On the Padres' Trail.

Since Christianity is a religion of conversion, its relation to the religions it has supplanted has always posed a problem. How complete should the break with the past be? Should Greek philosophy and Christmas trees be regarded as pagan adulterants of the faith or as old traditions pressed into a new service? As a successful religion of conversion, Christianity has also been a religion of empire, and this has posed a second problem. Is it on the side of the imperial powers that spread it or on the side of the conquered people who may resist it or practice unorthodox versions of it?

These two problems haunt every page of Christopher Vecsey's new history of the spread of Spanish Catholicism among the native people of North America. Vecsey, a professor of Religion and Native American Studies at Colgate University, provides a detailed chronicle of Catholicism in Mexico, the territory that became the Southwestern part of the United States, and California. Everywhere native people drew on older spiritual traditions in interpreting and expressing their Catholicism, and it is difficult to say when their faith was Christianity in local cultural trappings and when it was simply paganism with a thin Christian veneer. Everywhere, also, the padres, the promulgators of the faith, occupied an ambivalent position between the conquerors and the conquered and provoked ambivalent reactions from their flocks. Sometimes the padres acted as agents of the Spanish military and cultural conquest. Sometimes they protected those in their care from secular authorities. Frequently, the padres and their flocks differed over doctrine and ritual.

In central Mexico, centuries of efforts to extirpate native religions have resulted in Christian rituals absorbed into an Aztec worldview. In the north, the Yaquis voluntarily adopted Catholicism as a part of Yaqui identity and the Jesuits helped to maintain an eighteenth-century Yaqui nation that was largely independent of Spanish secular government. Even today, the Yaquis retain a religion that is an amalgam of Catholic and indigenous beliefs and practices. Still further north, the Papagos have developed both a Catholicized version of their traditional beliefs and a form of folk Catholicism, and they recognize each of these as a legitimate path of spirituality.

Vecsey's description of the religious history of the Pueblos, in what is now New Mexico, provides insight into tensions that continue to affect the role of Catholicism in the Southwest. The priests of the seventeenth century attempted to enforce orthodoxy ruthlessly and brutally, helping to provoke an Indian rebellion in 1680. A distrust of outsiders survived the Spanish reconquest, but Pueblo religion was deeply affected by Christian influences, so that Catholicism and non-Christian practices became intricately intertwined. As recently as the 1950s, the tension between Pueblo traditionalism and Catholicism provoked a crisis when Pueblo officials forcibly expelled a resident Catholic priest who had tried to stop syncretistic ceremonies.

In California, Vecsey explains, the mission system of Fray Junipero Serra brought Native Americans to Christianity, but it also destroyed indigenous cultures. Thus, the movement for the canonization of Fray Serra has stirred up controversy and anger among contemporary Native Americans, and it has stimulated a debate over whether the California Franciscans were protectors and instructors of the mission Indians or cultural imperialists. Although Vecsey generally avoids taking sides in this book, he makes it clear he thinks that Serra's canonization would be disastrous for Indian Catholicism in North America.

First in a three-volume series titled American Catholic Indians, On the Padres' Trail is an invaluable source for all of those interested in the religious history of Native Americans, Native-American culture and customs, and religious institutions in Native America. It brings together archival materials, ethnographies, historical works, personal observations, interviews, old newspapers, and other printed sources. In particular, Vecsey's research in diocesan archives and in the records of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions at Marquette University has made valuable data available. Out of this wealth of information, Vecsey has managed to shape a rich and nuanced reconstruction of the five-hundred-year encounter between the representatives of the Catholic church and the people these representatives sought to bring into the Christian fold. The book is comprehensive in its treatment, showing both the similarities and the great differences among the Catholicisms that emerged from the encounter. It effectively demonstrates that this encounter is a continuing one, and that contemporary events in Native American religious life have deep historical roots.

Vecsey treats his subject as complex and problematic, never reducing it to a drama of heroes and villains. He does not present the variety of religious forms among Native American Christians simply as a celebration of cultural diversity: He recognizes that other believers, especially members of the church establishment, may reasonably question the orthodoxy and even the Christianity of many of these Catholic-influenced religious systems. He also realizes that the beliefs and practices of Native North Americans cannot be fit into a neat pagan-Christian dichotomy, and that classification is often a matter of perspective.

Readers will come away from On the Padres' Trail with a new appreciation for the problems of syncretism and imperialism in Native American Christianity. Colorful customs, like the widespread dance of Los Matachines that supposedly commemorates the Spanish defeat of the Aztecs and the conversion of Montezuma, take on a new significance when we see them as products of a long-standing dialogue between cultures and faiths. Christopher Vecsey has made a signal contribution to our understanding of historical and contemporary religion in North America, and we can only hope that the next two volumes in this series live up to the achievement of the first.

Carl L. Bankston III teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.