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1 introduction Native Pentecostals, the Indigenous Principle, and Religious Practice Later while preaching that meeting I received from God what I had been waiting to hear. He came to me, confirming His call upon my life, in a vivid visitation of His presence. “Now is the time for you to take the Gospel to the American Indians,” He said. “You know now where they are. Go home and prepare yourself. Tell your husband and your church, and I will make the way plain for you.” With this commission from the Lord, an intense love for American Indians flooded my soul. Now that I had a confirmation of my call from God, I knew I must take the next step—a step of faith. —alta washburn, white evangelist to American Indians and founder of the American Indian College, circa 19351 I stood among the circular mounds and scattered cedar logs, a small Indian boy in crude Navajo garb, and looked across the small canyon. I shouted into the vast emptiness and heard the echo shouting back. Wonderingly I cried, “Who is talking to me; who dares mock Yel Ha Yah?” So I began my long search for knowledge—not for knowledge alone, but for an understanding of life itself. —charlie lee, Navajo evangelist/pastor and founder of the first indigenous church in the Assemblies of God, circa 19302 God called Sister Alta Washburn and Brother Charlie Lee. One was a dark-haired, petite midwestern woman with only a ninth-grade education; the other, a famous young Navajo artist. They came from vastly different places, but during the middle decades of the twentieth century, their lives and work intersected. They were unlikely partners in a movement that shaped the largest American Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God (AG). As agents of change, their calls to become missionaries to American Indians profoundly altered their lives as well as the lives of others. 2 introduction In 1918, the first missionaries from the AG set out to work among American Indians. Those missionaries, laboring among Northern California Indians in the Shasta Lakes region, pioneered the beginnings of the AG’s home missions.3 The AG’s emphasis on world missions initially overshadowed this project, and it took many years before home missions gained momentum among Pentecostal believers. Yet for the AG, realizing the goal of indigenous churches proved to be a long and painful struggle—especially in home missions. Working-class white Americans dominated the ranks of early Pentecostal missionaries, usually hailing from the Midwest or the South. Minimally educated, few white missionaries boasted Bible school degrees or any other form of higher education. These early missionaries went to reservations with little understanding of Indian culture or life, and many carried the baggage of white paternalism. Some were loath to give converts any form of power within the individual missions. Allowing Indian missionaries and clergy control over their own churches and acknowledging that God could work within Indian culture proved easier in theory than in practice. Yet this slowly changed. By the 1950s, missionary work among American Indians gained momentum, and by the 1960s a distinct American Indian leadership had emerged. That Indian leadership pushed for the establishment of an all-Indian Bible College and for voting rights on the governing councils of the AG. By 2007, it had achieved both goals, and the AG had established 190 churches or missions among them. American Indians currently make up 1.5 percent of the overall AG population.4 This number is in line with the overall percentage of Native peoples in the United States, which the U.S. Census reports to be 1.5 percent.5 Indian Pentecostals’ struggle for indigenous leadership so defined them that it became, in a sense, the practice that helped them realize what it meant to be Native and Pentecostal. They rooted their method in a distinctly realized Pentecostal theology—the indigenous principle—which allowed them to push for more Native autonomy within the AG. Although Pentecostalism changed American Indian converts, they also changed the AG. These were not people who passively converted, embraced Pentecostalism , and followed the lead of the AG. Instead, they actively engaged the AG and demanded their own autonomous space within the denomination. Indian Pentecostals were crucial actors within the AG. When the AG dragged its feet in the building of a Bible college to train its Indian pastors, a sympathetic white missionary named Alta Washburn built one with the support of both Indian leadership and...

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