"A skillful and insightful synthesis of the experience of native peoples living in missions in northern Mexico and Florida that goes beyond a narrative approach. Wade explains why native peoples accepted or rejected missionaries, and how native peoples lived."--Robert H. Jackson, author of Missions and Frontiers of Spanish America "A volume that will be a valuable addition to the library of all students of the Spanish colonial world. It will serve as a standard reference on the missionary efforts of Spanish colonial North America for decades to come."--Russell K. Skowronek, Santa Clara University From the 1600s through the 1800s, Spanish missionaries came to America to convert Native Americans. Maria Wade provides in-depth information on their efforts, their varying missionary ambitions, and native peoples' responses to evangelization and conversion efforts. No other study offers such a broad, comparative approach. By examining the missionary efforts of the Franciscans and Jesuits in Florida, Texas, California, and northern Mexico, Wade brings into sharp contrast the different experiences and outcomes as these two Catholic orders sought to gain a foothold in North America. Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans also provides an ethnohistorical and archaeological perspective on the structure and daily activities of early mission life. Of particular interest is the discussion of the similarity between Catholic religious practices and Native American shamanistic practices.

The region that now encompasses Central Texas and northern Coahuila, Mexico, was once inhabited by numerous Native hunter-gather groups whose identities and lifeways we are only now learning through archaeological discoveries and painstaking research into Spanish and French colonial records. From these key sources, Maria F. Wade has compiled this first comprehensive ethnohistory of the Native groups that inhabited the Texas Edwards Plateau and surrounding areas during most of the Spanish colonial era.

Much of the book deals with events that took place late in the seventeenth century, when Native groups and Europeans began to have their first sustained contact in the region. Wade identifies twenty-one Native groups, including the Jumano, who inhabited the Edwards Plateau at that time. She offers evidence that the groups had sophisticated social and cultural mechanisms, including extensive information networks, ladino cultural brokers, broad-based coalitions, and individuals with dual-ethnic status. She also tracks the eastern movement of Spanish colonizers into the Edwards Plateau region, explores the relationships among Native groups and between those groups and European colonizers, and develops a timeline that places isolated events and singular individuals within broad historical processes.