"to be Useful to the Whiteman and the Indian and the Country at Large": Constantine Scollen, Missionary-Priest, And Native-White Relations in the West, 1862-1885‪.‬

Most early historical accounts of Roman Catholic missionary activities in Western Canada were overwhelmingly hagiographic in nature. Written either by the participants themselves or by Church historians who sympathized with the goals of the missionaries and relied uncritically on missionary records, evangelical efforts were documented and evaluated from the perspective of the clergy. Individual missionaries were typically portrayed as divinely-inspired, courageous, and self-sacrificing men who endured countless hardships to bring the boon of true religion and superior civilization to the pagan and primitive Indians. The larger story of the conversion of Aboriginal people was presented as a glorious chapter in the global expansion of the Catholic Church.(1) Since the 1960s, however, scholarly writing on the subject has largely become the preserve of secular academics and has been influenced by changing intellectual trends within the discipline of history. In particular, scholarship in the area has been informed by the new social history approach which challenged historians to concern themselves with the daily lives of ordinary people in the past and the interdisciplinary methodology of ethnohistory which led to a focus on Native people as active agents in their historical interactions with Europeans. The result has been the emergence of a much more sophisticated and complex analysis of Catholic evangelism as a process of cultural interaction which occurred within the larger context of Aboriginal-European contact, accommodation, and conflict in North America.(2) By interrogating the activities of Catholic missionaries in the West from the perspective both of the evangelizers and those they sought to convert, recent scholarship has challenged many traditional assumptions and in the process has also given rise to significant interpretive debate. This divergence in interpretation is clearly exemplified in the two most notable recent additions to the literature.