As embodiments of cultural meanings and values, artifacts have always played an important role in the interactions between Native peoples and Christian missionaries, who not only aimed at religious but also at cultural conversion. This paper explores the relationship between missionary work and ethnographic collecting and attempts to place Friderik Baraga's collection in a broader context of missionary discourse on material culture by focusing on his and other missionaries' attitudes toward the indigenous arts and material culture they encountered. Parallels are also drawn to other nineteenthcentury missionary collections of western Great Lakes material in European repositories in order to evaluate Baraga's collecting activities by comparison with similar missionary efforts.