Many Nations, Under God

In the 18th century, Native Americans living in Appalachia prayed to a wide assortment of spirits. They were called Manitou.

ADAM JORTNER: And there are spirits for all kinds of forces and beings. There’s a spirit of thunder, there is a spirit of the bear, all the way down to a spirit of the strawberry.

PETER: This is Adam Jortner, a historian at Auburn University. Jortner describes this native religious tradition as a spiritual marketplace.

ADAM JORTNER: They’re always bartering with different spirits and trying to get different goods and booms from them, and individual Native Americans or Native American groups might venerate different Manitous.

PETER: Those beliefs baffled Christian colonists who got their spirituality from a very different kind of marketplace.

ADAM JORTNER: Monotheism is like a Walmart, you go to one God to get everything.

PETER: Now Natives also believed in a supreme god, a so-called Master of Life. But unlike the Christian God, the Master of Life created the universe and then left it alone.

ADAM JORTNER: But there’s a problem, and that is—of course—that the disease is ripping through Native American communities, and as we get into the 18th century, there’s pressure from white communities that are expanding westward and they’re taking Native American land. You’re still praying to Manitou, you’re still making sacrifices as you normally would, but you aren’t getting the benefits. This is a spiritual crisis as well as a political crisis, your religion isn’t working anymore.

PETER: While Natives desperately searched for help, a divine solution presented itself to a Delaware Indian named Neolin.

ADAM JORTNER: Neolin, we know almost nothing about where he came from and we know almost nothing about what happened to him. But from 1761 to 1766, he transforms Indian life west of the Appalachians.

One night while he was cooking dinner, he saw three paths just appear before him, and he got the feeling that he needed to walk down these paths. And two of those paths led to fire, and one of those paths—the most difficult path—he walks along and he encounters a sheer mountain wall. And he is informed that he needs to climb this wall using only his left hand and his left foot.

And he climbs up, and at the top of this mountain there is a celestial city, and that is where he meets the Master of Life. And the Master of Life informs him about the changes that need to happen. They need to institute worship of the Master of Life, they need to give up alcohol.

They need to reject national designations. There shouldn’t be anymore Ottawas or Ojibwes or Iroquois. These designations need to go away and everyone needs to be one group of Native Americans, the favored people of God. And if they do this, they can expel the British from their lands.

PETER: So Adam, this trip that he takes—from that journey, he returns with the news. And of course, that news is both spiritual but it’s also profoundly political, isn’t it?

ADAM JORTNER: I think so, it’s both. Once his message gets out there, once people start hearing about it—Native American groups start hearing about it—the British become very wary of all this preaching. And probably Neolin’s greatest convert is Pontiac, who is a Ottawa chieftain who accepts this idea and says, yes. And of course it’s Pontiac—with this preaching behind him—who begins to organize the tribes west of the Appalachians into a fighting force that expels the British from most of their forts, from most of their military positions.

PETER: OK, tell us a little bit about the lay of the land, Adam, that sets the stage for what’s now known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. He has specific targets, he wants to get rid of the British. What’s the big picture here?

ADAM JORTNER: I mean, the big picture is that once Britain defeats France in the French and Indian War, there’s a huge chunk of territory in what is today Ohio, Pennsylvania, the Midwest that Britain takes control of but has never conquered militarily. They just occupy the French forts that are already there. Pontiac’s goal is to attack every single fort to expel the British, and in that way force them out of the country.

And they do just that, and I think there’s all but three forts that are conquered. And actually at Michilimackinac, they conquer the fort by—they’re having a lacrosse game outside, someone throws the ball into the fort, and then they run in to chase after the ball and then once they’re in, take over. And they’re successful enough that the British actually cave and they say, this is not worth the blood and treasure it would take to conquer this land.

The British set up a Proclamation line in 1763, they actually forbid white settlement west of the Appalachians. So the British government is absolutely willing to say, you guys have won. Neolin’s religion has won this war.

PETER: So talk a little bit, Adam, if you would, about the aftermath. Neolin’s message remains powerful in Indian country, and you might say it’s partly responsible for the tremendous resistance that’s put up to westward expansion over the next half century.

ADAM JORTNER: Yeah, I think that’s right. Pontiac’s Rebellion is eventually rolled back. By 1768, there are already breaks in the Proclamation line and white settlers are coming across, but guns can’t stop an idea. Yeah, you can stop a military rebellion, but those religious ideas are deep-seated and they move around and that is not something that an army is well-equipped to take care of.

Neolin’s ideas are going to take other forms in the next 50 years. There’ll be other prophets among other Native American groups who preach similar messages, who also take journeys along forked paths, who also meet the Master of Life, who also preach about abstaining from alcohol, rejecting white culture. And these are people like the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, who emerges in Indiana in the 1800s, or Handsome Lake, the Seneca prophet who emerges in upstate New York in 1799. And Kennekuk, the Kickapoo prophet who emerges in 1819.

These prophets all preach resistance to white encroachments, and they preach a religious message of divesting themselves of white culture and going back to the worship of the one god of Indians, the Master of Life. But like every new religion, it is not universally accepted. There are Native American people and Native American groups that reject this message, that say no, our traditional religions are correct. And in fact, it’s these Nativists—it’s these new ideas from Neolin and Tenskwatawa and Handsome Lake—these are wrong, these are causing our problems.

So it also creates conflict within the Native American communities, as well, which explains in part why these—ultimately, you never get a situation where all Native Americans band together to fight white encroachment.

PETER: But one of things we’re trying to do on this show is talk about what it is about the American setting—about the world that Indians and Europeans both inhabit—that might be distinctive. Does Neolin’s teaching—and do the Nativist religions that follow in his wake—do they seem somehow to you distinctively American? Would you argue that there’s something that they have in common with their counterparts across the cultural frontier?

ADAM JORTNER: One of the things that makes Neolin’s religion so distinctively American is movement. One thing that’s true about the frontier and about Americans generally is they’re always moving around, and that happens among Native American communities first. That the Delawares have been ejected from their lands on the east coast and they’ve traveled, and now they live in Ohio, and there’s been all kinds of movements in Indian country in the Seven Years War. These are the communities that Neolin preaches to.

And that’s very true, I think, of American religions generally, that new American religions tend to grow out up on the frontier. Many new religious come out of Los Angeles, which is a city of people who have moved to a new place. I think Neolin’s religion is—in many ways—the first religion to really take advantage of the fact that people are all moving around and they’re ready to hear a new message.

PETER: Adam Jortner is a historian at Auburn University and author of The Gods of Prophetstown. Earlier, we heard from Estrelda Alexander. She’s the President of William Seymour College in Bowie, Maryland, and the author of Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism.