Christianity, Native Americans, and Global Indigeneity

Indigenous stories occupy increasingly prominent cultural spaces. From the bestselling book turned feature film Killers of the Flower Moon to the critically acclaimed coming-of-age television drama Reservation Dogs, Native stories of resilience, creativity, trauma, and joy fill our pages and screens in exceptional ways. Together, they mark an unprecedented moment in the depiction of Native history and spirituality, one that promises renewed truth-telling and testifies to the ongoing power of material, visual, and oral literacies to re-narrate both settler violence and Indigenous survivance. In the study of Christianity, scholars have likewise devoted renewed attention to Native histories. As with the case of popular media, it is not so much that scholars have not told stories that include Natives. However, those narratives have been locked in stereotype and caricature, tales of cowboys and Indians that were translated to tropes of missionaries and revolts.