Shaker Church Research Articles

Suburban Coast Salish Inter-Household Co-operation, Economics and Religious Movements

The Coast Salish Indians studied here have lived with pervasive financial insecurity. Most Indians have coped partly through preaching and practice of a collective ethic of sharing. Some with relatively high earned income have moved in the direction of a more narrow, competitive individualism. Those with social assistance incomes maintain a broad sphere of assistance with kin and community. Families who are strongly committed to Spirit Dancing and the Shaker Church keep alight the most broadly defined generosity towards kin and Indians in need.

Shaking Up Christianity: The Indian Shaker Church in the Canada-U.S. Pacific Northwest

Previous articleNext article No AccessShaking Up Christianity: The Indian Shaker Church in the Canada-U.S. Pacific Northwest*Susan NeylanSusan NeylanWilfrid Laurier University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 91, Number 2April 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/658108 Views: 103Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Hayley McCarron, Emily R. Griese, Elizabeth Dippel, Tracey R. McMahon Cultural and Social Predictors of Substance Abuse Recovery among American Indian and Non-American Indian Pregnant and Parenting Women, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 50, no.44 (Jun 2018): 322–330.https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2018.1481546Anna Schmidt “Fragmentary Holiness”: Spirituality and Environmental Justice in the Poetry of Elizabeth Woody and Melissa Kwasny, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14 (Jul 2018).https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isy044Emily Haozous, Ardith Doorenbos, Lori Alvord, David Flum, Arden Morris Cancer Journey for American Indians and Alaska Natives in the Pacific Northwest , Oncology Nursing Forum 43, no.55 (Sep 2016): 625–635.https://doi.org/10.1188/16.ONF.625-635

Assimilation's Agent: My Life as a Superintendent in the Indian Boarding School System

Assimilation's Agent reveals the life and opinions of Edwin L. Chalcraft (1855-1943), a superintendent in the federal Indian boarding schools during the critical period of forced assimilation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chalcraft was hired by the Office of Indian Affairs (now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs) in 1883. During his nearly four decades of service, he worked at a number of Indian boarding schools and agencies, including the Chehalis Indian School in Oakville, Washington; Puyallup Indian School in Tacoma, Washington; Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon; Wind River Indian School in Wind River, Wyoming; Jones Male Academy in Hartshorne, Oklahoma; and, Siletz Indian Agency in Oregon. In this memoir, Chalcraft discusses the Grant peace policy, the inspection system, allotment, the treatment of tuberculosis, corporal punishment, alcoholism, and patronage.Extensive coverage is also given to the Indian Shaker Church and the government's response to this perceived threat to assimilation. Assimilation's Agent illuminates the sometimes treacherous political manoeuvrings and difficult decisions faced by government officials at Indian boarding schools. It offers a rarely heard and today controversial 'top-down' view of government policies to educate and assimilate Indians. Drawing on a large collection of unpublished letters and documents, Cary C. Collins' introduction and notes furnish important historical background and context. Assimilation's Agent illustrates the government's long-term program for dealing with Native peoples and the shortcomings of its approach during one of the most consequential eras in the long and often troubled history of American Indian and white relations. Cary C. Collins has a PhD in history from Washington State University and is a public school teacher in Ravensdale, Washington.

Celibacy, Culture, and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence

This work is a cross-cultural inquiry into the practice of celibacy around the world and through the ages, among groups as diverse as: Kenyan villagers; US prisoners; Mazatec shamans; Buddhist nuns and monks; Shaker Church members; and anorexic women. The examples of celibacy described illustrate the complex relationship between human sexuality and its particular sociocultural context. Ideas about the body, gender, family, work, religion, health, and other dimensions of life come sharply into focus as the contributors examine many practices and institutions surrounding sexual abstinence. They show that, though celibacy is certainly sometimes a punishment or a deliberate ritual abstinence, it also serves many other social and material functions and in some cases contributes to kin-group survival and well-being.

Review: John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church, by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown

Book Review| May 01 1998 Review: John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church, by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown John Slocum and the Indian Shaker ChurchRobert H. RubyJohn A. Brown Mark T. Banker Mark T. Banker Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1998) 67 (2): 274–275. https://doi.org/10.2307/3641570 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark T. Banker; Review: John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church, by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 1998; 67 (2): 274–275. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3641570 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1998 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church

This detailed, well-documented history describes the life of the Squaxin spiritual leader John Slocum and the growth in the Pacific Northwest of his Indian Shaker Church (not to be confused with eastern Shakerism). Students of Native American religion and Christianity will find this a moving story both of assimilation and of the curing that is the Shaker Church's reason for being. The Indian Shaker movement began in 1882 when the charismatic but dissolute Slocum had a vision after a near-death experience. Later his church was led by his wife, Mary Thompson, and early-day leaders such as Mud Bay Louis and Mud Bay Sam. Today church members continue to combine Native American styles of singing, body movement, and verbal declarations with bell ringing, songs, burning candles, and shaking in a unique curing tradition that is honored outside the church particularly for its success in teaching against the use of alcohol. Intense community support, for both leader and patient, is a focal point in the lives of Shaker Church members. Their tradition has endured despite the important differences in members' tribal backgrounds and religious viewpoints chronicled in this up-to-date account by veteran scholars Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, the first outsiders to have access to church records.

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church.

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church.

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church

The Shaker Church and the Indian Way in Native Northwestern California

The Indian Shaker Church originated on Puget Sound in 1882 and was brought into Native northwestern California in 1926. Outsider scholars have often reduced it to the status of a minor crisis cult or revitalization movement, as opposed to a real-that is, traditional-Indian religion. Reports that California Shakers rejected all indigenous ceremonialism as sinful and anti-Christian while asserting that the new religion was a purely Native way, best closed to non-Indians, appeared to support this view (Barnett 1957: 142-143). While converted elders quietly defended the Church as a continuation of ways (in Gould and Furukawa 1966: 59) they seemed, to some, to be deluding themselves in a struggle to maintain their Indian identities while becoming pseudo-Christians. But even outsiders do well to listen closely to what the elders say and to think long on it, as local people well know. The notion that the Shaker Church is a continuation of an authentic Indian spirituality-an evolution of it, as a Church member said to me in 1978-rings false only as long as we viewmodern NativeAmerican history in terms of polarities-Indian/Christian, traditionalist/Shaker, this faction/that faction, and the rest (as anthropologists once did habitually). Perhaps it helps to view Native/European as the typal opposition, of which all the others are tokens, and to remember that it was, first, racist Europeans who insisted on its validity? But this, too, is over simple: the Indian Shakers themselves have insisted on a rigid us/ them, inside/outside dichotomy (Gould and Furukawa 1966: 57-64), whether such oppositional dualism was traditional or the result of acculturation to European modes of thought (e.g., Buckley 1984). Something more complex may be going on here, revealed in part by the powerful reemergence of indigenous ceremonialism that has occurred in northwestern California as elsewhere in Indian Country during the past two decades. The contemporary emergence of forms of religious life that non-Indian anthropologists and Native people alike once viewed as utterly gone should alert us to the possibility that, yes, innovations like the Shaker Church have indeed been continuations of Native traditions, and that-perhaps more difficult to see-reemergent traditions are themselves continuations or evolutions of modern innovations like the Shaker Church. That is, theoretically, that such seemingly diametrically op-

John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church

Journal Article John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church and Winning the West for Christ: Sheldon Jackson and Presbyterianism on the Rocky Mountain Frontier, 1869–1880 Get access John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church. By Ruby Robert H. Brown John A.. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. xx + 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)Winning the West for Christ: Sheldon Jackson and Presbyterianism on the Rocky Mountain Frontier, 1869–1880. By Bender Norman J.. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. xiii + 265 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00). Christopher L. Miller Christopher L. Miller University of Texas-Pan American Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 3, Autumn 1997, Pages 428–430, https://doi.org/10.2307/971055 Published: 01 August 1997

The Indian Shaker Church and Alcoholics Anonymous: Revitalistic Curing Cults

Chronic misuse of alcohol is a major health problem among American Indians. Growing frustration with the limited success of conventional alcoholism treatment programs to either initiate or maintain sobriety among Indian clients has prompted the study of indigenous treatment responses to alcohol misuse. This paper describes how the Indian Shaker Church functions as a culture-based alcoholism intervention. The authors consider those socio-structural features the Indian Shaker Church and Alcoholics Anonymous hold in common, as well as those culture-specific features which appear to account for the Shakers' particular success in supporting sobriety among American Indians.

Tolowa Indian Shakers and the Role of Prophecy at Smith River, California

N THE 1880s, the Prophet Dances and the Indian Shaker Church enjoyed increasing influence in the Pacific Northwest, eventually spreading into California. These movements fulfilled the need for powerful helpers and human fathers; North American messiahs and prophets of crisis cults [were] all cast in the mold of the old Indian Shamanistic god-man and culture heroes.' The Shaker Church was organized as an association on June 7, 1892 at Mud Bay, Washington, and incorporated June 20, 1910 at Olympia.2 La Barre wrote: Every prophet is at once revivalist and modernist,... [and each] .. . movement finds its own culture-hero or prophet. His genius is communication, particularly in his ability to establish similar subjective states in others.3 John Slocum, a Nisqually Indian of Mud Bay, Washington, and his wife, Mary Johnson Slocum, received the basic inspirations of the Indian Shaker religion in 1882. Like the Native American Church, this syncretic religion incorporated elements of Christian theology with traditional Indian religions. On June 25, 1893 at Tacoma, Washington, James Wickersham, the Shakers' attorney, recorded John Slocum's deposition regarding the incidents and prophetic insights which lead to the founding of the new religion. Church records include the few reasonably authenticated direct statements of John Slocum in his capacity of founder-prophet of the new religion, quoted in Barnett (1972). Like many other Indian prophets, Slocum reportedly and was resurrected. After Slocum contracted a serious illness which made him weak and poor, and after five Indian doctors had tried unsuccessfully to revive him, his would die two or three hours at a time, and though Shakers disagree as to whether he died in the usual sense, they believe his soul was out of the body. Slocum may have believed that he in fact had died, because he said he a shining light-great light-trying my soul. I looked and saw my body had no soul-looked at my own body-it was dead. Then Slocum returned and spoke to an assemblage of his friends, saying when I die, do not cry. At that point he a second time: Angels told me to look back and see my body. I did, and I saw it lying down. According to the Shaker Prophet,his left [his] body and went up to judgement

The Waptashi Prophet and the Feather Religion: Derivative of the Washani

D URING THE 1860s, as Smohalla's teachings began to spread across the Pacific Northwest, a child was born in a small Indian village just north of the Columbia River. He was born into the Hunt family in the Klikitat village of Husum, Washington, located on the east bank of the White Salmon River. The son was called Jake, and he would rise to become a prominent holy man among the Indians of the region. Jake Hunt would emerge as the Prophet of a new religion, based on many of the precepts of the old Washani faith and the Indian Shaker Church. The new faith was known to the Indians as the Waptashi or Feather religion. Raised in the Washani faith and influenced by the Shaker Church, Jake Hunt would borrow from the teachings of such Washani leaders as Smohalla and the Klikitat Prophet, Lishwailait. Yet, unlike the Washani followers, who believed in the superiority of God and Mother Earth, the followers of Waptashi believed that the Eagle was the supreme being. There was but one individual who could receive the wisdom of the Eagle through dreams, visions, and songs. That person was the Waptashi Prophet, Jake Hunt.' Like many of the Northwestern Indians, the Hunt family was much taken with the teachings of Smohalla. Their village between Mount Saint Helens and Mount Adams in present-day Washington state was not so isolated that it did not experience the effects of white expansion. The Indians living at Husum eagerly received the messages imparted by the Wanapum yanchta. The Hunt family had long followed the precepts of the Washani religion, and they accepted the diving revelations expounded by Smohalla. The Hunt family believed in the sacredness of the earth and followed the first food ceremonies as prescribed by Smohalla, believing if they failed to worship the natural gifts provided by God, they would be condemned by the Creator at the time when the world turned over. As a child, Jake Hunt was educated in the ways of the Washani and was taught the message of the Wanapum Prophet. But as a young man, Jake drifted away from the old teachings of the Washani and in direct opposition to Smohalla's teachings, he cut his long black hair and adopted the clothing of the white man. Still, he remained at his native village and was considered a decent and respectable individual.2

Symbolic Substitution in the Indian Shaker Church

In the late 1800s a local revitalization movement, the Indian Shaker Church, became an established vehicle for religious expression and social solidarity among Coast Salish Indians. It preserved aboriginal ideas by replacing powerless aboriginal symbols with imported Christian ones and introduced a new concept of solidarity based on ideological community rather than residential community. In the late 1900s the aboriginal religion has been revived with rituals and functions parallel to the Shaker Church. The two systems coexist as alternative or complementary expressions of Indian spirituality. Both persist because they offer individuals opportunity to affiliate with different groups at different times; they embody distinct parts of the Indian historical myth; and they perpetuate comparable but different styles of religious experience.

The Indian Shaker Church: A Study of Continuity and Change in Religion

The Indian Shaker Church: A Study of Continuity and Change in Religion