Lost Missions: American Indians, Religion, and Shifting Landscapes of

Lost Missions: American Indians, Religion, and Shifting Landscapes of Memory, Volume 1, examines the complex history of mission schools established by Euro-American colonists and Native nations. Sean T. Jacobson explores how these institutions functioned during the Early Republic and Jacksonian eras to promote a multiethnic Christian vision. This history book traces the rise and fall of these schools, which ultimately collapsed during the federally sponsored Indian Removal campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s.

The narrative follows the transformation of these sites into commemorative landscapes used to celebrate frontier piety and national expansion. Jacobson analyzes how Protestant and Catholic traditions recast missionary labor as a tool for nation-building, often obscuring the violence of westward expansion. Through the lens of history, the text investigates how these landscapes are reinterpreted today through Indigenous perspectives of survival. Lost Missions: American Indians, Religion, and Shifting Landscapes of Memory, Volume 1, provides a profound look at contested sites of memory.