What is Religion?

[caption id="attachment_4704" align="aligncenter" width="604"] The medicine wheel, also known as the sacred hoop, is part of the system of belief and action of an indigenous culture. This image was taken from http://healing.about.com/cs/native/a/medicinewheel.htm[/caption]

The simple functional definition of religion that I use for this website is: a system of belief and action.

Actually, it is a little more complicated. Historically speaking, I think religion is: a system of belief and action of a particular group of people.

I've been thinking about definitions like that for a long time. Since 2008 I've managed to write about church history without writing about religion per se. But I'm crossing the line now. I'm doing so - not to bring anybody over to my very own "system of belief and action," but rather, because the discussion of my blogposts in a (closed) Facebook group is already starting to focus on this topic.

I've made an offer to Brent Michael Davids to write one or more guestposts. It seems that he and I are engaged in a friendly online disagreement. Anyway, Brent, I still hope that you'll take some time to write a blogpost for Stock-Mo-History.

It seems the two biggest things that Brent and I disagree on are over the questions of 1)"what is religion" and 2)"did Indians (ever) have religion?" Obviously the answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first. So I have to explain my definition of religion before I can fairly address the second question.

Admittedly, there is such a thing as "personal religion," one's own consciously chosen and unique system of belief and action. But I suspect that personal religion is about as recent a development as the personal pizza.

When Brent Michael Davids said that I "conflate" religion with culture he was right: I've tried, but haven't been able to separate religion from culture in my thinking about history.

Why do I think "personal religion" is a new development? For a number of reasons, including a relative lack of information technology until recent decades, social structures of power, and the fact that it is probably just a natural thing to "do religion" with other people. But probably my main point is that It is only because we modern Americans live in a society that values a certain kind of "individualism" that many of us are able to pull off the now-popular thing known as personal religion. We Americans value a false kind of "individualism." I say it is false because we don't usually realize that we are still as dependent on others as before, but we are just much farther removed from most of them than we ever have been before.

I know that there always have been people who were... uh... "smart enough to think for themselves." There always were people who weren't onboard with the official system of belief and action of their community. As Steve Comer pointed out in a recent Mohican News article, when indigenous people had a strong enough disagreement with the leadership of the village there was an easy solution: move to a different village. If one shaman wasn't doing it for you spiritually, you could hang with a different shaman. Then again, there probably weren't huge differences between different Mohican shamans. And again, that is my point: religion is a cultural entity.

Well, I have to admit that I have a broad definition of religion. I mean, if vision quests and special dreams are part of one's culture, that is religion to me. (Other people that probably just don't like the word "religion" might prefer to call that "spirituality.")

I suppose it is possible if somebody else has a more narrow definition of religion than I do that they might be able to successfully argue that Indians "didn't have religion" prior to white contact. But who would ever say that indigenous people didn't have a culturally-based system of belief and action? Of course they did. I think that was the norm for centuries for groups of people from all races.

 

 

Blogger's note: On Facebook, Steve Comer made the point that the Algonquians' shamans were called Powwows. I purposely used the term Shaman, because it is a more well-known word. If I was only writing for Indians (who already have knowledge of their people's pre-history, there would be no need to use the more easily understood term. July 1, 2014.

 

Some More Thoughts about the Pre-contact Religion of Algonquian-Speaking Peoples

[caption id="attachment_4010" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Pictured above is the calumet or ceremonial pipe used by the Sac and Fox chief, Black Hawk.[/caption]

Caroline Andler, the former tribal genealogist of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin, has created some pages on genealogy.com, related to the Brothertown people.

These pages include "The Spirituality of the New England Indians pre Samson Occom's Conversion to Chritianity," an article in which Andler quotes Rudi Ottery. Ottery, Andler tells us, wrote a Master's thesis on "the spirituality of early New England Indians and their conversion to Christianity." I'm going to try to get access to that thesis if possible, but the quotes that Andler provides in her article will do just fine for this blogpost.

Andler starts off by asserting that "Our ancient ancestors used the pipe and tobacco to pray to their gods."

Then she introduces Rudi Ottery and the following quote comes from Ottery:

...a belief in spiritual forces and a powerful religion ordered Indian lives...
...the Indians percieved all of life as a series of interactions with spiritual powers and they were conscious of these forces regulating their daily lives. All of nature was sacred, created by a spirit... There was no desire to subdue or dominate any living thing.

What are your thoughts?

Feel free to leave a comment below.



[mc4wp_form]

Was the pre-contact Religion of Algonquian-speaking Indians Similar to Christianity?

When I first started blogging in the fall of 2008 I published a post called "The Mohican Ten Commandments." While there appears to be only nine of them and they weren't actually called "commandments," Captain Hendrick Aupaumut's teachings bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Calvinist Christianity of his time. And I think that the first person to make that observation was Captain Hendrick himself. Captain Hendrick also said that the Mohicans were once more "civilized" and they had some kind of a holy book like the Christian Bible, but when hard times came they lost their ability to read it and buried it with a chief. (The source for that is somewhere in Electa Jones' Stockbridge Past and Present.)

Captain Hendrick's way of looking at things is that Christian missions were giving Indians a chance to get their old, "civilized" ways back - after they had been corrupted by the fur trade.

I buy into that viewpoint myself. I mean I agree with the sequence: 1) Indians were doing alright prior to white contact, 2) the fur trade sent eastern seaboard Indians into a horrible downward spiral in which they lost much of their population and much of their culture, and 3) many of the Indians who survived the disasters of the fur trade became receptive to Christian missions which offered them "something."

I don't claim that sequence applies to all Native Americans, but it is an accepted reality among those who study the eastern seaboard Indians.

Of course, Captain Hendrick took it farther. In a scholarly article that is not available on the free web, Rachel Wheeler went into a lot of detail about Captain Hendrick's work to revitalize his people through participation in Christian missions and "civilization" programs. (The title of that article, if you want to try to access it, is "Hendrick Auapumut: Christian Mahican Prophet.")

However, after reading Wheeler's article a few times, I don't think she buys into the idea that the religions of Algonquian-speaking peoples were a lot like Christianity. Instead, I think Wheeler's understanding of Captain Hendrick is that he masterfully employed rhetoric to motivate his people. He knew there would be more energy in accepting Christianity and "civilization" if he could present it in a "back to traditional ways" package. And that is what he did.

 

Of course it goes without saying that Indians who took on Christianity  and "civilization" didn't give up all of their "Indian-ness." Of course their understanding of their new religion was influenced by whatever was left of their Native culture. In that sense, there likely were some similarities.

To my way of thinking, Captain Hendrick Aupaumut was not a sellout. Far from it. Instead, he promoted Christian missions and the "arts of civilized life" because he thought they were the best thing for his people. Probably the most effective way to do that was to make it seem like Christianity was rather similar to traditional Mohican religion.


[mc4wp_form]

How the Housatonic Mohicans Opened the Door to the Stockbridge Mission

Two of my recent posts, spirituality and Reactions to the Hard Times Brought on by White Contact and Death of the Spirit: How did the Eastern Woodland Indians Lose their Traditional Religion? were written in general or abstract terms. But even as I was writing them, I was trying to locate a quote that describes the Mohicans on the Housatonic River in 1734 as having a variety of religious beliefs. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find that quote.

The title of one of my two recent posts borrowed the phrase "Death of the Spirit" from a chapter title in Patrick Frazier's The Mohicans of Stockbridge. The phrase is simply a poetic way of saying that the Mohican religion was no longer intact after 125 years of white contact.

Maybe this should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: the disasters of the fur trade didn't damage the Mohicans' need for spirituality. (Otherwise why would they have ever accepted a new religion?) Instead, the fur trade irreparably damaged the Mohicans' orally transmitted system of rituals and beliefs.

Konkapot and Umpachenee, the chiefs of the two Housatonic villages, were approached by the British with the offer of a Christian mission. The proposal was discussed and debated in council in July of 1734.

It was not a decision that the residents of the two villages took lightly. The council lasted four days! And the winning argument - coming down on the side in favor of Christianity - was made by Poohpoonuc. When translated into English (by Nathaniel Appleton, see bibliography below), Poohpoonuc's argument sounded like this:

Since my remembrance, there were ten Indians where now there is one. But the Christians greatly increase and multiply and spread across the land. Let us therefore leave our former courses and become Christians.

Does that sound like a religious statement to you? Maybe not, but it is a religious statement in the context of the things Gregory Evans Dowd wrote about on page 19 of A Spirited Resistance. Dowd said that Indians were trying to understand the disasters they endured in the context of sacred power. And some Indians decided that there was more sacred power in Christianity. This explains why the Housatonic Mohicans accepted a Christian mission. But it also explains more. A lot more.

By 1737 the Mohicans had a missionary that was preaching in their own language and, according to Patrick Frazier (page 37), Indians came "from near and far" to listen to the sermons and "witness the new Indian life." Some of those visiting Indians permanently joined the tribe. For that reason, (and others) I continue to believe that Christianity was an essential element in the history of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

 

Printed Sources:

Appleton, Nathaniel. Gospel ministers Must be Fit for the Master's Use. (An ordination sermon, printed by S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1735.)

Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

 
[mc4wp_form]

Death of the Spirit: How did the Eastern Woodland Indians Lose their Traditional Religion?

[caption id="attachment_1367" align="aligncenter" width="403"] Oral historians, storytellers and other leaders (including African griots) in oral cultures transmited the knowledge that most of us now get from films, books, and websites. Photo credit[/caption]

Yesterday's post was about how Native Americans reacted to the disasters of colonialism - in terms of their spirituality and/or religion. It brought up a fair amount of discussion on Facebook and I'll get to that later in this post.


From time to time I like to remind readers that in the 1700's religion wasn't separate from everything else. I suppose there was some separation for Christians who had a Sabbath Day that was different from the other six "ordinary" days, but for Indians prior to white contact, religion - or "spirituality," if that is the term you prefer - was simply part of the fabric of their lives.

When game was still plentiful, Indians would say a prayer for the spirit of an animal after they killed it. So religion and the hunting economy were intertwined.

But - as we know - things changed. They changed for the worse. With the coming of the fur trade, Indians exchanged furs for the things they needed - and sometimes they exchanged the furs for firewater instead of for what they needed. Either way, the demand for furs that came from whites resulted in forests with less game. Hunting became more difficult and the practice of praying for the spirit of an animal after you killed it became extinct. Economics started to become separate from religion/spirituality.

That is one partial explanation for the erosion of traditional Native religion. But what follows is another, more comprehensive explanation.

After reading my post yesterday, a Native Facebook friend of mine made another point. (By the way, what he wrote on Facebook is also an agreed-upon reality amongst scholarly historians.) Anyway, my friend Shawn Stevens pointed out that diseases that came from Europe, like smallpox and measles, killed so many Indians from the Algonquian language family, and killed them off so fast, that it - indirectly - pretty much destroyed traditional Native religion. Not having a paper trail, traditional beliefs and rituals only survived when they were passed along orally from one generation to the next. The epidemics made that impossible.
[mc4wp_form]

Sprituality and Reactions to the Hard Times Brought on by White Contact

[caption id="attachment_1324" align="aligncenter" width="231"] The front cover of Gregory Evans Dowd's book.[/caption]

The first decades of white contact were very difficult for Native Americans for a number of reasons. But the disasters of colonialism are not the subject of this post, only the introduction. What I really want to address now  is that there were a variety of ways that Native Americans "reacted" to their most difficult and changing times.

In A Spirited Resistance, Gregory Evans Dowd (page 19) says that the troubles that resulted from white contact "brought about... a debate over the efficacy of sacred power."

Dowd's discussion of Indians' reactions to the hard times of colonialism gets more complicated from there. Nevertheless, I'm going to quote him at length.  As you read his quote, try to put yourself in the mocassins of a Native person trying to explain the disasters that followed white contact. How might you interpret the sufferings of your people?

For some, it was apparent that the Anglo-Americans were simply more powerful and that the Indians' sacred powers had failed them. These Indians sought survival and even gain in cooperation, at least of a limited kind, with the Anglo-American or European powers. Others, in a more moderate stance, sought to decipher the secrets of Ango-American strength, and made efforts to incorporate those secrets into their own way of living. Then there were those who understood that they had failed in their committments to the sacred powers, particularly the Great Spirit, the remote Creator who became increasingly important, probably under the influence of Christiainity (19).

Then Dowd tells us that it was that last belief, the mindset of some Indians that they themselves had somehow "failed in their committments to the sacred powers," that was the "central premise of the militant, pan-religious movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries"(19)

As I think back over some of the various visions of Native prophets that launched their movements, and as I also review in my mind the reasons other Indians gave for becoming Christians, I have to agree wholeheartedly with Dowd. What do you think?

[mc4wp_form]

Disambiguation of Lenape/Delaware/Mahican/River Indians

On page twelve of The Munsee Indians, A History, Robert Grumet states

The idea that cultures are...organizations of [internal] diversity is important... People identified as Munsees in one context and Mahicans [his spelling] in another did not suddenly become members of different cultures. Neither did references to people by different names necessarily suggest confusion or disorganization. Names used like this can reflect what may be called situational identity. Different names identifying the same people in different situations serve as markers of social flexibility that can allow a person to function as a Munsee in one context and a Mahican in another.

There was always cultural change, but that change accelerated after white contact. Grumet says that the fact that the Munsees were "enduring people" means that all the specifics of their lives changed. And with that change, it sometimes becomes harder to keep track of who is who. While Gromet says all the different names doesn't necessarily suggest confusion, I think that there is a lot of confusion about different names - I know for a fact that they aren't used with consistency.

The Arvid E. Miller Museum had a sign (maybe they still do) that listed many names and claimed they were all different names for the same tribe. I'd qualify that by saying that they were all legitimate names for the people now known - according to their most recent constitution - as "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community." That is not quite the same as saying all the names on the sign referred to exactly the same people in exactly the same context.

One of the names on the sign was "River Indians." According to Patrick Frazier, the River Indians included "the Mohicans and the Indians at Schaghticoke"(see page 6 of The Mohicans of Stockbridge).

Let's try another one. This is according to Grumet: "Today, many writers regard Lenape as the most appropriate term to use when talking about Delaware-speaking people." But he adds that "Lenape" is too broad of a term to be used in everyday language by the people themselves.

Wikipedia has pages where they "disambiguate" names that refer to more than one thing. Although I've made some attempt to disambugate the eastern Algonquian Indians here in this post, at some point, this disambugation becomes a fool's errand. We have to accept that the rapid change over the first 100 or 200 years of white contact resulted in complexity which, in turn, resulted in some confusion over names.

[mc4wp_form]

Little Turtle, William Wells and "Mad" Anthony Wayne

William Wells

 

The Miami chief Little Turtle was introduced in an earlier post. I wrote about him as a statesmanlike figure who advocated peace and befriended white leaders like President George Washington. Prior to that, Little Turtle was a war chief who made a name for himself as a brilliant military tactician. He was the biggest hero of La Balme's Massacre in 1780.

Not only did Little Turtle and his warriors beat the French under La Balme, but they beat the Americans too. If we can simplify the outcome of battles down to personalities, Little Turtle deserves credit for defeating General Harmar in 1790 and General Arthur St. Clair in 1791.

William Wells was what might be called a "white" Indian. Born in present-day Kentucky shortly before the Revolutionary War, Wells was orphaned and lived with his extended family as they headed west. One day William and a few other boys were out in the woods hunting and managed to get a bear. Precisely at that time they were captured by Indians, probably Delawares. Sometimes captured whites were killed, but, especially if they were young, many of them had the opportunity to become part of a Native community. William Wells was adopted by a Miami chief whose name in English translates to Porcupine. He took on Native ways and generally forgot his upbringing.

At some point Little Turtle was impressed by William Wells' toughness and skills and they became close allies, to say the least. William Wells even married Little Turtle's daughter, whose name translates to "Sweet Breeze." [Unfortunately, I have read somewhere that historians know "nothing about her, aside from her lovely name."] Anyway, in The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash, the author, Henry Lewis Carter, often refers to something he calls the legend of the family pact.

Some background is needed to understand the so-called family pact. What was happening is that - after Little Turtle and William Wells defeated Harmar and St. Clair together -  Wells decided to try to make a go of it in the white man's world. Sweet Breeze might already have died by that time, but could Wells just put aside his relationship to Little Turtle?

The legend of the family pact (as recorded in a pamphlet prepared by the staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, Indiana in August of 1952) has Wells saying to Little Turtle:

We have long been friends; we are friends yet, until the sun stands so high (indicating the place) in the heavens; from that time we are enemies and may kill one another.

Maybe those exact words weren't spoken, but it stands to reason that Wells said something to the Turtle before he left. They may well have had some kind of a "no kill" agreement. Wells' next stop was to enlist under General "Mad" Anthony Wayne.
 


General "Mad" Anthony Wayne

Back in Indian country, a number of tribes had gotten together to prepare for General Wayne and his forces. Little Turtle received a scouting report on Wayne's forces from a promising young Shawnee warrior, Tecumseh.

I need to emphasize that much of the lives of people like Little Turtle and William Wells - especially what they said in the Miami language - may be more the stuff of legend or oral history than it is known fact. Nevertheless, the "legend" that we do have is consistent with everything else that we know.

According to the oral history that was later recorded in the Fort Wayne Public Library's pamphlet, Little Turtle made the following statement in council:

We have beaten them [the white Americans] twice under separate commanders. We cannot expect the same good fortune always to attend us. The Americans are now led by a Chief who never sleeps; night and day are alike to him. Notwithstanding the watchfulness of our young men, we have never been able to surprise him. Think well of this; there is something that whispers to me, it would be prudent to listen to his [General Wayne's] offers of peace.

Little Turtle was accused of "cowardice, treachery, and self-interest," by some of the other chiefs. Some of them thought that William Wells had something to do with Little Turtle's viewpoint.

History proved Little Turtle correct. The Battle of Fallen Timbers was a decisive victory for General Wayne and his forces. It led to the Treaty of Fort Greenville, which put most of present-day Ohio, and a lot of present-day Indiana, into white hands.

After Little Turtle signed the Greenville treaty, he kept his vow of peace with the United States. and was re-united with his old friend and son-in-law, William Wells.

 

"Mohicans" is the title of a new video with music by Leo Rojas

No description was available on YouTube.