| Steven Charleston is a member of the Choctaw Nation and an Episcopal clergyman, theologian, and activist who has championed justice for Indigenous peoples as they confront the legacy of settler colonialism. In We Survived the End of the World, he provides a spiritual guide, a call to action, and a vision of enduring hope for all people beset by an unfolding environmental apocalypse and the societal apocalypse of racism, religious intolerance, misogyny, and economic inequality. Charleston recounts how Native peoples have experienced invasion, virgin soil epidemics, population collapse, forced removal, dispossession, and confinement on reservations. After the Civil War and throughout much of the twentieth century, Native children were taken from their communities and placed in boarding schools as an experiment in enforced acculturation, Christian conversion, and the suppression of Native languages, lifeways, and religious practices. How, then, did Native groups survive the relentless dynamic of settler colonialism? Charleston argues that Native prophets emerged with visions of revitalization, rebirth, and, for some, pan-Indian "spirited resistance."[1] He devotes most of this book to chapter-length discussions of four prophets: Ganiodaiio (Handsome Lake, Seneca), Tenskwatawa (Shawnee), Smohalla (Wanapams), and Wovoka (Paiute). He identifies teachings from each prophet, seeking lessons from their respective prophesies as we confront contemporary predicaments. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Senecas, known as Keepers of the Western Door, one of the six tribes of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were a colonized people--defeated during the Revolutionary War, they ceded 95 percent of their ancestral lands in various federal and state treaties. Accounts of life in Seneca villages reveal internecine violence, poverty, alcoholism, and despair. Handsome Lake (1735--1815), himself an alcoholic seemingly on a path to self-destruction, experienced a series of near-death experiences, trances, and vision quests, promulgating the Code of Handsome Lake. His followers revitalized Seneca lifeways and spiritual practices, reviving the sacred calendar of festivals and reaffirming the collective obligations to kin, clan, and village associations while balancing individual responsibilities. Handsome Lake enjoined believers to seek the good path and avoid sin and intemperance, prohibiting the practice of infanticide and the targeting of witches in response to personal or collective misfortune. The Code of Handsome Lake borrowed from Christian concepts of salvation, believers' ethical obligations to their Creator, and Quaker pacifism. This confluence promoted a hybrid religiosity that revived the communal orientation of traditional lifeways, tying it together with an ethical code and an individualist orientation that assisted Senecas in adjusting to the new realities of reservation life and the market economy. Tenskwatawa, (1775--1836), a contemporary of Handsome Lake who was also an alcoholic and broken man, suffered a near-death experience and spiritual vision in which the Master of Life provided depictions of alternative roads to either Paradise or Hell. Reborn as an ethical prophet--"the Open Door"--Tenskwatawa instructed the Shawnees in the doctrine of polygenesis, proclaiming that a malevolent spirit created white people separate from the goodness of Native origins. He thus instructed Native people to live separately from white people; reject their clothing, technology, food, and agriculture; and return to traditional lifeways. This prophecy addressed the Native predicament of American expansion west of the Appalachian Mountains into the Northwest Territories, which dispossessed tribes and introduced the government's civilization plan and factory system with the hope of transforming Natives into Christian farmers confined to reservations. Meanwhile, William Henry Harrison, then the territorial governor of Indiana, enforced the 1803 Treaty of Fort Wayne, which acquired most of Indiana, confined tribes to reservations, and established the paternalism of annuity chiefdoms. After Tenskwatawa converted his brother Tecumseh, they spread his message together from the Midwestern tribes (Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa) west to the Ojibwe and Dakota and south to the Cherokee or other Civilized Tribes. Tenskwatawa founded Prophetstown in 1808, a pan-Indian community of converts situated north of present-day Lafayette, Indiana. Unlike Handsome Lake's pacifism, Tecumseh used the prophet's teachings to create a multitribal military alliance, joining the British in the War of 1812 in an unsuccessful campaign to drive the Americans out of Indian country. Harrison burned down Prophetstown in 1811 and later defeated Tecumseh. However, Tenskwatawa's enduring message for contemporaries, according to Charleston, is the possibility of fostering a new community universally open to all believers committed to a life of mutual respect and unity. Smohalla, the Dreamer (1815--95), belonged to the Wanapams who resided in the Pacific Northwest along the Columbia River Plateau. As a warrior-prophet, he battled white expansion in the Yakima War (1855--56) and rejected the civilization plan, which included conversion to Christianity, residential schools, settled agriculture, and confinement on reservations. He revitalized Washani dance and ritual. According to Charleston, Smohalla introduced a Native covenant theology with the Creator and Mother Earth, seeking to live in harmony with nature. The author himself experienced a vision of this, drawing upon Smohalla's inspiration and enunciating a "Genesis Covenant" with the Creator and Mother Earth to cut greenhouse emissions and stop an environmental apocalypse. Wovoka (1865--1932) worked as a young man for a local Nevada rancher and adopted the name Jack Wilson. At age thirty, he journeyed to heaven through a vision in which God instructed him to return and teach his people to love one another and live in peace with white people. Wovoka introduced the Ghost Dance, which enjoined believers to fast and purify themselves in a sweat lodge, dress in traditional clothing, and paint their bodies in red clay. He prophesized that dead ancestors would return (collective parthenogenesis) and that the buffalo would emerge from their refuge under the earth, auguring a time of restored Native communities and prosperity. Thirty-five Plains Indian tribes embraced the Ghost Dance, including the Cheyennes and the Lakotas, providing the impetus for a pan-Indian spirited resistance that adopted a magical ghost shirt, which was believed to render the wearer impervious to bullets. White resistance to this movement culminated in the Massacre at Wounded Knee, where the 7th Calvary, fearing what settlers termed "the Messiah War," murdered nearly three hundred unarmed women and children on December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Charleston argues that Wovoka's legacy enjoins us to seek truth and reconciliation, whereby through forgiveness, Native and non-Native people can live in peace. In the final chapter, subtitled "We Are the Axis Point of the Apocalypse," Charleston exhorts readers to awaken as agents of change to prophetic visions and revelations guided by the four prophets he examines. He hopes that people will create new communities for collective action, form symbiotic and loving relationships with Mother Earth, and overcome the divisions of class, power, race, gender, and religion. As he urges, we must start dancing and chanting as in past revitalization movements and find, through truthful remembrance, reconciliation between the colonizer and the colonized. This awakening will address the unfolding environmental and societal apocalypse. Charleston repeatedly reminds readers that he is writing a spiritual guide, offering spiritual direction; this book is not a scholarly ethnohistory. His writing is accessible in order to reach a wide audience, providing only a few secondary sources for each chapter with no footnotes, bibliography, or index. This work is a continuation of the author's previous religious guides: Cloud Walking: A Spiritual Diary (2015), The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015), Sanctuary of the Spirit (2017), Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope (2021), and Spirit Wheel: Meditations from an Indigenous Elder (2023). In a 2015 essay, "Theory--Articulating a Native American Theological Theory," the author conflates what he terms "Native theory"--Native beliefs in a Creator, origin myths, and sacred relations with lands and animals--with the development of monotheism, the covenant between God and His chosen people, and the ethical obligations of believers to a creator deity, which first emerged in ancient Judaism. However, Indigenous religion was not a world religion and did not include what Max Weber considered the breakthrough to religious rationalization of the world credited to ancient Judaism. Charleston's essay foreshadows the argument he advances in We Survived the End of the World, as he mistakenly concludes: Native theory is a form of Christian theology growing from the fertile soil of the original Native covenant. My own experience of sitting in a classroom many years ago, feeling that I had heard this sacred story before, come full circle as I celebrate how the Native theory reveals new dimensions of classic Christian thought.[2] Native spiritual practices before "the invasion within" of Christian missionization in seventeenth-century North America involved the reciprocal relations of magic and ritual between human beings, mediated by shamans, with other-than-human persons intended to bring health, good fortune, and prosperity to the people.[3] Native religiosity was transformed into a syncretic-hybrid mix of Christian theology, theodicy, and eschatology with traditional Indigenous sacro-magical elements of ritual, vision quest, chant, and dance. Thus, the respective prophecies of Handsome Lake, Tenskwatawa, Smohalla, and Wovoka blended parts of the Christian narrative with Native religious practices to revitalize their communities in times of existential crisis by utilizing the Judaic-Christian tradition of the Jeremiad, or prophet of doom. This nuanced understanding of religious syncretism and Native appropriation of prophecy is absent from the author's work. Nevertheless, Charleston's writings deserve a wide audience for those who seek spiritual direction, namely, "comfort, truth, and challenge in a time of anguish and fear."[4] This book, however, is not meant for scholars of American history and religion or Native American studies. Notes 1. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745--1815. Johns Hopkins University, 1992. 2. Steven Charleston, "Theory--Articulating a Native American Theological Theory," in Coming Full Circle: Constructing Native Christian Theology, ed. by Steven Charleston and Elaine A. Robinson, Fortress Press, 2015, p. 25. 3. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford, 1985. 4. Steven Charleston, Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope, Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021, back cover. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and professionals. --Julius H. Rubin, emeritus, University of Saint Joseph |
