shamanism and christianity sergei kan

8/6/2019 Shamanism and Christianity Sergei Kan

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Shamanism and Christianity:M od em -D ay Tl ingi t Elders Look at the PastSergei Kan, Dartmouth College

Abstract. Shamanism , a key element of the precontact T lingit culture, was seen byChrisrian missionaries as one of the w on t m anifestations of paganism. A relentlesscam paign waged against d ie sham ans by the m issionaries, w ith the help of m ili-tary and civil authorities, succeeded: by the f ina ldecades of the nineteenth century,the T ling it had converted to Christianity, and by the 1930s m ost of the shamanshad disappeared. In their effort to reconci leChristianity and the "traditional cul-ture," modern-day TKngit elden construct various interpretations of sham anism.The article examines these accounts as indigenous history and as ideological state-ments that challenge the notion of the inferiority of the aboriginal T ling it religionto C hristianity.Alm ost tw o d ecades ag o Fogelson (1974:106) criticized Am erican eth no -historians for n ot paying en ough attention to ''the native interpretationsof crirical events and significant historical personag es." He contrasted o urown Westem notion of ""objective" "ethnohistory" with that of indige-nous history, which he called "'ethno-ethnohistory" (ibid.). Even thoughfew eth noh istorians today w ould quarrel w ith Fogelson's position, studiesthat focus o n th e Native North Am ericans' ow n view s and interpretationsof the past remain rare, w ith m uch of our research stil l concem ed exclu-sively w ith ""what really happened." In the last few years, how ever, severalinnovative works on specific North American Indian modes of histori-cal consciousness have finallyappeared, notably Harkin's (1988a) elegantan alysis o f Hd ltsuk narratives of their an cestors' f irst encounter w itb th eEuropeans an d Brightm an's (1990) fascinating paper on the M anitoba Cree


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sciousness (cf. Fogelson 1989:139-40) and a serious effort to rethink thepast in light of more recent experiences. They also demonstrate that thepast can be used to make sense of the present, to justify and explain the cur-rent predicament of the indigenous people of North America.^ Finally,they reveal that this changing historical discourse has developed in thecontext of a dialogue with Euro-American ideologies. In faa the "dialogi-cal" nature of many of the postcontact Native American oral traditionsmakes them particularly complex and interesting for ethnohistorians (cf.Harkin 1988a: io z ; see also Harkin 1988b). They are, after all, attempts bythe colonized people to defend their past against various efforts by Euro-Americans to impose their own, often critical, interpretations on Indianhistory. To complicate matters even further, some of the key elements ofWestern ideology, such as Christianity, have been accepted by many N ativeAmericans, so that they now often use Christian concepts to reinterprettheir own past. However, while accepting Christianity, they often rejectthe standard missionary view of traditional Indian religions as "primitive"and ''pagan."In this article I examine one attempt by the elders in a modem-dayNative American society to rethink its pre-Christian religion by affirmingits validity while acknowledging the greater wisdom and power of Chris-tianity. In the course of my intermittent work with informants from Sitka,Angoon, Kake, and a number of other mostly northern Tlingit commu-nities from 1979 to 1987, I collected several narratives and heard manystatements about the nineteenth-century shamans and their responses toChristianity. These comments ranged from occasional negative character-izations of shamans as "witch doctors" to some very strong endorsementsof these religious practitioners as healers, wise men, and prophets. M anycomments fell between the two extremes and exhibited some ambiguousfeelings about an aspect of indigenous Tlingit culture that once drew heavyfre from missionaries and other zealous agents of Westernization. In 1979-80, when I first heard these stories, 1 did not pay much attention to them ,dismissing them as a recent invention, a rhetorical "use of the past" forideological purposes by elderly Christian Tlingit.A more careful look at this ethnographic material has shown thatthis case is more complex. First, some of the narratives about the shamans


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poration of Christ ian ritual acts and objects into indigenous ceremonialactivit ies often preceded intense f irsthand contacts with Europeans andconversion to Christianity. Finally, these stories were not simply createdfor nonn ad ve con sum ption but played (and continue to play) an importantrole in m y elderly informan ts' ovwi wo rldview. A t the sam e t ime , they arebeing pa ssed o n to subsequent generations of Tlingit as agreed-upon tribalhistory and will u ndoubtedly becom e that in the future. T hu s, contem po -rary Tlingit narratives and com m ents abou t shamans are valuable sourcesof two kinds of information: the more factual history of the nilcentury sha m ans' response to Christ ianity and the continuou sly -yourhands are too short and it slips away." As the narrator explained: "Thiswas the sham an's way of saying that the m an's soul was pure and that h epossessed a higher power. The sham an also said that the m issionary wasbringing them the good news and the beginn ing of a new life. He cam e withlove a nd n ot h ate and he was telling them the truth. After tha t th e villageaccepted C hr istianity. This story dem onstrates the power of the Lord."InterpretationWha t d o th ese narratives tell us about the fate of the Tlin git sham ans inthe postconta ct period and about the m odern-day Tlingit elders* interpre-tation of shamanism? To begin with , it appears th at at least som e of th esestor ies, like the ones about the events in Tebenkof Bay or the confrontationben veen an uct' and a m issionary in Hoonah, are n ot recent inventions butaccounts (however modified) of actual events that took place after con ta ct.Thus,forexam ple, the story about an Angoon ixt' wh o acquired a power-ful spirit from a Russian was told to m e by an elderly m an wh o claim ed tohave teamed it in his younger days . The nineteenth-century origin of thisstory, or at least of this type of story , is confirmed by Swanton ( 1908:465 ),wh o was told in Sitka in 1904 that in the Angoon area there was a sham anwh o claim ed to h ave acquired h is power from "a big Russian."If such narratives refer to the actual events that took place in the


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linked to the possession of spiritual power, the shamans must have con-cluded that the white man had a lot of it (Kan 1985; cf. Harkin 1988a,1988b). This idea must have been reinforced by the whites' invincibilityto epidemic diseases and their possession of antidotes to them. The factthat the m issionaries were involved in administering vaccines undoubtedlycontributed to the clergy's high stature in the eyes of the Tlingit religiousspecialists and laypersons (cf. Veniaminov 1984 [1840]: 434).

However, instead of surrendering to this new power, nineteenth-century shamans tried to harness it for their own purposes, borrow-ing magical objects, substances, and formulas from their Euro-Americanrivals. To do so they did not even have to have a face-to-face encounterwith a priest but could rely on stories about the mysterious rites con-ducted in Sitka, stories that had undoubtedly circulated throughout Tlingitcountry since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is quite possiblethat these borrowings appeared to the shamans' tribesmen as independentinventions.The idea that the shamans could predict the coming of the "Peoplefrom under the Clouds" made perfect sense in light of the indigenousTlingit worldview. The shamans, the only persons capable of travelingthrough time and space, ha d to predict this important event. In fact, it isquite conceivable that a shaman from a village that had not yet experi-enced white contact would be foretelling the arrival of the Europeans onthe basis of the rumors rapidly spreading throughout the N orthwest Coast.All this suggests that my own informants and other twentieth-centuryHingit who have told stories about the old-time shamans predicting theEuropean arrival have been drawing upon earlier accounts with deep rootsin the nineteenth century. Of course, they have tended to rethink and re-interpret these narratives in light of their own historical experience. It isnot surprising that such stories have become especially popular since the1960s, when the Tlingit were no longer subject to heavy-handed mission-ary control and criticism. These narratives play a very important functionin the modern-day Tlingit worldview. They refuse to accept the Euro-Americans' condescending view of shamanism and other aspects of theprecontact native religion, though they do concede the ultimate validityof Christianity as the postcontact religion of the Tlingit people. In these


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Sham anism and Ch rist ianity 381

""narratives tha t cond ense, encapsulate, and dra m atize long-term h istoricalprocesses. Such events are inventions but h ave such com pelling qualitiesand explanatory power that they spread rapidly through the group andsoon take on an ethn ohistorical reality of their ovtm ." In Har kin 's (1988a:ICI) term s, such even ts "'m ediate between rad ically different yet con secu-tive syn chronie states, wh ose conjuncture w a s . . . more subtle and gradual:and yet th ese epitom izin g events provide m eaningful cultural sy m bols an dm n em onic d evices for th e rupture."Th e fact that th e old -tim e sham ans could predict the com ing of Chris-tianity d enies the wh ites their claim of being the givers of truth to th e"backward" Indians. As many of my informants insisted: ""The whitepeople did not teach us anything new; we had already known about thetrue religion. W e knew about the Great Spirit up in heaven even though wedid not worship him the way we d o today.'^ The only new th ing tha t th ewhite people brought to us was the Holy Bible." To assert one's equalitywith th e wh ites by refusing t o see them as givers is particularly im portan tto the society where those receiving a gift have traditionally been seen asless powerful than th ose giving it.

Finally, this view of the old-time shamans as wise prophets and healersrelieves som e of the m odem -da y elders of the burden of h aving to reconciletheir d evotion to C hristian ity with their belief in, or at leas t respectfor,th eindigenous religion. If the old-time shamans were frauds, why would onestill be afraid of touch ing their parapherna lia, and h ow would one explainall their m iraculousfeats,portrayed in numerous stories passed d own fromgeneration to generation? In the opinion of contemporary Tlingit elders,their own noble ancestors had to be telling the truth ahout the powerfulm edicine m en of yesterday .ConclusionThe aim of this article has been to demonstrate the im portan ce of paying at-tention to indigenous versions of history in reaching a much m ore thoroughunderstand ing of the past and present experience of Native N orth Am eri-cans. For m any of them , history is n ot just som e events tha t h appened inthe past hut a vital force that continues to sh ape the present, bes pite theim pact of th e written Western culture, oral traditions contin ue to be passed


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and experiences. This has always occurred, because few oral traditionsremain forever unchanging. However, since the arrival of Europeans andespecially since the establishment of American political domination, his-tory has become hotly contested between the colonizers and the colonized .Until recently, the former, particularly those determined to "civilize thenatives," tried to denigrate that history and contrast the heathen "oldcustoms" with the new culture of the "competent Christian citizens" (afavorite Presbyterian term). Native Americans, however, while accepting(or being forced to accept) many of the changes introduced by the domi-nant society, have tried to maintain their own version of the past, whichemphasizes the virtues of the ancestors and downplays their vices. Thusthe relationship between missionary and native versions of Tlingit historycan be seen as a moral dialogue (cf. Burkhart 1989) in which the two sidesuse some of the same language (i.e., Christianity) and describe some of thesame events but often disagree on their meaning.

The new rhetoric of Christianity is even used by the Indians to criticizethe virhices. For example, many of the persons cited in this article saidthat the Euro-Americans themselves have not lived up to the teachingsof Christ, and that it is the Tlingit who are the true Christians and have"always followed the Ten Commandments." Thus the tables have beenturned on the colonizers, whose own ideology becomes a weapon in thehands of the colonized (cf. Comaroff 1985).The material presented here also challenges the notion of the exis-tence of a monolithic 'Tlingit culture" equally shared by members of thatsociety. As I have shown recently (Kan 1989a), there is considerable dis-agreement among the Tlingit on the role of the potlatch in modern-daysociety and on the meaning of its specific symbols. Similarly, shamanismis looked upon somewhat differently by individual Tlingit, depending ontheir religious affiliation, age, education, and other factors. The goal ofthe ethnographer is to represent these divergent views rather than glossover them.

Up until now, none of the ethnographers working in southeasternAlaska have paid much attention to these issues. Determined to gain datawith which to reconstruct the nineteenth-century ("traditional") Tlingitculture, scholars trained in the Boasian tradition collected numerous nar-


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Sham anism and Christianity 383

Similarly , whi le d e L a g u n a ' s ( i 9 6 0 , 1 9 7 z ) r e m a r k a b l y d e t a i l e d w o r k s o nthe cul ture a n d his tory o f t w o T l ing i t v i l lages , A ngoon a n d Y akutat , a rea i m e d a t reco ns tn icdn g the ir e ighteenth- and n ineteenth-century h i s tor ies ,nadve representat ions o f postcontact events invo lv ing w hi tes a re givenshort shrif t ."

It is n o t m y in tendon here t o cr idc ize m y p r e d e c e s s o r s , w h o s e w o r khas been a major inspirat ion a n d a source o f valuable data . In fac t , muchof m y o w n e thnographic a n d ethnohistorical research h a s a l s o a i m e d a trec on s tm cd ng and analyz ing the T l ing i t cu lture prior to i ts drama dc trans -format ion i n t h e 1900S ( see Kan 1989b) . What I a m arguing , how ever , isthat in order to cons truct a tru ly comp rehens ive e thnohis tory of N or th w estC o a s t a n d o t h e r N a d v e N o r t h A m e r i c a n s o c i e d e s , w e must incorporatem o r e o f F oge l son' s e thno-e thnohis tory in to i t . T o succeed in this projectw e , anthropolog i s t s a n d ethnohistorians , wi l l have t o enl is t t h e he lp o far ch aeo log ists , l inguists , fo lkloris ts , an d, of course , na dv e his torians the m -selves. '^N o t e sI wo uld like to exp ress my gradtude to those Tlingit elders w ho over the years havetaught m e s o much about their culture and history, especially Mark Jacobs, Jr.,Charlie Joseph, Thomas Young, Jimmy George, Matthew Fred, George J i m ,William Nelson, and Moses Rose. One of these elders, Jimmy George, passedaway in the summer of 1990 at the age of one hundred when I w a s wridng thisarticle, and so i t is dedicated t o him . However, it expresses my ow n opinions andinterpretadons rather than those of my T lingit teachers. I w ould also like to thankmy aca dem ic teacher-, Raymond D . Fo gelson, for introducing me to ethnohistoryand ethno-ethnohistory, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for theirhelpful com m ents. The researchforand wridng of the article were suppo rted by aSummer Sdpend from the Na don al Endowm entforthe Hum anities and by a grantfrom the P hillips Fund of th e Am erican Philosophical S ociety.

I For afinerecentdiscussion of indigenous South A merican per spea ives on thepast (including European contact and colonization), see Hill 1988. Turner's(1988) com mentary on these essays is of special interest because it raises generaltheoretical issues conceming the relationship between ^'myth" and ""history"in no n-W estem cultures. In his essay Turner uses the term ethno-ethnohistorybut (surprisingly) do es n ot credit Fogelson w ith coining it .z Most of the Tlingit shamans were m ale, even though there were som e pow er-ful female ones as well. Throughout this rdele I refer to shamans with the


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entirely of conservative people, so that there was not much difference betweenthose who joined the Russian O rthodox church and those wh o became Pres-byterian. In addition, people in the villages were more likely to go back andforth between the different churches, a phenomenon that continues to this day.

6 The term old customs was introduced by the Protestants and was frequentlyused by Euro-Americans and Indians alike to describe the various indigenouspractices and beliefs in a somewhat pejorative way. It is still used today bysome of the older Tlingit.7 For biographical information on modem-day Tlingit elders who comfortablycombine indigenous and Christian beliefs and practices, see Dauenhauer andDauenhauer 1987: 443-510; 1990: 52.1-57.8 Thus G ovem or John Brady, who started his career in Sitka as a Presbyterianmissionary, tried once to dissuade some Sitka Indians from relying on a sha-man during the 1898 epidemic of tuberculosis. He invited them to his officeand displayed some physiological charts, explaining the cause of the diseaseand telling them that white people suffered from it as well. H aving listened torhe lecture, one Tlingit elder replied: "Well, that is what the white men say. Weare Indians, and we know that there are witches" (Hinckley 198z: 254).9 Cf. McClellan r97S, 2.: S2.9-63 on the Inland Tlingit, Tagish, and Tutchoneshamans.10 Cf. de Laguna 1972.: 723 un Yakutat in the early 1900s.] I Because shamanism remains a rather sensitive topic for many of rhe elders^ Ido not mention their names in this article.i z Some informants said that when they, as young children, saw an ixr' perform,they still believed in his power; others claimed that they had already lost that

belief. One elderly woman, who had been raised in a devout Christian familyin Sitka, told of throwing sand at an Angoon ixt' and thus forcing him to stopa seance when, as a young girl, she saw him perform on her aunt.13 Compare the Orthodox ritual of consecratirig the water by immersing a crossin a full container, performed on the feast of Epiphany. The Tlingit called thisceremony "baptizing the cross.''14 Cf. McClellan 197;;, z: 553-63 on the Inland Tlingit and their Athapaskanneighbors.r5 While the precontact Tlingit religion might have induded a vaguely definedconcept of a supreme being or spirit, many of the modem-day elders firmlybelieve that such a notion existed and that their ancestors prayed to "Our SpiritAbove," although only in times of great trouble rather than constantly, as Chris-tians do (for more details see de Laguna r97z: 812r6 and Dauenhauer andDauenhauer 1990: iz6,438).16 A few references in de Laguna's study of Yakutat support my findings. Herelderly informants, interviewed in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, spokeabout a female shaman who predicted the coming of the Russians (de Laguna


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Shamanism and Christianity 385

ReferencesArchival SourceBillman Co lle ction. A rchive s, Stratton Memo rial Library, Sheldon Jackson Co llege,Sitka, AK.Printed and Secondary SourcesBarsukov, Ivan P., ed.1897^1901 P is'ma Innokentiia, mitropolita mo skov skogo i ko lome nskogo ,1828-1878 (Letters of Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow andKo lomna, 18181878). 3 vols. St. Petersburg.Brightman, R obert A .Z990 P rimitivism in Missinippi Cree Historical Consc iou sness. M an, n.s.,

25:108-28.Burkhart, Louise M.1989 The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Mo ral Dialo gu e in Sixteenth-Century M e xico . Tuc son: University o f A rizona P ress.Comaroff, Jean1985 Body of Po wer, Spirit of R esistance: The Cu lture and History of aSou th A frican P eople. Chicago : University o f Chicago P ress.Dauenhauer, No ra M ., and R ichard Dauenhauer1987 Haa Sbuk, Our A nce stors: Tlingit O ral Narratives. Seattle: Universityo f Washington P ress.1990 H aa Tuwunagu Vis, For Healing O ur Spirit: Tlingit O ratory. Seattle:University of Washington Press.de Laguna, Fredericai96 0 The Story o f a Tlingit Community: A Problem in the R elationship be-tween A rchaeolo gical, Ethnological, and Historical Me thods. Bureauof A merican Ethnology, Bulletin N o . 172. Washington, o c : U.S. Gov-ernment P rinting O ffice.

1971 Under Mo unt Saint Elias: The History and Cu lture o f the YakutatTlingit. Smithsonian Contributions to A nthropo logy, N o . 7. 3 v o ls.Washington, DG: Smithsonian Institu tion P ress.1987 A tna and Tlingit Shamanism: Witchcraft o n the No rthwest Co ast.A rctic Anthropology 24 :84 -10 0.Emmo ns, Geo rge T.1945 The Tlingit Indians. Unpublished manuscript. A rchives, A merican Mu -seum of Natural History, Ne w York.Fogelson, Raymond D.1974 On the Varieties o f Indian History: Sequoyah and Trave ller Bird. Jou r-nal of Ethnic Studies 2:1 05 -12.1989 The Ethnohistory o f Events and No nev ents. Ethnohistory 36:13347.


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1790-C9ZO. Ph.D. diss.. Department of Anthropology, University ofChicago.Hill, Jonathan D ., ed.1988 Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspec-tives on the Past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Hinckley,TedC.1972 The Americanization of Alaska, 1867-1897. Palo Alto, CA: PacificBooks.198z Alaskan John G. Brady: Missionary, Businessman, Judge, and Gover-nor, 18781918. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Jones, Livingstone F.1914 A Study of the Thlingets of Alaska. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co.Kamenskii, Anatolii1985 [1906] Tlingit Indians of Alaska. Sergei Kan, trans, and ed. RasmusonLibrary Historical Translation Series, Vol. 1. Fairbanks: University ofAlaska Press.Kan, Sergei1985 Russian Orthodox Brotherhoods among the Tlingit: Missionary Goalsand Native Response. Ethnohistory 3z: 196zz).1987 Memory Eternal: Russian Orthodoxy and the Tlingit Mortuary Com -plex. Arctic Anthropology 14: 52-55 .1988 Russian Orthodox Missions. In Handbook of North American Indi-ans. Vol. 4, H istory of Indian-White Relations. Wilcomh E. Washburn,ed . Pp. S06-ZI. Washington, D C : Smithsonian Institution Press.1989a Cohorts, Generations, and Their Culture: The Tlingit Potlatch in the980S. Anthro|X)s84: 405-zz.1989b Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century.Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.1990a The Sacred and the Secular: Tlingit Potlatch Songs outside the Potlatch.American Indian Quanerly 14:355-66.1990b Recording Native Culture and Christianizing the Natives: RussianOrthodox Missionaries in Southeastern Alaska. In Russia in NorthAmerica: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Rus-sian America. Richard A. Pierce, ed. Pp. Z9831V Kingston, ON:Limestone.forthcoming Russian Orthodox Missionaries and the Tlingit Indians of Alaska,T880-1890. In New Dimensions in Ethnohistory. Barry M. Gough,ed. Canadian Ethnology Service Mercury Series. Ottawa: CanadianMuseum of Civilization.Krause, Aurel1956 [1885] The Tlingit Indians. Erna Gnther, trans. Seattle: University ofWashington Press.


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Peck, Cyrus E ., Sr.1975 The Tides People. Juneau, AK: Indian Studies Program.Spier, Leslie1935 The Prophet Dance of the N orthwest and Its Derivatives. General Seriesin A nthropology, N o . i . Menasha, wi: George Banta.Suttles, Wayne1957 The Plateau Prophet Dance among the Coast Salish. SouthwestemJoumal of A nthropology 13: 35z96.Swanton, John R.1908 Social Conditions, Beliefs, and Linguistic Relationship of the TlingitIndians. In Twenty-sixth A nnual Report of the Bureau of A mericanEthnology for the Years 1904-1905. Pp. 391-512.. Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office.1909 Tlingit Myths and Texts. Bureau of A merican Ethnology, BulletinN o. 39. Washington, D C : U.S. Government Printing Office.Tikhmenev, Petr A .1978 A History of the Russian-A merican Company. Richard A . Pierce andA lton S. Donnelly, trans, and eds. Seattle: University of Washing-ton Press.Tumer, Terence1988 Ethno-Ethnohistory: Myth and History in Native South A mericanRepresentations of Contaa with Western Society, in Rethinking His-tory and M yth: Indigenous South A merican Perspeaives on the Past.Jonathan D . Hill, ed. Pp. 135-81 . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Veniaminov, Ivan1984 [1840] Notes on the Islands of the Unalashka D istrict. Lydia T. Black andRichard H . Geoghegan, trans. K ingston, ON: Limestone; Fairbanks:University of A laska Press.Willard, Carolyn McCoy1884 Ufe in A laska: Letters of M rs. Eugene S. Willard. Eva M cClintock, ed.Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication.Wyatt, Victoria1989 Images from the Inside Passage: A n A laskan Portrait by Winter andPond. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Young, S. Hall19Z7 Hall Young of A laska: "The Mushing Parson." New York: Fleming H.Revell Co.


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