In his provocative ethnohistory, Christopher Miller offers an innovative reinterpretation of relations between Native Americans and Christian settlers on the Columbia Plateau. Miller draws on a wealth of ethnographic resources to show how culturally-derived perceptions and systems of rationality played more of a determining role in the interactions between these two groups than did material forces. Initially, Plateau Indians and the American missionaries who came to convert them perceived each other as crucial to the fulfillment of their own millennial destiny. When these views were contravened, relations quickly and fatally soured. In explaining this devolution, Prophetic Worlds provides a novel and insightful rendering of the cultural understandings that underwrote the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of life on the Plateau.
- ISBN10 0295983027
- ISBN13 9780295983028
- Publish Date 1 September 2003 (first published 1 May 1985)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Washington Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 192
- Language English