返回Google圖書搜尋

Episcopal Women Missionaries as Cultural Intermediaries in Interior Alaska Native Villages, 1894-1932

出版	University of New Mexico, 2008
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=3R2otAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"Between 1894 and 1932, approximately 100 women missionaries of the Episcopal Church exerted a lasting influence in Native communities of Interior Alaska. They were part of a large-scale, worldwide, largely female Christian mission effort that reached its height in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. During that time, more than twice as many women as men moved to Interior Alaska to serve as Episcopal missionaries. The great majority of the women worked in Alaska Native communities, where they filled the roles of teachers, nurses, and house mothers at boarding schools. Clergy wives who accompanied their husbands to Alaska performed missionary work in their own right. The years from 1907 to 1914 form the core of this study. During that time, women missionaries opened six new missions in isolated Native villages (one on the Yukon River and five on its tributaries). The Native people constructed and furnished the mission buildings and supplied the resident missionaries with wood and water, meat and fish. The Episcopal Church, the Woman's Auxiliary, and 'friends Outside' provided essential monetary and material assistance. Focusing on day-to-day interaction between women missionaries and Native people reveals that the creation of missions in Native villages was a collaborative process involving three parties: missionaries, Native peoples, and the Episcopal Church. The missionaries worked to ensure the survival of the Native people and to help them adjust to changed circumstances. They attempted to influence the pace, direction, and extent of change that the Indian people were living through. As the women offered medical care, schooling, and religious instruction, they also feminized the missions by promoting a lived Christianity, touting the merits of the "Christian home," and introducing selected aspects of Western culture along with attendant moral and social controls. While serving as cultural intermediaries, these women missionaries taught young people, who, in tum, became cultural intermediaries of their own. Mastery of English-language skills and an understanding of Western ways enabled the former mission-school students to negotiate with U.S. government agencies in behalf of their people and to share aspects of Native knowledge and culture with the world at large"--Leaves viii-ix