John Slocum And The Indian Shaker Church

This richly detailed, well-documented history describes the life of the Squaxin spiritual leader John Slocum and the growth in the Pacific Northwest of his Indian Shaker Church (not to be confused with eastern Shakerism. Students of Native American religion and Christianity will find this a moving story both of assimilation and of the curing that is the Shaker Church’s reason for being. The Indian Shaker movement began in 1882 when the charismatic but dissolute Slocum had a vision after a near-death experience. Later his church was led by his wide, Mary Thompson, and early-day leaders such as Mud Bay Louis and Mud Bay Sam. Today church members continue to combine Native American styles of singing, body movement, and verbal declarations with bell ringing, songs, burning candles, and shaking in a unique curing tradition that is honored outside the church particularly for its success in teaching against the use of alcohol. Intense community support, for both leader and patient, is a focal point in the lives of Shaker Church members. Their tradition has endured despite the important differences in members’ tribal backgrounds and religious viewpoints chronicled in this up-to-date account by veteran scholars Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, the first outsiders to have access to church records.

A thorough anthropological study of a distinct religious cult of the Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest. The book traces the Shaker cult’s development, its ceremonies, ritual elements, faiths, and doctrine.

Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.

Vividly told and richly illustrated with more than 160 photos, this fascinating history of the cultural, religious, fraternal, economic, and everyday life of Chicago's Jews brings to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape today's Jewish communities. 15 maps. Graphs & tables.

For American Indians, tribal politics are paramount. They determine the standards for tribal enrollment, guide negotiations with outside governments, and help set collective economic and cultural goals. But how, asks Raymond I. Orr, has history shaped the American Indian political experience? By exploring how different tribes’ politics and internal conflicts have evolved over time, Reservation Politics offers rare insight into the role of historical experience in the political lives of American Indians. To trace variations in political conflict within tribes today to their different historical experiences, Orr conducted an ethnographic analysis of three federally recognized tribes: the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, the Citizen Potawatomi in Oklahoma, and the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. His extensive interviews and research reveal that at the center of tribal politics are intratribal factions with widely different worldviews. These factions make conflicting claims about the purpose, experience, and identity of their tribe. Reservation Politics points to two types of historical experience relevant to the construction of tribes’ political and economic worldviews: historical trauma, such as ethnic cleansing or geographic removal, and the incorporation of Indian communities into the market economy. In Orr's case studies, differences in experience and interpretation gave rise to complex worldviews that in turn have shaped the beliefs and behavior at play in Indian politics. By engaging a topic often avoided in political science and American Indian studies, Reservation Politics allows us to see complex historical processes at work in contemporary American Indian life. Orr’s findings are essential to understanding why tribal governments make the choices they do.

Examines the Native American experience during the American Revolution.

IN SLOCUMS'S WAKE, written for sailors and non-sailors alike, is an autobiographical tale of a hard-won circumnavigation aboard a 43-foot cutter. This story will entice, entrance and inspire the reader whether you intend to embark on your own voyage or just enjoy a good adventure saga. With a primary focus on the remarkable people and places encountered during nearly five years at sea, IN SLOCUM'S WAKE also offers those who are planning their own long-distance off-shore exploit invaluable advice and data about best routes, strategies, stops, services and tricks of the trade. If you have always dreamed of undertaking such a journey, IN SLOCUM'S WAKE will either help you summon the courage to actually take the leap or convince you it's really not worth the risk or trouble you will surely encounter along the watery way. It's impossible to sail around the world without facing some of the most challenging experiences of your life. On the flip side, you will also surely discover the most sublime and exhilarating moments and memories guaranteed to stay with you for the rest of your earthbound days. Nat Warren-White's five-year journey follows many of the same passages and roughly traces much of the route followed by Joshua Slocum who, in the late 1800s, became the first person to sail alone around the world. IN SLOCUM'S WAKE compares the challenges Warren-White faced aboard his South African-built sloop, BAHATI, with those faced by Slocum aboard his 37-foot Chesapeake Bay oyster-fishing vessel, SPRAY . The two boats are similar in design and capability though built more than 100 years apart, one in wood, the other in fiberglass. The two captains are similar in background and stature, though born almost 100 years apart. To both men, navigating the world's oceans came from a similar motivation: "...a natural outcome of [a] love of adventure, [and] of [our] lifelong experience" in, on and around the sea.