AChristian Missionaries, Colonial Knowledges, Contested Geographies:

The Missionary Translation of Indigenous Language and Culture in New

South Wales and Oregon Territory in the Nineteenth Century@

My dissertation is a comparative project which examines the work

of Christian missionaries as translators of indigenous language and

culture in two regions of the world transformed by European settler

colonialism in the first half of the nineteenth century: New South

Wales, Australia and Oregon Territory in America. In both regions,

Protestant missionaries were sent out to convert indigenous people to

Christianity. In pursuit of this goal, they studied indigenous

languages, developed knowledges of indigenous cultures and came to act

as mediators between indigenous people and European colonists. My

dissertation considers how these missionary knowledges and activities

were shaped by - and shaped - the distinctive political, economic and

cultural histories of colonization in each region. It also seeks to

illuminate the distinctive role missionaries played as negotiators

between Europeans and indigenous communities in settler colonies.

I have developed the outlines of my comparative inquiry from a

study of the work of the American philologist, Horatio Hale, who

visited both New South Wales and Oregon Territory between 1838 and

1842 as a member of the United States Exploring Expedition. On his

travels, Hale relied principally on Christian missionaries for

information about the indigenous languages and cultures of each

region. In Australia he met with missionaries from the London

Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society who had

established their missions in 1824 and 1830 respectively. In Oregon

Territory he met with missionaries from the Methodist Missionary

Society who had been there since 1831 and the missionaries of the

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who had

established their missions in the mid-1830s. In his philological

study, Philology and Ethnography (1846), which was largely derived

from missionary accounts, Hale presented the indigenous languages of

Oregon Territory and New South Wales in strikingly different ways.

In Oregon Territory, Hale named the language of each indigenous tribe

and mapped the languages as tribal entities onto territory. In other

words, he described - and inscribed - the indigenous languages of the

Pacific Northwest according to Western conceptions of nationhood:

equating land, language and people. The one Pacific Northwest

language he did not map on to territory, was the ATrade or Jargon

Language@ of the region which he describes in an a separate chapter.

In New South Wales, by contrast, Hale commented on the difficulty of

naming any of the indigenous languages of the country. He made no

reference to the territorial extent of each language, provided no map

and made no mention of the Australian colonial jargon, although this

language has since been thoroughly documented.

These different representations of the indigenous languages of New

South Wales and Oregon Territory were, I argue, a product of the

different political and economic histories of colonization which

shaped each region. In Oregon Territory, the Anglo-American custom of

according political recognition to indigenous people meant that

Europeans, including the missionaries, were interested in naming

indigenous groups and mapping tribal territories: not surprisingly,

they used their own political terms and categories. In New South

Wales, on the other hand, the founding doctrine of the British

colonization of Australia was terra nullius which held that the

country was either uninhabited or without a recognizable sovereign

power. The British in New South Wales therefore felt no need to name

Aboriginal tribes and map them as language groups. Indeed, quite the

opposite: the recognition of Aboriginal tribes would have run counter

to the prevailing interests of British colonial ideology.

The question of the recognition or nonrecognition of the different

Ajargon languages@ of each territory was, similarly, a consequence of

the different socio-economic histories which shaped each region. In

Oregon Territory, the jargon language which Hale documents, had

evolved out of the Alegitimate@ colonial trade in fur over the course

of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The jargon of

New South Wales, by contrast which Hale ignored, had evolved out of

the trade between Aborigines and convict laborers in tobacco, alcohol

and sexual relations - a trade regarded by both the colonial

authorities and the missionaries whom Hale conferred with as

illegitimate.

These differences provide the comparative framework for my

examination of the work of missionaries as translators of indigenous

languages and culture. The kind of comparative study I am undertaking

is aimed not so much at uncovering the structures which shaped

colonial relations in each region, but at exploring the ways in which

everyday missionary practices were affected by larger political and

economic forces. My study is local and cultural for the most part,

but from the local it looks in two directions. On the one hand, I am

interested in how localized colonial and cross-cultural relations and

practices were affected by different imperial intentions and

ideologies. How, for example, did the recognition or nonrecognition

of indigenous societies as political entities affect the ways in which

missionaries went about the everyday work of translating indigenous

languages. Or how did it affect their roles as negotiators between

European colonists and indigenous people? On the other hand, I am

interested in the ways in which transnational colonial and evangelical

discourses were employed and reshaped by missionaries in these

different local contexts. In both regions, for instance, missionaries

turned to philology and ethnology to describe the indigenous people

they intended to convert: how were their philological and ethnographic

descriptions affected by the different organization of colonial

relationships in each place? In attempting to answer these kinds of

questions, I hope to illuminate some differences - to show how

missionary practices were shaped by different histories of colonialism

- and to draw some cross-regional parallels - to show how

missionaries in both places came to represent indigenous people, act

as mediators for them and, in the process, play a key role in the

reshaping settler colonial identities.

I have organized my study around four overlapping areas or

problems: Language, Religion, Land and Law. In each of these

fields, missionaries played a key role as interpreters of both

indigenous language and culture. Each issue involved an interplay

between local, national and transnational forces.

With regard to language, I begin by examining the various

religious, moral and scientific discourses which informed the

practice of missionary translation in both New South Wales and Oregon

Territory: the belief that all languages could be transparent

vehicles for the message of the Christian God; the commitment to

literacy and the study of language as part of the moral training of

the Protestant subject; and, coming out of the emerging life sciences,

a growing interest in the scientific classification of languages. I

then outline the different sociolinguistic contexts in which the

missionaries began their work of translation. In New South Wales,

before the arrival of the missionaries, translation was, of course,

mainly undertaken by the Aborigines who acquired elements of English

as a means of dealing with the colonizers who were taking over their

country. Most of the British, on the other hand, following the

arrogant logic of terra nullius, were either disinterested in

Aboriginal languages or held that Aboriginal people did not have a

language proper at all. There were some, amongst the colonial

officials, who took an amateur scientific interest in Aboriginal

languages, and then, at the other end of the social scale, there were

the convicts and laborers who learnt to speak a colonial jargon with

the Aborigines for the purposes of trading or engaging in sexual

relations with Aboriginal women. But no one among the British had

seriously attempted to learn an Aboriginal language in order to

communicate with the Aboriginal people. In this context, the

missionary recognition of Aboriginal languages challenged the

prevailing ideologies of British colonialism - while their rejection

of the jargon language entailed a new formulation of British-

Aboriginal relations. The missionaries, themselves, were not

especially concerned with naming different Aboriginal languages,

although they did become increasingly aware of differences and

increasingly aware of Aboriginal communication networks. I argue,

that in the absence of political recognition, and in the absence of

firmly established British categories and ways of dealing the

Aboriginal people, the missionaries eventually came to a more radical

understanding of Aboriginal culture. They increasingly found their

own linguistic and social categories destabilized in the process of

translation. However, for all that, I show that missionary

descriptions of indigenous languages and later their philological

studies came to be harnessed to humanitarian and paternalist demands

for Aboriginal protection and assimilationist Acivilization@ policies.

In Oregon Territory the missionary translation and representation

of indigenous languages took a rather different form. The

sociolinguistic context in which the missionaries of the American

Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the Methodist

Missionary Society found themselves had developed along different

lines. Fur traders interested in identifying trading partners and

establishing trading relationships, had established names for

indigenous groups and their languages: the Nez Perce, the Flathead,

the Cayuses, the Chinook, the Walla-Wallas. Such names attributed a

European-style national unity to social groups whose organization was

often rather more fluid. The fur traders did not, however, usually

make any concerted attempt to learn the indigenous languages.

Although some did become more or less fluent, most furtraders were

content to speak the colonial trade jargon, a language which was

developed out of exchanges with fur-trading Indians. But again, in

most cross-cultural exchanges, it was the indigenous people themselves

who did most of the translating. The missionaries, then, when they

arrived, followed the furtraders= in naming indigenous tribes for the

purposes of identifying different linguistic groups for conversion.

They also turned to the use of furtrader interpreters for the purposes

of spreading their religious messages, although some of the Methodists

went on to use the colonial trade jargon. I argue that in Oregon

Territory, missionary preconceptions of indigenous society combined

with their reliance on furtrade interpreters, ultimately limited their

work of translation and their understanding of the indigenous cultures

of the Pacific Northwest. They held to the categories which had

emerged out of European economic interests and political practices.

Their philological interests were similarly informed by an interest in

strict classifications. I go on to show, in a later section, that

the missionary conceptions of indigenous linguistic groups ultimately

came to be used by Americans in the treaty-making process, and

therefore, in the reformulation of indigenous political identities.

Having outlined the socio-linguistic contexts in which

missionaries carried out their work of translation, I go on to examine

translation in relation to the specific matters of religious

conversion, territorial claims, and legal and political relations.

With regard to religion, I take up the question of how missionaries

in both New South Wales and Oregon Territory went about their attempts

to convert indigenous people to Christianity. In both regions, the

development of a knowledge of indigenous practices and beliefs was

integral to the project of conversion. I examine missionary

assessments of indigenous beliefs and practices and, again, I consider

the ways in which this was to varying degrees, informed by both

Christian and ethnographic discourses. I then look at how missionary

conversion strategies and the indigenous reception of Christianity was

conditioned by the different histories of colonization which

characterized each region. In Oregon territory the missionaries

focused on either converting indigenous leaders or indoctrinating the

children. The development of an ethnographic knowledge of indigenous

religious beliefs was limited by both missionary use of the colonial

jargon and their relations with interpreters. It was also limited by

indigenous interest in Christianity. Those indigenous groups who had,

to a degree, been able to turn the fur trade to their own advantage

tended to show the most interest in Christianity and appropriated some

of its forms and practices for their own purposes. It was in the face

of syncretism that the American missionaries attempted to develop a

better understanding of indigenous customs. In New South Wales, on

the other hand, the British missionaries confronted a rather

different situation. In the absence of established political

relations, they did not look to the conversion of tribal leaders as a

strategy for the conversion of whole tribes. Initially, they also

made a greater attempt to understand indigenous belief systems if only

to seek parallels which they could use to communicate Christianity.

The Aborigines, for their part, showed only a limited interest in the

religious message of the missionaries. Seeing little to gain from

British Christianity and repelled by the Christian interest in death

even as their own communities were being devastated by disease, they

held fast to their own beliefs. In the face of this failure, some of

the missionaries returned to ethnography and ethnographic writing as a

means of shoring up the cultural authority they had lost as

missionaries.

With regard to land and territory, I examine missionary

understandings of indigenous relations to the land. In both regions,

incoming colonists were intent on the appropriation of indigenous

territory and, to varying degrees, in both places missionaries found

themselves negotiating between colonial and indigenous claims to the

land. In New South Wales, missions were initially established at a

remove from European settlements but on land which the British had

already imaginatively claimed. The missionaries, however, found that

Aboriginal people were continuing to use the land for their own

purposes. Although the missionaries made a limited attempt to

encourage Aborigines to farm, the Aborigines rejected their attempts,

continuing to live by native means of subsistence. Consequently, the

British missionaries developed an understanding, albeit limited, of

indigenous economic, social and even religious uses of the land which

ran counter to prevailing British beliefs. In the later 1830s and

1840s, however, European colonizers began to move in to claim the land

for grazing sheep and violence broke out between colonists and

Aboriginal people. The missionaries, horrified by attacks on the

indigenous people and alarmed by the influence of convict stockmen on

the Aborigines , came to defend indigenous claims to the land, but

they did so with difficulty, both defining such claims in British

terms whilst seeking to avoid any overt challenge to terra nullius and

the overarching British claim to the continent.

In Oregon Territory, the missionaries played a rather different

role. The furtraders in the Pacific Northwest had developed their own

knowledge of indigenous geography and understood the territory to be

the possession of different indigenous groups of the region. The

furtrade, had also, of course, begun to transform indigenous uses of

the land. When the missionaries arrived, they established their

mission stations not far from fur-trading centers or on sites deemed

good for farming. They understood, in abstracted European terms, that

the land belonged to indigenous people but they believed themselves to

be agents of a higher moral project. When indigenous leaders

initially accepted the missions, hoping that they would provide

desirable material goods, the missionaries settled in the belief that

this was a Providential sign of the future success of their mission

and that they had been given the land. They accordingly established

farms and were active in their attempts to encourage indigenous people

to turn from hunting to farming. In this situation, missionary

understanding of alternative indigenous relations to the land remained

limited. When it became apparent that the missionaries were not

going to provide for indigenous groups in the same way the traders

had, indigenous resistance to the mission establishments grew. Then,

in the 1840s, as American settlers began to move in to the region, the

missionaries welcomed them, viewing them in the terms of Anglo-

American ideology as model Christian farmers (in ways in which the

convict stockmen of Australia were so obviously not). Indigenous

leaders, for their part, rightly saw them as invaders and increased

their resistance, leading to the infamous massacre of Marcus and

Narcissa Whitman of the ABCFM in 1847 and the consequent eruption of

warfare between colonists and indigenous groups across the region.

Whilst the remaining missionaries hoped for peace, they did not seek

to defend indigenous claims to the land, as in New South Wales, rather

they defended the Christian American expansionism to which they

believed the indigenous people should accede.

Finally, with regard to law, I examine the role missionaries

played as negotiators between indigenous people and colonial officials

in each region. In New South Wales I examine the work of missionaries

as interpreters in the courts and advocates for Aboriginal protection.

In Oregon territory I consider the role missionaries played in treaty

negotiations. In both cases, I look at the ways in which missionary

representations of indigenous people informed the constitution of

colonial relations in each region. In New South Wales, I focus on a

court case in 1836 in which an Aboriginal man was charged with the

murder of another Aboriginal man. In this case, the counsel appointed

for the defense called into question the legitimacy of British

jurisdiction in cases involving crimes committed between Aborigines.

The missionary interpreter was called upon for advice and he

accordingly submitted an affidavit describing the alternative

Aboriginal practices of justice and punishment, although he ultimately

argued that they should be brought under British law. The judge=s

ruling definitively reasserted British jurisdiction over the entire

colony. The missionary, for his part, subsequently went on to argue

for Aboriginal rights within the British legal system. In Oregon

Territory, on the other hand, I will be focusing on the work of the

Methodist missionary, Elijah White, who went on to become an Indian

Agent and conduct a number of treaty negotiations in the 1840s and

1850s. Here I explore the ways in which White represented indigenous

people. On the one hand, he recognized their autonomy in American

terms, as Adomestic nations@ but on the other hand, this recognition

ironically allowed for little acknowledgment of alternative indigenous

forms of political organization. Although accounts of the treaty-

making process itself provide some evidence of alternative ways of

understanding the transaction, ultimately White, with all the

authority of his missionary experience, insisted on representing the

indigenous groups using established American categories and compelling

them to accept to American colonization.

______________________________________________________

Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: four essays. (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1981)

Bourdieu, Pierre. The logic of practice. (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1990.)

Burke, Peter and Roy Porter, eds. Language, self and society : A social history of language. (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1991.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1988)

Comaroff, Jean & John. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)

Fabian, Johannes. Language and colonial power : the appropriation of Swahili in the

former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 (Cambridge, U.K. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1986.)

Goody, Jack The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

Hefner, Robert W. ed. Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)

Thomas, Nicholas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1994)

Attwood, Bain. The Making of the Aborigines. (Sydney ; Boston : Allen & Unwin, 1989.)

Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: an exploration of landscape and history. New York : Knopf, 1988.)

Goodall, Heather. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996)

Mulvaney, Derek John. Encounters in place : outsiders and Aboriginal Australians, 1606- 1985 (University of Queensland Press,1989.)

Read, Peter. A Hundred Years War : the Wiradjuri people and the state (Australian National University Press,1988.)

Reynolds, Henry. The law of the land. (Ringwood, Vic., Australia : Penguin Books ; New York, N.Y. : Viking Penguin, 1987.)

Swain, Tony A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Swain, Tony & Rose, Deborah Bird, eds. Aboriginal Australians and Christian missions : ethnographic and historical studies ( Australian Association for the Study of Religions, c1988.)

Troy, Jakelin. Australian aboriginal contact with the English language in New South Wales, 1788 to 1845 (Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University,1990.)

Andresen, Julie Tetel. Linguistics in America 1769-1924: A Critical History (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)

Drury, Clifford, editor of the published diaries and letters of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions including Myron Eells, Asa Bowen Smith, Henry Harmon Spalding, Elkanah and Mary Walker, , Marcus and Narcissa Whitman

Miller, Christopher L. Prophetic worlds : Indians and whites on the Columbia Plateau (New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 1985.)

Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1991)

Stern, Theodore. Chiefs and Change in the Oregon Country: Indian Relations at Fort Nez Perces, 1818-1855, Vol.II (Oregon State University Press, 1996)

White, Elijah. Reports and writings.