Communicating Jesus Through an “Aboriginal Lens”: The Growth of a Self-determining Indigenous Evangelicalism in Northwestern Canada, 1950-2000

For Indigenous peoples in Canada, the second half of the twentieth century was a period of monumental and lasting change. Bolstered by demographic growth and the mobilization of intertribal alliances, Indigenous organizations pursued agendas of justice with renewed fervour. At the same time, Indigenous communities reckoned with the intergenerational traumas wrought by colonization and invested in projects focused on communal and cultural recuperation, materializing as the Aboriginal Healing Movement. In this same period, the Northern Canada Evangelical Mission launched a new evangelism program in the northwest aimed at conversion. They encountered Indigenous communities badly vandalized by the prolonged policies of coercive colonization but equally attuned to pan-Indigenous empowerment and healing. By the 1960s, an independently administered, Indigenous-led evangelical network emerged, coalescing institutionally as the Native Evangelical Fellowship in 1968. This study contends that the emergence of an Indigenous evangelical network in the twentieth century only makes sense in relation to the destructive fallout of colonization and the wider socio-cultural projects of the era. Indigenous communities were keen to rupture with their colonial pasts, achieve greater sovereignty, heal from trauma and dysfunction, and reconnect with fractured cultural identities. Fundamentalism’s anti-Catholic rhetoric and emphasis on independent congregations and outreach inadvertently meshed with the broader Indigenous pursuits of decolonization and autonomy. The “contextualization movement,” representative of a post-colonial branch of Indigenous evangelicalism, arose in the 1980s as a response to unheeded longings to reconnect with identity, a process ultimately instigated by the North American-wide Indigenous cultural resurgence. Through an analysis of the contours of Indigenous fundamentalist evangelicalism – from its origins in the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century – this dissertation places its trajectory of development within the wider social, cultural, and psychological contexts demarcating Indigenous life. By utilizing under-examined Indigenous evangelical publications and personal conversion narratives, this dissertation examines the most salient points of interface between Indigenous communities and the fundamentalist tradition, adding a thematically diverse and analytically rich Indigenocentric chapter to the winding history of Indigenous Christianity.

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