Against narratives representing Native religion as static and Christianity as an inherent threat to Native “authenticity,” Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape makes the case that Christianity was not always detrimental to Native cultures. Indeed, the book's essays suggest that Christianity often vectored American Indian practices and sometimes worldviews through violent periods of colonization. The fourteen contributors to Native Americans posit a way of looking at early American Christianity beyond either missionary hagiography or simple vilification of Christianity's role in colonization. In doing so, the book does not attempt to determine whether Native Americans “truly believed” in Christianity – the focus of much scholarship to date – but instead aims to explore the practices and material culture that resulted from these encounters.

Native Americans emerges out of important conversations about Native American religious history and a broader surge in interdisciplinary religious studies across the humanities. If there is a dominant claim across the essays, it is that American Indians appropriated or adapted European objects, theologies, and rituals to their existing practices and worldviews. Refreshingly, many of the essays focus not on specific physical sites, but on mobility or networking, embracing the challenges of reconstructing the complex and ever-changing specifics of Indian communities under pressure from European settlement.

The interdisciplinary emphasis makes otherwise divergent approaches resonate within the same critical space. For example, Laura Stevens's transatlantic framing of Scottish missionary work, showing how missionizing strengthened the Scottish sense of religious and political identity within the British Empire, holds interesting implications for Daniel Mandell's argument that Christianity enabled the continuity of Native traditions and language in the case of missionary Frederick Baylies's controversial establishment of Christian schools. Joanna Brooks and Rachel Wheeler each ask the reader to look at certain prominent historical figures in a new light. Brooks imagines the psychological state of Mohegan Presbyterian Samson Occom at a low point in his career, arguing that Native American studies should take feelings into account both because of how indigenous conceptions of emotion played a role in shaping their Christianity and because doing so offers productive methodological and evidentiary challenges to scholars of Indian religious experience. Wheeler takes up this notion implicitly, asking readers to view the eighteenth-century Mahican Christian Hendrick Aupaumut as a “prophet of cultural revitalization” and declaring Native Christianity a means of strengthening more traditional Native views and values (228). David Silverman's take on Aupaumut's controversy with Nativist groups that wanted to reject Christianity is darker: such debates effected survival by maintaining a flexible approach to cultural systems but did not displace the historical irony that while Christianity may have aided survival in some respects, the dream of earthly safety for Native Christians has yet to be fulfilled.

Other essays' primary innovation lies in their analyses of Native ideas' impact on European missionaries: a claim crucial to the book's ambition to describe the “reshaping” of the American religious landscape. Joel Martin's “Crisscrossing Projects of Sovereignty and Conversion” explores the personal and professional relationship between Cherokee Christian David Brown and missionary Jeremiah Evarts, who toured the East Coast to promote Christianity. Because Brown used his prominence to network and to educate his audience about injustices to Native communities, Martin contends, the Cherokee convert simultaneously advanced the interests of missionaries and Native communities; these goals were not inherently at odds with one another. While Brown learned about Christianity from Evarts, the latter also drew inspiration from his companion, eventually including in his prayers a hope for Native rights to be “vindicated” (85). Douglas Winiarski's essay on popular religion performs a similar kind of work on a broader scale, portraying the circulation of “supernatural lore and occult practices” among Anglo, Native, and African Americans (111).

Michael McNally's coda is not to be missed; it raises, graciously but gravely, a concern we shared in considering the volume. “Do historians and ethnohistorians,” McNally asks, “not risk overstating the reach of Native agency and understating the ways that colonization, dispossession, and disease have set the dramatically unequal terms of power on which missionaries and Indians interacted?” (300). For McNally, this scholarly project is not historically isolated, but has significant implications for Native communities today, especially as the relationship between Natives and Christianity remains complex and in flux. Some of the strongest essays, unsurprisingly, raise other questions about the shape of the project as a whole. In their jointly written chapter – the only essay that addresses Spanish missionary work – Steven Hackel and Hilary Wyss develop new methodological ground by comparing and contrasting the relationship between missionary education and Native literacy in California and New England. It would be rewarding to see more comparisons with other colonial contexts, but also perhaps with other theological frameworks. Tracy Leavelle's essay on Illinois women's spiritual leadership and Hackel and Wyss's chapter address gender differences in missionizing, but the book is silent about female missionaries, which might deepen its depiction of missionary dynamics.

That these concerns resonate among the essays in the collection will be one of the book's strengths, we suspect, for both researchers and students. Native Americans cements the consensus emerging out of many disciplinary corners about the importance of agency, adaptation, and an Indian-centric conception of religious history in North America, but it also raises questions both old and new.