In studying
General Anthony Wayne I was led to study his most famous Indian adversary,
the Shawnee hero Tecumseh, and in studying Tecumseh I was led to study
his brother Tenskwatawa, also known as the Shawnee Prophet. It
was Tenskwatawa who put a curse on William Henry Harrison that was said
to condemn every President elected in a year divisible by twenty to
a premature death. This curse held for 140 years until it was
broken by Ronald Reagan, who had to survive an assassination attempt
to do so. Perhaps Mrs. Reagan’s astrologer had more powerful
medicine than the Indian medicine man. In their own heyday Tenskwatawa
and Tecumseh not only dispensed powerful medicine but were also reputed
to predict comets, eclipses, and earthquakes, which played the role
of Biblical miracles in adding to their credibility. After studying
Tenskwatawa, I was led to study the prophets and messiahs of other Indian
tribes, and the result of that study is this sermon.
Between 1740
and 1890 there were a number of Native American prophets and messiahs
who claimed to have received divine revelations and promised the Indians
a much better existence both here and hereafter if they would return
to a simpler lifestyle in greater harmony with Nature and the Great
Spirit. As wise as this advice may sound to some of us long after
the fact, it ironically did not help the Indians very much at the time.
The forces of history were so strongly stacked against them that the
Manifest Destiny of the European interlopers was destined to push the
Indians further and further west, while distorting the balance of Nature
to such an extent that the simpler life envisioned by their spiritual
leaders was virtually impossible. In several cases the false euphoria
of their seers’ optimistic spiritual messages led the Indians into
dire predicaments. Most famously at Wounded Knee, but also at
Tippecanoe and elsewhere, the Indians thus experienced disastrous outcomes
that were at direct variance with the expectations of their spiritual
leaders.
The fault in
these cases was more with the white settlers and soldiers than it was
with the Native American prophets and messiahs. And in a further
irony, had it not been for the Indians’ prior contact with European
religions, their own prophetic messages would have taken a very different
form. Although evil spirits were a very old idea, such Judeo-Christian
concepts as hell, purgatory, sin, and the devil were rarely found in
earlier Indian religions, but began to creep in as cultural interchanges
occurred in the 1600’s and 1700’s. Likewise, the much more
affirmative concepts of salvation and redemption were quite new to the
Indians. And although shamans had been common in almost all tribes
for millennia, there was little likelihood that they would be seen as
predictors or progenitors of an entire new eschatological relationship
with the Great Spirit, whose realm was previously perceived as stable
and cyclic, based on the endless annual rotation of the seasons, rather
than directional and goal-oriented, with an unprecedented season of
earthly bliss at the end of the rainbow, and possibly heavenly bliss
as well after that. Due in part to the tribalism of Indian culture,
the salvation envisioned by the seers was perceived not just as an individual
goal but also as a collective one. This aspect was what gave the
optimistic messages not only their unifying power but also their potential
for tragedy. Yet it was perfectly understandable that a culture
experiencing severe external threats might turn to external ideas to
help resolve or minimize those threats.
Departing from
the traditional Native American theme of the connected web of existence,
the new theme was the triumph of good over evil, with Indian ways perceived
as being good and the white man’s ways being perceived as evil.
Mirroring the desperation that faced the Indians as their hunting grounds
were being fenced in by farmers and the wild animals were being killed
or chased away, and the Indians themselves were either being slaughtered
along with the buffalo, forced out of their villages, or forced onto
reservations, the message at times became almost apocalyptic.
In its most extreme form this theme presented the white men themselves
as the evil agents or creatures of the devil, while in its less extreme
form the white men or at least some of them were either tolerated or
included in the better future that awaits the Indians if they heed the
warnings of the seers. Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee
Prophet, clearly perceived the white men and especially the Americans
as the evil spawn of a devil from across the sea, even as he and his
brother used British weapons to fight against the Americans on behalf
of the British. But Wovoka the Paiute Messiah was equally adamant
that the Indians should tolerate and respect the white men, work hard
for them, and peacefully avoid all forms of conflict with them, even
as they also avoided as much as possible of the white men’s boxed-in
lifestyle and materialistic culture. Yet even in its most apocalyptic
form the Indian seers’ message was ultimately optimistic. Both
the warriors at Tippecanoe and the ghost dancers at Wounded Knee thought
they were immune from the soldiers’ bullets.
Before returning
to these two leading examples as the extremes between which the Indian
prophecies tended to fall, let’s go back to the beginnings of the
movement that produced them. The prophets of the Delawares, longtime
friends and allies of the Shawnees, anticipated Tenskwatawa by more
than half a century. We don’t know the names of all these prophets,
but the most important one was probably Neolin, whose message was first
reported to the white settlers in 1762. Like Tenskwatawa and Wovoka,
Neolin based his prophecies on dreams and visions in which he communicated
with the Great Spirit. The essence of the divine commands he received
was to denounce alcoholism, witchcraft, polygamy, and sexual promiscuity
along with excessive compromise with the white intruders. The
Great Spirit also called for Indian unity, and declared that if his
wishes were heeded the whites would be repelled and the wild animals
would return. The tone of Neolin’s prophecy was basically that
of the Old Testament, with Neolin in the role of Moses. But the
concluding optimism was mainly that of the New Testament, to the extent
that even the Book of Revelation promises a favorable outcome for the
true believers. Clearly Neolin had some familiarity with the Bible,
which he probably acquired from Moravian missionaries.
Tenskwatawa
differed from Neolin mainly in the specificity of his religious message
and in its stringent moral requirements. He and Tecumseh claimed
the power of predicting natural calamities such as eclipses and most
notably the New Madrid earthquake of 1811, which gave them more credibility
than their predecessors. Exploiting his authority to the hilt,
Tenskwatawa decried the wearing of white men’s clothing as well as
the decorating of native clothing with white men’s baubles.
He decried eating white men’s foods such as beef, pork, bread, and
beans. As a former alcoholic he especially decried the consumption
of alcohol, and even of tea or coffee, instead of drinking only water.
He decried hunting with white men’s weapons, though he made an exception
for fighting with them against the white men. He decried relying
on traditional charms, amulets, and fetishes obtained from other lesser
shamans instead of relying on his own revelations which came straight
from the Great Spirit. He reserved the right of denouncing witches
himself, often pointing the finger of blame at chiefs of tribes that
had signed treaties with the whites and given away lands that they did
not own. Instead of saying that all the land belongs to the Great
Spirit, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh said that it all belongs collectively
to all the Indians, so that no particular chief or tribe has the right
to sign any of it away without the consent of all the members of all
the tribes. As Tecumseh’s power increased in the first decade
of the 19th Century, the fear of being denounced by Tenskwatawa
became a very real deterrent for some of the chiefs who resisted Tecumseh’s
pan-Indian coalition, but after the defeat at Tippecanoe it was harder
for Tecumseh to keep the other chiefs in line.
Tenskwatawa
was not just a religious leader. He was also a political leader,
the civil chief of the thriving community of Prophetstown which for
a time was the Native American equivalent of Mecca, and occasionally
a war chief by default, e.g. when Tecumseh was out of town on his frequent
junkets attempting to recruit other tribes into his military coalition.
That was unfortunately the case at the time of Tippecanoe, which was
a close enough battle that Tecumseh’s presence might have turned it
into an Indian victory, though more likely Tecumseh would have preferred
to fight at a later date when more warriors and more British weapons
were available to him.
Wovoka, on the
other hand, was a humble ranch hand who just as often went by the name
of Jack Wilson. He was a good worker for white employers, diligent
and soft spoken, of moderate reputation and status, at the time of his
religious visions. His father had been a minor medicine man, but
it was not a role that Wovoka inherited automatically within the tribe.
In fact he had been brought up largely by white Christians. The
ghost dance itself was not that different from any number of other Indian
dances that moved in a large circle. However, the simple fact
that it was supposed to be danced for several days and nights without
stopping probably gave it some of its mystic power. No doubt most
of the dancers were delirious by the time the dance was over.
It was somewhat by accident that Wovoka’s ideas about returning to
simple Indian basics and doing his ghost dance caught on with other
tribes such as the Sioux. Wovoka did not have an apostle such
as Tecumseh to play St. Paul to his Jesus. He was illiterate,
so he produced no sacred quotes or texts. Others such as Sitting
Bull learned his message mainly by traveling to Nevada to meet him.
There they found a large but unpretentious man who wore neat but unadorned
western clothing and lived very simply in a remote hut. After
Wounded Knee Wovoka did even less to publicize himself. But he
never recanted his message and he never denied that he was a messiah
of some sort. Clearly Wovoka believed that he had received an
important revelation from the Great Spirit if only society were better
prepared to receive it from Wovoka. And at no time did he exclude
white people from becoming its beneficiaries.
An approximate
contemporary of Tenskwatawa was the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, and
in between Tenskwatawa and Wovoka there were a number of other Indian
prophets such as the Kickapoo prophet Kenekuk. The latter, especially,
provided a plausible middle ground between the angry militancy of Tenskwatawa
and the meek pacificism of Wovoka, consciously seeking a common ground
between Christianity and Native American spirituality. But of
all these Indian spiritual leaders it’s probably the unassuming Wovoka,
who might with some justice be called the Native American Thoreau, that
appeals most genuinely to our UU audiences today. Much as we still
respect the noble warrior Tecumseh, who went into his final fatal battle
wearing simple buckskins and carrying only the war club he had been
given by his older brother Chiksika as a teenager, the fact remains
that his younger brother Tenskwatawa’s religious message is a kind
of reverse racism, and Tecumseh’s attempt to spread it led among other
things to a bloody civil war in Tennessee between pro-white and anti-white
Creeks that Andrew Jackson used to assert his own military power over
both factions and confiscate most of their land.
As for myself,
it does not take the addition of Satan, sin, or salvation to make Native
American religious ideas more attractive to me, and in fact the mixed
versions produced by the aforementioned prophets are probably less attractive
to me than the unalloyed original. For its environmental message
alone, the Native American religion is well worth the careful attention
of caring people of all faiths. Chief Joseph probably said it
best when he said “The earth is the mother of all people, and all
people should have equal rights upon it.”
I hope we do not forfeit some of those rights by exaggerating our Manifest Destiny and treating our Mother Earth and some of its other occupants with a disrespect that no Native American would ever countenance.