The Shaker Church and the Indian Way in Native Northwestern California

Abstract

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