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79 chapter 3 The Lived Indigenous Principle New Understandings of Pentecostal Healing, Native Culture, and Pentecostal Indian Identity Late one evening in 1943, John McPherson, a young Cherokee solider, went out drinking with his wife. As he stumbled from one bar to the next, he spied a Pentecostal preacher on the street corner exhorting sinners to come to Christ. Although McPherson grew up in a Salvation Army home and his wife was the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher, neither one had been saved. McPherson recounted, “[W]e heard the melodic refrain of a song, and recognizing it to be religious in nature, stopped to listen for a moment. This time, I heard more then [sic] just a melody, I listened to the words of the preacher.”1 Despite his wife’s dismay, McPherson knelt down on the street and prayed the sinner’s prayer. At that moment, a realization washed over him. “All my life I had labored under the stigma of being born an Indian. I had always been made to feel I wasn’t quite as good as people with white skin. I was amazed after laboring under that stigma all my life to find the One who so loved me that He died upon the cross for me. He wasn’t ashamed of me or my copper skin. He wasn’t ashamed of my humble beginnings or ancestry.”2 From that moment on, John McPherson became Brother McPherson and, after the end of World War II, embarked on a long career as a traveling evangelist and AG missionary. As it did for many of his other Pentecostal Indian brothers and sisters, conversion and the baptism of the Holy Spirit changed Brother McPherson’s life. He had grown up as an Indian in the white man’s world because his mother had sold her allotment; they did not live on the reservation. Born and reared in Drumright, Oklahoma, during the Depression, Brother McPherson experienced not only racial prejudice 80 the lived indigenous principle but also grinding poverty. In his autobiography, he jokingly described his house as being so rickety that “if the termites had stopped holding hands it probably would have fallen on top of us.”3 He went on to note, “our furniture , instead of ‘Early American,’ I think was ‘Early Orange Crate.’”4 Despite poverty, he grew up in a happy home, well loved by his parents. Their love, however, could not shield him from the realities of American life. He recalled that he “was reminded daily that I was an Indian growing up in a white man’s world. When I started to school, I can remember coming home in tears, crying because of the cruelty of the other children as they mocked and called me names because of my dark skin.”5 Hatred inflicted deep wounds. But once Brother McPherson became a Pentecostal and an AG missionary, he found theological and spiritual ways to address his pain—and the pain of his Indian brothers and sisters. In June 1955, Brother and Sister Rehwinkel, home missionaries to the Menominee in Wisconsin, published an article in the PE. While the article served mainly as a report on their mission in order to raise more funds, it also contained language that indicated the ethnocentrism that prevailed among white missionaries of the era. In talking about a group of traditional Indians, the Rehwinkels described their “pagan” customs. “At their ceremonies they beat drums and dance all night. Hours are spent in feasting and sitting in a circle while they pass out a drug called ‘peyote .’ Strange to say this ritual is called ‘prayer.’ These Indians, in bondage to dope, drink, and tobacco, desperately need the message of Christ, the Deliverer.”6 By today’s standards, this language is troubling, but we need to consider the context. The article revealed the Pentecostal worldview: traditional Indian religion, along with newer traditions such as peyote, were of the Devil, and American Indians needed Christ to keep them from such sin. The Pentecostal audience that the Rehwinkels addressed expected this sort of insider language because they viewed themselves as spiritual warriors for Christ. In Pentecostals’ minds, there was only one way to God—their way. Brother McPherson’s conversion narrative reveals a deep undercurrent of cultural pain—he had been stung by racism and ethnocentrism his whole life and had suffered because of it. Part of this has been caused by how outsiders perceived Native peoples and Native religion—a...

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