Linda M. Clemmons begins her study, Conflicted Mission, Faith, Disputes and Deception on the Dakota Frontier, with an apt allegory for the relations that developed between Dakota bands and ABCFM (American Board of Foreign Missions) missionaries in southern Minnesota between 1835 and 1862. According to a story told by an early Minnesota settler, missionary Samuel Pond met a Shakopeee Indian on a trail. Since neither man would turn out of the narrow path for the other, they bumped into each other. Clemmons finds the tale a good example of ABCFM missionary-Dakota interactions: “Most times, the missionaries and Dakotas walked on parallel paths, both committed to their own ways, never coming together or truly understanding the other” (3). Although this metaphor could apply to any number of ABCFM missions around the world in the first half of the nineteenth century, Clemmons goes further than most mission scholars by demonstrating how interaction with indigenous people “pushed the missionaries in unintended and frequently unwelcomed directions” (3).

With this study, Clemmons has made an important contribution to the growing body of well-researched, nuanced investigations of missionary-indigenous people interaction during the first half of the nineteenth century. There is nothing surprising about her conclusion that “conflict was one of the defining features of the Dakota mission during its thirty-year existence in Minnesota” (4). Conflict was an inherent feature of all foreign missions established by the ABCFM (American Board of Foreign Missions). Disagreement among strong-minded missionaries within and between stations was as typical as their disagreements with board policies. What makes Clemmons's book unique is its focus on the particular circumstances faced by the Dakota bands and the ABCFM Dakota missionaries, who both had to adjust to rapid and wide-ranging changes brought about by the government's removal policy.

In the first half of this superb Minnesota Historical Society publication, Clemmons provides the background of the mission board, its missionaries, and the evangelical culture that produced motivation for both. Readers unfamiliar with the romanticized idealism of the foreign mission cause will need to be aware of what propelled the movement and what was expected of its agents. Clemmons makes clear that so-called “cultural imperialism” and the ubiquitous racist attitudes of Minnesota settlers and government agents were not shared by the missionaries or its board.

To be sure, the Dakota missionaries, men and women alike, engaged in paternalistic attitudes toward the Dakota, and they surely did not give the latter a choice about whether or not they wanted to be “Christianized.” However, Clemmons stresses throughout how after living amongst Dakota bands and especially after learning their language, Dakota missionary assumptions about Indian barbarity began to break down. Moreover, their daily interactions with the Dakota “occasionally forced the missionaries to question, and even redefine, their definition of what it meant to convert to Christianity” (15). Overtime, several of the Dakota missionaries, particularly Thomas Williamson and his son John and the Pond brothers, became intolerant of their own intolerance. Yet overall, the missionaries “never became cultural relativists,” Clemmons emphasizes. They did not abandon the central doctrines of their faith in which “conversion remained an all—or—nothing affair” (94).

Every ABCFM mission had to engage with local and/or colonial authorities. Dakota aversion and indifference to the missionaries' proselytizing was exacerbated by the mission's proximity to federal forts and Indian agents. If the mission angered federal agents, it risked losing its permit to stay in Indian country. On the other hand, when the missionaries took Civilization Fund monies and farming positions from the government, they made themselves indistinguishable from federal agents.

While the mission's principle leaders, Stephen Riggs and Thomas Williamson, argued over whether they should admit polygamous men to their small congregations, the Treaty of 1837, part of President Jackson's removal policy, ceded Dakota territory east of the Mississippi to the U.S. government. Even though they worried about the influx of “heathen” settlers who followed soon after, the Dakota missionaries did not publicly criticize the treaty. Because of the missionaries' assumed and actual collaboration with the government, anti-mission Dakotas accelerated their opposition during the 1840s, destroying mission livestock, boycotting mission schools, and ridiculing and ostracizing Dakota mission supporters.

Clemmons' third theme after “Faith” and “Disputes” is “Deception.” Using primarily missionary correspondence and annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, she finds no shortage of evidence for deception. The missionaries' reluctance to inform the board of many of their problems and their disagreement with board policies is considered by the author to have been intentionally misleading. The board's deceptions lay mainly in failing to acknowledge the Dakota mission's failures and problems, even when they knew of them, in its fund raising publication, the Missionary Herald. However, this kind of missionary and board self-deception was experienced at all ABCFM missions. It was fostered by the board's constant need for donations in conjunction with its inoperable policy of privileging the gospel over attempts to assimilate natives to American material culture, as if the two could be separated.

For this reader, Clemmon's greatest contribution to ABCFM and mission studies is the exceptionally well-researched and well-written narrative she has provided about the Dakota bands and their opposition to the federal government. Surely, the greatest deceptions were committed by government agents, fur traders, and settlers, who ignored and broke treaty after treaty, as they drove the Dakota off their lands and withheld promised compensation. Unlike the ABCFM missionaries to the southeastern tribes who went to jail and to court to prevent what later became known as the “Trail of Tears,” the Dakota missionaries made little effort to influence or openly criticize government Indian policy. The Dakota missionaries and the Dakota bands may have moved in the same direction against the federal government, but they were, in fact, on very different paths.