In this paper, I will address issues of (post-)colonial linguistic studies based on the premises and methods of Germanic discourse linguistics. I evaluate missionary narratives of the Moravian Church that provide us with an alternative perspective on North America at the end of the 18th century. To do so, it is necessary to briefly examine the Moravian Church and its (missionary) theology and to appreciate the sources that are the subject of the study, as they can help to question the constitution of our European and modern bodies of knowledge. Here, however, we will focus only on two exemplary constructions that can be used for verbal devaluation: adjectival attribution and naming. In the quantitatively supported qualitative analysis, I will focus on the use of these constructions and thus on one aspect of the linguistic contouring of discourse positions by actors in the Moravian church.