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A SEAT AT THE TABLE
Nineteenth-century German lithograph of
North American Indian ceremonial objects.
A SEAT AT THE TABLE

HUSTON SMITH
IN CONVERSATION WITH
NATIVE AMERICANS
ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY

PHIL COUSINEAU
WITH ASSISTANCE FROM
GARY RHINE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
University of California Press, one of the most
distinguished university presses in the United
States, enriches lives around the world by
advancing scholarship in the humanities, social
sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are
supported by the UC Press Foundation and by
philanthropic contributions from individuals
and institutions. For more information, visit
www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2006 by Huston Smith and Phil Cousineau

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Huston.
A seat at the table : Huston Smith in conversation
with Native Americans on religious freedom / edited
and with a preface by Phil Cousineau ; with assistance
from Gary Rhine.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-24439-7 (alk. paper)
1. Indians of North America—Religion.
2. Freedom of religion—United States.
I. Cousineau, Phil. II. Rhine, Gary. III. Title.
e98.r3s56 2006
323.44'2'08997073—dc22 2005005290

Manufactured in the United States of America

13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 60,

containing 60% postconsumer waste, processed
chlorine free; 30% de-inked recycled fiber, elemental
chlorine free; and 10% FSC-certified virgin fiber,
totally chlorine free. EcoBook 60 is acid-free and meets
the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01
(Permanence of Paper).8
 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
REUBEN SNAKE (WINNEBAGO) AND VINCENT PARKER (COMANCHE)
Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors—the dreams of
our old men, given to them in solemn hours of night by the Great
Spirit; and the visions of our sachems (medicine people); and it
is written in the hearts of the people.
CHIEF SEATTLE (DWAMISH), 1786 –1866

A very great vision is needed, and the man who has it must
follow it as the eagle seeks the deepest blue of the sky.
CRAZY HORSE (LAKOTA), 1849 –1877

If we don’t change directions, we’re going to end up where

we’re headed.
REUBEN SNAKE (WINNEBAGO), 1943 –1993
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xi
Preface xiii
The Indian Way of Story xxi

INTRODUCTION: THE PRIMAL RELIGIONS

Huston Smith 1
1. THE SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA
THE CONFLUENCE OF RELIGION, LAW,
AND COMMUNITY 6
A conversation with Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux)
2. FIVE HUNDRED NATIONS WITHIN ONE
THE SEARCH FOR RELIGIOUS JUSTICE 24
A conversation with Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee)
3. ECOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY
FOLLOWING THE PATH OF NATURAL LAW 39
A conversation with Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabeg)

IX
4. THE HOMELANDS OF RELIGION
THE CLASH OF WORLDVIEWS OVER PRAYER, PLACE, AND CEREMONY 58
A conversation with Charlotte Black Elk (Oglala Lakota)
5. NATIVE LANGUAGE, NATIVE SPIRITUALITY
FROM CRISIS TO CHALLENGE 75
A conversation with Douglas George-Kanentiio (Mohawk-Iroquois)
6. THE TRIUMPH OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN CHURCH
CELEBRATING THE FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION 97
A conversation with Frank Dayish Jr. (Navajo)
7. THE FIGHT FOR NATIVE AMERICAN PRISONERS’ RIGHTS
THE RED ROAD TO REHABILITATION 113
A conversation with Lenny Foster (Navajo)
8. STEALING OUR SPIRIT
THE THREAT OF THE HUMAN GENOME DIVERSITY PROJECT 130
A conversation with Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga)
9. THE FIGHT FOR MOUNT GRAHAM
LOOKING FOR THE FINGERPRINTS OF GOD 146
A conversation with Anthony Guy Lopez (Lakota Sioux)
10. REDEEMING THE FUTURE
THE TRADITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS OF SPIRITUAL LAW 162
A conversation with Chief Oren Lyons (Onondaga)
11. THE HEALING OF INDIAN COUNTRY
KINSHIP, CUSTOM, CEREMONY, AND ORATORY 184
A conversation with Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux)
AFTERWORD
Huston Smith 201

Notes 205
Bibliography 211
Acknowledgments 217
Index 219

X
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Nineteenth-century German lithograph of North

American Indian ceremonial objects.
Huston Smith speaking at the Parliament of World Religions,
1999. 1
Vine Deloria Jr., 2000. 6
Walter Echo-Hawk, 2000. 24
The First Parliament of World Religions, Chicago, 1893. 27
Winona LaDuke, 1996. 39
Grand Medicine Lodge scroll, April 4, 1888. 44
Charlotte Black Elk, 1999. 58
Sun Dancers painting, Black Hawk. 69
Douglas George-Kanentiio, 2000. 75
Frank Dayish Jr. delivering the opening prayer at the
Parliament of World Religions, 1999. 97
Lenny Foster, 1999. 113
Tonya Gonnella Frichner at the Parliament of World Religions,
1999. 130
Anthony Guy Lopez, 2004. 146
Chief Oren Lyons, 1991. 162
Buffalo shield painting, Billy Mack Steele. 184
The White House, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. 190

XI
 PREFACE
A long time ago the Creator came to Turtle Island and said to
the Red People: “You will be the keepers of Mother Earth.
Among you I will give the wisdom about Nature, about the in-
terconnectedness of all things, about balance and about living
in harmony. You Red People will see the secrets of Nature. . . .
The day will come when you will need to share the secrets with
other people of the Earth because they will stray from their Spir-
itual ways. The time to start sharing is today.”
MOHICAN PROPHECY

In December 1999 over seven thousand religious leaders, academics, and

practitioners of every color and creed gathered in Cape Town, South
Africa, for the Third Parliament of World Religions. The Parliament was
held at the Good Hope Center in District Six, the symbol of apartheid
for decades but now a potent symbol of reconciliation. During the eight-
day Parliament hundreds of workshops, seminars, and performances ex-
ploring issues such as religious diversity, understanding sacred practices,
practicing tolerance, and community activism were offered.
As the Cape Town Argus reported, a multitude of speakers shared the
teachings of Bahai, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism,
Christianity, and African tribal religions, turning the city into a “crucible
for believers.” Among the presenting groups was a delegation of eight
American Indian leaders and the world-renowned historian of religions
Huston Smith. Under the title “America’s Shadow Struggle,” the dele-
gation offered a series of panel discussions that covered a wide range of
religious freedom issues of pressing concern to Native Americans. As if
evoking the Mohican prophecy, as rendered by Don Coyhis, about shar-
ing tribal wisdom in a time of spiritual crisis, the delegation inspired the

XIII
XIV PREFACE

gathering with their impassioned testimony. But they were also deter-
mined to present the seldom-heard Indian side of the story about Amer-
ica’s much-vaunted religious freedom.
In Professor Smith they had the consummate interlocutor, to use one
of his favorite terms for an interviewer. Not only is he one of the most
widely respected scholars of religion in the world, he has also been a tire-
less advocate for Native Americans for the last twenty-five years. His life-
long search for what is ultimately true in the world’s religions is remi-
niscent of the passion the Irish writer James Stephens once described in
one of his short story characters: “All desires save one are fleeting, but
that one lasts forever . . . he would go anywhere and forsake anything
for wisdom.”
Go anywhere and everywhere Huston has, traveling the world for the
last fifty years to “winnow the wisdom from the world’s great religious
traditions.” At the Parliament of World Religions, in Cape Town, Pro-
fessor Smith, a strong proponent of interfaith dialogue, had the chance
of a lifetime to express his deepening concern over the “fate of the hu-
man spirit,” especially as it relates to the primal religions of the world.
“Tribal peoples,” Smith told the Cape Town press, “have religions which
are fully deserving of the world’s attention. Unfortunately, these tradi-
tions have suffered from noncomprehending governments.” Inspired by
the trickster advice of his friend Reuben Snake, “Listen, or your tongue
will keep you deaf,” Smith urged the audience to learn how to listen to
native people. Only then, he said, will we have the nuanced view of world
religions on which our future depends.
His sage advice was in accord with the unusually realistic goals laid
out in the Parliament’s official program: “Very few religious and spiri-
tual communities can reach consensus with one another on an extensive
religious, moral, ethical, or social agenda. . . . [But] there are points of
convergence—of shared interest, common purpose, or common cause—
that can provide a basis for dialogue and cooperation.”1 For the duration
of the conference the American Indian forums on religious freedom un-
folded in just that spirit of common cause. The participants revealed not
only the hidden history of Anglo-Indian relations but also the enduring
tensions within contemporary Indian life, what Navajo author Simon
Ortiz once described as the “real struggle” for Native Americans: “You
have to fight it, to keep what you have, what you are, because they are
trying to steal your soul, your spirit, as well as your land, your children.”
Though “no one voice speaks for all,” as Lakota writer Joseph Bruchac
writes, sometimes many speak as one.
PREFACE XV

What Ortiz describes as the real struggle was evoked throughout the
delegation’s presentations, in which nine voices spoke as one about one
of the strangest paradoxes in history. With the traditional eloquence of
Indian orators going back to Tecumseh, Black Hawk, and Chief Joseph,
the delegation described how the United States, founded on the ideal
of freedom of expression, had routinely denied religious and political
freedom to its native people. This refusal has forced the land’s original
inhabitants—its “First People”—to struggle again and again for an equal
voice in the religious and political debates that have determined their
destiny.
With this legacy of disregard for Indian participation in mind, Pawnee
lawyer and author Walter Echo-Hawk set the theme for the panels that
followed: “An important reason that our delegation came here,” he said,
“was to try to get a seat at the table with the recognized religions on the
planet. If we hadn’t come to represent the religions of the New World
this wouldn’t be a real world Parliament. We want a seat at the table to
make this gathering real and complete.”
In the final session sacred lands activist Anthony Guy Lopez told Pro-
fessor Smith that the real reason the Apaches are banding together is to
fight against the latest seizure of their land in Arizona: “We can’t allow
this to happen anymore.” The causes motivating Echo-Hawk and Lopez
and so many other American Indian leaders to carry forth the fiery mes-
sage about their struggle for religious freedom, like the long-distance In-
dian runners who used to carry messages from village to village, were the
inspiration for this book.
My longtime filmmaking partner, Gary Rhine, and I were privileged
to accompany Professor Smith and the Indian delegation to the Parlia-
ment in Cape Town and to film all nine sessions there. Over the next few
years we augmented those conversations by taping Huston’s interviews
with all the participants in their own countries, as well as new interviews
with two other eminent Native American leaders, Vine Deloria Jr. and
Oren Lyons. Our documentary film premiered at the Amnesty Interna-
tional Film Festival in March 2004, under the title inspired by Echo-
Hawk’s cri de coeur at the Parliament in Cape Town: A Seat at the Table:
Struggling for American Indian Religious Freedom.
These forums, follow-up interviews, and archival footage reveal more
than just a litany of grievances. They are lively conversations that offer a
unique record of contemporary American Indian voices speaking out on
both history and current events. What emerges here is a terrific resolve to
transform “crisis into challenge,” as Iroquois journalist Douglas George-
XVI PREFACE

Kanentiio says of his own nation’s response to modern times. These re-
markable dialogues also show a deep respect for the form itself, much in
the manner described by the great Oglala Sioux medicine man Luther
Standing Bear (1904–1939) as the speaking style of the old orators:
Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No one
was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was
pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly
courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was
meaningful with the Lakota, and his granting a space of silence to the
speech-maker and his own moment of silence before talking was done
in the practice of true politeness and regard for the rule that, “Thought
comes before speech.”2

The spirit of deliberation and respect for religious freedom for every-
one permeates the first two chapters, featuring conversations with Vine
Deloria Jr. and Walter Echo-Hawk. Together, they reveal what poet Joy
Harjo calls “a heart for justice,” while giving an unflinching view of the
roots of religious intolerance in the New World. Chapters 3 and 4, with
Winona LaDuke and Charlotte Black Elk, eloquently portray the inextri-
cably connected relationship between human beings, nature, and religion—
or what Peter Matthiessen calls “the religion before religion,” nature it-
self as the “Great Mysterious.” In chapter 5 Douglas George-Kanentiio
explores another aspect of the indigenous idea of the web of life, the in-
timate relationship between language and religion, and in chapter 6 Frank
Dayish Jr. offers a humble and triumphant view of one of Indian country’s
most dramatic success stories, the regaining of legal rights to worship in
the Native American Church.
Chapters 7 and 8 concern two of the harsher struggles for religious
freedom: prisoners’ rights, as represented by the courageous spiritual
counselor Lenny Foster, and the protection of indigenous peoples’ rights
to “informed consent” with scientific researchers, as presented by lawyer
Tonya Frichner. In chapter 9 sacred lands activist Anthony Guy Lopez
shares his impassioned ideas about the enduring Indian struggle for ac-
cess to sacred lands, the vital connection between ecology and spiritual-
ity, and healing ceremony. The final two chapters of the book feature tribal
leader and college professor Oren Lyons and Vine Deloria Jr., who re-
veal their strong convictions about the depredations of the past, and
where we can look for signs of the spiritual and cultural renaissance that
is under way in Indian country.
Each conversation with Professor Smith displays the grit of those en-
gaged in the “good fight,” not only the struggle against religious injustice
PREFACE XVII

but also the fight to achieve a very valuable goal: it is exceedingly diffi-
cult to reach understanding with a culture whose understanding of you
is either nonexistent or heavily influenced by the gauzy world of stereo-
types, archetypes, old movies, or modern advertising. As Walter Echo-
Hawk explained it at a question-and-answer session at the end of the
Parliament, the problem is that “most Americans have never even met a
native person and wouldn’t even recognize one if they saw one.” The fo-
rums at the Parliament, and this book, are an effort on the part of con-
temporary Native Americans to resist the double bind of romanticism
and racism that endures in Indian country.

THE TRAIL OF BROKEN PROMISES

When the hulls of the first European ships scraped the shores of Arawak
Island in the Caribbean, they were landing in a vast New World several
times larger than the one they had left behind. This land, called Turtle
Island by its original inhabitants, was populated by an estimated 12 mil-
lion people who comprised some five hundred nations. The People, as
most tribes referred to themselves, spoke over six hundred languages, as
distinct from one another as Icelandic and Tibetan.3 They created imag-
inative artworks and beautiful crafts, built complex cities, and explored
the land from coast to coast. They knew more about the healing prop-
erties of the native herbs and plants than most Europeans knew about
theirs. Many of their foods—tomatoes, squash, potatoes, chocolate, and
tobacco—are now a part of everyday life around the world.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the combination of war, famine,
conversion at sword point, the appearance of railroads, and Indian re-
moval programs had conspired to destroy entire tribes and to decimate
the rest. The mosaic of proudly independent tribes was reduced to less
than 300,000 people surviving on a crazy quilt of reservations. To many
contemporary Americans and Europeans, the bathetic statue The End
of the Trail, featured at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, was not sym-
bolic art; it was the literal truth, proof that the Indians had been con-
quered and removed from the land—and from sight. The Plains Indian
slumped over his horse represented the inevitable result of a “century of
progress,” as the Fair proclaimed. And though the World’s Fair also
featured the First Parliament of World Religion, not one group of in-
digenous people was invited, though millions of visitors filed past Sit-
ting Bull’s log cabin, which had been installed as a tourist attraction.
Yet despite the trail of over eight hundred treaties broken by the U.S.
XVIII PREFACE

government and all the “broken promises” reported by the U.S. Com-
mission on Civil Rights, Native Americans are living in a time of tremen-
dous transition and vitality. According to the 2000 Census Bureau re-
port, there are now 567 federally recognized tribes in thirty-three states
(Alaska alone has 226 tribes), with 1,300,000 living on reservations, out
of a total Indian population of 2,476,000. Indians are the youngest and
fastest-growing minority in the United States. While America’s indige-
nous people still confront serious levels of diabetes, cancer, and heart
disease, and many still struggle under what the Commission on Civil
Rights called the “quiet crisis of discrimination and poverty,” many be-
lieve that the corner has been turned.
Dramatic reversals have been won in areas such as health, education,
and the recovery of lost land. Great social strides have been made with
the passing of the Repatriation Act, protection for the Native American
Church, and the Native Land trust. And the efforts continue at an elec-
trifying pace. Moreover, according to an editorial in the New York Times
in September 2004, some $3 billion dollars of restitution are at stake
for the “profound cultural and symbolic legacy of America’s indigenous
peoples”:
[There is] a continuing lawsuit, whose purpose is to restore to the Indians
assets and revenues that are rightfully theirs. Specifically, the suit seeks
a proper accounting of a huge trust established more than a century ago
when Congress broke up reservation lands into individual allotments. The
trust was intended to manage the revenues owed to individual Indians from
oil, timber leases and other activities. Yet a century of disarray and dishon-
esty by the federal government, particularly the Interior Department, whose
job it is to administer the trust, has shortchanged generations of Indians
and threatens to shortchange some half million more—the present benefi-
ciaries of the trust.4

Along with the recovery of lost land and revenues comes the revital-
izing of what many elders call the “Good Red Road,” the spiritual path
that emphasizes the community and the great web of life. The return to
this ancient way of life, the way of native ceremony and oratory, of ethics
and morality, has helped build a sense of hope about a future that weaves
together the best of the two worlds in which native people find them-
selves. But even this effort to walk in both worlds, Indian and Anglo, is
difficult if the inhabitants of these worlds don’t share a language. “The
fundamental factor that keeps Indians and non-Indians from communi-
cating,” wrote Vine Deloria Jr. in 1979, “is that they are speaking about
two entirely different perceptions of the world.”
PREFACE XIX

NO WORD FOR RELIGION

In the eleven conversations that comprise this book it becomes evident

that no Native American language has a word for “religion,” at least the
way that Westerners conceive of it, as institutionalized spirituality. Tra-
ditionally, Indians had no institutions, no dogma, no commandments,
and no one idea about how to worship, or even what to call the great
force at the heart of all life that was perceived by all the tribes in their
own way. Instead, there was what sociologist Duane Champagne (Chip-
pewa) calls “religiousness,” rather than a belief system, a way of life
that encompassed a rich variety of ceremonies, a mosaic of myths, leg-
ends, and poetry, together forming a complex heritage and a deep spir-
itual force.
In this animating spirit revered medicine man Lame Deer spent his
life resisting claims of superiority made by organized religion, writing
later, “I carried church within me . . . and wanted to see with the eye of
the heart. . . . All nature is within us and all of us is in nature.” Like-
wise, Ohiyesa (Charles Alexander Eastman) wrote a hundred years ago,
in The Soul of the Indian, “We believed that the spirit pervades all cre-
ation and that every creature possesses a soul in some degree, though
not necessarily a soul conscious of itself. The tree, the waterfall, the griz-
zly bear, each is an embodied force and as such an object of reverence.”5
Although there was never one word for God, for art, for the spiritual
path, and most assuredly no one voice for all Indian people, there was
what Huston Smith calls a “wisdom tradition” that is recognizable among
primal cultures the world over. No one word for God, but many for the
Great Mystery—Wakan-Tanka, Awoawilonas, Tirawa, May Wah-Kon-
Tah, Tatanga Mani, Usen, the Great Spirit, Grandfather, the Creator—
sacred names for the great force in the universe that connects all living
beings in the circle of life. And for the Hopis, ultimate reality is simply,
numinously, a’nehimu, “a mighty something.”
No word for “religion,” but innumerable metaphors for the spiritual
path, luminous expressions for the right road to take in life, such as Oglala
Sioux holy man Nicholas Black Elk’s description of his Great Vision: “Be-
hold the circle of the nations’ hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus
all powers shall be one power in the people without end. Now they shall
break camp and go forth upon the Red Road, and your Grandfathers
shall walk among them.”6 This earnest search has been echoed for gen-
erations in ceremonial songs, such as this one: “Wacho ney ney ney ney
wacho ney, ney,” “I am searching for the road of life.” And this one, from
XX PREFACE

the singers of Laguna Pueblo, who beautifully echo the Creator’s call
down the Good Red Road, the path with heart, the journey where we
look for one another:
I add my breath to your breath
That our days may be long on the Earth;
That the days of our people may be long;
That we shall be one person;
That we may finish our roads together.
May Oshrats [God] bless you with life;
May our life roads be completed.

The common thread running through these conversations, philosophies,

ceremonies, ways of being, and calls to action is this one unconquerable
belief in the spiritual road that keeps individuals and their communities
intact. This belief binds them to the land, to the whole, to the Creator, to
the sacred truth behind the illusion of separateness that marks the insti-
tutionalized religions of the world. It imbued all Creation with mean-
ing and was reinforced by a complex web of worship, ceremonies, songs,
and storytelling, so that there was no boundary between the individual,
Mother Earth, and what Luther Standing Bear called the “Big Holy.”
In her conversation with Professor Smith, Winona LaDuke vigorously
described this way of conducting oneself in the world when she remarked
how wearying it was for indigenous people to be charged with always
wanting to go back to an idealized past: “It’s not about looking back—
it’s about being on your path—staying on the path the Creator gave you.”
That plangent note of timeless wisdom and inspired optimism was
echoed at the recent grand opening, in September 2004, of the new Na-
tional Museum for the American Indian on the National Mall in Wash-
ington, D.C., when Director W. Richard West remarked, “We were here
before, we’re here after, and we’ll be here into the future far beyond.”7
Aho!

Phil Cousineau
March 2005
 THE INDIAN WAY OF STORY

To the questions, “Why do you write? Who do you write for?” Simon
Ortiz replies: “Because Indians always tell a story. The only way to con-
tinue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says. The only way to con-
tinue is to tell a story and there is no other way. Your children will not
survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how
they came to this certain place, how they continued.” And to the further
question, “Who do you write for besides yourself?”: “For my children,
for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then
in reverse order so that I may have a good journey on my way back
home.”

Simon Ortiz, A Good Journey, 1977

XXI
 INTRODUCTION

THE PRIMAL RELIGIONS

HUSTON SMITH

Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for

“art,” because for Indians everything is art. Equally, everything
is, in its way, religious. This means that to learn of primal religion,
we can start anywhere.
HUSTON SMITH, THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS, 1989

Huston Smith speaking at the Parliament of World Religions,

Cape Town, South Africa, 1999. Photograph by Phil Cousineau.
Used by permission of Phil Cousineau.
T
he Third Parliament of World Religions exceeded my expectations
in a number of ways. The attendance was far beyond what I imag-
ined it would be, more than seven thousand people paying what
was required in time and money to make a kind of pilgrimage to South
Africa. It was amazing for sheer numbers. But the objective and the qual-
ity of the presentations were even more important. In this time of so much
ethnic conflict, with religion involved in people’s antagonism toward one
another, to have them come together was a very important statement to
the world that conflict is not the bottom line of religion. Working to-
gether is a higher priority.
I think the conveners of the Parliament were brilliant in their choice
of location, Cape Town, South Africa, because if there is any geograph-
ical spot in the world that stands as a kind of symbol of oppression—
especially racial oppression—it is Cape Town. To hold the Parliament
there underscored a leading problem of our time, and maybe through
much of history. Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, gave
one of the most moving addresses I have ever heard, with its climactic
line, “There can be no future without forgiveness.” All this came together
to make Cape Town an unexpectedly important event.
The Parliament vividly brought back to me a string of memories re-
lating to my discovery of the place of Native Americans (and through
them indigenous religions generally) in the history of religions. The dis-
covery took place during the 1970s, the decade when I taught at Syra-
cuse University, in upstate New York. When I accepted the invitation to
teach there I didn’t even know that the Onondaga Reservation is only
five miles from the university. As the decade progressed, I found myself
spending more and more of my weekends hanging out with the chiefs.
Up until then I had dismissed the whole family of indigenous religions—
namely, the tribal and the oral—as unimportant. I blame my teachers for
this, for they dismissed them. After all, they said, they can’t (or until re-
cently couldn’t) even write, so what did they know? I was young and im-
pressionable. I simply accepted what they said until my Onondaga friends
set me straight, and I will never be able to adequately repay the gift they
gave me.

2
INTRODUCTION 3

Three moments in that decade with them stand out. The first occurred
early on. I had spent a Saturday afternoon talking with Chief Leon
Shenandoah and current Onondaga Wisdomkeeper Oren Lyons, and was
beginning to sense the importance of what only came through to me later.
My excitement—that would not be too strong a word—mounted as the
afternoon progressed, until it detonated as I was driving home. I can re-
member my exact words.
“My God, Huston,” I heard myself saying in the car. “For three decades
you have been circling the globe trying to understand the metaphysics and
religions of worlds different from your own, and here’s one that has been
right under your feet the entire time—and you haven’t even noticed it!”
That was the moment when the significance of this totally new area of
world religions, supposedly my field of study, just clicked.
The second moment came later. On one of the many splendid after-
noons I spent with them, Chief Leon Shenandoah and Oren Lyons in-
formed me that the following Saturday the annual gathering of the Six
Nations Iroquois was scheduled to begin. Their chiefs would be trick-
ling in from 9 a.m. on, and if I would like to meet representatives from
the other Iroquois nations I would be welcome. I readily accepted and
spent a lovely morning with them, sitting around, drinking coffee, with
no agenda. At one point Oren looked at his watch and said, “Well, it’s
11:00, time for us to begin.” Then looking me square in the eye, he said,
“And, Huston, that means that we are going into the longhouse, and you
are not.”
Then Oren, being Oren, assuaged my disappointment by saying, “You
know we love you to pieces, and we know you’re totally on our side. But
this is sacred material for us, and we will be meeting in a place that is
sacred for us, and we believe it’s not a time for the profane to come in.”
What I still find amazing is that rather than feeling rejected, I felt a
surge of exultation rising and coursing through me. The reason was im-
mediately clear to me. It was simply thrilling that there were still people
on our planet who think that there are things sacred enough that the
profane—meaning those for whom these things are not equally sacred—
would desecrate the substance itself with their presence.
The third moment occurred when I had arranged for two carloads of
Onondaga youths to be taken to a park near New York City for an event
that would open the International Youth Program, a gathering of stu-
dents who were setting off on a summer-long round-the-world trip. There
were about a hundred young members of various faiths, representatives
of the world’s religions. As an advisor to that project, I proposed that
4 INTRODUCTION

since this pilgrimage to the major religious sites of the world was be-
ginning in America, it would be appropriate for Native Americans to con-
duct the opening ceremony.
The proposal was accepted, and the afternoon was turned over to
them. A young Onondaga man in his late twenties stood under a large
oak tree and assumed the leadership position by announcing that the cer-
emony would begin with a prayer.
My eyes automatically closed, and I bowed my head. But after a minute
or two I opened them and looked at the young leader. His head was not
bowed, nor were his eyes closed. Instead, he was actively looking around
in the four sacred directions, up at the sky, and down at the ground. His
opening prayer, said in his native tongue, lasted more than forty min-
utes. I always regard chaplain’s prayers at presidential inaugurations as
tediously long, but this was something else. After concluding his prayer,
he walked back to his people, signaling that the ceremony was over. I
made my way over to him and asked what he had said.
The young man responded, “I needed to call upon every living thing
in the area that came into my line of vision—the trees, the birds, the
stones, the clouds, and the Earth—to invite their participation. I asked
their spirits to bless what is to follow in our journey and our Interna-
tional Youth Program.”
Together, these moments, along with innumerable others, were ma-
jor factors in inducing me to bring out a second edition of my book The
World’s Religions. So thirty-five years after the first edition had appeared,
I added a chapter about the primal religions, making it eight, instead of
seven, religions covered in the book. There are still other important re-
ligions, such as Sikhism and Shinto, not included, but I didn’t want to
make the book just a catalog. I wanted to provide space to go more deeply.
I knew I had to do that because the religions I had dealt with in the first
edition were all part of the field we call “historical religions,” which have
sacred text and histories recorded in writing. But these religions are only
the tip of the iceberg. They are only about four thousand years old,
whereas the primal, tribal, oral religions can be traced back archeolog-
ically into the twilight zone of prehistory, perhaps forty or fifty thousand
years ago. To omit them from the first edition of my book was inexcus-
able, and I am glad I will not go my grave with that mistake uncorrected.
The added chapter honors the primal religions as fully equal to the his-
torical ones.
But why include them? Is there anything in the primal religions that
is uniquely important? I would say yes. They correct our modern as-
INTRODUCTION 5

sumption that later is better. That illusion is contained in this word

progress, and progress has been, pardon the language, the bitch goddess
of the twentieth-century West. Even today’s stand-up comics get into the
act. Recently I heard one of them say, “I like even my antiques to be of
the latest genre!” From a traditional perspective, and with regard to the
things that matter most, this kind of reductionism is a flat mistake. Some
commentators in the Middle Ages said St. Paul understood Moses far
better than we can. The point is that from a traditional standpoint, the
closer to the source you are, the more sacred the ground is, and that’s
why many tribal people honor animals over human beings: they’re closer
to the source.
We can imagine a Darwinist’s horrified response to the notion that ear-
lier is better. And yet I think that there is a great deal of truth in that view,
because it recognizes what is ultimately important. I was taught that tribal
religions were “primitive,” with a pejorative built solidly into that word.
I went into the first fifty-five years of my teaching with that prejudice in-
stilled in me. Students are young and impressionable; they just believe
what their teachers tell them. Great danger! I might have stayed in that
mode if I hadn’t moved to Syracuse. Those ten years in the shade of the
Onondaga Reservation absolutely transformed my view of indigenous
religions.
I am grateful to Phil Cousineau and Gary Rhine for gathering and ed-
iting these conversations so that others may have their perceptions about
indigenous religions as transformed and deepened as mine have been over
the course of these past two decades.
 1

THE SPIRITUAL MALAISE

IN AMERICA
THE CONFLUENCE OF RELIGION,
LAW, AND COMMUNITY

Vine Deloria Jr., 2000. Photograph by Mankato State

University. Used by permission of Vine Deloria Jr.
V
ine Deloria Jr. is from the Standing Rock Sioux Agency, in Fort
Yates, North Dakota, and a leading Native American scholar
whose research, writings, and teachings have encompassed his-
tory, law, religious studies, and political science. He is the former execu-
tive director of the National Congress of American Indians and a pro-
fessor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado. In January 2005
Indian Country Today chose him for the American Indian Visionary
Award. He has written many acclaimed books, including Evolution, Cre-
ationism, and other Modern Myths; Spirit and Reason; God Is Red; Red
Earth,White Lies; Power and Place: Indian Education in America; Custer
Died for Your Sins; Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties; and For This Land.
This dialogue between Deloria and Huston Smith was recorded in two
parts, at Deloria’s home in Tucson, Arizona, in February 2000, six weeks
after the Parliament of World Religions. Along with the interview with
Oren Lyons, these conversations augment and enrich the themes that
emerged in the Cape Town forums.
In this first chapter, Deloria expands on one of the central themes of
his life’s work, what he calls the “spiritual malaise” of contemporary
America, especially how it relates to the Indian struggle for religious free-
dom. Another theme that emerges here is his impassioned concern for the
vital connection between Indian spirituality and the natural world. He in-
sists that any religion not intimately rooted in this world is delusional:
“The lands of the planet call to humankind for redemption,” he wrote in
God Is Red. “Religion cannot be kept within the bounds of sermons and
scriptures. It is a force in and of itself and it calls for an integration of
lands and peoples in harmonious unity. . . . The peculiar geniuses of each
continent all call for relief from the burden of exploitation.”1
For Professor Smith, the conversation was an extraordinary oppor-
tunity to explore several of his favorite topics, such as the epistemology
of religion, the difference between symbolism and literalism, and what
native people consider natural law. Smith is particularly enlivened by De-
loria’s insight about the roots of our current spiritual crisis—which De-
loria believes is based on our overreliance on the mythology of the lone
individual—and our undervaluing the tribal belief in religion as an ex-

7
8 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

pression of community. What emerges in the exchange is Smith’s exten-

sion of his discovery that “at the center of the religious life is a particu-
lar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from nec-
essarily painful beginnings, the promise of human difficulties embraced
and overcome.”2 On the edge of meaning here rests an ardent belief in the
modern need to return to some semblance of tradition, which is, Deloria
has written, “a renewal of meaning, not a flight from reality,”3 and to
an intimate connection with the land.
In an indication of his respect and of his ability to challenge and lis-
ten, moments before the interview began, Professor Smith turned to me
off camera and confided, “What a privilege to spend a morning with a
mind, a man, like this.”

We believed in one God, the Great Spirit, we believed in our

own kind of Ten Commandments. And we behaved as though
we believed in them.
VINE DELORIA SR. (STANDING ROCK SIOUX), 1901–1990

HOUSTON SMITH: Vine, I can’t begin this conversation without first

expressing that I feel greatly honored by this opportunity, and I also feel
extremely happy. It’s a great good fortune that has fallen into my lap. I
have followed your words from afar, and once I have been in your pres-
ence, as the Indians from Asia would say. I’ve had your darshan, an infu-
sion of spiritual power that comes from a disciple listening to a master,
if you look directly “eye to eye.”
Two or three years ago, at an annual meeting of the American Associa-
tion of Religion conference, you delivered the most remarkable plenary
address I’ve heard in my fifty years of indentured service to that organi-
zation. You told us what we needed to hear, and you told us without minc-
ing words, but your words were totally free of cant and bitterness. I re-
member your conclusion, which, I will have to confess, I have stolen many
times for my own talks. After you had us all in the palm of your hand,
you concluded by saying, “If I have offended anyone, I wish to apolo-
gize, and if there are any of you who feel lonesome because I have not
offended you, my apologies to you also.”
It was a remarkable occasion, and now it is equally remarkable to be
with you again. Let me start with the big picture. In your writings you
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 9

often come back to the point that here in America we are living in a time
of a great spiritual malaise. You say that our problems exceed the par-
ticulars, such as population explosion, environmental danger, and the
peculiar economic arrangements that allow the rich to keep getting richer.
Underlying this, you say, is this immense spiritual malaise, which is caused
by the decline of the sacred certainty that you say has been common to
traditional or primal religions all over the world. I would like to hear
you expand on that point so that it might serve as a basis for our dis-
cussion about the native struggle for religious freedom.

VINE DELORIA: Boy, that’s a tough question.

SMITH: You’ve written about it as if it were glibly rolling off your tongue!

DELORIA: I think we have one basic problem we haven’t defined yet.

It’s a problem we don’t know how to deal with, which is the structure
of the world’s great religions, the institutional religions. They cannot pro-
vide religious experiences. We go out and search for religious experiences,
but we have no framework to put them in. So we need some theological
or metaphysical view that has not yet emerged. We’re all experimenting
by crossing, synthesizing, syncretizing, and trying frantically to find some
way to express ourselves. But the community and the religions that are
based on Western institutions are based on the solitary individual—not
on the group. So we don’t really have any communities to bring anything
back to. The reason you find people interested in tribal groups is that the
community is there. Religion is the expression of the community and its
history, and not of individual searches, or of more precise renditions of
religious belief.

SMITH: The community is the focus of the tribal religion. I think you’ve
made your point, and you escalate it to a superlative. The entire focus
of Native American religion, and indigenous religions, generally speak-
ing, is the community. I thought when I read that sentence in one of your
books that you didn’t mention the land because you probably took the
connection for granted. So would you say that the focus is on the com-
munity and the land on which the community lives?

DELORIA: Well, the land is part of the community and the animals and
the spirits.

SMITH: Oh, well, here I am making a white distinction between the an-
imate and the inanimate, as we Westerners tend to think of things.
10 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

DELORIA: If you look at the sacred pipe ceremonies or the sand paint-
ings, you see that the whole universe is part of the community and must
be represented in that ceremony.

SMITH: You said it right out front—the whole universe is alive. Now,
Vine, when I put that against the Western picture of the universe being
15 billion light years of dead matter, I mean, what a contrast. It goes
without saying that the effect of living with a belief that the whole uni-
verse is alive is deeply humanizing, as opposed to the other, more West-
ern outlook, in which most of the universe is dead, which leads to a kind
of spiritual deadening. And as you know, I have always believed this hu-
manizing aspect of religion to be one of its greatest attributes.
So I know I don’t have to tell you that the dominant scientific out-
look is changing every week. Every Tuesday the New York Times has a
science section whose reports are sort of turned over the following week.
In the latest report scientists are withdrawing their previous surmise that
with the hugeness of the universe there must be life in innumerable other
galaxies. The evidence now points to our being on this little planet called
Earth that is surrounded by a moat, which is outer space, and it’s the
only place where there is consciousness, awareness.
I’m glad you are laughing!

DELORIA: Most science is speculation. The problem with the United

States today is we take these speculations as some kind of reality, as some
kind of concreteness. In one of his essays, philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead calls it “misplaced concreteness.” We get into it and think it
is real, when they’re revising things all the time. They don’t know what
they’re doing.

SMITH: In his book The End of Science John Horgan argues that the
age of great discoveries in foundational empirical science, physics, has
come to a close. Isaac Newton—on through Albert Einstein, Werner Heis-
enberg, Niels Bohr, and their likes—revolutionized our understanding
of the physical universe, and DNA was a genuine biological break-
through, but it doesn’t look like there are going to be any more revolu-
tionary discoveries about the material world.

DELORIA: Not only that, but what scientists are saying is that life, all
life, has physical underpinnings. Life grows out of matter and is completely
dependent on it—no matter, no life. We don’t know that’s the case. For
all we know, there may be immaterial forms of life, like shamans’ allies.
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 11

SMITH: Yes, yes. In fact, it’s becoming clear that the opposite is the case.
Matter isn’t the fundamental reality; consciousness is.
DELORIA: Right. We do not know that this is the only form of life.
Our individual experiences tell us that there is a nonphysical realm that
we have to come to grips with.
SMITH: Oh, you’re stirring up all kinds of opinions in me! Let me run
this one by you. In the indigenous view, spirit is first and, if anything,
matter is a kind of “spin-off” from spirit, whereas in the modern sci-
entific view, matter is fundamental, and spirit is like the foam on top of
the beer. You can have beer without the foam—spirit—but you can’t have
foam without the beer—matter.
DELORIA: Yes, well, many tribes reverse that and agree with modern
physics that the universe is essentially an idea. But the analogy I like to
use is that of an architect who draws up a beautiful plan. That’s an ex-
pression of spirit, the concept of how shapes go together, places and liv-
ability. But you don’t know if it’s going to work, unless you build it. Once
you build it, then you have to deal with it as a concrete expression. So
if you view the world as primarily spirit having all these ideas manifest-
ing themselves materially to see if it actually works, well, that’s the re-
verse of saying that you start with inner matter and evolve it to the point
where it has intelligence and personality. That’s why we’re always so at
odds with science and mainstream thinking. We’re the reverse.
Huston, all this connects again with the point I brought in at the be-
ginning, which is the spiritual malaise of our time. I guess T. S. Eliot’s
poem “The Rock” gives us a document of the spiritual denouement:
“Here were decent godless people . . .” That’s what we have today!

RECONCILING LAW AND THEOLOGY

SMITH: I know that one of the thrusts among your people is to really
speak to the white European community, because you feel there are things
they need to hear, things that will probe the spiritual basis of this malaise
in which people are living. Do you make a point in your writing to speak
to two audiences?
DELORIA: Yes. I’ve always viewed myself as standing between the two
and trying to find the points where they touch. Then I try to figure out how
to translate ideas from one context to another. You see, that’s the tough
part. I don’t think you can take concepts straight across, from one cul-
12 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

ture to another; you’ve got to find out the substance of that idea in one
context and then how it would be expressed in another.
For some years I taught a seminar called Law and Theology. Now, the
idea was that this is one world we experience, so we don’t have subgroup
experiences. When the disciplines of law and theology are speaking to the
condition of humanity, you must have concepts that are equivalent but
which have to be translated back and forth. If you look at all this mod-
ern social legislation and you take out the word eligible and put in the
word worthy, you have Protestant theology. If you take “equality before
the law” and translate it, you’ve got “brotherhood of man” theology. So
you can take law and theology and trace out what they are expressions
of, but how do you move them back and forth? That’s why the civil rights
movement starts with religion but is essentially political. Now you have
the conservative right wing, which is essentially political, trying to express
itself as religion. You have to watch those things all the time.

SMITH: When you first said that law and theology are the same, it
seemed like such an oxymoron, but as I think about it Judaism says vir-
tually the same thing. In religious studies, Judaism is said to center on
orthodoxy, but it is a religion of orthopraxis, or right practice.

DELORIA: Now, Huston, if you go to the tribal traditions you see they
don’t separate the two. They say, “This is our way.” Religion and law
are the same thing, except you present them in different contexts. Some-
one was telling me last night that when the Navajo went to the Parlia-
ment of World Religions in Cape Town last year, one of their elders said,
“We don’t have a religion, but we do have a ‘way.’” That’s why you didn’t
have religious conflict between tribes. You might have fought over every-
thing else—women, horses, or buffalo—but not over religion. Each per-
son, each group, had to do what their tradition told them to do. So it’s
very difficult now to keep the Indians focused on their own tradition.
We continually want to syncretize, and now we’ve got Indian mission-
aries going out and trying to convert whites to Indian religion!

SMITH: There is always this gnawing around the edges by the domi-
nant culture. It’s very difficult to keep the focus clear. But when you say
that law and religion are the same, my first reaction is alarm because
law is going to be the dominant word, the way the law is moving in and
dictating what can and cannot go on in the region of religion. Of course,
the Al Smith case picked on the most powerless group of the land to
strip them of their right to practice their religion. [See chapter 5.] They
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 13

targeted them so as to deprive them of their constitutional rights to their

sacrament peyote, a harmless cactus. On the other hand, when we look
at the sacrament of the dominant religion—alcohol—the situation, as
you said in the film The Peyote Road, is “surrealistic.” That is precisely
the right word!
DELORIA: If it just acts in its brute force, it’s not law in its better
expression.
SMITH: Hm, “better expression.”
DELORIA: I was told when I was studying in the seminary that the orig-
inal Hebrew concept of law was meant to point the way, but then it de-
generated into all those rules and regulations.
SMITH: Vine, I’ve learned something in an area I thought was my turf,
but it is really your turf! I recall the epigraph for your book For This
Land. It is only one sentence long: “While America has produced great
businessmen and scientists, it has been unable to produce one great
philosopher, one great theologian.” You may be lying through your teeth
in saying that! I mean, you may be he!
DELORIA: No, no, no. I’m a very practical philosopher.
SMITH: I mean this very seriously. You just referred to Whitehead, and
he is a great philosopher, but he did not have the indigenous experience
that you have.
DELORIA: He was not Native American, native in the sense of being
born here.
SMITH: That’s right!
DELORIA: I’m not a political tactician. You’re giving me far too much
credit.

THE ROLE OF ELDERS IN INDIAN COUNTRY

SMITH: Let me ask you something. With your astonishing life work and
productivity, do you feel you are getting anywhere?
DELORIA: I’m getting older.
SMITH: Well, so am I! But I know you’re doing your best. It’s just that
you’re swimming against the tide. I know it’s hard to ask about the
14 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

weather system of our culture as a whole. Do you feel your message get-
ting through to any degree?

DELORIA: Many of the things I write about start from the grass roots
and move up. That’s the way I want it, because I want to communicate
with ordinary people, put questions in their minds, give them questions
they can take to more intellectual people and force them to confront re-
ality. And so I write very simple books and try to cover simple themes.
I try to answer all the questions I’ve had whenever I’ve seen inconsis-
tencies in the way we believe or the way we act. I write about why we
are doing these things. I’m not really writing for American intellectuals
at all. I am writing to kind of erode the social foundations and get people
to look at change in that way. Americans are too prone to grab fads and
run down the road with them, and if your message becomes a fad, you
may just as well not have sent it.
I do have a very complex manuscript about Jungian psychology and
Sioux religion, and I’ve had it, I think, about fourteen years. But I don’t
want to release it while the emphasis is on this “delicatessen Christian-
ity” that all the people like the New Agers are dining on. I think there is
a sincere effort to find things in the New Age, but Americans are too flip.
So I’m just going to keep refining the manuscript and eventually, I’ll find
the right audience and then publish it.

SMITH: So this book is on Native American psychology?

DELORIA: No, what I’m doing is looking at Jungian psychology and

what it tried to do. Of course, it had great outreaches, as you know, to
the world religions and European paths. But what I find in Jung is that
when he’s a scientist he says terrible things about “primitives,” like they
can’t distinguish themselves from the environment, or they have no fam-
ilies. These are his offhand remarks when he’s got his class in front of
him. But then he says the closest you can get to wisdom is with the chief
of the Taos Pueblo or with an African medicine man. So the so-called
primitive, the wise old man, becomes the goal for Jungian psychology.
Then I ask myself, “Why does this guy have this schizophrenia?”

SMITH: Hm, perhaps this search for the wise old man, the elder, is an
offshoot of our fascination with kinship—or our lack of it—in the mod-
ern world.

DELORIA: What I think is that the Indian concept of family is very in-
clusive. It’s a concept of responsibilities, not rights! So the European con-
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 15

cept of the nuclear family is one in which they have rights against each
other, but they don’t articulate responsibilities. It’s the difference between
zero being conceived as the fullness of things and zero being conceived
of as nothing, and so once again you have that reversal.
Now, if you have psychic energy in individuals they have to express
it in some way, and if you keep that psychic energy within the nuclear
family you have all these complexes, Oedipus, Electra, and so forth.
SMITH: A real pressure cooker, right?
DELORIA: Right! Go to the Indian tribes, and you’ve got sixteen pos-
sible relationships within the family. Grandma and grandpa, uncle and

CARL JUNG’S REFLECTIONS ON NATIVE AMERICANS

On my next trip to the United States [in 1925] I went with a group of American
friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city-building Pueblos. . . . There for
the first time I had the good fortune to talk with a non-European, that is, to a non-
white. He was a chief of the Taos pueblos, an intelligent man between the ages
of forty and fifty. His name was Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake). I was able to talk
with him as I have rarely been able to talk with a European. . . . It was astonish-
ing to me to see how the Indian’s emotions change when he speaks of his reli-
gious ideas. In ordinary life he shows a degree of self-control and dignity that bor-
ders on fatalistic equanimity. But when he speaks of things that pertain to his
mysteries, he is in the grip of a surprising emotion, which he cannot conceal—a
fact which greatly helped to satisfy my curiosity. . . . Their religious conceptions
are not theories to them (which, indeed, would have to be very curious theories
to evoke tears from a man), but facts, as important and moving as the corre-
sponding external realities. . . . “Why,” Mountain Lake said, “do the Americans
not let us alone? Why do they want to forbid our dances? Why do they make difficul-
ties when we want to take our young people from school in order to lead them to
the kiva [ceremonial site], and instruct them in our religion? We do nothing to
harm the Americans.” After a prolonged silence he continued, “The Americans
want to stamp out our religion. Why can they not let us alone? What we do, we
do not only for ourselves but for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole
world. Everyone benefits by it. . . . ”
I then realized on what the “dignity,” the tranquil composure of the individual
Indian, was founded. It springs from his being a son of the sun; his life is cos-
mologically meaningful for he helps the father and preserver of all life in his daily
rise and descent. . . . Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more
from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth. . . .
Such a man is in the fullest sense of the word in his proper place.

FROM CARL JUNG, MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS, 1961

16 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

aunt, cousin and cousin; you multiply them on both sides, and you go
through life with responsibilities to each of these people. So you never
have a confusion of roles, such as who is supposed to teach whom, and
who is supposed to discipline whom. The elder is supposed to set an ex-
ample. Kinship is a very complex thing. But what it allows you to do is
to take individual psychic energies and distribute them over a field or a
community rather than a small group.

SMITH: That’s powerful! That’s wonderful! I grew up in China, where

my parents were missionaries. So I think East Asians are midway between
our individualistic Western society and the indigenous view. When I came
to this country I was comparing the two with a Western view, not with
an indigenous view. China certainly was feeling-oriented, in terms of the
extended family, and as you pointed out, the indigenous people proba-
bly just take that further.

DELORIA: With Indian people you always have responsibilities toward

your grandfather, your grandmother, your grandson, uncle, or son-in-
law. What does Christianity tell you? “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
You don’t get the identity of the neighbors: Are they young, old, or mid-
dle aged? What gender is the neighbor? The neighbor remains nebulous.
So you end up liking only those qualities in your neighbor that are the
same qualities you see in yourself. Anything different becomes alien, and
then you feel the compulsion to change that person to conform to who
you think you are. There’s the source of our conflict.

SMITH: For a moment let me put on my historian of religions cap. The

urge to comment just bubbles up so powerfully here. I have concluded
in my studies that religious history goes through three stages.
First, there’s the archaic stage, and we take the Australian aboriginal
as an example. Then you get to the historical religions that have texts,
such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Third, there’s the indigenous
prewriting civilizations in which I have found a very interesting, dis-
tinctive feature. There’s not much about ethics with regard to them. That
puzzled me until I realized that these are religions of the primary group,
where they are really an extended family. In an extended family you don’t
have to pound down on the virtues to do this or not to do that, because
empathy, to a very large degree, spreads over to the group.
I have heard that there is an Indian tribe in which there is no word
for “disobedient.” Now, to a Western parent that is mind-boggling! How
could I have raised my children without drawing that line? But my imag-
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 17

ination has been so stretched by the notion of this feeling-centered sense

of the human self, rather than the isolated, perpendicular “I” obtruding
everywhere, that I now can imagine this possibility.
DELORIA: See how you just brought up responsibility to the family? In-
stead of setting rules: “You can do this or you can’t do that,” people can
grow up, or they can go back and forth from the group. The older mem-
bers say you mustn’t do that because that will bring shame on everyone.
So you share that sense that you have to represent something definite—
your family or your tribe—and that becomes the standard.
If you want to go further, there’s a book on the Creeks that goes
through this method of training children. It’s just fascinating how they
do it. They teach you to make up errands for the kids to do, like fetch-
ing a bucket of water. So the little boy goes to get a bucket of water, and
everybody in the village praises him. They say, “Look at that fine young
man getting water for his parents.” So he learns that his job is to make
the rest of the community feel proud and his relatives feel proud.
SMITH: Oh, my. When one contrasts that behavior with switchblades
in the schools, I mean, it’s enough to make one just weep with longing
for our young people to lead a different way of life.
DELORIA: Yes, yes, it does.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

SMITH: This modern view, with the changes wrought by modern sci-
ence and its individualism, has really taken over.
DELORIA: But modern science is really a very confused version of West-
ern religion, isn’t it?
SMITH: Hm, I need to get my mind around that. I think of the distinc-
tive feature of science as being the controlled-experiment laboratory where
knowledge can be proven. But you don’t get any controlled experiments
in Christianity.
DELORIA: No, but what you do have is a whole set of concepts, be-
ginning with the possibility of isolating the individual. So when Jesus
comes along and says, “Leave father and mother and follow me,” you’re
destroying the family there, and you’re pulling together a group that has
in common only that they all believe in Jesus. You get to modern science,
and the proposition is that you can set up an experiment. You pretend
18 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

all other things don’t count except the concepts of your experiment. You
run the experiment and report, “This is reality,” but of course we know
it isn’t. All the great physicists are saying, “We’re not telling you about
nature; we’re telling you about what we were able to find out when we
asked nature certain questions.”

SMITH: As Francis Bacon, the leading publicist for modern science, put
it, “We need to put nature on the rack!” It’s a powerful quote, and it
says something to us even today.

DELORIA: Yes, Bacon and Heisenberg both say this. What they’re say-
ing is there’s no subjective knowledge. That’s what I think Christianity
turns into. The question is, How are we going to get people to follow
these creeds, to follow the sacraments, to perform everything we want
them to do? There you’ve got this force entering, and that’s when law
becomes demonic, when it becomes an expression of religion.
Lately, I’ve been reading an awful lot of science, and now I think these
people could really use a good law school course. They don’t make their
point; they don’t muster enough evidence. This is powder puff; it’s not
answering the questions. But I really trace the problem back to Christianity.
We’re having all these problems between science and fundamentalist Chris-
tianity because Christianity originally had the theory that God made every-
thing. That put the concept of “monogenesis” into science, and Darwin
figured he had to have an alternative to the fundamentalist version. But
there’s no missing links, no punctuation, there’s nothing to it. So every-
thing we’ve done in evolution—none of which works—is answering a
question that was wrongly assumed to be valid many centuries ago.
If you look at other religions—and you’re the expert here—you see
the Earth has cycles, you have period-destruction. Things continue to go.
They give a preliminary explanation and say this is what we think the
world is, or that is what we think the world is. But then in their devo-
tional life it all goes to another area, into all kinds of Creation stories.
But then who do we deal with in our ceremonies? The thunders and an-
imal spirits, the Earth spirits and the spirits of places? These have only
a logical connection to the doctrine of Creation.

SMITH: Now, Vine, you mention that scientists need courses on law,
which reminds me that probably the two most forceful critiques of evo-
lution have been written by lawyers. The first one was written by Nor-
man Macbeth after a newsman said to him, “Look, you’re not a biolo-
gist, what right do you have to write about biology?”
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 19

DELORIA: Listen, Huston, that’s the attitude of bishops when you start
talking about religion. They’ll say, “I am ordained of the Church of God—
so you don’t have the right to tell people what religion is.”
SMITH: It’s the same thing, but on the other foot. Macbeth answered
the newsman saying, “I have a right to write about this because as a
lawyer I am an expert on evidence, and I fault them on their use of ev-
idence.” Twenty years later, a harsh critique came from Phillip E. John-
ston, the most voluble critic of Darwinism, and again coming out of the
Boalt School of Law, at the University of California at Berkeley. You’re
a lawyer. Let me pick up on that and just ask you what you think of
Darwinism.
DELORIA: I just finished reading Niles Eldredge’s Time Frames, an ex-
planation of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. If he were in the box-
ing ring, he wouldn’t lay a glove on his opponent. He wouldn’t be able
to do a thing. If I had him on the stand in a courtroom, I would just cut
him into tiny little bits. He offers no evidence, no logic. Every now and
then he says, “Of course this is all valid because you have this assump-
tion.” Well, my God, can you imagine translating that attitude to crim-
inal law? You could say there was a robbery down at the 7-Eleven this
morning, at ten o’clock, and Huston Smith was six blocks away at ten
thirty. We have no other suspects, so Huston did it!
I was involved in the Wounded Knee trials and gave some of the ar-
guments. The judge wrote this opinion saying we’ve heard from tradi-
tional people, lawyers, and scholars. All of them say that the United States
broke the treaty. But what about all the people who didn’t appear here
today? How do they feel? Then he writes this mushy opinion that’s to-
tally irrational and illogical, from a legal standpoint.
No, you take what you have and make the best use of it. You don’t
say all these people saw Huston do this, but there are millions of people
who didn’t see him do it. This is the kind of reasoning you get in Dar-
winism or in Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium,” that says
that all these species step offstage and evolve like mad and come back
and are stable. You say, well, that’s what the Creationists said. They were
created, and now they’re stable. So what’s point there? There is none.

RELIGION AS EPISTEMOLOGY

SMITH: What my mind is going to from what you said is that accord-
ing to the Darwinian point of view, this conflicting view of human ori-
20 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

gin, the view of indigenous people, and now the “scientific Darwinian
view” really has built into it maybe a more fundamental question.
Namely, not origins, but anthropology, the study of who we are. Ac-
cording to the Darwinian account we are organisms that over the eons
have developed more sophisticated strategies for working out our sur-
vival within our environment. But all the subjective stuff is only this
“foam on the beer” I referred to earlier. They use the word emergent,
but that’s not an explanatory concept at all. It’s a descriptive. But let’s
move on. Let me ask you about the Great Spirit. Is that a personal God?

DELORIA: It’s personal because the universe is personal. That’s the way
we say things. What I’m getting at is epistemology. If we just took an or-
dinary group of people, what can we reasonably know? See, I think a lot
of religion is epistemology, a way to ask, “What can we reasonably
know?” The philosophers and theologians stagger around the question
and go through generations of experiences and then they come out and
say, well there seems to be a personal energy underneath all this, which
is what physics is saying now.

SMITH: But how is that personal? Scientists say the universe is energy,
but they just haven’t said it’s personal because they’re trying to be ob-
jective. How many religions start with that premise, as opposed to the
pantheons of deities or the solitary deity who does all these miraculous
things and now is keeping score on a blackboard of the things we’re do-
ing? We’ve been talking about this almost opposite conception of the “big
picture,” the whole shebang, between indigenous and modern, Western
science. How does this difference between big pictures concern the dom-
inant culture’s allowing the indigenous culture religious freedom? Is there
a connection? What I am reaching for is an understanding of the re-
strictions that have been placed on the indigenous point of view. In ef-
fect, how can we work out of this basic misunderstanding, this polarity
between diametrically opposite points of view?

DELORIA: It’s been very oppressive the whole time. It is simply a to-
tal lack of understanding of who the natives were and who they are to-
day. But there is also a basic misunderstanding by non-Indians of who
“they” are and what they really want because of this schizophrenia. They
want to take everything the Indians have, and at the same time they want
to have the Boy Scouts or the YMCA teach the Indian virtues. You say,
now look, this doesn’t fit together. They want to set aside beautiful lands
for national parks for tourists to visit, but you can’t get them to change
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 21

a law to set aside land for people to simply go and pray on. So you’re
going to have schizophrenia all across. When you look at it as that kind
of problem, then one, you identify where the problems are going to
emerge in the future, and two, you begin to build a strategy for commu-
nicating and dealing with these things. The problem is that non-Indians
have too much energy!
You try to set aside wilderness, which basically means you don’t want
logging roads and buildings and other things in there. But then they adopt
a law that says wilderness should have nothing to do with humans. Now,
there’s never been a landscape on this planet that has had nothing to do
with humans. There were plenty of landscapes that were revered, used
sparingly, if at all, and they were given an integrity of their own. That’s
what a lot of tribes have got to communicate to the larger society. We
must maintain the integrity of the place, which eliminates multiple use.
Multiple use just says everybody can use it, and if you feel like praying
over the ruins then go ahead. So that’s no solution at all.

SMITH: Can I ask you to apply this situation to Mount Graham, which
is sacred to the Apache, but where the Vatican and several universities
are building telescopes?

DELORIA: An old Indian told me they want to put all those telescopes
up to try to find God—but they’re a long way away!

SMITH: Currently, the Indians have to have permits to go up onto the

sacred mountaintop and pray. Is that right? That seems cruel, and opposed
to the promise of religious freedom the United States was founded on.

DELORIA: This was true of Blue Lake, near Taos, New Mexico, until
finally the circumstances came about so the laws could change, and Blue
Lake was finally returned to the people of Taos in 1970. Whenever you
confront one of these problems, these issues on religious freedom, you
have to build a total context. Only then can you have a true expression
of the Indian religion and say, “This is what it is and this is what it means.”
But then you have to find a way to translate it so it affects people who
wouldn’t ordinarily be involved in this and get them committed to help.
There are a lot of good people out there who will help you—but it’s a
very tedious educational job.

SMITH: Oh, yes. But religious freedom has required eternal vigilance
throughout history, even if it seems tedious at times. Think of the process
we have of educating the world about the situation in Tibet. But the
22 SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA

Mount Graham case is particularly outrageous because it is so unneces-

sary to build the telescopes.
DELORIA: But what are they going to find? Tucson is growing so fast,
Arizona is growing so fast, the smog and light pollution are going to can-
cel anything they might achieve there. Eventually those telescopes are go-
ing to fall into disuse. Then the tribes will have to come in and try to re-
consecrate that area and to rededicate people to the land. They’re going
to lose a lot because there is so much economics involved. But mistakes
can be rectified. In the long run the tribes are going to win.
SMITH: Win. That’s a hopeful word to hear in this context. What
popped into my head is that there are a lot of churches now empty, sort
of like mausoleums. Maybe the observatory on Mount Graham may be-
come, before too long, just another mausoleum.
DELORIA: I’m sure it will.
SMITH: The observatory project is just not fit for the ecology of the uni-
verse, and as you say, the Native Americans will have to reconsecrate it,
which, in my understanding, means to make it sacred again. That’s a mar-
velous concept.
DELORIA: After World War II, the government built all these dams on
the Columbia River and the Snake River, which killed the salmon. Now
they’re taking the dams out. So you see, if you just kept fighting and you
just kept educating people, like the Nisqually tribe, in western Washington
State, did for the fishing rights on those rivers, you’ll win in the long run.
You’ll win because what you’re doing is right.
SMITH: This may not fit into your argument, but I just heard a joke
about two beavers looking out at the Hoover Dam. The first beaver asks
the second if he built the dam, and the second one says, “No, I didn’t
actually build it. They just picked up on one of my ideas.”
DELORIA: Right! Beaver ideas are coming back everywhere, Huston,
but not only from the animals. Ideas are coming back from indigenous
people. The hope is that we can pick up some ideas that make a differ-
ence. What a joy! In the sixties we used to say, “We want this country
completely cleaned up. You’re leaving, and we want the holes in the golf
course filled in; we don’t want any buffalo with broken legs!”
SMITH: Did you say you knew nothing? Let me just make this connec-
tion. When we talk about a sustainable environment I hear the Native
SPIRITUAL MALAISE IN AMERICA 23

Americans translating this idea into concrete terms like planning for seven
generations. Longer than that is beyond the human ken, but we can pre-
serve our planet if we plan for seven generations.
DELORIA: Oh, sure. That’s what science does; if it’s possible theoreti-
cally to do it, they’ll do it. Then there are no brakes on them at all. We’re
basically saying we’re gods. But do we have the right to make that state-
ment? We’re also saying human beings are nothing more than material,
but we have plenty of evidence that that’s not true.
If you look at traditional native healing, a lot of it can’t be done today,
because we’re in an urban, mechanized context. Many of those old Indian
healers were able to do things that modern science has not begun to do.
They had to learn from the animals and the birds and all the other crea-
tures how to get along in this world, rather than embracing the idea that
we are just visitors on this Earth.
SMITH: As I see it, this is precisely the kind of wisdom we can learn
from you. The wisdom traditions are perhaps the most enduring attempts
to infer meaning to the whole, and they teach that things are more inte-
grated than they seem.
 2

FIVE HUNDRED NATIONS

WITHIN ONE
THE SEARCH FOR
RELIGIOUS JUSTICE

Walter Echo-Hawk, 2000. Used by permission of Walter Echo-Hawk.

W
alter Echo-Hawk, Pawnee, is a courtroom attorney, political
activist, lobbyist, tribal judge, and scholar. As senior staff at-
torney of the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), he has
been a powerful champion of human rights. Echo-Hawk has worked on
cases involving Native American religious freedom, prisoner rights,
water rights, treaty rights, and reburial and repatriation rights. He was
a leader in the Indian civil rights campaign to obtain passage of the Native
American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, which required the re-
turn of ancestral remains to tribal descendants. In 1992–1994, Echo-
Hawk joined Reuben Snake in leading NARF efforts to secure federal
legislation to protect Native American religious freedom. Mr. Echo-Hawk
is a member of the Carter Center’s International Human Rights Coun-
cil and has been profiled in Notable Native Americans (1995). A prolific
writer, his publications include an award-winning book, Battlefields and
Burial Grounds (1994). He has received various awards, including the
American Bar Association’s Spirit of Excellence Award for legal work in
the face of adversity (1996).
In this forum at the Parliament, Echo-Hawk spoke with Huston Smith
about the background of the five-century-long Native American search
for religious freedom, which provided an important context for the en-
tire presentation of the delegation. For Echo-Hawk, depriving indigenous
people of their freedom of religion is not just a theological question but
a “basic human rights issue.”
Together, Echo-Hawk and Smith provide an important overview of
what has been called the “American Holocaust,” offering vital back-
ground on the roots of intolerance between the early European colonists
and the native people they encountered, as well as an invaluable exchange
about the complex reality of five hundred nations existing within one.
Other themes explored in this chapter include Echo-Hawk’s description
of Native American religion as a “mark of humanity,” “a way of life, and
a way of prayer,” in contrast to institutionalized worship. For his part,
Smith explores “why religion matters” out of his deep concern over the
suffocation of the human spirit by the materialism of modern times. Here
he discusses the indigenous worldview that he now champions in books

25
26 FIVE HUNDRED NATIONS WITHIN ONE

and lectures all over the world, a religion that permeates everyday life
and offers a transcendent view of reality, but one whose survival he is
deeply concerned about.

Let us see, is this real,

Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
You Spirits, you dwell everywhere,
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
PAWNEE WAR SONG

HUSTON SMITH: Walter, I’m going to begin by telling you something

you don’t know. I have one sibling, and one only. He is a brother, and
his name is Walter, and so perhaps I contribute somewhat to the feeling
of being at home with you, which feels very nice. I also want to mention
one other thing that I think is relevant. I was recently invited to a con-
ference in India. But instead of describing it as a conference, the orga-
nizers used a unique word that I have never heard used before or since.
They called it not a conference, but a “convivium.” The distinction was
that in a conference people come together to talk, whereas in the con-
vivium they had mounted we were coming together to live together, which
would, of course, include talking. I hope that we can import that idea
into this Third Parliament of World Religions, that we can live and talk
together for the next five days. We have convened not just to talk but to
share the blessings of living together.
Now, as we settle into the agenda for this interview, I think it’s im-
portant to ask why the Native American sessions at this Parliament—
aptly titled “America’s Shadow Struggle”—are being given prime billing,
nine one-hour sessions at the best hour of the day.
I see two reasons. One is that the primal indigenous religions of the
world are generally overlooked. I don’t have to tell you that. At the First
World Parliament, in Chicago in 1893, the world’s indigenous people
weren’t even invited, though I’m sure that it wasn’t deliberate. It just never
occurred to the conveners that indigenous religions were advanced enough
to warrant invitations. One hundred years later, in 1994, at the Second
World Parliament of Religions, again in Chicago, indigenous peoples were
FIVE HUNDRED NATIONS WITHIN ONE 27

The First Parliament of World Religions, Chicago, 1893. Used by permission

of the Parliament of World Religions.

included in a number of plenary sessions. Five years later you have been
given prime time to bring the religious freedom concerns of Native Amer-
icans to the attention of the world. That’s an encouraging development.
The second reason your people have been given prime billing, as I see
it, is because of where this Parliament is being held. We all know that the
reason it is convening in Cape Town is because its organizers wanted to
highlight the issue of justice. There is no place on this planet that so graph-
ically calls to mind the injustice human beings inflict on each other as South
Africa. Turning the spotlight on South Africa could easily divert attention
from injustices elsewhere, and you wanted to point out that not all the
injustices occur here. There are injustices all over the world, including in
the United States, the nation that initiates these Parliaments, which is why
the title for our symposium refers to the “shadow struggle” within Amer-
ica. I have watched you nodding, so I assume that you agree with this.
WALTER ECHO-HAWK: Huston, I do agree with you. I think that all
people have a religion. There are a lot of really good things about reli-
gion. It inspires humanity to the highest ideals and brings warmth to the
human spirit; it actually reminds us that everyone has a spirit. Religion is
a mark of humanity in all ages, in all corners of the world, and that in-
cludes Native Americans in the United States and the other indigenous
peoples of the world. It’s true that the native religions that have survived
are vastly different from the Judeo-Christian religious traditions most of
us are familiar with. They have survived, but they are overlooked and un-
protected by the laws of their countries. An important reason our dele-
gation came here was to try to get a “seat at the table” with the recog-
Other documents randomly have
different content
 The failure of this enterprise excited much
Unpopularit
indignation, and seemed to justify the distrust with y of the
which so many people regarded the French alliance. In French
Boston the ill-feeling found vent in a riot on the alliance
wharves between French and American sailors, and
throughout New England there was loud discontent. It required all
Washington’s tact to keep peace between the ill-yoked allies. When
Congress passed a politic resolution approving the course of the
French commander, it met with no cordial assent from the people.
When, in November, Estaing took his fleet to the West Indies, for
purposes solely French, the feeling was one of lively disgust, which
was heightened by an indiscreet proclamation of the count inviting
the people of Canada to return to their old allegiance. For the
American people regarded the work of Pitt as final, and at no time
during the war did their feeling against Great Britain rise to such a
point as to make them willing to see the French restored to their old
position on this continent. The sagacious Vergennes understood this
so well that Estaing’s proclamation found little favour in his eyes. But
it served none the less to irritate the Americans, and especially the
people of New England.
So far as the departure of the fleet for the West
Stagnation
Indies was concerned, the American complaints were of the war
not wholly reasonable; for the operations of the French in the
in that quarter helped materially to diminish the force northern
which Great Britain could spare for the war in the states
United States. On the very day of Estaing’s departure,
Sir Henry Clinton was obliged to send 5,000 men from New York to
take part in the West India campaign. This new pressure put upon
England by the necessity of warding off French attack went on
increasing. In 1779 England had 314,000 men under arms in various
parts of the world, but she had so many points to defend that it was
difficult for her to maintain a sufficient force in America. In the
autumn of that year, Sir Henry Clinton did not regard his position in
New York as secure enough to justify him any longer in sparing
troops for the occupation of Newport, and the island was accordingly
evacuated. From this time till the end of the war, the only point which
the British succeeded in holding, north of Virginia, was the city of
New York. After the Rhode Island campaign of 1778, no further
operations occurred at the North between the two principal armies
which could properly be said to constitute a campaign. Clinton’s
resources were too slender for him to do anything but hold New York.
Washington’s resources were too slender for him to do anything but
sit and watch Clinton. While the two commanders-in-chief thus held
each other at bay, the rapid and violent work of the war was going on
in the southern states, conducted by subordinate officers. During
much of this time Washington’s army formed a cordon about
Manhattan Island, from Danbury in Connecticut to Elizabethtown in
New Jersey, and thus blockaded the enemy. But while there were no
decisive military operations in the northern states during this period,
many interesting and important events occurred which demand
consideration before we go on to treat of the great southern
campaigns which ended the war.
 CHAPTER XI
WAR ON THE FRONTIER

The barbarous border fighting of the Revolutionary War was

largely due to the fact that powerful tribes of wild Indians still
confronted us on every part of our steadily advancing frontier. They
would have tortured and scalped our backwoodsmen even if we had
had no quarrel with George III., and there could be no lasting peace
until they were crushed completely. When the war broke out, their
alliance with the British was natural, but the truculent spirit which
sought to put that savage alliance to the worst uses was something
which it would not be fair to ascribe to the British commanders in
general; it must be charged to the account of Lord George Germain
and a few unworthy men who were willing to be his tools.
 A North View of Fort Johnson drawn on the spot by Mr.
Guy Johnson, Sir Wm. Johnson’s Son.
In the summer of 1778 this horrible border warfare
Joseph
became the most conspicuous feature of the struggle, Brant,
and has afforded themes for poetry and romance, in missionary
which the figures of the principal actors are seen in a and war-
lurid light. One of these figures is of such importance chief
as to deserve especial mention. Joseph Brant, or
Thayendanegea, was perhaps the greatest Indian of whom we have
any knowlege; certainly the history of the red men presents no more
many-sided and interesting character. A pure-blooded Mohawk,
descended from a line of distinguished chiefs,[21] in early boyhood he
became a favourite with Sir William Johnson, and the laughing black
eyes of his handsome sister, Molly Brant, so fascinated the rough
baronet that he took her to Johnson Hall as his wife, after the Indian
fashion. Sir William believed that Indians could be tamed and taught
the arts of civilized life, and he laboured with great energy, and not
without some success, in this difficult task. The young
Thayendanegea was sent to be educated at the school in Lebanon,
Connecticut, which was afterwards transferred to New Hampshire
and developed into Dartmouth College. At this school he not only
became expert in the use of the English language, in which he
learned to write with elegance and force, but he also acquired some
inkling of general literature and history. He became a member of the
Episcopal Church, and after leaving school he was for some time
engaged in missionary work among the Mohawks, and translated the
Prayer-Book and parts of the New Testament into his native
language. He was a man of earnest and serious character, and his
devotion to the church endured throughout his life. Some years after
the peace of 1783, the first Episcopal church ever built in Upper
Canada was erected by Joseph Brant, from funds which he had
collected for the purpose while on a visit to England. But with this
character of devout missionary and earnest student Thayendanegea
combined, in curious contrast, the attributes of an Iroquois war-chief
developed to the highest degree of efficiency. There was no
accomplishment prized by Indian braves in which he did not outshine
all his fellows. He was early called to take the war-path. In the fierce
struggle with Pontiac he fought with great distinction on the English
side, and at the beginning of the War of Independence he was one of
the most conspicuous of Iroquois war-chiefs.
It was the most trying time that had ever come to these haughty
lords of the wilderness, and called for all the valour and diplomacy
which they could summon. Brant was equal to the occasion, and no
chieftain ever fought a losing cause with greater spirit than he. We
have seen how at Oriskany he came near turning the scale against us
in one of the critical moments of a great campaign. From the St.
Lawrence to the Susquehanna his name became a name of terror.
Equally skilful and zealous, now in planning the silent night march
and deadly ambush, now in preaching the gospel of peace, he
reminds one of some newly reclaimed Frisian or Norman warrior of
the Carolingian age. But in the eighteenth century the incongruity is
more striking than in the tenth, in so far as the traits of the barbarian
are more vividly projected against the background of a higher
civilization. It is odd to think of Thayendanegea, who could outyell
any of his tribe on the battlefield, sitting at table with Burke and
Sheridan, and behaving with the modest grace of an English
gentleman. The tincture of civilization he had acquired, moreover,
was by no means superficial. Though engaged in many a murderous
attack, his conduct was not marked by the ferocity so characteristic
of the Iroquois. Though he sometimes approved the slaying of
prisoners on grounds of public policy, he was flatly opposed to
torture, and never would allow it. He often went out of his way to
rescue women and children from the tomahawk, and the instances of
his magnanimity toward suppliant enemies were very numerous.
 A View of Niagara Fort
At the beginning of the war the influence of the
The Tories
Johnsons had kept all the Six Nations on the side of of western
the Crown, except the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, who New York
were prevailed upon by New England missionaries to
maintain an attitude of neutrality. The Indians in general were quite
incapable of understanding the issue involved in the contest, but
Brant had some comprehension of it, and looked at the matter with
Tory eyes. The loyalists in central New York were numerous, but the
patriot party was the stronger, and such fierce enmities were aroused
in this frontier society that most of the Tories were obliged to
abandon their homes and flee to the wilds of western New York and
Upper Canada, where they made the beginnings of the first English
settlement in that country. There, under their leaders, the Johnsons,
with Colonel John Butler and his son Walter, they had their
headquarters at Fort Niagara, where they were joined by Brant with
his Mohawks. Secure in the possession of that remote stronghold,
they made it the starting-point of their frequent and terrible
excursions against the communities which had cast them forth. These
rough frontiersmen, many of them Scotch Highlanders of the old
stripe, whose raiding and reaving propensities had been little
changed by their life in an American wilderness, were in every way fit
comrades for their dusky allies. Clothed in blankets and moccasins,
decked with beads and feathers, and hideous in war-paint, it was not
easy to distinguish them from the stalwart barbarians whose fiendish
cruelties they often imitated and sometimes surpassed. Border
tradition tells of an Indian who, after murdering a young mother with
her three children, as they sat by the evening fireside, was moved to
pity by the sight of a little infant sweetly smiling at him from its
cradle; but his Tory comrade picked up the babe with the point of his
bayonet, and, as he held it writhing in mid-air, exclaimed, “Is not this
also a d—d rebel?” There are many tales of like import, and whether
always true or not they seem to show the reputation which these
wretched men had won. The Tory leaders took less pains than
Thayendanegea to prevent useless slaughter, and some of the
atrocities permitted by Walter Butler have never been outdone in the
history of savage warfare.

EARLY MAP OF WYOMING AND LACKAWANNA VALLEYS.

During the year 1778 the frontier became the scene
The valley
of misery such as had not been witnessed since the of Wyoming
time of Pontiac. Early in July there came a blow at and its
which the whole country stood aghast. The valley of settlers from
Wyoming, situated in northeastern Pennsylvania, Connecticut
where the Susquehanna makes its way through a huge cleft in the
mountains, had become celebrated for the unrivalled fertility and
beauty which, like the fatal gift of some unfriendly power, served only
to make it an occasion of strife. The lovely spot lay within the limits
of the charter of Connecticut, granted in 1662, according to which
that colony or plantation was to extend westward to the Pacific
Ocean. It also lay within the limits of the charter of 1681, by which
the proprietary colony of Pennsylvania had been founded. About one
hundred people from Connecticut had settled in Wyoming in 1762,
but within a year this little settlement was wiped out in blood and fire
by the Indians. In 1768 some Pennsylvanians began to settle in the
valley, but they were soon ousted by a second detachment of
Yankees, and for three years a miniature war was kept up, with
varying fortunes, until at last the Connecticut men, under Zebulon
Butler and Lazarus Stewart, were victorious. In 1771 the question
was referred to the law-officers of the Crown, and the claim of
Connecticut was sustained. Settlers now began to come rapidly,—the
forerunners of that great New England migration which in these latter
days has founded so many thriving states in the West. By the year
1778 the population of the valley exceeded 3,000, distributed in
several pleasant hamlets, with town-meetings, schools and churches,
and all the characteristics of New England orderliness and thrift. Most
of the people were from Connecticut, and were enthusiastic and
devoted patriots, but in 1776 a few settlers from the Hudson valley
had come in, and, exhibiting Tory sympathies, were soon after
expelled. Here was an excellent opportunity for the loyalist border
ruffians to wreak summary vengeance upon their enemies. Here was
a settlement peculiarly exposed in position, regarded with no friendly
eyes by its Pennsylvania neighbours, and, moreover, ill provided with
defenders, for it had sent the best part of its trained militia to serve
in Washington’s army.
 FORTY FORT, WYOMING
These circumstances did not escape the keen eye
Massacre at
of Colonel John Butler, and in June, 1778, he took the Wyoming,
war-path from Niagara, with a company of his own July 3, 1778
rangers, a regiment of Johnson’s Greens, and a band
of Senecas under their chief Sayenqueraghta, commonly called Old
King; in all about 1,200 men. Reaching the Susquehanna, they glided
down the swift stream in bark canoes, landed a little above the
doomed settlement, and began their work of murder and pillage.
Consternation filled the valley. The women and children were huddled
in a blockhouse called Forty Fort, and Colonel Zebulon Butler, with
300 men, went out to meet the enemy. There seemed to be no
choice but to fight, though the odds were so desperate. As the
enemy came in sight, late in the afternoon of July 3d, the patriots
charged upon them, and for about an hour there was a fierce
struggle, till, overwhelmed by weight of numbers, the little band of
defenders broke and fled. Some made their way to the fort, and a
few escaped to the mountains, but nearly all were overtaken and
slain, save such as were reserved for the horrors of the night. The
second anniversary of independence was ushered in with dreadful
orgies in the valley of Wyoming. Some of the prisoners were burned
at the stake, some were laid upon hot embers and held down with
pitchforks till they died, some were hacked with knives. Sixteen poor
fellows were arranged in a circle, while an old half-breed hag, known
as Queen Esther, and supposed to be a granddaughter of the famous
Frontenac, danced slowly around the ring, shrieking a death-song as
she slew them one after the other with her tomahawk.
The next day, when Forty Fort surrendered, no more lives were
taken, but the Indians plundered and burned all the houses, while
the inhabitants fled to the woods or to the nearest settlements on the
Lehigh and Delaware, and the vale of Wyoming was for a time
abandoned. Dreadful sufferings attended the flight. A hundred
women and children perished of fatigue and starvation in trying to
cross the swamp, which has since been known to this day as the
“Shades of Death." Several children were born in that fearful spot,
only to die there with their unhappy mothers. Such horrors needed
no exaggeration in the telling, yet from the confused reports of the
fugitives, magnified by popular rumour, a tale of wholesale slaughter
went abroad which was even worse than the reality, but which careful
research has long since completely disproved.
 The Six Nations
The popular reputation of Brant as an incarnate
Massacre at
demon rests largely upon the part which he was Cherry
formerly supposed to have taken in the devastation of Valley, Nov.
Wyoming. But the “monster Brant,” who figures so 10
conspicuously in Campbell’s celebrated poem, was not
even present on this occasion. Thayendanegea was at that time at
Niagara. It was not long, however, before he was concerned in a
bloody affair in which Walter Butler was principal. The village of
Cherry Valley, in central New York, was destroyed on the 10th of
November by a party of 700 Tories and Indians. All the houses were
burned, and about fifty of the inhabitants murdered, without regard
to age or sex.[22] Many other atrocious things were done in the
course of this year; but the affairs of Wyoming and Cherry Valley
made a deeper impression than any of the others. Among the victims
there were many refined gentlemen and ladies, well known in the
northern states, and this was especially the case of Cherry Valley.
 Washington made up his mind that exemplary
Sullivan’s
vengeance must be taken, and the source of the evil expedition
extinguished as far as possible. An army of 5,000 men
was sent out in the summer of 1779, with instructions to lay waste
the country of the hostile Iroquois and capture the nest of Tory
miscreants at Fort Niagara. The command of the expedition was
offered to Gates, and when he testily declined it, as requiring too
much hard work from a man of his years, it was given to Sullivan. To
prepare such an army for penetrating to a depth of four hundred
miles through the forest was no light task; and before they had
reached the Iroquois country, Brant had sacked the town of Minisink
and annihilated a force of militia sent to oppose him. Yet the
expedition was well timed for the purpose of destroying the growing
crops of the enemy. The army advanced in two divisions. The right
wing, under General James Clinton, proceeded up the valley of the
Mohawk as far as Canajoharie, and then turned to the southwest;
while the left wing, under Sullivan himself, ascended the
Susquehanna. On the 22d of August the two columns met at Tioga,
and one week later they found the enemy at Newtown, on the site of
the present town of Elmira,—1,500 Tories and Indians, led by Sir
John Johnson in person, with both the Butlers and Thayendanegea.
In the battle which ensued, the enemy was routed with
Battle of
great slaughter, while the American loss was less than Newtown,
fifty. No further resistance was made, but the army Aug 29,
was annoyed in every possible way, and stragglers 1779
were now and then caught and tortured to death. On
one occasion, a young lieutenant, named Boyd, was captured while
leading a scouting party, and fell into the hands of one of the Butlers,
who threatened to give him up to torture unless he should disclose
whatever he knew of General Sullivan’s plans. On his refusal, he was
given into the hands of a Seneca demon, named Little Beard; and
after being hacked and plucked to pieces with a refinement of cruelty
which the pen refuses to describe, his torments were ended by
disembowelling.
Such horrors served only to exasperate the
Devastation
American troops, and while they do not seem to have of the
taken life unnecessarily, they certainly carried out their Iroquois
orders with great zeal and thoroughness. The Iroquois country
tribes were so far advanced in the agricultural stage of
development that they were much more dependent upon their crops
than upon the chase for subsistence; and they had besides learned
some of the arts of civilization from their white neighbours. Their long
wigwams were beginning to give place to framed houses with
chimneys; their extensive fields were planted with corn and beans;
and their orchards yielded apples, pears, and peaches in immense
profusion. All this prosperity was now brought to an end. From Tioga
the American army marched through the entire country of the
Cayugas and Senecas, laying waste the cornfields, burning the
houses, and cutting down all the fruit-trees. More than forty villages,
the largest containing 128 houses, were razed to the ground. So
terrible a vengeance had not overtaken the Long House since the
days of Frontenac. The region thus devastated had come to be the
most important domain of the Confederacy, which never recovered
from the blow thus inflicted. The winter of 1779-80 was one of the
coldest ever known in America, so cold that the harbour of New York
was frozen solid enough to bear troops and artillery,[23] while the
British in the city, deprived of the aid of their fleet, spent the winter
in daily dread of attack. During this extreme season the houseless
Cayugas and Senecas were overtaken by famine and pestilence, and
the diminution in their numbers was never afterwards made good.
The stronghold at Niagara, however, was not wrested from
Thayendanegea. That part of Sullivan’s expedition was a failure. From
increasing sickness among the soldiers and want of proper food, he
deemed it impracticable to take his large force beyond the Genesee
river, and accordingly he turned back toward the seaboard, arriving in
New Jersey at the end of October, after a total march of more than
seven hundred miles.
 Though so much harrying had been done, the
Reign of
snake was only scotched, after all. Nothing short of the terror in the
complete annihilation of the savage enemy would have Mohawk
put a stop to his inroads. Before winter was over dire valley
vengeance fell upon the Oneidas, who were now
regarded by their brethren as traitors to the Confederacy; they were
utterly crushed by Thayendanegea. For two years more the
tomahawk and firebrand were busy in the Mohawk valley. It was a
reign of terror. Blockhouses were erected in every neighbourhood,
into which forty or fifty families could crowd together at the first note
of alarm. The farmers ploughed and harvested in companies, keeping
their rifles within easy reach, while pickets and scouts peered in
every direction for signs of the stealthy foe. In battles with the militia,
of which there were several, the enemy, with his greatly weakened
force, was now generally worsted; but nothing could exceed the
boldness of his raids. On one or two occasions he came within a few
miles of Albany. Once a small party of Tories actually found their way
into the city, with intent to assassinate General Schuyler, and came
very near succeeding. In no other part of the United States did the
war entail so much suffering as on the New York border. During the
five years ending with 1781, the population of Tryon county was
reduced by two thirds of its amount, and in the remaining third there
were more than three hundred widows and two thousand orphan
children.

JOHNSON HALL
 This cruel warfare, so damaging to the New York
The
frontier settlements and so fatal to the Six Nations, wilderness
was really part of a desultory conflict which raged at beyond the
intervals from north to south along our whole western Alleghanies
border, and resulted in the total overthrow of British
authority beyond the Alleghanies. The vast region between these
mountains and the Mississippi river—a territory more than twice as
large as the German Empire—was at that time an almost unbroken
wilderness. A few French towns garrisoned by British troops, as at
Natchez, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia on the Mississippi river, at
Vincennes, on the Wabash, and at Detroit, sufficed to represent the
sovereignty of George III., and to exercise a very dubious control
over the wild tribes that roamed through these primeval solitudes.
When the thirteen colonies declared themselves independent of the
British Crown, the ownership of this western territory was for the
moment left undecided. Portions of it were claimed by Massachusetts,
Connecticut, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, on the
strength of their old charters or of their relations with the Indian
tribes. Little respect, however, was paid to the quaint terminology of
charters framed in an age when almost nothing was known of
American geography; and it was virtually left for circumstances to
determine to whom the western country should belong. It was now
very fortunate for the United States that the policy of Pitt had
wrested this all-important territory from the French. For to conquer
from the British enemy so remote a region was feasible; but to have
sought to obtain it from a power with which we were forming an
alliance would have been difficult indeed.
The commanding approach to this territory was by
Rivalry
the town and fortress of Pittsburgh, the “Gateway of between
the West,” from which, through the Ohio river and its Pennsylvani
tributary streams, an army might penetrate with a and
comparative ease to any part of the vast Mississippi Virginia for
the
valley. The possession of this gateway had for some
possession
years been a subject of dispute between Pennsylvania of Fort Pitt
and Virginia. Though the question was ultimately
settled in favour of Pennsylvania, yet for the present Virginia, which
had the longest arm, kept her hold upon the commanding citadel. To
Virginia its possession was then a matter of peculiar importance, for
her population had already begun to overflow its mountain barriers,
and, pressing down the Ohio valley, had made the beginnings of the
state of Kentucky. Virginia and North Carolina, lying farther westward
than any of the other old states, were naturally the first to send
colonies across the Alleghanies. It was not long before the beginning
of the war that Daniel Boone had explored the Kentucky river, and
that Virginia surveyors had gone down the Ohio as far as the present
site of Louisville. Conflicts ensued with the Indians, so fierce and
deadly that this region was long known as the “Dark and Bloody
Ground.”
During this troubled period, the hostile feeling between
Pennsylvania and Virginia was nourished by the conflicting interests
of the people of those two colonies in respect to the western country
and its wild inhabitants. The Virginians entered the country as
settlers, with intent to take possession of the soil and keep the
Indians at a distance; but there were many people in Pennsylvania
who reaped large profits from trade with the barbarians, and
therefore did not wish to see them dispossessed of their border
forests and driven westward. The Virginia frontiersmen were angry
with the Pennsylvania traders for selling rifles and powder to the
redskins, and buying from them horses stolen from white men. This,
they alleged, was practically inciting the Indians to deeds of plunder
and outrage. In the spring of 1774, there seemed to be serious
danger of an outbreak of hostilities at Fort Pitt, when the attention of
Virginia was all at once absorbed in a brief but hard-fought war,
which had a most important bearing upon the issue of the American
struggle for independence.
 This border war of 1774 has sometimes been
Lord
known as “Cresap’s War,” but more recently, and with Dunmore’s
less impropriety, as “Lord Dunmore’s War.” It was War, 1774
conducted under the general direction of the Earl of
Dunmore, last royal governor of Virginia; and in the political
excitement of the time there were some who believed that he
actually contrived to stir up the war out of malice aforethought, in
order to hamper the Virginians in their impending struggle with the
mother-country. Dunmore’s agent, or lieutenant, in western Virginia,
Dr. John Connolly, was a violent and unscrupulous man, whose
arrogance was as likely to be directed against friendly as against
hostile Indians, and it was supposed that he acted under the earl’s
secret orders with intent to bring on a war. But the charge is ill-
supported and quite improbable. According to some writers, the true
cause of the war was the slaying of the whole family of the friendly
chief Logan, and doubtless this event furnished the occasion for the
outbreak of hostilities. It was conspicuous in a series of outrages that
had been going on for years, such as are always apt to occur on the
frontier between advancing civilization and resisting barbarism. John
Logan, or Tagahjutè, was of Cayuga descent, a chief of the Mingos, a
brave and honest man, of fine and stately presence. He had always
been kind and hospitable to the English settlers, perhaps in
accordance with the traditional policy of his Iroquois forefathers,—a
tradition which by 1774 had lost much of its strength. In April of that
year some Indian depredations occurred on the upper Ohio, which
led Dr. Connolly to issue instructions, warning the settlers to be on
their guard, as an attack from the Shawnees was to be apprehended.
Captain Michael Cresap was a pioneer from Maryland, Logan and
a brave man and sterling patriot; but as for the Cresap
Indians, his feelings toward them were like those of
most backwoodsmen. Cresap not unnaturally interpreted the
instructions from Dunmore’s lieutenant as equivalent to a declaration
of war, and he proceeded forthwith to slay and scalp some friendly
Shawnees. As is apt to be the case with reprisals and other
unreasoning forms of popular vengeance, the blow fell in the wrong
quarter, and innocent people were made scapegoats for the guilty.
Cresap’s party next started off to attack Logan’s camp at Yellow
Creek; but presently bethinking themselves of Logan’s well-known
friendliness toward the whites, as they argued with one another, they
repented of their purpose, and turned their steps in another
direction. But hard by the Mingo encampment a wretch named
Greathouse had set up a whiskey shop, and thither, on the last day of
April, repaired Logan’s family, nine thirsty barbarians, male and
female, old and young. When they had become dead drunk,
Greathouse and two or three of his cronies illustrated their peculiar
view of the purport of Connolly’s instructions by butchering them all
in cold blood. The Indians of the border needed no stronger
provocation for rushing to arms. Within a few days Logan’s men had
taken a dozen scalps, half of them from young children. Mingos and
Shawnees were joined by Wyandots, Delawares, and Senecas, and
the dismal tale of blazing cabins and murdered women was renewed
all along the frontier. It was in vain that Lord Dunmore and his
lieutenant disclaimed responsibility for the massacre at Yellow Creek.
The blame was by all the Indians and many of the whites laid upon
Cresap, whose name has been handed down to posterity as that of
the arch-villain in this rough border romance. The pathetic speech of
the bereaved Logan to Dunmore’s envoy, John Gibson, was preserved
and immortalized by Jefferson in his “Notes on Virginia,” and has
been declaimed by thousands of American schoolboys. In his
comments Jefferson spoke of Cresap as
“a man infamous for the many murders
he had committed upon these injured
people.” Jefferson here simply gave
voice to the tradition which had started
into full life as early as June, 1774,
when Sir William Johnson wrote that “a
certain Mr. Cressop had trepanned and
murdered forty Indians on the Ohio, ...
and that the unworthy author of this
wanton act is fled.” The charge made
by Jefferson was answered at the time, but continued to live on in
tradition, until finally disposed of in 1851 by Brantz Mayer.[24] The
origin of the misconception is doubtless to be traced to the
insignificance of Greathouse. In trying to shield himself, Connolly
deposed Cresap from command, but he was presently reinstated by
Lord Dunmore.
In June of the next year, Captain Cresap marched to Cambridge at
the head of 130 Maryland riflemen; but during the early autumn he
was seized with illness, and while making his way homeward died at
New York, at the age of thirty-three. His grave is still to be seen in
Trinity churchyard, near the door of the north transept. The Indian
chief with whose name his has so long been associated was some
time afterwards tomahawked by a brother Indian, in the course of a
drunken affray.
The war thus ushered in by the Yellow Creek
Battle of
massacre was an event of cardinal importance in the Point
history of our western frontier. It was ended by the Pleasant
decisive battle at Point Pleasant, on the Great Kanawha and its
(October 10, 1774), in which the Indians, under the consequenc
famous Shawnee chief Cornstalk, were totally defeated es
by the backwoodsmen under Andrew Lewis. This defeat so cowed the
Indians that they were fain to purchase peace by surrendering all
their claims upon the hunting-grounds south of the Ohio. It kept the
northwestern tribes comparatively quiet during the first two years of
the Revolutionary War, and thus opened the way for white settlers to
rush into Kentucky. The four years following the battle of Point
Pleasant saw remarkable and portentous changes on the frontier. It
was just at the beginning of Lord Dunmore’s war that Parliament
passed the Quebec Act, of which the practical effect, had it ever been
enforced, would have been the extension of Canada southward to the
Ohio river. In contravention of old charters, it would have deprived
the American colonies of the great northwestern territory. But the
events that followed upon Lord Dunmore’s war soon rendered this
part of the Quebec Act a nullity.
 In 1775, Richard Henderson of North Carolina
Settlement
purchased from the Cherokees the tract between the of Kentucky
Kentucky and Cumberland rivers, and at the same time
Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were founded by Daniel Boone and
James Harrod. As a party of these bold backwoodsmen were
encamping near the sources of the southern fork of the Licking, they
heard the news of the victory which ushered in the War of
Independence, and forthwith gave the name of Lexington to the
place of their encampment, on which a thriving city now stands.
These new settlements were not long in organizing themselves into a
state, which they called Transylvania. Courts were instituted, laws
enacted, and a militia enrolled, and a delegate was sent to the
Continental Congress; but finding that Virginia still claimed their
allegiance, they yielded their pretensions to autonomy, and were
organized for the present as a county of the mother state. The so-
called “county” of Kentucky, comprising the whole of the present
state of that name, with an area one fourth larger than that of
Scotland, was indeed of formidable dimensions for a county.
The settlement of Tennessee was going on at the
and of
same time. The movement of population for some time eastern
had a southwestward trend along the great valleys Tennessee
inclosed by the Appalachian ranges, so that
frontiersmen from Pennsylvania found their way down the
Shenandoah, and thence the stream of Virginian migration reached
the Watauga, the Holston, and the French Broad, in the midst of the
most magnificent scenery east of the Rocky Mountains. At the same
time there was a westward movement from North Carolina across the
Great Smoky range, and the defeat of the Regulators by Governor
Tryon at the battle of the Alamance in 1771 no doubt did much to
give strength and volume to this movement. The way was prepared
in 1770 by James Robertson, who penetrated the wilderness as far as
the banks of the Watauga. Forts were soon erected there and on the
Nolichucky. The settlement grew apace, and soon came into conflict
with the most warlike and powerful of the southern tribes of Indians.
The Cherokees, like their kinsmen the Iroquois at the North, had
fought on the English side in the Seven Years’ War, and had rendered
some service, though of small value, at the capture of Fort
Duquesne. Early in the Revolutionary War fierce feuds with the
encroaching settlers led them to take sides with the British, and in
company with Tory guerrillas they ravaged the frontier.
Defeat of
In 1776, the Watauga settlement was attacked, and the
invasions were made into Georgia and South Carolina. Cherokees
But the blow recoiled upon the Cherokees. Their on the
country was laid waste by troops from the Carolinas, Watauga
under Andrew Williamson and Griffith Rutherford; their
attack upon the Watauga settlement was defeated by James
Robertson and John Sevier; and in 1777 they were forced to make
treaties renouncing for the most part their claims upon the territory
between the Tennessee and the Cumberland rivers.

THE COUNTRY BEHIND THE MOUNTAINS, 1770-80.

Robertson and Sevier were the most commanding Its
and picturesque figures in Tennessee history until consequenc
Andrew Jackson came upon the scene; and their es
military successes, moreover, like those of “Old
Hickory,” were of the utmost importance to the whole country. This
was especially true of their victory at the Watauga; for had the
settlement there been swept away by the barbarians, it would have
uncovered the great Wilderness Road to Lexington and Harrodsburg,
and the Kentucky settlement, thus fatally isolated, would very likely
have had to be abandoned. The Watauga victory thus helped to
secure in 1776 the ground won two years before at the Great
Kanawha.[25]
Such were the beginnings of Kentucky and George
Tennessee, and such was the progress already made Rogers Clark
to the west of the mountains, when the next and
longest step was taken by George Rogers Clark. During the years
1776 and 1777, Colonel Henry Hamilton, the British commander at
Detroit, was busily engaged in preparing a general attack of Indian
tribes upon the northwestern frontier. Such concerted action among
these barbarians was difficult to organize, and the moral effect of
Lord Dunmore’s war doubtless served to postpone it. There were
isolated assaults, however, upon Boonesborough and Wheeling and in
the neighbourhood of Pittsburgh. While Hamilton was thus scheming,
a gallant young Virginian was preparing an effective counter-stroke.
In the late autumn of 1777, George Rogers Clark, then just twenty-
five years old, was making his way back from Kentucky along the
Wilderness Road, and heard with exultation the news of Burgoyne’s
surrender. Clark was a man of bold originality. He had been well
educated by that excellent Scotch schoolmaster, Donald Robertson,
among whose pupils was James Madison. In 1772, Clark was
practising the profession of a land surveyor upon the upper Ohio, and
he rendered valuable service as a scout in the campaign of the Great
Kanawha. For skill in woodcraft, as for indomitable perseverance and
courage, he had few equals. He was a man of picturesque and stately
presence, like an old Norse viking, tall and massive, with ruddy
cheeks, auburn hair, and piercing blue eyes sunk deep under thick
yellow brows.
When he heard of the “convention” of Saratoga,
Clark’s
Clark was meditating a stroke as momentous in the conquest of
annals of the Mississippi valley as Burgoyne’s the
overthrow in the annals of the Hudson. He had sent northwester
spies through the Illinois country, without giving them n territory,
any inkling of his purpose, and from what he could 1778
gather from their reports he had made up his mind
that by a bold and sudden movement the whole region could be
secured and the British commander checkmated. On arriving in
Virginia, he laid his scheme before Governor Patrick Henry; and
Jefferson, Wythe, and Madison were also taken into his confidence.
The plan met with warm approval; but as secrecy and dispatch were
indispensable, it would not do to consult the legislature, and little
could be done beyond authorizing the adventurous young man to
raise a force of 350 men and collect material of war at Pittsburgh.
People supposed that his object was merely to defend the Kentucky
settlements. Clark had a hard winter’s work in enlisting men, but at
length, in May, 1778, having collected a flotilla of boats and a few
pieces of light artillery, he started from Pittsburgh with 180 picked
riflemen, and rowed swiftly down the Ohio river a thousand miles to
its junction with the Mississippi. The British garrison at Kaskaskia had
been removed, to strengthen the posts at Detroit and Niagara, and
the town was an easy prey. Hiding his boats in a creek, Clark
marched across the prairie, and seized the place without resistance.
The French inhabitants were not ill-disposed toward the change,
especially when they heard of the new alliance between the United
States and Louis XVI., and Clark showed consummate skill in playing
upon their feelings. Cahokia and two other neighbouring villages
were easily persuaded to submit, and the Catholic priest Gibault
volunteered to carry Clark’s proposals to Vincennes, on the Wabash;
upon receiving the message this important post likewise submitted.
As Clark had secured the friendship of the Spanish commandant at
St. Louis, he felt secure from molestation for the present, and sent a
party home to Virginia with the news of his bloodless conquest. The
territory north of the Ohio was thus annexed to Virginia as the
“county” of Illinois, and a force of 500 men was raised for its
defence.
When these proceedings came to the ears of
Capture of
Colonel Hamilton, at Detroit, he started out with a little Vincennes,
army of about 500 men, regulars, Tories, and Indians, Feb. 23,
and after a march of seventy days through the 1779
primeval forest reached Vincennes, and took
possession of it. He spent the winter intriguing with the Indian tribes,
and threatened the Spanish governor at St. Louis with dire
vengeance if he should lend aid or countenance to the nefarious
proceedings of the American rebels. Meanwhile, the crafty Virginian
was busily at work. Sending a few boats, with light artillery and
provisions, to ascend the Ohio and Wabash, Clark started overland
from Kaskaskia with 130 men; and after an arduous winter march of
sixteen days across the drowned lands in what is now the state of
Illinois, he appeared before Vincennes in time to pick up his boats
and cannon. In the evening of February 23d the town surrendered,
and the townspeople willingly assisted in the assault upon the fort.
After a brisk cannonade and musket-fire for twenty hours, Hamilton
surrendered at discretion, and British authority in this region was
forever at an end. An expedition descending from Pittsburgh in boats
had already captured Natchez and ousted the British from the lower
Mississippi. Shortly after, the Cherokees and other Indians whom
Hamilton had incited to take the war-path were overwhelmed by
Colonel Shelby, and on the upper Ohio and Alleghany the Indian
country was so thoroughly devastated by Colonel Brodhead that all
along the frontier there reigned a profound peace, instead of the
intended carnival of burning and scalping.
The stream of immigration now began to flow
Settlement
steadily. Fort Jefferson was established on the of middle
Mississippi river to guard the mouth of the Ohio. Tennessee
Another fortress, higher up on the beautiful river which
La Salle had discovered and Clark had conquered became the site of
Louisville, so named in honour of our ally, the French king. James
Robertson again appeared on the scene, and became the foremost
pioneer in middle Tennessee, as he had already led the colonization
of the eastern part of that great state. On a bold bluff on the
southern bank of the Cumberland river, Robertson founded a city,
which took its name from the General Nash who fell in the battle of
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