MAKING A JOYFUL NOISE

Abstract

This article explores how early North American Methodism became a site of postcolonial negotiation between American Indians and Christianity. It particularly focuses on Methodism's thick orality through the figure of William Apess, a nineteenth-century Pequot, who became a convert to Methodism as well as one of this movement's itinerant preachers. Through the example of Apess, as well as an unnamed, seventeenth-century Mi'kmaw woman, the article argues that the available critical vocabularies for analyzing the Native-Christian encounter are inadequate: neither syncretism-acculturation nor postcolonial notions of hybridity capture the complexity of conversion's exchanges. The article proposes retraditionalization, a concept that emerges from indigenous theory, as an alternative to syncretism, acculturation or hybridity.

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