This interesting new collection of essays explores the question of “how people came to interpret exchanges” (x) between white missionaries and native peoples during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The focus here is equally on the process of intercultural exchange in the past and on the various methods by which historians and ethnographers of the present interpret those exchanges. Indeed, the essays presented here, introduced by A. G. Roeber, grew out of a conference held at the publication of a new translation of Moravian missionary David Zeisberger's diaries covering the period between 1772 and 1781 (The Moravian Missionary Diaries of David Zeisberger, 1772–1781, ed. Hermann Wellenreuther and Carola Wessel, trans. Julie Tomberlin Weber [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005]). As a result of this textual and methodological focus, many of the essays deal with “the issue of texts, translations, and the challenge multiple languages posed in European-Native American exchanges” (xiii).

As Roeber's concise introduction explains, most of the essays take as their subject missions to native communities in the mid-Atlantic, including seventeenth-century Jesuit missions, eighteenth-century Moravian missions, and, in a particularly compelling essay by Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, early nineteenth-century missions to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in New York. This territory is, Roeber argues, important for two reasons. First, the Moravians and Jesuits who produced the documents upon which most of these essays are based displayed “an intensified interest … in the language, religion, and political organization of the First Peoples they encountered in North America” (x). Their records have therefore been used for ethnographic purposes that may at times be at odds with the missionary contexts of their production. Second, despite the richness of these records, which were produced centuries into the colonial project, “many of our deepest impressions about these first exchanges continue to be guided by the Spanish contacts in the Caribbean, Meso, and South America, or English experiences in Virginia and Massachusetts” (xi). The later moments of contact between natives and Europeans represented here offer a very different perspective on the complexity of inter-ethnic relations. Collectively, these essays seek to challenge paradigms of contact within missions and too-easy assumptions about the texts produced there.

Several of the more specialized pieces deal with the problem of understanding the kinship structure among the Delaware peoples where David Zeisberger worked. These essays draw on Moravian records, and each asks, implicitly or explicitly, how reliable those sources truly are. Hermann Wellenreuther examines Zeisberger's description of the succession of head chiefs and argues that the missionary's diaries “force us to historicize the Delaware nation” (47). He suggests that the internal political structures of the Delaware changed over time, so that the structures modern historians identify cannot be assumed outside any specific historical context. Robert S. Grumet, on the other hand, uses the Zeisberger diary in tandem with other sources to outline a sketch of the various structures that organized Delaware societies. His anthropological approach is quite at odds with Wellenreuther's historical one, but it provides a wealth of valuable information about the “guiding set of principles determining ancestry, descent, affiliation, and social control” (51) among the Delaware and about how contact with missions challenged those principles. The third essay in this conversation comes from Siegrun Kaiser and examines the relationship between clan membership and political strategies among the Munsee across centuries of history. As Roeber points out, these scholars disagree about both terminology and methodology, but their combination here illustrates the breadth of questions that must be asked about Moravian missions and about the sources they left before any overarching interpretation of the period can be achieved.

The rest of the essays in the collection ponder this same territory of text and contact in creative ways. Dominique Deslandres reminds readers that, while the Jesuit records may appear to have an ethnographic bent when describing native peoples, “Missionaries and theologians tried their best to integrate this radically different example of humanity into a familiar system of thought” (75). In other words, even in identifying the natives' otherness, missionaries placed their subjects into a fundamentally European context. Christopher J. Bilodeau weaves a fascinating tale of how Jesuit missionaries to the Wabanaki sought to control their subjects through internal policing, the use of the state, and, ultimately, deception. Walter W. Woodward follows on recent scholarship emphasizing the importance of sound in history to argue that the Moravians' use of music in their own worship and in missions may have provided an important “intercultural bridge” (140). These contributions are well written and insightful.

Taken as a whole, this collection brings needed scholarly attention to important epistemological and historical questions for mission and native history. If the religious contexts from which missionaries and natives operated is less well examined (excepting Deslandres's contribution), the authors may certainly be forgiven; their task was substantial enough. Several of the essays, especially those offered by Bilodeau and Mt. Pleasant, provide readable illustrations of substantive issues that would be appropriate for undergraduates. The more technical discussions offered by other pieces will be of interest to specialists. Finally, the comparative perspective enabled by essays that span more than a century and several different religious traditions provides fertile territory for those seeking broad questions.