The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian-French Religious Encounter

Kenneth M. Morrison

Feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

Arguing that Native Americans' religious life and history have been misinterpreted, author Kenneth M. Morrison reconstructs the Eastern Algonkians' world views and demonstrates the indigenous modes of rationality that shaped not only their encounter with the French but also their self-directed process of religious change. In reassessing controversial anthropological, historical, and ethnohistorical scholarship, Morrison develops interpretive strategies that are more responsive to the religious world views of the Eastern Algonkian peoples. He concludes that the Eastern Algonkians did not convert to Catholicism, but rather applied traditional knowledge and values to achieve a pragmatic and critical sense of Christianity and to preserve and extend kinship solidarity into the future. The result was a remarkable intersection of Eastern Algonkian and missionary cosmologies.

About the author

Kenneth M. Morrison is Professor of Religion at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations.