has spawned several interesting forms. One has been the biographical essay or book that profiles a single writer, with the aim of familiarizing them to a scholarly audience (see e.g., Guarasci, Moore, and Vaughn, 2018; Pina-Cabral, 2023). These efforts importantly undertake the intellectual labor involved in rethinking canonical traditions, sharing that knowledge for the betterment of the community as a whole. Still, it is worth bearing in mind that a slightly different set of relations are pursued here, shaping a citational kinship that concretizes—through citation—a lineal debt, gift or set of “powerful inheritances” between the current writer and past figures as well as a past set of conversations (Mariner, 2022: 216–217).

As we reflect on the complex ethical terrain of bringing past figures into canonical conversations, I would like to underscore that the recent literature on citation emphasizes that past figures, even when named and cited individuals, are not perfectly represented by a single citation. In addition to naming and citing single authors, more work is needed to situate writers in the circumstances of their writing and thinking and the important relations that informed their texts. Scholarly discussions about recognizing overlooked academic ancestors can sometimes imply that, contrary to Mariner, McKittrick, Smith, et al., a single process is at play that brings the figure back into canonical conversations, whether in citations, bibliographies, or syllabi, and that this act is a straightforward moral good, with fairly uniform or consistent effects. I want to look deeper at this process of ancestral reincorporation, drawing upon already existing work on ancestors in Protestant communities. Taking cues from this second set of conversations has potential, I suggest, for making important distinctions among different kinds of cultural engagements with ancestors and their potential effects.

Several different connections are worth tracing to this end. First, recent work in the anthropology of religion has highlighted “the capacity of kinship” to delimit “religious sociality” (McKinnon, 2017: ix; Thomas, Malik, and Wellman, 2017; Thomas, 2021). Through this lens, Christians negotiate belonging and peoplehood itself within ritual and textual practices concerning past Christian spiritual kin, ancestors, leaders, and influential moral stewards (see e.g., Taylor-Seymour, 2022; Van Klinken, 2019). This is seen vividly in Malagasy communities where believers variously combine or reject worship of the ancestors and Christian observance. In Madagascar, the sacred veneration of the ancestors or razana is mediated through cultural institutions and specialists, whether ritual healers, astrologers or mediums, who help safeguard ancestors’ transitions into and out of the lives of community members across the island (see e.g., Larson, 1997; Bloch, 1986; Cole, 2001; Crossland, 2014). However, among Pentecostal and charismatic Christians who do not regard razana as legitimate spiritual agents, Eva Keller (2005) has noted how religious commitment can involve opting out of communal ancestral practices altogether, even reconceptualizing kinship as spiritual ties to past and current Christian leaders who are “parents in the Gospel” or ray amandreny. I find this approach compatible with a view of ancestralization that looks into the everyday cultural acts that fortify relations between select past figures and contemporary Christian communities. Such views of ancestry importantly suggest that past Protestant figures, such as Rateaver, are brought into being by circulating interpretive and communal practices that shape how Christians variously engage with them. Simplified views of reincorporating ancestors into academic canons can not only efface important differences among what kind of ancestors are at stake, when and for whom, but they can also overemphasize the ancestor and academic as unencumbered, secular individuals without kinship, lineage, or community.

In addition, cultural studies of kinship and of Christianity reveal how ancestors are made across many social genres, both text and non-text, each of which come with their own limitations, channeling effects, and power relations. ⁶ As in anthropologist Sylvia Yanagisako’s (2002) work on the lauded founders of Italian silk-weaving firms, written documents, whether property records, letters, transcripts, family histories and employment files, are crucial media for substantiating selective relationships with past figures. Thus, the work of making an ancestor is one of traversing, interpreting, selectively combining, and citing these different genres (and the various portraits or glimpses of people they make possible, leave hidden, and disallow), as I will show in the next section. Citing past figures is a process thoroughly entwined with these acts of knowledge production occurring within both academic and Christian communities, and one that frequently involves not only written but also spoken “texts” (such as the story with which I began this article). Such “entextualized” oral histories have recognizable and repeatable content, all processes that show the workings of power in the shaping of transportable knowledge (Briggs and Bauman, 1992). At the same time, ample evidence demonstrates that ancestors in Christian communities are constructed through believers’ engagements with not only texts but also a wide variety of social genres and material forms, from Mormon pioneer landmarks (Mitchell, 2002) to DNA evidence (Imhoff and Kaell, 2017; Dundon, 2011). Therefore, because ancestor-making is a creative social act negotiating irresolvable gaps among various times and places, historical genres, and material entanglements, such activities foster selective, partial portraits and glimpses of how past individuals have navigated, and been interpolated by, the power relations of these practices of knowledge production.

Through these distinctions, I aim to add further complexity to current conversations on ancestors and decolonizing canons. Ancestralization is not one singular process culturally and, in fact, includes quite distinct acts of relating to and “citing” ancestors. Distinguishing among them can help highlight the different mechanisms of institutional and cultural transformation in both academic and religious communities and their various potentials and limits for serious engagement with past forms of oppression. That is, if we look more carefully at what ancestors are and to whom and when they become relevant, what is involved culturally in “citing” past figures and what are the effects of those actions? When is a lineage invoked, whether of biogenetic family, spiritual kinship, or intellectual thought, and when is the past figure more of a spectral presence or placeholder, pointing to unresolved problems? What might be respectful forms of reincorporating ancestors into communities from which they may have been excluded? In order to begin exploring these questions, I turn now to a discussion of Rateaver’s life.

The making of an ancestor-figure: Assembling the “puzzle pieces” of Rateaver’s life

In this section, I present a short portrait of Eugene Rateaver. I heed the idea that a careful citational practice requires an in-depth, historicized assessment of the relations and experiences of a past figure’s work. Most of the material I draw upon comes from American Lutheran (ELCA) institutional records, such as biographical files and administrative correspondence. While white Norwegian-American missionaries kept copious records that prove useful to describing Rateaver’s educational and professional trajectory, the authors’ own cultural perspectives shape the documents in every way, from their descriptive phrases to what papers were actually placed in Rateaver’s file. Moreover, Malagasy voices are few and far between in the official church file on the Rateaver controversy, with the notable exception of a protest letter I discuss that was signed by sixty-three male Malagasy pastors and evangelists. To read these documents critically, I highlight their selective wording and omissions and, after my initial discussion, analyze the cultural and political forces shaping their dominant narratives.

Eugene Rateaver was born on April 18, 1884 in the southern highland town of Vangaindrano. His father was Alaric Routier de Granval, a French merchant, and his mother was Rasoa Tavanira, an Antesaka Malagasy woman who claimed Arab, Malayo-Indonesian, and African ancestry. Eugene’s family lived in the Malagasy capital, Antananarivo, when he was a young boy. From age 9 until 11, he attended a French-medium school there. But after his father left Madagascar during the onset of French colonial occupation in 1895, Eugene and his mother and brother moved back to Vangaindrano. Through unknown connections, his mother found him a place at the Lutheran boys’ school in the southern coastal town of Ft. Dauphin/Tolagnaro. Not long after beginning his studies there, Norwegian and American missionaries running the school had singled out Rateaver as a “very bright” student with great promise. ⁷

When Eugene was 16, one of those American missionaries and a distant relation of mine (paternal great grandfather’s brother-in-law), Gabriel Isolany, began to make arrangements—with Rasoa’s approval—for Eugene to attend St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a Lutheran institution. To pursue this plan, Eugene was even adopted legally by Isolany’s family, a creative strategy they devised to bypass restrictive immigration laws. Eugene went on to attend St. Olaf Academy, graduating in 1904, followed by St. Olaf College, from which he graduated in 1908. At St. Olaf, Eugene was a highly involved student. He led Bible studies, played cornet in the band and showed himself to be a “gifted linguist,” with aptitude in Malagasy, Norwegian, English, German, French, Latin, and Greek. ⁸ Around this time, he also met his future wife Margaret Schaffnit, the German American daughter of a Minneapolis-based Lutheran pastor. Rateaver went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 1911 and a divinity degree the same year from Luther Seminary. This ushered in another professional accomplishment: ordination as a minister in the NLCA. With these credentials in place, Eugene was offered an official missionary position and returned to Madagascar. For the next 25 years, from 1911 to 1936, he primarily served as school director for the Boys’ School in Behara, Madagascar, a southeast village in the Anosy region.

Though Rateaver was officially regarded as an American missionary, several signs indicate that he occupied a liminal role in the mission, without the full privileges of a white missionary, and struggled in his Behara post in particular. For instance, Rateaver earned more than Malagasy evangelists and pastors, “due to his US training” according to one missionary’s biographical notes, but may not have received the same pay as his American colleagues, who were classified as “white clergy.” Several photographs in his biographical file paint a portrait of friendly conviviality between the Rateaver family and other missionaries: Eugene’s daughter Borgella, for example, was the flower girl at missionary Andrew Burgess’s 1928 wedding. However, a letter in the same file, written by a different missionary, notes that some unnamed missionaries “had it in for” Eugene since he returned to Madagascar, though does not explain why. ⁹ At the same time, Eugene was supposedly “not entirely accepted by Malagasy” laypeople in the Behara district where he worked, a claim attributed to Burgess on Rateaver’s biographical record. ¹⁰ The records do not mention that class differences and long-standing tensions between highland ethno-regional groups like Merina and Betsileo, with which Rateaver was identified, and southern coastal groups like Tanosy and Tandroy, among whom Rateaver worked, may have influenced his interactions with local congregants.

All of these different issues came to a head in 1936. Rateaver was accused of having an extramarital affair with a Malagasy woman named Marie Helena who lived in a small village near Behara. The actual allegations against Rateaver are rarely put in writing. ¹¹ After a subsequent “trial” on May 22–26, 1936, which involved witness testimony and a hearing with Eugene’s wife Margaret, Rateaver was found guilty of unethical conduct by twelve Euro-American missionaries. Strikingly, sixty-three male Malagasy pastors and evangelists signed a letter dated October 20, 1936—five months after the trial—that attested to Eugene’s innocence and described him as the victim of a slander campaign by a “dishonorable woman” (femme sans honneur). ¹² Yet the Malagasy pastors’ oral testimonies appear not to have been considered in the earlier trial. Signaling some internal debate, the Madagascar board took a second vote on August 18, 1937 but it unanimously upheld the first one. In 1937, the NLCA revoked Rateaver’s status as a missionary and officially removed his name from church membership rolls.

What happened after the trial has since become part of the contemporary lore of Rateaver. On the day he was to leave Madagascar with his family, he refused to do so, according to retired missionaries. Once back in the US, Eugene’s wife Margaret maintained his innocence. Through at least eight letters written over the next fourteen years, she asked the US mission board to reconsider their decision or, alternately, transfer to the Rateaver family part of Eugene’s pension. ¹³ Rateaver stayed in Madagascar until his death in 1962, though the elderly white missionaries with whom I spoke in Minneapolis/St. Paul were largely unaware of what had transpired in the next 25 years of his life. I have pieced together an account through stories from his living family members, as well as little-known records in his official church file. One of his first acts was actually an attempt to maintain his role as a religious leader. In 1937, he petitioned the French government to begin a new church in the southeast, though his request was unsuccessful due to opposition from American missionaries at the time. ¹⁴

After the late 1930s, Eugene became increasingly involved in Malagasy nationalist and anticolonial movements. Most notably, he was an underground participant in the 1947–1948 uprising, considered the most significant revolt in Madagascar against French colonial rule (Cole, 2001). With other insurgents, Rateaver was jailed by the French for 21 months beginning on April 9, 1947. Though the official charge against him was the circulation of anticolonial propaganda, Eugene was suspected of having played a role in organizing the rebellion, because he was involved in the famed Mouvement Democratique de la Renovation Malgache. While in a prison hospital, Eugene wrote a letter to his American family. He said his papers were confiscated during his arrest and, since then, had been subject to forced labor and “threats and rough handling.” After his release from prison, Eugene continued working for a decade toward political independence. When Madagascar gained independence in 1960, he was not only an informal advisor to the newly elected government. In a brief and final return to the US, he was also one of a four-person delegation to travel in November 1960 to Washington, DC, for the opening of the Embassy of the Malagasy Republic, where he was listed as a “cultural attaché.” ¹⁵

In sum, archival documents paint a complex portrait of Rateaver as an inspiring national independence leader, brilliant student and linguist, political activist, and controversial cleric, encompassing a maze of perspectives that I have only scarcely begun to do justice to here. However, I would like to spend some time analyzing what the written records reveal about Rateaver’s conflicted relationship with the church, before turning to a discussion of how he has been variously remembered as an ancestor-figure in the present day.

In particular, I believe Rateaver’s political activism points to an alternate set of reasons for why he was excommunicated from the church. Brief allusions in the church records indicate that Eugene was politically active well before 1947–1948. In the 1936 hearing transcript, the presiding missionary notes that Rateaver refused to pay a mandatory 4000-franc colonial tax, and that his protest had “put the mission in rather bad with the government.” ¹⁶ Many American Lutheran missionaries quietly criticized the French and privately imagined themselves as more aligned with Malagasy cultural perspectives, as they lived for up to 40 years in Malagasy communities and spoke the Malagasy language rather than French. Yet they also publicly cultivated amicable ties with the French administration, whose approval they needed to build churches, hospitals, and schools. Through his anticolonial activism, Eugene transgressed this public-private divide and, in the eyes of some American missionaries, his behavior may have jeopardized the mission’s standing with the government. This has led me to believe that, beyond its explicit focus on moral misconduct, the trial actually served several different goals, including addressing Rateaver’s political activities.

Rateaver’s own 1911 master’s thesis in political science, titled “The French Administrative Policy in Madagascar,” underscores that he had already formed a strong political critique of French occupation by the time he returned to Madagascar later that year. The first few lines of the thesis’ foreword set the tone for what follows. “Part One is presented because the writer feels,” Rateaver notes, “that all the works on colonization that have come under his observation present a point of view that is one-sided” (1911, 2). Though Rateaver troublingly reproduces a Eurocentric civilizing discourse in his descriptions of Malagasy culture, he characterizes French colonization as a form of economic exploitation or, as he puts it, “a business speculation on the largest scale” (16). He compares Malagasy experiences of colonization to those in Tahiti, Papua New Guinea, and among Native Americans, to suggest he is aware of the potent cross-connections in different forms of colonial occupation and their contributions to a growing, transnational anticolonial movement. Though as a Christian he is sympathetic to the spiritual aims of non-French missionaries, Rateaver writes that they are caught up in a geopolitical game that ultimately serves governing European elites.

In addition to the mission’s expressed concerns over Rateaver’s anticolonial views, which influenced how he conceptualized church work, it is clear that problematic ideas about race and racial mixture also pervaded his trial. Prevailing racial and political discourses in Madagascar at the time perceived métis as people with divided loyalties (Cole, 2010: 100–102). Though French officials initially viewed marriages between French male settlers and Malagasy women positively, they later expressed fear in the 1930s that créoles malgaches would wreak havoc with the political order, as they were imagined to be “torn between their European and Malagasy heritage” (Cole, 2010: 100–101). As Emmanuelle Saada (2012) has argued in a study of French colonial filiation, métissage and métis sexuality—at the center of the Rateaver controversy—were often characterized as challenging the racial system underpinning colonial political order. Written evidence of these views exists in the trial record. In the words of Margaret Rateaver, due to his métis identity, “a certain mistrust [of Rateaver] . . . crept into the minds of the missionaries . . . and they . . . more easily believe[d] these things of him than . . . about other missionaries.” ¹⁷

In sum, as a young pupil, Rateaver had been characterized as embodying the future promise of the Malagasy Lutheran Church. Yet a few decades later his racial, ethnic, national, and gender positioning had arguably made him vulnerable to charges of being misaligned with the authorized practices of the mission church, so shaped as they were by colonial political and racial hierarchies. His alleged misconduct had operated as the trial’s central charge when, in fact, a variety of issues, including anxieties over métissage and Rateaver’s anticolonial political views, surfaced in the trial’s exchanges and clearly influenced its outcome. ¹⁸ But at this point we might wonder: how is Rateaver recalled today? Now I return to the story with which I began the article, current-day remembrances of Rateaver among American missionaries, and contrast those recollections with the stories of Rateaver’s own descendants.

Citing as referring back: Competing remembrances of Rateaver

The retired American missionaries who shared stories about Rateaver with me in 2004–2006 had not read Rateaver’s master’s thesis nor the institutional records I have drawn upon here. What was striking to me was that, among retired missionaries, the story of Rateaver seemed frozen on the image of the ship departing Madagascar in 1936, with Rateaver nowhere in sight. Margaret and the children were on board, unsure what was happening. But inevitably, the story would end with the sense that Rateaver himself had vanished in Madagascar and was not really seen nor heard from since. Among the retired Lutheran missionaries with whom I spoke, Rateaver’s widely recalled, surprising non-appearance at the ship in 1936 was evocative through the sense of mystery and not-quite-graspability that surrounded it. Rateaver’s decision not to return to the US and legendary role in anticolonial rebellion appeared to bring to the surface unresolved questions: Were the allegations against Rateaver mishandled by the church? If so, what does Rateaver’s story tell us about the past church as an institution, and do people bear some moral responsibility for those issues today? How then should the frequently narrated history of mission work in Madagascar be understood or rethought?

Several of my contemporary American interlocutors—a generation later than the twelve who voted on his case—noted with apparent pride that Rateaver had played a role in the Malagasy fight for independence; in hindsight, he became the Malagasy leader that some had thought he would be, only not in the church. ¹⁹ What I noticed across these interactions was that, as a past figure, Rateaver had quietly come to symbolize complex ethical and spiritual questions surrounding the operation of the earlier colonial mission and whether it was fully aligned with God’s will for the church. ²⁰ By continually revisiting the past figure of Rateaver, white former missionaries examined the moral question of whether Rateaver was treated unjustly, considering what might have been if things had gone differently. By refusing to appear, however, we could say that Rateaver evaded any quick resolutions, slipping out of view. Like a cultural mirror, stories about him seemed to call for retired missionaries to grapple with the broader racial and political inequalities of the mission church. In the context of the US-Madagascar Lutheran aid partnership described earlier, he spoke to the limits of creating a “non-colonial” social and political order in the current aid relationship, without a more thoroughgoing American examination of the colonial past.

With all this in mind, it is helpful to contrast retired missionaries’ remembrances with Rateaver’s family’s current views of him. Perhaps most of all, his family members with whom I have had contact do not feel that Eugene disappeared in Madagascar at all, merely that he decided to stay there. They attribute that decision to the fact that, according to the family’s stories, he did have a separate relationship with a Malagasy woman and, after that relationship ended, went on to form another family with his second Malagasy-born wife. Nonetheless, Rateaver was mistreated by the Lutheran mission, Cathy noted matter-of-factly, and several factors—the mission’s institutional racism, his relationship, and Rateaver’s public anticolonial activism—contributed to his excommunication. That expulsion also resulted in the entire family cutting ties with the Lutheran church, as Margaret and the children went on to become Jehovah’s Witnesses. While white missionaries with whom I spoke in 2004–2006 tended to characterize Rateaver as either guilty or a virtuous but tragic figure, his family members had settled on a much more morally complex view of him as an ancestor.

Putting these pieces together was a project Rateaver’s descendants had embraced for a variety of different reasons. Perhaps first among them was that the past had been mysterious all along, not something that could be readily established. Cathy’s first husband, Paul, had been adopted at birth in 1939 and grew up in California with two white adoptive parents. According to Cathy, Paul did not initially express any interest in finding his biological parents. He was a driven and successful student, going on to earn a PhD in chemistry at MIT. At age 40, while Paul, Cathy, and their children were living in Saudi Arabia as he taught chemistry, he was surprisingly contacted by his birth mother, who happened to be one of Eugene’s children. Within the span of a single phone call in 1979, Paul learned that he had a Malagasy maternal family. He began what Cathy describes as an “obsessive” investigation into Rateaver, with the goal of writing a novel called Lover of the Lost, the literal translation of “Rateaver.” In spite of some good attempts, that project never came to fruition. So, nearly 20 years after Paul’s death in 1993, Cathy picked up the research and decided to tackle it in the way she knew how as a college history major, making it a history book for her children. But so much remains unknown. As Cathy writes, “Speculation stands in [for] fact to keep the flow going.”

In short, competing ways of relating to Rateaver among former American Lutheran missionaries and Rateaver’s descendants reveal different social and political concerns. While Rateaver could signal to his family impressive national leadership, the unknown puzzles of the past, and even qualities of steadfastness and resolve familiar to the current generation, he could also be to white missionaries a complex symbol of possible institutional failures, of lingering questions about colonial racial and political persecution in the church. In the article’s final section, I revisit the question of what can be learned about ancestors, citation, and Christian community from Rateaver’s and his family’s experiences.

Conclusion: Toward conscientious ancestral cites

At a time when many are importantly reconsidering canons, what does it mean to reincorporate an ancestral figure into a canonical conversation? What does it take to move beyond what some have called a superficial engagement with a past figure? Here I have in mind what Smith et al. (2021) characterize as packing bibliographies with rediscovered figures in a cursory fashion.

My preliminary research into Eugene Rateaver points to important variations in what ancestors are culturally and what different relations to past figures are possible, depending on who is interpreting the past and relating to and “citing” past figures. Among white American Lutheran retired missionaries, Rateaver was spiritual kin and became adoptive kin to several families but his kinship tie was dramatically severed through excommunication. It is notable that, in a community where it is not uncommon to read voraciously or pursue independent research projects, former missionaries did not in my experience demonstrate a desire to research Rateaver’s life story or discuss his writing on Malagasy colonialism (as they sometimes did for other canonical figures, such as J.P. Hogstad or the Malagasy martyrs). He existed as a possible Christian spiritual ancestor, with the potential to be reincorporated into Lutheran community in some limited respects, but occupied more of a haunting role overall.

By haunting, I refer to a cultural and theoretical approach that recognizes how past figures can intercede in the present, carrying amorphous anxiety and unresolved issues associated with forms of colonial violence and other “contested historical experience[s]” (Good, 2019: 419). ²¹ Through their appearance, they can speak against powerful forces associated with silencing the past (Good, Chiovenda, and Rahimi, 2022). As Jean Langford (2016: 2) describes of haunting, it is “less a form of deliberate remembrance, than a condition of being accosted by the dead in immersive or oneiric encounters where temporality no longer maintains its chronicity.” While considerable work like Langford’s has focused on communities who suffered mass violence and trauma, some writers have explored how ghostly figures in relatively dominant, powerful communities illuminate the limits and workings of power, revealing “what lies under the surface of open dialogue and public behavior . . . [and] often remains also unformulated and unarticulated” (Chiovenda, 2019: 489–490). I follow their lead here, viewing Rateaver as a force that recurrently splits open and unsettles dominant recollections of the past among white American Lutheran former missionaries. His banishment from Lutheran community amplifies the sense that he is a lingering presence who awaits forms of resolution and justice.

While Rateaver had a haunting quality among white retired American missionaries, he held a different role among some of his living US-based family, who have embraced his legacy as a Malagasy independence leader. Among Rateaver’s own descendants, making connections with Eugene through family history research is an active process of ancestralizing him, of selectively deepening relations between themselves and their present circumstances and the cultural and historical conditions of his life (see Cannell, 2021). Cathy, for example, once remarked that researching Eugene made her reflect critically on lessons about “missions” she heard as a young girl in the Congregationalist church in Massachusetts where she grew up; her niece, a college student interested in studying anthropology, saw Eugene as an inspiring activist whose life experiences bore lessons for the social and political issues facing her generation.

Therefore, it is important to bear in mind the distinct knowledge-generating practices that constrain and shape who ancestors are in these cases. How do past figures fit into broader systems of power and knowledge, each of which variously mediate relations among experience and understanding? ²² With white American Lutheran missionaries, it is less that Rateaver himself is being reincorporated into a canonical history of mission work in Madagascar and more that his story prompts questions about unknown or unrecognized dimensions of past injustice in the mission church. Yet among his family members, Rateaver is an important, recuperated spiritual and lineal figure. Cathy has noted that her current Episcopal church in the Bay Area, where she is treasurer, focuses on a social justice-oriented Christianity; her extensive research into Rateaver complements this orientation by demonstrating his lifelong commitment to a Christianity engaged in social change. In this sense, “citing” Rateaver is a multifaceted act that canonizes his shaping role in the values and concerns of the contemporary family.

My own effort at “citing” Rateaver in this article also has different implications. Several issues should be considered, I think, when approaching Rateaver as a potential intellectual ancestor or canonical figure. First, a conscientious engagement with past figures’ ideas involves a careful assessment of the historical context(s) of their work and writing. This assessment must involve a sustained engagement with not only their ideas but also an appreciation for, as we see with Rateaver, how those ideas may have been formed as a counterpoint to a dominant order. Such work can also involve an effort to identify how power relations informed the specific circuits and forms through which past figures’ writing traveled (or did not) as well as how their cultural positioning influenced not only the structural relationships they had with academic and religious institutions but also the unique understandings of religious experience that their cultural positioning offered.

Incorporating overlooked ancestors into canonical academic conversations is therefore not only an act of valuing intellectual labor and crediting contributions but also an important way to unearth directions of knowledge-making that could positively transform studies of religion. This is an important step toward “decenter[ing] Western-centric theory to minimize its theoretical dominance in the field” (Davis and Mulla, 2023: 1; Gupta and Spoolman, 2022). It is, at its core, an effort to disrupt power relations associated with how academic knowledge is produced. In this vein, Rateaver’s ideas could influence scholarship on Malagasy Christianity, the independence struggle, and the connections between colonial missions and ongoing US Christian involvement in Madagascar. As we saw in his thesis, Rateaver endorsed a Christian practice of unifying political action and religious commitment. Rateaver’s politically informed Christianity is not unusual in Madagascar as Malagasy Protestant pastors have played an influential role in political movements, from secret anticolonial societies like Vy, Vato, Sakelika in the early colonial period (Randrianja and Ellis, 2009) to the contested election of Marc Ravalomanana as president in 2002 (Nielsson and Skeie, 2014). Rateaver’s theological views could be interpreted as providing an alternative to scholarship on “pure” Christian theological reflection or dematerialized piety. As Halvorson and Hovland (2021) have argued, clarifying who it is that seeks to ideologically maintain “purified” forms of Christianity is important; its pursuit relies on time for reflection and relative political and economic security, all characteristic historically of white masculine trajectories of institutional privilege.

Finally, I follow other authors in this collection who call for repositioning our whole selves in efforts to transform canonical conversations. It is no coincidence that I have examined Eugene Rateaver’s overlooked contributions to Lutheran evangelism in Madagascar and the Malagasy independence struggle. To some extent, my own paternal ancestors’ conflicted involvements with Rateaver, as well as community members’ and Rateaver’s family’s recognitions of this and their own knowledge-generating practices, have set me up, now several generations later, to recognize this complex inheritance of a sort and look into it. Such family histories, intellectual lineages, intersecting forms of power and knowledge production, social networks and hybrid, multiple identifications indelibly shape scholarly work on citation. Canonical figures, therefore, are profoundly relational and socially mediated phenomena. Even when individuals, they resist individuation, prompting an important question: How do they make us, as we make them?