The Religious Worldview of the Indigenous Population of the Northern Ob' as Understood by Christian Missionaries

On the eve of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church had at least nine missions operating among Siberia's indigenous peoples. The Red victory in the ensuing civil war led to the elimination of all missionary activity, whose resumption was possible only after the fall of the Communist regime seventy years later. The few accounts of Christian missions published in the USSR were tendentious in the extreme. Only in the post-Communist era have scholars in the former Soviet Union been free to explore the rich archival and journalistic resources left by the missionaries.

Anatoliy Ablazhei's article was chiefly addressed to scholars in Russia. It explores the extent to which the newly available missionary accounts are useful sources for contemporary scholars investigating native religion and cosmology. His work is reproduced here in translation for several reasons. It exemplifies the new wave of Russian scholarship about missions history, giving us a glimpse of the mass of documentary material available for researchers to use. Its critique of Russian Orthodox perceptions of native religion and the imperfect methods employed to spread Christianity in Siberia provides us with material from a mission field little known in the outside world. This information can prove useful for comparative missiological investigations. Above all, however, its value lies in its contribution to the ongoing debates about contextualization and syncretism, the validity of the Gospel for all peoples, and the appropriation of Christianity by the world's indigenous peoples. It exemplifies the errors of ignorance often committed by outsiders trying to spread the Gospel within a thoroughly alien culture. As Terence Ranger reminded us in the first Adrian Hastings Memorial Lecture at Leeds University in November 2002, authentic Christianity is indeed possible among indigenous peoples. The Holy Spirit can inspire a transformation of their lives and culture, without an excess of Eurocentric accretions.¹