Why would any Indigenous person in Canada, past or present, embrace Christianity? What would prompt the colonized to adopt the religion of the colonizer? The essays in Mixed Blessings revisit these and other essential questions for Canadian religious history. Moving beyond both triumphalist and vilifying accounts, the contributors to this volume—a combination of historians, theologians, religious studies scholars, and Indigenous studies experts—seek to offer more nuanced and textured narratives of Indigenous-European religious encounters. The book's title is meant to suggest that Christianity brought both harm and benefits to Indigenous communities and individuals.

To suggest that Christianity if not the colonialism to which it was inextricably tied was anything other than an unmitigated disaster for Canada's Indigenous peoples is a bold claim given current stereotypes, reinforced in recent decades by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Sordid revelations of missionary abuse of Indigenous children at residential schools as well as the concept of forced assimilation leave the public disgusted. Yet these authors, some of them Indigenous Christians themselves, insist that this history is messier and more complicated than any black-and-white portrait might suggest. In particular, they are keen to make the Indigenous subjects of their case studies the principal actors in their stories. Those folk were never merely victims; instead, to use the language of scholars of Native peoples in early America, those who accepted Christianity usually made that faith their own. They adapted its rituals, reshaped its theology, and managed its religious and political power. Often they gravitated toward Christian beliefs and practices that resonated with their own traditions and saw them as aids in their efforts to cope with the other changes colonialism brought.

What those processes looked like and how we might effectively teach about them today constitute major themes of the volume. A short review may only highlight a few of the essays that illustrate these emphases. In part 1, “Communities in Encounter,” Elizabeth Elbourne examines how Haudenosaunee people interacted with Anglicans amid an evolving political relationship with the British in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both sides recognized that Christianity “was a source of both power and danger . . . [and] needed to be managed in order for it to be harnessed effectively” (38). Part 2, “Individuals in Encounter,” includes Jean-François Bélisle and Nicole St-Onge's reinterpretation of Louis Riel (leader of the Northwest Rebellion in western Canada in 1885), emphasizing the close links between the religious and the political within Métis culture and proposing interesting parallels with leaders and events in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico during the same era. This section also features Tasha Beeds's analysis of early twentieth-century Cree Anglican minister Edward Ahenakew. She finds that his Indigenous and Christian identities were not mutually exclusive or inherently antagonistic but instead together gave him resources for leading his people. Part 3, “Contemporary Encounters,” largely shifts the focus to pedagogical matters. Denise Nadeau describes her efforts to incorporate Indigenous methodologies and values into her course on “Indigenous Traditions, Women, and Colonialism” at Concordia University, while Carmen Lansdowne promotes autoethnography as a worthy and deeply personal approach for Indigenous scholars studying their own peoples' history.

Typical of collections of essays, and particularly ones with contributors from multiple disciplines, this one feels uneven in the quality and persuasiveness of its content. All of the authors would have benefitted from being afforded a bit more space. It is hard to make a full case for anything in less than twenty pages. Moreover, several of the contributors spend as much time telling us what they are going to tell us as actually telling us. As such, most of the essays are more suggestive than conclusive in their assertions. Editors Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton help the cause by providing an excellent introduction and a succinct conclusion that pull the volume together. Beyond identifying a number of key themes, they rightly point out a number of fault lines running throughout the work: differences over “why and for whom they [the contributors] research and write,” “how to research this subject in a good way,” and “how to reconcile the nuance of past events with the complex current legacies of Christianity and colonialism in Indigenous Canada” (206). As a historian, I gravitate to those essays that put a higher premium on historical evidence than social scientific theory or theological discourse for understanding past experience. The archival record is frustrating in its incompleteness and biases, but it nevertheless remains our surest guide to making sense of these complex encounters. Still, Mixed Blessings illustrates the value of employing and listening to multiple approaches to the past and makes plain that this particular past remains very present and relevant for Indigenous peoples and all Canadians.