Missionaries: From Alaska to Patagonia

For four centuries the question in Latin America was which church would convert the Indigenous. In the Cold War it became which Christianity would win the poor — and the two answers went to war. On one side, Catholic priests reading the Gospel as a demand to overturn unjust structures; on the other, a surging conservative Protestantism preaching personal salvation and anti-communism, backed — to a...

At the frozen tip of the Americas, the spiritual conquest reached its coldest and bleakest end. An Anglican captain and his men starved in a Fuegian cave; the Yámana they came to save later rose up and killed the next missionaries on the beach. The one missionary who truly learned their language built a 32,000-word dictionary of it — and watched the people who spoke it die of the diseases his own...

Deep in the forests between the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the Guaraní and the Jesuits built something no other people in the Americas managed: an armed, literate, self-governing republic of some thirty cities, with its own communal economy and its own army — an army that in 1641 wiped out a Portuguese slaving expedition and held the frontier for a century. Then two kings in Europe traded the...

In Brazil the cross and the slaver's net arrived together. For two centuries the Jesuits fought colonists for control of Indigenous bodies — protecting them from the sugar plantations while gathering them into mission villages and inventing a single language to convert them in. Then a Portuguese prime minister destroyed the whole system overnight, banned the language on pain of the whip, and the c...

In the Andes the Spanish didn't find scattered villages but the devout remnant of an empire — and discovered, decades after declaring the people Christian, that they had been secretly feeding their mummified ancestors in mountain caves the whole time. The Church's answer was the Extirpation of Idolatries: torture the elders, find the sacred stones and the mummies, and burn them in the square. This...

After Cortés destroyed the Aztec empire in 1521, twelve barefoot friars set out to convert millions — fast, because they believed it would trigger the end of the world. They tore down the temples and built churches from the same stones. But the brutality forced Spain to do something no other empire did: hold a formal debate over whether the people it was conquering were even human. This fifth epis...

In the 17th-century Eastern Woodlands, the French and English were badly outnumbered by powerful Native nations — so they made two opposite bets. The French Jesuit "Black Robes" moved into the longhouses and learned the languages; the New England Puritans herded converts into "Praying Towns" and demanded total surrender. Both ended in catastrophe — and yet the Bible one Puritan printed to erase a...

Spain conquered the Southwest and California not mainly with soldiers but with friars — gathering Native people into missions that were church, farm, factory, and, for many, prison. This episode tells how that system worked, the revolt that drove Spain out of New Mexico for twelve years, the demographic collapse it caused, and why a mission-founding saint still divides the descendants of the peopl...

There was no treaty for the Canadian Arctic — there was a race. Anglican ministers and Catholic Oblate priests paddled the same rivers to reach each Inuit and Dene family first, leaving "Catholic towns" and "Anglican towns" side by side to this day. This episode tells how that rivalry spread a Native writing system, built the residential hostels that broke children's link to the land, and ended in...

In 1880 a handful of Protestant leaders met in New York and divided the entire territory of Alaska into denominational "spheres of influence" — then ran federally funded schools to erase Native languages and ceremonies. This is the story of how that system worked, the harm it did, and how Alaska Native people turned the missionaries' own schools into the launchpad for a civil-rights movement. This...