Tangled Reconciliations: The Anglican Church and the Nisga'a of British Columbia

In the late 1960s, after decades of neglect, the Anglican Church of Canada rededicated considerable resources to the Nisga'a, a people with whom it had deep missionary ties. In this article I examine the nature of this new relationship and the motivations behind it. The efforts of the contemporary Anglican Church among the Nisga'a are best understood, I argue, as an attempt at reconciliation following a rejection in the national church of earlier assimilationist projects. The Nisga 'a reception of the church's outreach, however, was born out of a different process of reconciliation: between indigenous cultural forms and political needs and aspirations, on the one hand, and mission Christianity, which had already developed into a vernacular expression of Christianity in the Nass valley, on the other. I thus explore the politics of religious synthesis in the postmissionary world, a synthesis that occurs simultaneously at local and global levels [northwest coast, Nisga'a, missions, Christianity, land claims, syncretism]