The Plateau Prophet Dance among the Coast Salish

Abstract

THE SUBJECT of messianic movements, revival cults, and related phenomena has continued to hold the interest of students of culture change. The occurrence of these movements among American Indians has been best documented for the Basin and Plains areas, but they are also known from the Southwest, the Mackenzie, and the Plateau. In fact, Spier has presented good arguments for deriving the Basin, Plains, and Mackenzie movements from an underlying stratum of religious activity in the Plateau, which he has called the Dance.2 He has also presented evidence that a form of the Plateau Prophet Dance reached the Northwest Coast by two routes, down the Skeena River to the Tsimshian and Haida, and down the Fraser River to the Coast Salish. Since the appearance of Spier's paper twenty years ago, so far as I know, no further work has been done specifically on the occurrence of the Prophet Dance on the Coast. But several publications have contained material on it not fully recognized as such. And in addition, in the course of my own field work with the Coast Salish I have obtained several accounts of Prophet Dance phenomena.3 In view of the continued interest in such phenomena and their theoretical implications, it may be worthwhile to assemble this new material and look again at the westward extension of the Prophet Dance. In this paper I shall first summarize Spier's analysis of the history of the Prophet Dance in the Plateau, then present the data I have collected on its occurrence among the Coast Salish, and finally try to reconstruct the history of several of the elements of the complex. The Coast Salish data should demonstrate that a form of the Prophet Dance was carried westward from the Plateau to the Coast, where it spread to all or nearly all the tribes of Puget Sound and Georgia Strait. The nature of the movement, moreover, suggests that the distinction between the native belief system