Religion, Race, and Remembering: Indo-Caribbean Christians in Canada Paul Bramadat* In this article, I consider the ways Indo-Caribbean Christian Canadians remember and tell stories about their own and their family’s religious histories. Most participants in this study had Hindu ancestors who con- verted to Christianity during or after the Caribbean experience of inden- tured labor. Most of the stories I heard identified Africans as the source of the problems that once and still beset the homelands of the families I encountered. Moreover, many of the people I interviewed told generally positive stories about the period during which they or their relatives were objects of British imperial power and the Christian missionary project so closely associated with British geo-political expansion. I suggest that the narrative patterns I heard regarding both Africans and the British must be understood against the backdrop of the interpenetration of race and religion among the Indians I interviewed. WHILE IT MAY BE COMMON for representatives within religious traditions to police the circulation of the narratives that galvanize their communities, contemporary religious and cultural studies scholars recognize that individuals retain an enormous amount of autonomy in the way they interpret and personalize the stories they hear from the *Paul Bramadat, Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria, Sedgewick B102, Vandekerkhove Wing, PO Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 2Y2. E-mail: bramadat@uvic.ca. Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank the JAAR’s reviewers of this article for their helpful insights. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2011, Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 315–345 doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfq065 Advance Access publication on October 14, 2010 © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/79/2/315/854468 by University of Victoria user on 11 December 2020