NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN RELIGIONS: NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

From the time of their earliest contact with European settlers and explorers, Native Americans have defended their lands, cultures, religions, and political rights. Often, Native American efforts to preserve their communities and cultures take the form of religious, military, political, and cultural movements. The ways that Native nations have sought to preserve their cultures and territories have varied considerably throughout colonial history and in the contemporary world. There were wars, battles, and strategic political alliances during the colonial period before and after the establishment of the United States. Religious movements, or revitalization movements, characterize Native responses to colonialism as American Indian peoples sought cultural solutions to drastically changing economic, political, and cultural situations.

Many Native American traditions, religions, and revitalized cultures continue into the present day as living communities. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, Native peoples openly practiced, reclaimed, and maintained their religious beliefs and understandings. If there is one generalization about Native American communities over the past five hundred years of colonial contact, it might be that Native nations have sought to preserve their cultures, communities, political rights, and territories. Social and religious movements have been among the ways in which Native people have sought to preserve core aspects of their cultures while accommodating changing political, economic, and cultural relations in an increasingly globalized world.

Military and Diplomatic Movements

Eastern North America was colonized by an assortment of colonial powers, including the English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedes. As the competitive and warring nation states of Europe transferred their disputes to the colonies, diplomatic and economic rivalries were played out as part of the policies of the mother countries. The hunt for gold was an early motivating factor for the colonizers, but they soon turned their attention to the export of furs and skins. Native people were willing to trade furs for European manufactured goods such as ironware, rifles, traps, cloth, and pots and pans. Native trappers and hunters became sources of labor in complex intercontinental markets extending back to the European capitals.

Native communities soon became dependent on trade with Europeans for manufactured products they could not produce themselves. Economic dependence required a European trading partner, and the eastern Native nations soon found themselves forced to ally with one or another European colony for trade and military protection. Trade allies became military allies during times of war, and the Native nations were soon swept into a series of conflicts that were often initiated to serve European interests far away from North America. Warfare became more frequent, involved more combatants, marshaled greater firepower, and was far more deadly than traditional Native American conflicts.

Working according to the dictates of the European market, European traders demanded more and more furs from Native American hunters and trappers, coercing them to trap more by reducing the value of furs relative to trade items; thus more furs were required to trade for necessities. Traders used alcohol as an inducement to bring in more furs or a distraction leading to poor trades, requiring additional hunting. Market demands for furs led to Native hunters overhunting local animal resources, and often forced tribes like the Delaware and Munsee to fall back into the interior to follow the disappearing hunting grounds. Movement into the interior, however, often led to conflict with other nations who had already claimed the hunting grounds.

By the 1640s the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) saw their local beaver and deer supplies shrink to levels that could not sustain trade with the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Consequently, the Iroquois sought trade agreements with the Native nations of the interior, but were rebuffed because the interior nations had their trade and diplomatic alliances with the French. With Dutch support, the Iroquois initiated a series of battles and wars in the middle 1640s that lasted until about 1700, known as the Beaver Wars. From the 1640s until 1820 in eastern North America there was nearly continuos warfare and economic and diplomatic competition that ended only with the emergence of the United States and the extension of its control over the region.

The trade and diplomatic ties of the Native nations to European colonies not only involved them in the European wars but intensified military and economic interactions among the Native nations. The Iroquois, supported by Dutch and later English alliances and weapons, pushed out or dispersed many of the Native nations of the lower Great Lakes, and forced the Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Odawa, Sac and Fox, Wyandot, and others farther west. In turn, the migrating Native nations, often better supplied with weapons, pushed others like the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Gros Ventre, and Cheyenne farther to the west and onto the plains.

The intensification of diplomatic, military, and trade relations greatly affected the ability of many Native nations to maintain their territorial and economic integrity. Most nations in eastern North America were forced into a trade, military, or diplomatic alliance with one or another European colony. Many coastal nations were quickly subjugated by the English colonies. The Pamunkey Algonquins under Powhatan (c. 1550–1618) were early subject to English land encroachments, taxes, and pressures to convert to Christianity that resulted in several conflicts, ending with the social, political, and cultural marginalization of the Virginia nations by 1675.

At about the same time, the Native nations of New England were increasingly forced to cede land and political autonomy to the English. The Wampanoags did not believe they could live under English rule, and the economic and cultural changes were corrupting their way of life. The defeat of the Wampanoags and allied New England nations in King Philip's War (1675–1676) led to their relegation to small tracts of land and communities often called Indian Praying Towns. The New England nations adopted town-government democracy and Christian Protestant religions, although they have maintained a sense of Native identity to the present day.

While most Native nations in the thirteen original U.S. colonies were eventually brought under colonial control, the nations farther to the west continued to engage in trade, diplomatic, and military relations with the rival European colonial powers. By 1700 some of them began to realize that the expansionist goals of the English colonists were a threat to their sovereignty and traditional territories. The Iroquois and Creek confederacies began to form alliances of Native nations in order to manage relations with the Europeans more effectively. During the early 1700s the Iroquois often boasted that they had a military alliance with fifty Native nations, although most likely this claim was a bargaining ploy for negotiating with the Europeans.

The Iroquois Confederacy held together an alliance of Native nations based on economic treaties that allowed the Iroquois access to western hunting grounds, and in exchange they gave the western nations access to British trade goods at Albany in the New York colony. The Iroquois managed this alliance for their own and English trade and diplomatic interests, but it unraveled after the 1750s as trade moved farther west and Pennsylvania traders moved into the Ohio region. The alliance was increasingly taken over by Shawnee and Delaware leadership.

During the early 1760s, Pontiac (c. 1720–1769) assembled many groups from the northern confederacy to attack British forts in the Great Lakes region. This same confederacy was united to oppose U.S. expansion during Little Turtle's War in the 1790s, and in 1812 Tecumseh (1768–1813) was appointed warrior head of the confederacy that fought with the British against the United States in the War of 1812. After the War of 1812 the northern alliance was left depleted and in disarray.

The Creek nation also tried to strengthen its trade and diplomatic position by inviting coastal groups and other nations or villages to join the Creek Confederacy. The Creek leadership tried to manage relations among the English, French, and Spanish colonies of the south in order to gain diplomatic and trade advantages. The Creek were relatively successful with these methods during the second half of the 1700s. During the early 1760s the southern tribes, including the Creek, rejected overtures by the Shawnee and Delaware to join with the northern confederacy against the British. And in 1811 the southern Native nations generally declined to ally with the northern confederacy by refusing to join Tecumseh to oppose the expansion of the United States into Native lands.

Many Native nations during the late 1700s and 1800s engaged the U. S. government in warfare. Most were defending territory and their way of life, or moving to preserve an economic resource like the buffalo. Native military alliances were usually loose coalitions of friendship, and often seasonally deployed. In general, they were hard to sustain in the field, could not manufacture their own rifles and ammunition, and depended on the backing of a strong European colonial ally who was willing to provide military supplies and, hopefully, armed forces. After the War of 1812 and the sale of Florida and West Florida (present-day Alabama and Mississippi) by Spain to the United States, the eastern Native nations were left without effective allies and were forced to recognize U.S. authority in the region.

Movements of Religious Fundamentalism and Reform

As eastern North America became increasingly engaged in trade, diplomacy, and the economic markets, the encroachments of colonial power led to the dispersion and social and economic degradation of Native life and culture. Native communities were forced to migrate farther west, game disappeared, colonists took over land and made farms, disease greatly reduced the numbers and life expectancy of Native peoples, and economic and political dependencies required interaction and compliance with colonial authorities and traders. European trade goods, access to alcohol, overspecialization in the fur-trade economy, and new Christian religious ideas and concepts were changing and modifying everyday life. Native social and living conditions deteriorated noticeably, and the colonial expansion westward was increasing.

Under these conditions many Native American leaders and spiritual guides began to lament the declining conditions of the Native nations and sought answers. While military action was one option, many leaders hoped to understand the spiritual and religious significance of the changes that were occurring and sought remedies through spiritual means. There are reports of spiritual preaching among the Iroquois as early as the 1720s, but not to the extent of becoming a full-fledged movement. There may have been many spiritual leaders who discussed the issues of the day in spiritual terms but did not lead recognizable movements, or who have been lost in history.

Among the Delaware in the 1740s, there appears to have been much distress because of migrations and declining conditions, and there are hints of spiritual unrest. Several prophets appeared among the Delaware in the late 1750s and early 1760s. The British had just won the French and Indian War, and many tribes in the northern alliance, including the Delaware and Odawa, who were both allied with the French, were highly suspicious of British motivations. The British now controlled trade and gained control of the military forts in the Great Lakes region. The Native nations in the region expected British retaliation and were unhappy under British administration. Under these conditions two religious movements emerged among the Delaware. One led to the unified national Delaware Big House religion, and the other to the militant teachings that the Odawa Pontiac endorsed and used to collect a military coalition to try to force the British out the Great Lakes region.

The militant prophet's teachings combined elements of Christianity with selected Native teachings. The prophet Neolin (the Delaware Prophet) had a near death experience and dreamed he went to heaven and received instruction directly from god. In general, his teachings suggested that the Native people had abandoned the religious teachings and lifeways of their forebears and had adopted too many European ways, including their clothing, trade, alcohol, and Christianity. These changes had corrupted Native life, and the solution was to return to the beliefs and life of their ancestors, which would help restore the Native American nations to their former health and prosperity. The Europeans would have to be pushed off the continent through warfare, and no warrior could reach the next world if he did not believe in the prophet's teachings and do his bidding. Pontiac and the militant Delaware prophet used these teachings to organize the northern confederacy against the British, but after losing a brief war, called Pontiac's War, the teachings were lost or went underground. This movement, which emphasizes spiritual solutions to colonial situations and a return to the culture and religion of the ancestors, we can call fundamentalist.

The second Delaware religious movement during the early 1760s led to the political, social, and religious reform of Delaware society. This prophet synthesized elements of traditional Delaware religious views, brought them together into a common ceremonial structure, the Big House, unified three phratries of a dozen clans each into a common religious-kinship structure, and established unified chief and leadership positions for all three phratries. The phratries are known to us as the Wolf, Turkey, and Turtle divisions, or perhaps more generally as four-leggeds, two-leggeds, and those that walk on land and water.

The newly established chief of the Turtle division was the first leader of the newly reformed Delaware nation. The reformed Delaware religion-society helped centralize and unify Delaware political and religious relations, and helped the Delaware more effectively manage relations with other tribes and Europeans. The Delaware Big House religion was practiced until at least the 1920s. This movement can be called a reform movement because it led to long term and durable institutional change in Delaware society. Its purpose was religious, moral, social, and political reform.

The fundamentalist movements

The Native religious landscape had numerous fundamentalist and reform movements. The fundamentalist movements have generally been more historically colorful and often gained considerable attention. They include the Pueblo Revolt (1680s), the Shawnee Prophet movement (1805–1811), the Cherokee Prophet movement (1811–1813), the Red Stick War (1813–1814), White Path's Rebellion (1826), the Winnebago Prophet movement (1830–1832), the first Ghost Dance (1869–1870) and the second Ghost Dance (1889–1890), and the Snake movements among the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek during the 1890s. These generally fundamentalist movements favored a return to traditional ways and rejected the social, cultural, and economic changes brought by the colonies or the United States.

Many of these movements adopted elements of Christianity, such as the idea of a second coming or the concepts of heaven and a single anthropomorphic God, but their solution to the economic, demographic, and political decline of the Native communities was to seek a solution through spiritual intervention and a restoration of the way of life that existed before the Europeans arrived. The second Ghost Dance asked the faithful to dance at regular intervals in a circle to induce dreams and communication with the ancestors in order to learn about the ancestors' immanent return and restoration of the Native way of life. The Cherokee Prophet, in 1811–1813, taught that the changes in Cherokee society were corrosive and that the community would be destroyed in a hailstorm of fiery rocks. Only those who went to Lookout Mountain would be saved. The first Ghost Dance taught that the people would be saved by trainloads of manufactured goods that would arrive only for the Native people. This movement is reminiscent of the cargo cults in the Pacific.

The Winnebago Prophet taught that by resisting the Americans militarily, the Winnebago and Sac and Fox would regain their traditional lands when a group of spiritual warriors appeared to defeat the U.S. Army. The Creek Red Sticks opposed economic and political change introduced by U.S. Indian agents, and they started a civil war for cultural reasons, which later developed into the Creek War (1812–1813). The Pueblo Revolt was strongly influenced by a rejection of Christianity and Spanish political domination, and it earned the Pueblo the right to practice their own religion, although most Pueblo people were returned to Spanish control in the 1690s. The Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek Snake movements were ways to mobilize a political organization to oppose the abolishment of the tribal governments and force their inclusion in the state of Oklahoma. The members of the Snake movements were the most culturally conservative members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek nations.

The fundamentalist movements, generally, have been strongly resistant to cultural and political change, favoring military or spiritual solutions to the degradation of life under colonial domination. Some of the movements have relied on a cataclysmic spiritual event to intervene and restore the old order and tradition. If the significant spiritual event does not occur, however, then most people lose faith in the movement and the movement disintegrates, though sometimes small groups of adherents remain and carry on the beliefs, often in secret.

The reform movements

Reform religious movements are aimed at changing or supporting community social and cultural values to accommodate fluctuating political, cultural, and political conditions. Native American reform movements include the Yaqui religion (1500–present), the Handsome Lake movement (1797–present), the Munsee Prophetess movement (1804–1805), the Kickapoo Prophet movement (1815–present), the Cherokee Keetoowah Society (1858–present), the Washat Dreamers religion (1850–present), the Indian Shakers (1881–present), the Native American Church (1800s–present), the Shoshoni Sun Dance (1890–present), and perhaps the New Tidings religion of the Canadian Sioux (1900–present) and Ojibwe Drummer movement (contemporary). Most of these religions adopt some concepts from Christianity but have a predominantly Native cultural and philosophical focus that would not be generally recognized as Christian.

The most characteristic of the religious reform movements is the Handsome Lake movement among the Seneca and Iroquois. Handsome Lake, after having a near-death experience, brought back a message of reform to the Seneca from god. Elements of Catholicism and Quakerism are integrated with selected features of traditional religion and ceremony to create a reform message. Handsome Lake's movement emerged as the Iroquois were relegated to small reservations. He advocated no gambling or drinking and legitimized the role of men in farming, which previously was women's work, by suggesting that males take up the horse and plow while women focused on horticulture using hand implements. The prophet advocated social and culture reform as a means of helping the community adapt to life on small reservations. Strong emphasis is given to moral issues and individual responsibility, and Christian concepts of heaven and hell and punishment in the afterlife are emphasized for those who would break the new moral code. Handsome Lake is given credit for introducing significant social reform into Iroquois society. His followers established a church about fifteen years after his death.

The Kickapoo Prophet, Native American Church, and Indian Shaker movements follow analogous patterns of moral and community reform and continue as contemporary religious movements. The Yaqui religion is an example of the formation of a reformed religion, borrowing significantly from Christian Catholic teachings but recreated and relocated within Yaqui tradition and history. Some movements are less influenced by social or cultural change and instead emphasize and support the continuity of community and tradition. Such movements are the Munsee Prophetess movement, the New Tidings religion, and the Ojibwa Drummer movement.

The religious reform movements are generally responses to radically changing social, cultural, political, and economic conditions experienced by many Native communities over the past two centuries. Traditional religions seemed ill equipped to interpret and give guidance under radically changing colonial conditions, and some people have looked for new ways to understand the world and make accommodations to it. Some Native Americans have adopted Christianity, but often continue to engage with the Native community and beliefs. Native American Christian churches, such as the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, and Creek, are based on Native languages and social and cultural organizations. Native religious reform movements often provide syncretic religious solutions to a community undergoing rapid change, as well as provide a new set of moral values, beliefs, ceremonies, and sometimes community organization to help people endure and live under the new conditions. The reform movements usually retain many central Native concepts and philosophies.

Contemporary Social Movements

Current Native American social movements take many forms. Native peoples are actively engaged in many activities in the area of land claims, education, Native rights, international rights, and many others. The focus here will be on the movements that are related to religious issues.

During the 1970s the Red Power movement's activities ranged from the occupation of Alcatraz Island to the second Long Walk in 1978. Contemporary Red Power activities have been less visible, but have taken the form of occasional protests, especially over nuclear waste sites on or near reservation land, as well as sacred walks or sacred runs. American Indian Movement (AIM) chapters are still active, meet in national meetings, and are engaged in community issues and cultural events. Native American students at colleges and universities are engaged in Native American issues, recruitment, cultural events, and community activities.

One major outgrowth of the Red Power movement was the open revival of Native traditions in many Native American communities. Activism in the 1970s started in urban areas but soon moved to the reservation communities, where young Native Americans sought greater knowledge and understanding of traditional culture. These events encouraged many spiritual leaders and traditionalists to bring Native ceremonies, dances, and stories out into public view, when they had been hidden away for many years. Elders and traditionalists gained more respect, and they became more active and visible in Native American communities. Tribal community colleges and universities started teaching Native languages and culture.

Native religious freedom issues were defended in the courts to preserve the right to smoke sacred peyote in ceremonies. Twice Congressional bills were written to preserve Native American religious rights through the American Indian Religious Freedom Acts. Native Americans moved to protect sacred sites and places of worship, both on and off the reservations. Native religion and traditional knowledge became more highly regarded within Native American communities. Contemporary Native peoples are actively engaged in the world through a variety of social, religious, political, educational, and cultural movements aimed at preserving their communities, identities, religions, and political autonomy.

See Also

Ghost Dance; Handsome Lake; Neolin; North American Indians, article on Indians of the Plains; Sun Dance; Tecumseh; Wovoka.

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Duane Champagne (2005)