Prophetic worlds : Indians and whites on the Columbia Plateau / Christopher L. Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Christopher L., 1950-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indians of North America--Missions--Columbia River Valley.

Indians of North America.

Indians of North America--Missions.

Indians of North America--Columbia River Valley--Religion and mythology.

Columbia River Valley--Church history.

Columbia River Valley.

Physical Description:

x, 174 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [1985]

Summary:

In his provocative ethnohistory, Christopher Miller offers an innovative reinterpretation of relations between Native Americans and Christian settlers on the Columbia Plateau. Miller draws on a wealth of ethnographic resources to show how culturally-derived perceptions and systems of rationality played more of a determining role in the interactions between these two groups than did material forces. Initially, Plateau Indians and the American missionaries who came to convert them perceived each other as crucial to the fulfillment of their own millennial destiny. When these views were contravened, relations quickly and fatally soured. In explaining this devolution, Prophetic Worlds provides a novel and insightful rendering of the cultural understandings that underwrote the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of life on the Plateau.

Notes:

Includes index.

Bibliography: pages 147-165.

ISBN:

0813510848 :

OCLC:

11133836