NATIVE AMERCAN PROPHETS AND MESSIAHS

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 pacifisms 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.