Native Americans

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Native Americans

Indians and Christians . Native Americans had religious beliefs and practices quite different from those of white Christians. Indians found themselves in a time of religious change as a result of contact with European Americans. In some cases Indians became Christians in European ways. Some, like the Mohegan Samsom Occom, who died in 1792, left their tribes to live and be educated among whites and then returned as missionaries to the Indians, having abandoned their original values and beliefs. Other Indians embraced Christianity in more limited ways, retaining at least some aspects of their native cultures, merging complementary elements of both together, just as many slaves combined African and European practices. Others resisted Christianity. This became increasingly evident in the early national period, as the United States developed a policy of moving Indians westward to make way for the expansion of the white population into the frontier. Efforts to convert the Indians to Christianity often went hand in hand with military actions and the signing of treaties which deprived Indians of land and independence. In the early national era, the Christian churches organized and expanded their missionary efforts to the Native Americans with the avowed purpose of destroying Indian religions; along the way, they were increasingly the agents of even greater destruction.

Handsome Lake . After the end of the Revolution, Indians, like white Americans, found themselves in a period of religious renewal. The revivalist enthusiasm that marked white Protestants at frontier camp meetings had a powerful effect on Native American cultures as well. As the nineteenth century opened, the Seneca Indians of western New York, part of the Iroquois Confederacy, had fallen far from their former political and military prowess. Many Senecas responded to their dislocation and social turmoil with destructive behaviors such as drinking, feuding, and suicide. Among these people was Ganiodaio, also known as Handsome Lake. In 1799 Handsome Lake began to experience a series of visions, which left him at times in a trancelike state similar to that experienced by converts at camp meetings. The visions made Handsome Lake into a preacher, and he began to travel among his people. He urged them to reform their lives and return to their old ways, much as Methodist circuit riders urged their listeners to repent and return to the traditional values of biblical times. A new religion developed from these teachings, called Gaiwiio, or the Longhouse Religion. It included many Senecan beliefs and rituals, including the important Thanksgiving Dance, Great Feather Dance, Personal Chants, and Bowl Game, all of which honored the traditional spirit gods and recounted ancient myths. The Bowl Game, for example, reenacted with dice made from peach pits a primal struggle between the Good Twin and the Evil Twin for control of the earth. The game lasted for several days in midwinter, with feasting and dancing at night. Handsome Lake encouraged these old practices, but his apocalyptic visions led him to all new interpretations. Influenced by the themes of the Christian gospels, he came to see the Bowl Game as not only a creation ritual but also as prefiguring a climactic war between good and evil at the end of the world, when the Senecas would be judged and sent to heaven or hell. These beliefs were new to the Senecas but were easily incorporated into their revived ritual life, which was open to such syncretism. As a practical matter Handsome Lake preached moral reform, encouraging his followers to give up drinking and abortions since they were not part of the old ways and only weakened the nation. Many Iroquois embraced this powerful message of revival, renewal, and survival. This is not surprising, given the ongoing concerns about the security of their territories. Handsome Lake failed as a political leader, and the Iroquois’s political situation deteriorated steadily, although his preaching of peaceful acceptance of some white ways eventually helped relax tensions. Nevertheless, his religious success was remarkable. By the time of his death in 1815 he had sparked a major revival of Iroquois culture, both moral and spiritual. Handsome Lake’s religion of Gaiwiio survives today.

Tenskwatawa . Farther west of the Appalachians a similar phenomenon occurred among the Shawnee in the Ohio River valley, but there it was even more deeply colored by the politics of Indian removal. In 1794 Gen. Anthony Wayne defeated an Indian force drawn from several tribes, including the Shawnee, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The resulting Treaty of Greenville was to have ended Indian resistance to white settlement of the region, which dated back to the French and Indian War (1754–1763). The British continued to rally the Indians against the white Americans, however, and fighting continued through the War of 1812. Indian resistance was based not only on Britain’s support, but was also grounded in the Shawnee religion. In 1805 a Shawnee named Tenskwatawa began to experience visions. Just as Handsome Lake was doing among the Iroquois, he preached moral reform and spiritual renewal through returning to old ways. He used his visions to create a religious message grounded in resistance to white expansion. The new religion revived old rituals and added some new ones, like the ceremony of confessing sins to Tenskwatawa, that were rooted in Christianity. Tenskwatawa traveled widely among the western tribes, and people from across the trans-Appalachian region joined him. Tenskwatawa’s brother was Tecumseh, the war leader of the Shawnee. As the American government continued to pressure all the western Indians for more land cessions, Tecumseh tried to forge a pan-Indian union to resist the United States, built on the pan-Indian religious feelings preached by Tenskwatawa. Tenskwatawa’s defeat at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 dealt a serious setback to the revival of traditional ways, and the renewal movement gradually faded as American troops wore down the Indians. Tecumseh’s alliance with the British marked the end of both the religious and military efforts, as England acknowledged American control over the Great Lakes area at the end of the conflict in 1815.

Missionaries and Acculturation . Removal was only one part of the American policy toward the Indian nations during the early national period. The other was acculturation, the effort to get Native Americans to take up European ways. Christian missions to the Indians were at the forefront of this effort. Beginning with the establishment of the American Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, American Protestants founded at least eleven organizations between 1787 and 1800 for the support of missions to the Indians. This was part of the same evangelical impulse shaping the camp meetings on the frontier, but the goals were not only religious. One missionary said his job was to instill “those habits of sobriety, cleanliness, economy, and industry, so essential to civilized life.” Beginning in 1803 Congress funded Presbyterian and Moravian missionaries to pursue this “civilization program,” first announced by George Washington. Partly due to the emphasis on morality in evangelical preaching, missionaries persisted in this effort long after the federal government largely abandoned the policy in the 1820s.

The Cherokee . In religious and social terms the mission to the Cherokee of Georgia and Tennessee was the most successful, but it was also a vivid sign of the limits of acculturation. The Cherokee had an elaborate culture before the Europeans’ arrival, which they gradually modified over the 1700s by taking up some white ways. They sided with the British during the Revolution, however, and paid the price afterward in the loss of control over their lands. Missionaries soon arrived, led by the intensely pietistic Moravians. The effort took a distinctive form under the Presbyterian Gideon Blackburn, who arrived in 1803 to pursue the goal of acculturation with a school combining religious instruction with lessons in reading and writing. The school was better at securing political and economic change than religious conversions. Christianity spread slowly. In 1811 a revival of the traditional Cherokee religion began as several people reported visions somewhat like those of Handsome Lake and Tenskwatawa. The problem of acculturation was a recurring theme in these visions. One featured Selu, the goddess of corn and mother of the nation. She urged the Cherokee to return to growing Indian corn and give up the hybrid varieties that the Cherokee got from white farmers and were growing with only limited success. Other visions spurred the revival of traditional rituals such as the purification ceremony, which involved bathing and communal dancing by men and women, accompanied by drums and rattles. Earthquakes at the end of

1811 prompted more visions and sent many to the conjurers for an interpretation. They also asked the Christian missionaries for answers, however, and the Cherokee revival never turned against whites to the extent of the Shawnee revival. The visionaries urged the Cherokee to set limits on assimilation but not to abandon the process entirely. Many Cherokee political leaders supported this compromise; some of them were Christian and some financially benefited from closer ties to whites. These men allied the Cherokee with the United States in its war with the Creek nation, which began in 1812 and brought an end to this phase of the religious revival. The Cherokee mission revived after the end of the War of 1812 and saw the tribe pursue a remarkable combination of Christianity and republicanism, including the development of a written language. But neither their Christianity nor their cultural success kept them from being removed forcibly to Oklahoma in the 1830s.