More than a Façade: The Kenekuk Religion Revisited

Nearly 160 years have passed since the death of Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet. He led a band of Great Lakes Indians in Illinois and Kansas from the 1820s until smallpox claimed his life in 1852. He is most noted for his pacifist resistance to relocation and encroaching Americans. Historians have examined Kenekuk in a handful of articles, chapters, and one autobiography, and almost uniformly depicted him as a pragmatist. The Prophet's sole biographer defined Kenekuk's religion first and foremost as a tool to resist dispossession and defined his legacy as "helping his followers to adjust to white society and retain their lands, without resorting to warfare or losing their identity as Indians."¹ The Prophet constructed a new religion and culture designed to mimic elements of Christianity and Western "civilization" as part of a conscious strategy to peacefully resist dispossession. This portrayal of the religion as an "outwardly" adaptation often suggests an empty façade and discounts the deeper impact of the experience.² Other authors have echoed this interpretation.³ This approach limits the validity of the Kickapoos' newfound spirituality by defining it by its relation to encroaching whites and not for its own merits and meaning to adherents. The question remains, "What did the Kenekuk religion mean to the Kickapoos?"

Determining meaning can be difficult, particularly in a community with few records and no modern adherents. The Kenekuk religion quickly declined after Kenekuk's death, and the surviving documentation is limited and highly filtered through the interpretations of white observers. Most firsthand witnesses in the nineteenth century attended to the Kickapoos as Methodist, Presbyterian, or Catholic missionaries. Sarah Carter's work on unrelated Methodist tracts reveals how such missionaries commonly misinterpreted Native lifeways as either

Fig. 1.

Artist George Catlin visited the Kickapoos at Fort Leavenworth in 1830, where the prophet likely sat for this portrait. Catlin described him as "a very shrewd and talented man." Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr.

"irreligious," "misguided," or even "devilish" to reaffirm Euro-American cultural and religious superiority. Others fixated on perceived doctrinal parallels to Christianity—sin, atonement, immortality of the soul—as indicators of some liminal status en route to an eventual conversion that also reaffirmed development theory.⁴ The same is true of missionaries who visited Kenekuk: some perceived him as a rival whom they criticized as savage; others believed his message served as a valuable precursor to the Kickapoos' eventual conversion to a more correct Christian church. Their records are central to any interpretation of the Kenekuk religion but are clearly limited and must be moderated by historic and ethnographic context. Speculation by outsiders—then and now—easily lends itself to accusations of white shamanism; nevertheless, difficult historical questions linger about the meaning of Kenekuk's religion.⁵

Far from claiming exclusive interpretive privilege, this article explores one possible meaning of the Kenekuk religion by exploring its cultural and societal impact on adherents. Decades ago Clifford Geertz called for an emphasis on "cultural dimensions of religious analysis" that both examined "the system of meanings" as well as how they related to "social-structural and psychosocial processes."⁶ Geertz pointed to the interplay between theology and lived religion, as manifest through the shifting interpretations of symbols, ethos, and worldview. His rally cry led to a shift beyond the dogmatic and into the experience of religion. Lawrence Sullivan answered that charge in Native Religions as he sought to reframe the study of indigenous American spirituality to include both traditional exploration dogma as well as an emphasis on "the religious responses they inspire in individuals and communities."⁷ This autochthonous approach avoids the longstanding mistake of obviating the essence of Native American spirituality with the longstanding Western fixation on theology. Anthropologist Jordan Piper explained, "Because Christianity has traditionally placed a primary value on belief, belief has become central to the Western understanding of religion. . . . However, in most of the world's religions, behavior is accorded more concern than belief."⁸ Barre Toelken likewise...