Dawson Times

Brenau University’s Gnimbin Ouattara and Southern Illinois University’s Rowena McClinton will team up Nov. 1 at the Northeast Georgia History Center at Brenau University to showcase their combined expertise on 19th century efforts to convert southern American Indians to Christianity.

The two scholars will discuss their research and answer questions from the audience at a special 7 p.m. presentation Thursday. The program is free and open to the public.

Brenau University’s Gnimbin Ouattara

Ouattara, who is in his first semester at Brenau as professor of international studies and history, is a native of Ivory Coast in Africa. He came to the United States in 2001 to study democracy, but discovered striking similarities between the legacy American missionaries left on his homeland and imposed on the Cherokee people in the South in the early 19th century. His doctoral dissertation, which he hopes to turn into a book, was about the first American Christian foreign mission agency, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), and how its work among the Cherokee became a springboard for its missions in West Africa.

“Although the Cherokees and the West Africans were two different peoples, the ABCFM used the same method to Christianize them: the Lancasterian method with which the missionaries planned to ‘civilize’ the Cherokees and West Africans before Christianizing them,” Ouattara wrote. “West Africans did not face the same pressures as those faced by the Cherokees, yet they still embraced the ABCFM’s civilization and Christianization program, though with a lesser sense of urgency and with more assertiveness than did the Cherokees, despite the white missionaries’ racism.”

McClinton, an associate professor of history at the Illinois university, also has researched, written and lectured extensively about missionary activities among the Cherokee before they were all shunted off to Oklahoma via the “Trail of Tears” in the 1830s. Her specialty, however, is mission work by the Moravian Church, which was the first protestant sect with large-scale missions around the world, including initiatives with slaves in the Caribbean and the American South. Like many of those to whom it ministered, the church itself was often persecuted because of its stances on nonviolence and separation of church and state.

Although the Cherokee had little interest in adopting Moravian Christianity, McClinton wrote, “they looked to the Moravians for ways to adapt peacefully to an ever-changing world that was far more intolerant of diversity than were the Moravians.”

“There was no formal tie between the Moravian and the ABCFM missions,” said Ouattara. “The common ground between these two missions is the fact that they were both Christian and the fact that they both targeted native Americans in general and Cherokees in particular.”