The Age of Discovery brought to western Christianity a missionary challenge of epic proportions. Medieval Christianity had always claimed to be universal, but it was the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries that moved the claim towards reality. By the seventeenth century the frontier of the Christian mission stretched from China to Paraguay, and from Mexico City to Quebec. On that frontier the Society of Jesus was perhaps the best organized and most effective force for the spread of Christianity. Jesuit missions in the New World were a major institution on the frontier and a crucial arena for the confrontation of European and Native American cultures. It is that arena and the meeting of cultural values in one mission region that is the subject of this essay. While historians of the Christian mission and of Indian-white relations have been quick to see the importance of Jesuit missionaries on the frontiers of the Americas, these same observers have done little to explore the theories and methods of the missionaries, and even less quick to examine the impact of the mission on Native Americans. This historiographical failure is nowhere more evident than in studies of the Jesuit missions in New France. From Francis Parkman to the most recent comprehensive history of the Christian mission, the treatment of the missionaries and the Indians has been remarkably similar. The Fathers, so goes this interpretation,

In a moving speech delivered a few years before his death in 1813, the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh recalled the tragic events that had claimed the lives of so many Indian people. "Where today are the Pequot?" he lamented. "Where [are] the Narraganset, the Mohican, the Pokanoket and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun." By his bitter words Tecumseh hoped to inspire a grand Indian resistance movement that would halt the deadly process. But the ultimate failure of Tecumseh's plan meant that the decimation of Indian tribes would continue. In a few short years the Mingo, Miami, and Wea were added to the list of nearly-shattered tribes. Tecumseh's own people, the Shawnee, were scattered beyond the Mississippi, thoroughly dispossessed and demoralized. But one significant Eastern tribe emerged from this turbulent period with its identity and dignity intact. "Where today" are the Stockbridge? Despite severe hardships, the Stockbridge Indians of Tecumseh's time could answer readily. This small but influential tribe managed to hold together-from those years into the present-in the face of tremendous social and political change.