Surveying the history of the Episcopal Church and the Wisconsin Oneidas from the early nineteenth century to the present, this anthology of academic essays and personal Native recollections issues from a close collaboration between professional historians, Episcopal clergy and members – both clerical and lay – of the Oneida community.

One set of articles surveys Oneida-missionary contacts until just before the Episcopalians entered the picture, a second sketches the establishment of nineteenth-century Oneida Episcopalianism, while a third offers summary interpretations of the entire historical trajectory. Taken together, these articles advance a balanced interpretation of the Episcopalian mission, denying that it either brought ‘civilisation’ to ‘savages’ or degraded Native traditions. Instead, the authors treat the relationship between Church and tribe as an encounter framed – significantly – in Oneida terms as a covenant chain, a concept rooted in historic agreements between the Iroquois and Anglo-American colonists that stressed the equality and mutual respect grounding their interactions. Oneidas had good reasons to embrace the Episcopal faith willingly: its clergy often defended their interests, framed the Gospel message in indigenous cultural terms and allowed the Oneidas agency to shape their devotional life. For their part, the Oneidas responded most readily to what the missionaries did rather than to what they preached, valuing their good works more than their theology. While allowing that each side sometimes used the other for its own purposes and noting some of the mission's deleterious effects – such as weakening ancient clan structures – the authors pay less attention to Christianisation's negative impacts. At times this accentuation of the positive imparts a mildly congratulatory tone, which reflects the volume's composite character as part scholarly enterprise, part collective rehearsal of this Oneida community's history, and part celebration of what one contributor calls ‘a special bond between a [Native] people and an institutional church’ (p. 167). The first-person Oneida accounts – eight from oral narratives taken eight decades ago, nine of them contemporary statements – provide supporting anecdotes, albeit without any scholarly apparatus that might link them more closely into the larger story. Their inclusion both reflects current scholarly concern to include Native informants into ethnohistorical work and acclaims the durability of the Episcopal-Oneida ‘chain’. This book adds to the large literature that emphasises how and why Natives embraced Christianity on substantially their own terms rather than on those of the missionaries. Centuries of contact with French, British and then American clergy inexorably changed the Oneidas’ traditional religion, but elements of the old ways persisted meaningfully within the now-dominant Christian context. For good reason, Native-inflected Episcopalianism strongly grounds contemporary Wisconsin Oneidas’ identity.