The policies of the United States government regarding Indian nations are based on the Discovery Doctrine which states that Christian nations have a right to rule over non-Christian nations. During the nineteenth century it was assumed that, as a Christian nation, the United States had an obligation to convert Indians to Christianity as a way of “civilizing” them.
In the 1870s, in an attempt to overcome the corruption in the Indian Office (the forerunner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs), President Ulysses Grant instituted his Peace Policy in which the administration of reservation services was turned over to Christian (primarily Protestant) missionary groups. In her Dartmouth College M.A. Thesis Chemawa Indian Boarding School: The First One Hundred Years, 1880-1980, Sonciray Bonnell summarizes Grant’s Peace Policy this way:
“The Peace Policy aimed to place Indians on reservations, provide agency personnel appointed by church boards of various religious organizations, provide churches and schools and authorize the president to appoint a group of philanthropists to a Board of Indian Commissioners whose responsibility was to review and administer Indian policy with the Secretary of the Interior.”
In her chapter in American Indians/American Presidents: A History, historian Donna Akers writes:
“In reality, the policy rested on the belief that Americans had the right to disposses Native people of their lands, take away their freedoms, and send them to reservations, where missionaries would teach them how to farm, read and write, wear Euro-American clothing, and embrace Christianity. If the Indians refused to move to the reservation, they would be forced off their homelands by soldiers.”
While there are some histories which portray Indians joyfully becoming Christians, this was not usually what happened. In response to the intense pressure of the government to abandon their aboriginal religions, particularly their ceremonies, Indians often responded by incorporating some Christian concepts into their own religions. This resulted in blended indigenous/Christian religions, or by segregation in which aboriginal practices went underground and became invisible to non-Indian eyes. In some cases, revitalization movements arose. In his book Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, Peter Silver explains:
“A revitalization movement occurs whenever a charismatic leader uses a divinely revealed system of rituals to channel the dissatisfactions that come with cultural change—and its worrisome half-digestion of new ways—toward a reawakening of traditional ideas and customs.”
Briefly described below are some of the events of 1873 that impacted Indian religions.
Native Religions
Among the Cheyenne, there are two sacred tribal medicine bundles: Sacred Arrows (Maahotse) and Sacred Buffalo Hat (Esevone). In Montana, Coal Bear returned and reminded Broken Dish that the care of the Cheyenne Sacred Buffalo Hat medicine bundle was to be turned over to him upon his return. The soldiers’ societies offered Broken Dish horses and other gifts as an inducement to turn over the sacred bundle. He refused and the soldiers’ societies decided to take the bundle from him and to restore it to Coal Bear, the rightful keeper.
Before the Sacred Buffalo Hat was turned over to the soldiers’ societies, Ho’ko, the wife of Broken Dish, took off one of the horns and concealed it in her dress. Broken Dish and Ho’ko then snuck off to live in exile among the Sioux.
Sometime later, when the bundle was opened ceremonially, the loss of the horn was discovered. When the Sutai prophet Erect Horns had given the Sacred Buffalo Hat to the people, he had warned them that they must never injure the hat in any way. With the removal of the horn, the people knew that bad things were going to happen.
In South Dakota, Big Missouri’s Winter Count records that Standing Cloud became the keeper of the sacred Sioux white buffalo robe.
In Washington, the Sanpoil prophet Kolaskin predicted that a major disaster was going to happen. On November 12, a major earthquake struck. In her book A Necessary Balance: Gender and Power Among Indians of the Columbia Plateau, anthropologist Lillian Ackerman reports:
“This event enhanced his reputation and increased the number of his followers, including the protestant Indians on the Spokane Indian Reservation.”
Protestant Missionaries
The United States government built a church for the Presbyterian mission at Kamiah, Idaho on the Nez Perce reservation.
In Idaho, the Shoshone and Bannock of the Fort Hall Reservation were assigned to the Methodist Church. The new Indian agent preached sermons to the Indians, but one army officer charged that the agent was not promoting material progress on the reservation.
In Oregon, the operation of the Siletz Reservation was turned over to the Methodist Church. (see Indians 101: The Methodists run the Siletz Indian Reservation).
In California, Presbyterian missionaries began working among the Hoopa. In an article in American Indian Quarterly, anthropologist Thomas Buckley reports:
“Conversions were few, however, and seem to have been restricted to mixed-blood Indians who were, at that time, marginal to both Indian and non-Indian societies and thus had little to lose in moving even farther from the moral center of elite Native society.”
Mormon Missionaries
Mormon missionaries under the leadership of George Washington Hill travelled to southern Idaho where they baptized about 100 Shoshone and Bannock. In an article in Idaho Yesterdays, Lawrence Coates writes:
“Relying upon his previous experiences with the Shoshoni, Hill used his ability to speak their language to tell them of the Book of Mormon, depicting its story by placing pictures on a scroll.”
The Indians were then settled on farmland near Brigham City, Utah. The Indians named the community Washakie, after a Shoshone Chief.
In northern Utah, a Mormon missionary, who had been “called privately”, baptized more than 100 Shoshone.
Catholic Missions
Under Grant’s Peace Policy, many reservations allowed only one Christian sect: all others were barred from proselytizing on the reservation. Since most of the reservations were given to Protestant groups, even when there had been Catholic missionaries working on the reservation for generations, the Catholic priests were removed from the reservation.
The Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions had been given permission by the Indian Office to construct churches on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho and on the Yakama reservation in Washington. Under President Grant’s Peace Policy, the Nez Perce had been given to the Presbyterians and the Yakama to the Methodists. The response of the Methodist Indian agent for the Yakama to the proposed Catholic intrusion is that the Protestant churches:
“…were to have entire jurisdiction without the interference of other denominations, most of all without the interference of the Catholic priesthood.”
More nineteenth century American Indian histories
Indians 101: American Indians and religion 200 years ago, 1823
Indians 101: American Indian religions 150 years ago, 1870
Indians 101: Southwestern Indian Reservations 150 years ago, 1873
Indians 101: Indian reservations 150 years ago, 1873
Indians 101: Visiting Washington, D.C. 150 years ago, 1873
Indians 101: Heathens on the Nez Perce Reservation
Indians 101: America's Christian General confronts the Nez Perce
Indians 201: The Pueblos and the United States, 1846 to 1876