SOURCE: McAllister, Edwin J. “‘Our Glory and Joy’: Stephen Riggs and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century American Missionary Ethnography Among the Sioux.” In Christian Encounters with the Other, edited by John C. Hawley, pp. 150-65. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, McAllister describes Riggs's ethnology in the context of contemporary thought about human civilization and racial difference. McAllister suggests that while Riggs's writing demonstrates a lack of modern respect for Native American tradition, it also reflects his belief that Native Americans were not biologically inferior to Whites and therefore incapable of “civilization.”

Stephen Return Riggs (1812-83) was a Presbyterian missionary to the Dakota Sioux Indians from 1837 until his death. Like countless other American missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Riggs took up the pen to describe for Christians at home the people among whom he lived and worked. The works of these missionaries...