The Arrival of Tradition: The Influence of the Tradition Concept on Missionary-Indigenous Interactions in the Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest Coast

Abstract

Tradition is a paradoxical concept that, on the one hand, defines a set of practices as external or resistant to the dynamics of global modern society but, on the other hand, makes sense of these practices in references to modernity itself. Colonial scholarship has struggled with this paradox, taking the appearance of tradition as situated outside modernity at face value. By historicizing the logical form of the concept of tradition, this article offers a critique of its use in colonial scholarship. Examining the Oblate missionization of British Columbia in the nineteenth century as a case study, this article tracks how the logical form of tradition was articulated with the development of capital, how it defined Oblate ideology, how it was adopted by various Indigenous communities to make sense of their own social transformation in relation to broader global transformations, and ultimately how it was adopted as a critical analytic by colonial scholars.