Susan Neylan

Susan Neylan is an Associate Professor of History, at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She is an expert on the history of Canada, particularly interested in Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations and the Indigenous-Christian encounter on Northwest Coast of North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Author of “The Heavens are Changing”:  Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (2003), and co-editor of New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada’s Aboriginal Pasts (2007) Neylan has been published in the Canadian Journal of History, History Compass, and Journal of Religion, among others. Recently her research interests have turned to social histories focused on expressions of culture that may have been first introduced by missionaries that have since taken on a distinctive life of their own as meaningful expressions of Indigenous identities — marching bands and sports such as basketball. She is working on a book covering a range of topics related to the 20th-century Indigenous-church relationship, with special emphasis on developments among Protestant forms of Christianity in the Canadian province of British Columbia.