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Reviews
Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 1700–1850
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By Larry Cebula
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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2003. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 203 pages. $49.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Andrew H. Fisher
College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
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| In 1985, historian Christopher Miller published Prophetic Worlds, a provocative reassessment of early Indian-white relations on the Columbia Plateau. Focusing on the encounter between Protestant missionaries and Native peoples in the mid–nineteenth century, Miller argued that spiritual beliefs and cultural perceptions played a greater role than material concerns in shaping initial group interactions. His thesis stirred intense debate within the field of ethnohistory — pitting the idealist-cultural relativist model of human behavior against the older rationalist-materialist interpretation — and the controversy has yet to subside. Larry Cebula joins the discussion with Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 1700–1850. Although he differs with Miller over certain details, Cebula also sees religion as the guiding force behind Native American responses to European contact. "To the natives of the Columbia Plateau," he contends, "the arrival of whites was primarily a spiritual event" (p. 3). His study, like Prophetic Worlds, traces the Indians' spiritual journey from fascination with Christianity in the late 1700s to disillusionment and rejection by the 1840s. |
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The journey unfolds in five chronological chapters. In the first, Cebula outlines precontact Plateau culture and describes the aboriginal belief system as "a complex cosmology oriented toward acquiring and using spirit power" (p. 11). The initial shocks to this system form the subject of chapter 2. In the mid–eighteenth century, Plateau societies began to change in response to the advent of European horses, trade goods, and diseases. Imported pathogens, in particular, shook Indian religious beliefs and challenged the status of traditional shamans. As stories about the whites spread across the region, a revival movement known as the Prophet Dance developed "to integrate this disturbing new knowledge into the existing Plateau cosmology, while at the same time revitalizing the connection with the spirit world so that Plateau natives would be able to survive in their new world" (p. 49). |
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The Prophet Dance laid the foundation for a distinctive Columbian Religion, which Cebula examines in chapters 3 and 4. Formed amid the tumults of the fur-trade era, this syncretic faith mingled aboriginal traditions with Christian concepts gleaned from the newcomers. Indians valued this spiritual knowledge more than the material benefits of trade, Cebula argues, and they used trading outposts primarily as windows into white society. By the mid-1820s, their desire to obtain European spirit power had produced increasing demands for formal religious instruction. These appeals caught the attention of the American evangelical community and led to the establishment of both Protestant and Catholic missions during the 1830s. As Cebula notes in chapter 5, though, much of Christian doctrine proved either incomprehensible or incompatible with Indian culture. When missionaries failed to provide trade goods and prevent diseases, Native people began to suspect that they possessed only the power to harm. By 1847, when the Whitman killings forced most missions to close, Plateau Indians had largely rejected Christianity. |
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Cebula passes on the opportunity to extend his analysis into the reservation period — a time of significant missionary activity — and readers familiar with Prophetic Worlds will find few surprises in his narrative. He tells the story well, however, and adds some important insights of his own. In addition to incorporating material on the Jesuits, he challenges the idea (introduced by anthropologist Leslie Spier and accepted by Miller) that Plateau Indians perceived the first Europeans as supernatural beings. On the contrary, Cebula reveals, Native people had extensive intelligence concerning the arrival of whites and regarded them "not as spirits or messengers from the spirit world, but as men like themselves, though important and powerful" (p. 50). Thus, he injects a measure of rationality into the extreme ideological position taken by Miller while also anticipating some of Colin Calloway's recent work in One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (2003). Plateau society had changed substantially by 1805, and the people who greeted the explorers "knew far more about Europeans than any European knew of them" (p. 44). |
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Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power will not settle the debate between idealist and materialist views of Native behavior. It is an accessible contribution to the literature, though, and it would make a useful supplemental text in courses on Northwest, Native American, and religious history. |
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