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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2022
This essay explores the human stakes of theorizing religion in the early nineteenth century, on the borderlands of an expanding U.S. empire. It does so through the lens of a single text, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians. Published in 1830, the Narrative offers an entrée into the circulation of knowledge and debates about religion among Native Americans and white settlers in a time and place from which we have little record of such debates. Tanner joined in the Midewiwin of the Ojibwe and cultivated the Anishinaabe practice of medicine hunting; held back his own skepticism, perhaps retrospectively exaggerated, at the messages of those he called “Indian prophets”; and discussed the differences, solidified in the telling, between white and Indigenous religions. His editor, Edwin James, meanwhile, drew on comparative scholarship about mythology and religion around the world to defend his own preferred theories about the religious and racial character of Indigenous peoples. Religion has long been theorized far beyond the academy and the centers of empire. Relatively unfamiliar accounts, like Tanner's, reveal how everyday people have engaged with these theories and the consequences of these theories on the ground. Tanner's Narrative, in short, usefully illuminates the webs of knowledge about religion in early America and its human stakes for people caught in the crosshairs of a transforming imperial world.
For helpful comments on this article, I am grateful to Ed Countryman, Andrew Fisher, Zareena Grewal, Eric Hemenway, Farina King, Kathryn Lofton, Samira Mehta, Douglas Miller, Colleen O'Neill, Sally Promey, Nicole Myers Turner, and the anonymous readers for Religion and American Culture. Special thanks to Eric Hemenway, historian and archivist for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, for his generous hospitality in and around Harbor Springs and an invaluable conversation about Tanner.
1 Zhaazhaawanibiisens's family were Odawa and Ojibwe, two nations within the larger Anishinaabe family. I use the name Tanner when discussing the author's perspective in the Narrative and his life after he left his Anishinaabe family in 1819, and Zhaazhaawanibiisens when discussing his life and views during the thirty years he went by that name. Tanner spelled his Anishinaabe name “Shaw-shaw-wane-base.” On this and other names in the text I follow the orthography of Fierst, John T., “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences’: Scholarly Editing and the Organization of Time in John Tanner's Narrative,” Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 33 (2012)Google Scholar.
2 [2] John Tanner, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America, ed. Edwin James (London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1830), 178–79.
3 Louise Erdrich, “Introduction,” in John Tanner and Louise Erdrich, The Falcon: A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (New York: Penguin, 2000); Witgen, Michael J., An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 My account of Tanner's life follows Fierst, “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences.’” See also Witgen, Michael John, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 97–149Google Scholar.
5 Bottiger, Patrick, The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hyde, Anne Farrar, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
6 Dowd, Gregory Evans, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Andy Doolen, “Autobiography across Borders: Reading John Dunn Hunter's Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen,” in Inventing Destiny: Cultural Explorations of US Expansion, ed. Jimmy L. Bryan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019).
7 Sayre, Gordon M., “Abridging between Two Worlds: John Tanner as American Indian Autobiographer,” American Literary History 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 480–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hawk, Black, Life of Black Hawk, Ma-Ka-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1916)Google Scholar; Black Elk and John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks; Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Ogalala Sioux (New York: W. Morrow, 1932).
8 Fierst, “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences.’”
9 One exception is Christopher Vecsey, who long ago noted the value of the Narrative for understanding Ojibwe religious life. See Vecsey, Christopher, Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983)Google Scholar.
10 Weisenfeld, Judith, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: NYU Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
11 Among the relevant works in Native American religious history are Anderson, Emma, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Anderson, Emma, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisher, Linford D., The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); McNally, Michael D., Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)Google Scholar. McNally, Michael David, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Pesantubbee, Michelene E., Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Wenger, Tisa, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wenger, Tisa, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wheeler, Rachel M, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. All these works offer insightful analysis of Indigenous religious movements in early America; few ask explicitly how Native Americans theorized religion or how ideas about religion circulated on the ground.
12 Ogden, Emily, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism, Class 200: New Studies In Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Enlightenment skepticism, see also Taves, Ann, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. On the racial and colonial politics of possession, see Paul C. Johnson, ed., Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). Conversations with former Yale Divinity School student Nicole Carroll, and her 2021 master's thesis, “The Mark of Cain: Possession, Racialized Secularism, and the Haunting of Austin Reed,” helped me clarify these points.
13 Masuzawa, Tomoko, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Chidester, David, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996)Google Scholar; Chidester, David, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Tanner, A Narrative, 25–37, 40–41, 46, 167. On Tanner in the fur trade, see Theodore Catton, Rainy Lake House: Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
16 Tanner, A Narrative, 41–45.
17 Ibid., 45–46.
18 Peter Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2013); Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of “Religion” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 188; Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come after: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 41.
19 Tanner, A Narrative, 43–46, 6.
20 Ibid., 51–54.
21 I am thinking here of Native visionary leaders including Tenskwatawa, known as the “Shawnee Prophet,” who banned the use of alcohol among his followers; and of Naadinokwa's relative, the Odawa headman Assiginac of Waganakising (L'Arbre Croche). See R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Dowd, A Spirited Resistance; Cecil O. King, Balancing Two Worlds: Jean-Baptiste Assiginack and the Odawa Nation, 1768–1866 (Saskatoon: Dr. Cecil King, 2013).
22 Tanner, A Narrative, 163–67, 172.
23 Ibid., 116–18; F. J. Bonduel, Baptismal Record for Martha Tanner, June 7, 1836, Edward Jacker Papers, 1823–1887, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library (hereafter, DPL).
24 Tanner, A Narrative, 108–109, 137.
25 Ibid., 135.
26 Ibid., 187, 209.
27 Graber, Jennifer, “Beyond Prophecy: Native Visionaries in American Religious Studies—Más Allá de La Profecía: Los Visionarios Nativos En Los Estudios de La Religión Americanos,” American Religion 2, no. 1 (2020): 41–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.2979/amerreli.2.1.09.
28 Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance; Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, The Penguin Library of American Indian History (New York: Viking, 2007); Adam Joseph Jortner, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Bottiger, The Borderland of Fear.
29 Tanner, A Narrative, 152–56. On Anishinaabeg in Upper Canada who allied with Tenskwatawa and later joined the Methodist movement, see Stoehr, “Neolin, Tenskwatawa, and the Anishinabeg Methodist Movement,” in Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands, Karl S. Hele (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008).
30 Tanner, A Narrative, 156; Warren, History of the Ojibwe Nation, 324.
31 Tanner, A Narrative, 156–57.
32 Ibid., 156.
33 “Tecumseh and the Prophet's Visit to the Sauks, 1810,” n.d., Draper Manuscript Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, MSS YY (Tecumseh Papers), vol. 1, pp. 31–32; Microfilm edition, reel 118.
34 Theodore J. Karamanski, Blackbird's Song: Andrew J. Blackbird and the Odawa People (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 16–17; Kininitigagan and Blackbird, “Extract from the Speech of the Ottawa Nation of Indians Delivered to the Secretary of War by their Delegation,” October 5, 1811, War Department and Indian Affairs, 1800–1824, United States National Archives (USNA), Gale Archives Unbound; Tanner, A Narrative, 91, 135.
35 Catton, Rainy Lake House; Susan Sleeper-Smith, ed., Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
36 Tanner, A Narrative, 181–86, 216. On the complex Anishinaabeg and Métis society of Red River, and the conflict between trading companies, see Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
37 Tanner, A Narrative, 186–88.
38 Ibid, 186–88; “Tecumseh and the Prophet's Visit to the Sauks, 1810,” Draper Manuscript Collection, Reel 118, MSS YY (Tecumseh Papers), vol. 1, pp. 31–32.
39 Tanner, A Narrative, 171–72; King, Balancing Two Worlds.
40 King, Balancing Two Worlds; Robert P. Swierenga and William Van Appledorn, eds., Old Wing Mission: Cultural Interchange as Chronicled by George and Arvilla Smith in Their Work with Chief Wakazoo's Ottawa Band on the West Michigan Frontier, The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America in Cooperation with the Van Raalte Institute, no. 58 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008).
41 Tanner, A Narrative, 194–98.
42 Ibid., 197–99; Graber, “Beyond Prophecy,” 91. I am grateful to Sally Promey for pointing out the similarity of Aiskawbawis's drawing to widely circulating white Protestant imagery at the time.
43 Tanner, A Narrative, 200–12.
44 Ibid., 231, 233, 235–37.
45 Ibid., 227, 238–41.
46 Ibid., 245–48.
47 Ibid., 250–53.
48 Ibid., 253–55.
49 Ibid., 256–66, quote on p. 261.
50 Ibid., 266–81; Catton, Rainy Lake House, 279–320.
51 John T. Fierst, “John Tanner's Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie,” Minnesota History, Spring 1986, 23–36.
52 On the métis culture of Sault Ste. Marie, see Alan Knight and Janet Chute, “In the Shadow of the Thumping Drum: The Sault Métis—the People In-Between,” in Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands, ed. Karl S. Hele (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 85–113; and Witgen, Seeing Red, 104.
53 Edwin James, Kekitchemanitomenahn Gahbemahjeinnunk Jesus Christ, Otoashke Wawweendummahgawin (Albany: Packard and Van Benthuysen, printers, 1833).
54 Tanner, A Narrative, 280–81; Abel Bingham to Lucius Bolles, August 3, 1831, Church History Documents Collection (hereafter, CHDC), Box 1, f.2, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; Bingham to Bolles, October 1, 1831, CHDC, Box 1, f.2; Jotham Meeker, Journal, December 1832, Jotham Meeker Papers, Ms. Coll. 439, Manuscript Division, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka; Bingham to Bolles, December 1832, CHDC, Box 1, f.2.
55 I am grateful to Nicole Turner, my colleague in Religious Studies at Yale, for this insight.
56 Tanner, A Narrative, 261; Edwin James et al., Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains: Performed in the Years 1819 and 1820; by Order of the Hon. J. C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, under the Command of Maj. S. H. Long, of the U.S. Top. Engineers (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823).
57 Edwin James, “Introductory Chapter,” pp. 5–6, in Tanner, A Narrative. On the myth of disenchantment as the defining characteristic of European modernity, see Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
58 James, Introduction to Tanner, A Narrative, 6.
59 Michael C. Coleman, Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes toward American Indians, 1837–1893 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985); Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).
60 Tanner, A Narrative, 6–8, 13. All italics here are from the original.
61 Ibid., 18, 21. Schoolcraft's judgment on James's credulity can be found in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co, 1851), 601, also cited in Fierst, “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences,’” 3. On U.S. Indian policy as genocide, see Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). On the involvement of Christian missions, see George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993); and Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
62 Tanner, A Narrative, 285.
63 Theresa M. Schenck, “The Algonquian Totem and Totemism: A Distortion of the Semantic Field,” Algonquian Papers—Archive 28 (December 1, 1997), https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/ALGQP/article/view/515; Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (London: The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2020).
64 James specifically cites Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels through the Northwestern Regions of the United States: Extending from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River, Performed as a Member of the Expedition under Governor Cass in the Year 1820 (Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1821); and Thomas Loraine McKenney et al., Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes: Of the Character and Customs of the Chippeway Indians, and of Incidents Connected with the Treaty of Fond Du Lac (Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jun'r, 1827).
65 Tanner, A Narrative, 289, 357.
66 Ibid., 334–35. On the quest for origins in the study of religion, see Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
67 Tanner, A Narrative, 335–36. On the debate over potential Hebrew origins, see Elizabeth Fenton, Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel (New York: NYU Press, 2020); and Matthew W. Dougherty, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021).
68 Tanner, A Narrative, 351–52.
69 Chidester, Savage Systems; Chidester, Empire of Religion; Dees, Sarah, “An Equation of Language and Spirit: Comparative Philology and the Study of American Indian Religions,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27, no. 3 (2015): 195–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341338.
70 Tanner, A Narrative, 352; Asiatic Society of Bengal, Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, Printed Verbatim from the Calcutta Edition, vol. 1 (London: Printed for J. Sewell; Vernor and Hood; J. Cuthell; J. Walker; R. Lea Lackington, Allen, and Co.; Otridge and Son; R. Faulder; and J. Scatcherd, 1799), 221, 234; Robert Lawrence Gunn, Ethnology and Empire (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 26–27; Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions.
71 Tanner, A Narrative, 418–26.
72 Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs, 316, 343, 601.
73 Abel Bingham to Lucius Bolles, October 1, 1831, CHDC, Box 1, f.2; Bingham to Bolles, November 9, 1832, CHDC, Box 1, f.2.
74 Fierst, “John Tanner's Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie.”
75 “[Review of] A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner . . . during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America,” American Quarterly Review, 1830, Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. Fierst, “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences,’” lists the multiple published editions of the Narrative.
76 Fierst, “John Tanner's Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie”; Abel Bingham to S. Peck, July 31, 1846, CHDC, Box 1, f. 5; George Johnston, “Evidence as to Death of James L. Schoolcraft,” September 6, 1848, George Johnston Papers, 1813–1862, Box 5, f.4, DPL; Catton, Rainy Lake House, 327–29.
77 Drake, Benjamin, Life of Tecumseh and of His Brother the Prophet: With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians (Cincinnati: H.S. & J. Applegate & Co, 1852), 88, 103–104Google Scholar; Edward Eggleston, Tecumseh and the Shawnee Prophet: Including Sketches of George Rogers Clark, Simon Kenton, William Henry Harrison, Cornstalk, Blackhoof, Bluejacket, the Shawnee Logan, and Others Famous in the Frontier Wars of Tecumsehs̕ Time, Famous American Indians (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co, 1878), 140, 150.
78 Tanner and Erdrich, The Falcon, xv.
79 McClurken, James M., Gah-Baeh-Jhagwah-Buk: The Way It Happened: A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa (East Lansing: Michigan State University Museum, 1991), 18–25Google Scholar; McClurken, James M., Our People, Our Journey: The Little River Band of Ottawa Indians (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 23–25Google Scholar.
80 McClurken, Our People, Our Journey, 38; Swierenga and Van Appledorn, Old Wing Mission; McClurken, Gah-Baeh-Jhagwah-Buk, 25–27; Penner, Robert, “The Ojibwe Renaissance: Transnational Evangelicalism and the Making of an Algonquian Intelligentsia, 1812–1867,” American Review of Canadian Studies 45, no. 1 (March 2015): 71–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2015.1013264; Tolly Bradford, Prophetic Identities: Indigenous Missionaries on British Colonial Frontiers, 1850–75 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012).
81 F. J. Bonduel, Baptismal Record for Martha Tanner, June 7, 1836, Jacker Papers, DPL; Martha Tanner to Bishop Lefevre, November 16, 1843, Bishop Peter Paul Lefevre Collection, Box 1, f.20, Archdiocese of Detroit Archives, St. Mary's Seminary, Detroit, Michigan; Martha Tanner to Edward Jacker, January 31, 1876, Jacker Papers, DPL; Karamanski, Blackbird's Song, 54–55.
82 See for example Treat, James, Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; McNally, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion; Lewis, Bonnie Sue, Creating Christian Indians: Native Clergy in the Presbyterian Church (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Martin and Nicholas, Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape; Penner, “The Ojibwe Renaissance.”
83 Personal conversation with Eric Hemenway, May 24, 2021, Harbor Springs, Michigan; see also McClurken, Gah-Baeh-Jhagwah-Buk, 23–25.