The Handsome Lake Religion and the Indian Shaker Church

REVITALIZING PEOPLE(S): THE HANDSOME LAKE RELIGION AND THE INDIAN SHAKER CHURCH TED BAILEY University of Miskolc ”’As tribes and nations the Indians must perish and live only as men!’” (qtd. in Berkhofer 1978:151) This remark by a missionary in 1846, with all its racist and ethnocentric overtones, rather crudely summarizes the attitude of many other Christian missionaries in the frontier territories of the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. The process of becoming “men” in the white European sense, however, was not as straightforward a matter as many missionaries envisioned it, for they were running up against peoples who already had centuries-old religious systems of their own. In the wake of mili- tary and/or economic defeat and the resultant social collapse, these Indian groups did not simply surrender their belief systems but often incorporated them into the new ideologies being preached amongst them by the missionaries to produce syncretic religious blends. Using one such example — the religion developed among the Seneca by Handsome Lake two hundred years ago — Anthony F. C. Wallace classified these and other syncretic belief systems as revitalization movements which attempt to restore an equilibrium to the native culture (1956:264). In the case of the Seneca, the rejuvenated religion allowed them to maintain a sense of tribal identity and thus prevented them from being swallowed whole by the dominant white society. In many aspects of its origin, the Indian Shaker religion of the Pacific Northwest bears a strong resemblance to the Handsome Lake religion. And, like the Longhouse religion, it is one of the few syncretic cults to have sur- vived the closing of the frontier and continue in existence into the 21st centu- ry. Nevertheless, these two churches, which have today achieved what Wallace calls the “New Steady State” (1956:268), are different systems of belief: the Longhouse religion is comparatively strong with a concentration primarily in one tribe, while the Shaker church is numerically smaller and spread out over a number of tribes in three states. If there were so many similarities in their origins, what accounts for the present day differences? Does Shakerism, in fact, qualify as a revitalization movement according to Wallace’s model? Since Wallace developed his ideas based upon the Seneca B.A.S. vol. XI, 2005 36 experience, the answers to these questions may well lie in a comparison of the two religions, and this in turn may shed some light as well on some of the con- clusions Wallace reached about revitalization movements. Wallace’s model for revitalization movements includes five stages: “1. Steady State; 2. Period of Individual Stress; 3. Period of Cultural Distortion; 4. Period of Revitalization [. .], 5. New Steady State” (1956:268). The rise of Handsome Lake’s religion and the Indian Shaker church inside their respective cultures fits this pattern to a remarkably similar degree; indeed, inside the Revitalization period, which describes how movements galvanize a culture, creating new “mazeways” (Wallace 1956:270) that help individuals as well as groups adapt to the stresses of cultural change, there are also a great number of similarities. Both belief systems arose out of near-death-experience visions of an individual, who then preached a syncretic blend of Christianity and the native religion to adherents, who then began an “organized program of group action” (Wallace 1956:275). Wallace ascribes a central role in this process to a charismatic leader who adapts the new ideology to the needs of the population, and it is precisely in this point that the two movements differ. Handsome Lake fulfilled this role for the Seneca — as the name of the religion indicates — while a charismatic leader was missing in the Shaker Church. This single point alone is very likely the key to the differences in the two belief systems today. It is no coincidence that eighty years separates the development of Handsome Lake’s religion and Shakerism from one another. This period roughly reflects the length of time it took white Europeans to expand their domination across the American continent and approximately marks the difference in time between the subjugation of the Iroquois and the Coast Salish Indians of the Pacific Northwest. The steady decline of the Seneca began in the 1750s and, punctuated by the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, continued for the next forty years until the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797 (Wallace 1972:179), two years before Handsome Lake received his first vision. Similarly, the Coast Salish found their way of life disrupted some thir- ty to forty years prior to the visions of John Slocum, who together with his wife founded what became the Indian Shaker church. The arrival of missionaries in the 1840s, the establishment of settlements such as Olympia — close to the home of Slocum’s Squaxin tribe — in the 1850s, and white-Indian war- fare in the area during the mid-1850s all marked this period of cultural decline. Although Slocum probably was too young to have taken part in these wars as Handsome Lake almost certainly did in the Seneca’s conflicts with the whites (Wallace 1972:137), both of these men experienced the general deteri- oration and collapse of their cultures during their lifetimes. The visions these 37 IDENTITY — WOUND AND PRIDE men experienced — Handsome Lake at about the age of fifty, Slocum at around forty — came to them a full generation after the onset of decline. Born at the beginning of their respective tribes’ cultural disintegration, both men belonged to — and preached to — the first generation of their tribe that knew only decline. The cultural devastations both the Seneca and the Coast Salish experienced in the period immediately prior to the prophets’ visions were marked by severe economic and social disruptions. The population of the Iroquois had been halved since the start of the Revolutionary War (Wallace 1972:194), and the Coast Salish suffered devastating epidemics of small pox and scarlet fever in 1881, just months before Slocum’s first vision (Barnett 1957:342-43). With the steady increase in the surrounding white populations, both tribes became drawn into economic dependency on a foreign system and eventually were forced into the reservation system. Though still able to fish, clam, and hunt to a large extent, many Salish were starting to find work outside their tra- ditional economic roles and became loggers or worked in the hop fields and other agricultural industries in the Puget Sound area. For the Iroquois, economic dislocation also brought severe social problems: unable to hunt due to the loss of large tracts of land and encouraged by the Quakers to work the land agriculturally instead, many men were turning to, or resisting, what had previ- ously been considered women’s work and suffered a loss of social prestige and self-esteem. This made it even easier for many in both tribes to turn for solace to a vice that was already wreaking havoc in many Indian tribes, alcohol. The personal situations of Handsome Lake and John Slocum mirrored this general social decline. Both lived in squalid circumstances and had taken to drinking heavily. The former was a hunter who in the days before his first visions appeared to be about to drink himself to death, while the latter was a logger given to binge drinking and gambling. The only noticeable difference between the two men at the time they apparently died and returned to life with divine messages was their social connections: Slocum was an entirely ordinary man, while Handsome Lake, destitute as he was both financially and morally, was the half-brother of a chief, Cornplanter. Thus the support Handsome Lake received early on may well have been a factor in the success of his religion becoming a strong cultural institution among the Iroquois. The more extensive development of his theological and social doctrines are, of course, among the many other reasons for the large success compared to the Shakers, but at the time of the first visions both religions had striking similarities in the new elements they introduced. Neither the religion of the Iroquois nor that of the Coast Salish had any concept of a doomsday or heaven and hell until the two prophets emerged B.A.S. vol. XI, 2005 38 with their visions. Given the situations the tribes were in, however, it is no sur- prise that they readily accepted these ideas. The cultural disintegration around them made the Christian idea of an eventual end of the world easily accessi- ble and relevant to the two groups, and the presence of Christian missionaries gave not just the prophets but the entire tribe a background knowledge of these concepts. The Quakers had established a mission on the Seneca reservation shortly before Handsome Lake’s vision (Berkhofer 1976:135), while a Catholic mission had been opened in the South Puget Sound area in 1850, fol- lowed later by a Presbyterian mission in 1876 (Castile 1982:169). In this sense, the two men were simply acting as conduits for an acculturation process that was going on around them: whether they liked it or not, they were merely pawns in a larger social evolutionary process. Indeed, the initial messages they brought with them seemed more centrally focused on personal sal- vation: Handsome Lake preached that “[t]he four evil words are whiskey, witchcraft, love magic, and abortion-and-sterility medicine” (Wallace 1972:241), while Slocum had been confronted with “the error of his sinful life” and came out inveighing against alcohol and shamans (Barnett 1957:6).

Load more