Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America, and: Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (review)

American history began with and resulted from repeated European invasions of North America. Those events brought indigenous people centuries of new diseases, economic disruption, physical dislocation, violence, and warfare. Over the generations, Indians developed a variety of initiatives for dealing with their new circumstances. Alfred Cave and Ned Blackhawk explore some of the different approaches tribal people used to help themselves to understand and shape their changing worlds. Although a quick glance at the titles might suggest otherwise, the fundamental issues these studies analyze bear remarkable similarities.

Cave examines the emergence of nativist Indian shamans, beginning with the little known Delaware prophets who appeared during the mid-eighteenth century. Then he follows the careers of Neolin, Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh, the Creek Red Stick leaders, Handsome Lake, and Kenekuk from 1750 through the 1830s as they led Indian cultural–religious movements among tribes east of the Mississippi River. His analysis depicts the cultural and religious movements they led as part of a long series of revitalization efforts to protect tribal identities and ways of life in the face of continuing and repeated cultural, economic, and military threats posed by the developing Anglo–American society growing up around them. In every case, these shamans developed their teachings to give their followers cultural defenses so they might survive the perpetual violence they faced.

This study examines many of the same issues presented in Gregory Evans Dowd’s A Spirited Resistance (Baltimore, MD, 1991), but focuses more particularly on each prophetic movement’s religious thought and how that thought influenced tribal actions. According to Cave, the prophets blended their objective goal, to preserve a way of life in danger of being destroyed, with the means of achieving it, speaking for the spiritual power(s) of the universe. He contends that the movements’ strong appeals resulted from a willingness to use borrowed Christian concepts such as a supreme creator, heaven, and hell within the framework of familiar Indian religious beliefs.

In addition, the narrative presents each prophetic movement as distinct, with particular local issues being central to its development, and with a variety of approaches to the ever expanding Anglo–American society. Prophets such as Neolin and Tenskwatawa preached distinctly anti-white messages that Indian diplomats and war leaders used to justify military actions. Others, such as Handsome Lake and Kenekuk, urged peaceful dealings with the pioneers. The Red Stick prophets in Alabama used anger at tribal members who adopted white cultural and economic practices in 1813 to launch a vicious civil war on members of their own society. All of the prophets shared the same dilemma. Whether dealing with trade, alcohol, language, economic practices, or missionary intrusions, they sought to retain a way of life crumbling from multiple attacks that could not be ignored.

Cave displays a thorough knowledge of current ethnohistorical approaches and literature. His research ranges widely and acknowledges and builds on ideas and approaches from other scholars. Because in some cases he is going over well-plowed ground, it might appear that his analysis offers little that is new, but this is not so. He demonstrates the variety of prophetic approaches and tactics clearly, and, whenever possible, he succeeds in keeping the tribal societies and ideas directly at the center of the narrative.

Approaching armed violence more directly, Ned Blackhawk’s study analyzes tribal colonial relationships with Spain, Mexico, and the United States during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in an area encompassing New Mexico, Colorado, the northern Rockies, and the Basin and Range region between those mountains and the Sierra Nevada. Throughout the narrative, he focuses primarily on relations between the invaders and the Ute, Comanche...