Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
76. Did colonial missions destroy Indigenous religions?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Brandon Bayne [+]
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Brandon Bayne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. His first book, Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain (Fordham University Press, 2021) argues that Catholic priests invoked the rhetoric of redemptive sacrifice to justify epidemic disease, colonial dislocation, and the territorial dispossession of Indigenous communities. His current research focuses on race, religion, and erasure in the modern memorialization of colonial missionaries in the U. S. – Mexican borderlands.
Description
European colonization in the Americas dramatically impacted pre-contact Indigenous lifeways. In their work of territorial dispossession, monarchs employed missionaries to either extirpate or convert Indigenous spaces, bodies, and customs. Extirpation campaigns set out to discover and destroy powerful objects as well as challenge the authority of Indigenous ritual leaders.