This project examines moments of encounter between American Protestant missionaries belonging to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the indigenous peoples of Ottoman Harpoot/Kharpert from roughly the years 1860-1900. The missionary enterprise’s success and survival depended on native agency, yet one encounters them as props and “special objects”. By examining letters and reports written by female missionaries through an affect-oriented approach, I trace how indigenous women and girls were “Otherized” when presented to an American audience in the form of magazines, memoirs, and letters. Working in conjunction with the ABCFM, and independently at first, the Woman’s Board of Missions (WBM) work through their missiology, missionary methodology and ideology, of “Women’s Work for Women,” that operated by saving the souls of indigenous women through evangelism and conversion and “uplifting” their social status through Western-style “civilization”. Coming from and contributing to a moment in United States history that was concerned with empire-building, the female missionaries and their domestic audience used racialized, gendered representations of indigenous women to uphold the legitimacy of their enterprise and the superiority of their beliefs. The diversity and heterogeneity of “Eastern Turkey” – a region where many ethno-religious groups coexisted – becomes collapsed and homogenized in these textual encounters.