Graduate Students

Barr, Joel - M.A

"Searching For Survival: The Relationship Between The Mississauga People And The Methodist Church 1820-1850" - Dr. Terry Crowley, advisor

         This paper attempts to understand to what degree the Mississauga people of Southern Ontario became accultured to Euroamerican religious and secular values during their intense, and relatively successful, relationship with the Methodist Church between 1820 and 1850. The association continues to some degree to this day; however, these first years were more 'successful' in missionary terms than many other relationships in Canadian aboriginal history. In fact, it is this rapid failure of this relationship between natives and missionaries that draws attention to this period and to the question of the conversions that the church claims it felt it had inspired. This relationship is also affected by the dominant and impressive stature of Peter Jones, the remarkable Mississauga leader whose adopted Euroamerican and Christian character coloured the relationship between his people and the Methodists in a brighter and more angelic light. The task is to deduce the motivation and mindset of a culture that has left virtually no personal records, aside from edited autobiographical works or a few of its leaders and the writings of non-native missionaries who worked among them. Therefore to determine the nature of the relationship, there is a need to reassess these "cultural conversions" based on the incongruities between the conclusions of the existing records and the actual descriptions of the Mississaugas' behavior and lifestyle before the Methodist arrival and during the thirty-year period in question.