ABSTRACT
We will never know the full extent of the assimilation of Bible stories by Native Americans into their oral repertories in the nineteenth century because most linguistic and ethnographic fieldworkers simply ignored such assimilations in their campaign to collect “classical” Native narratives. While understandable under the circumstances, this neglect of Native Bible stories is regrettable, in that such texts as we do have shed valuable light on (1) the practical circumstances of evangelical work among the Indians, (2) the theological dispositions of various tribes before and during the Contact Era, (3) Native imaginative and philosophical responses to the acculturative traumas of Anglo contact and conquest, and (4) the governing “rules” and conventions of the traditional Indian mythologies, as revealed in the ways these myth-systems absorbed the missionaries’ Bible stories. (The same claims and complaints might be made, of course, on behalf of largely unrecorded Bible-adaptations in all colonialized cultures, as far back as sixth-century England. Augustine’s letters back to Rome neglect to record, alas, what imaginative and literary sense his “converts” were making of the stories of the Old Testament and the Gospels.)
In the American and Canadian West, Indians were hearing and absorbing biblical stories (as well as French folktales) from French-Canadian trappers and voyageurs before 1800, but the Bible’s main literary impact in the West came in the 1830s and 1840s with the arrival of Protestant and Catholic missionaries such as Jason Lee, Henry Spalding, Cushing Eells, Father Peter De Smet, and Father F.N.Blanchet. “Preaching”—often across two or even three translations, and often ending in Chinook jargon-most often took the form of telling simplified stories from Scripture, notably the Creation and Fall, the Tower of Babel and Confusion of Tongues, Noah and the Flood, Jonah, Daniel, and the Life of Christ, sometimes supplemented with illustrations and diagrams depicting biblical history according to the Protestant or Catholic viewpoint.
