An Ethnohistorian in Rupert's Land by Jennifer S. H. Brown

Author:Jennifer S. H. Brown [Brown, Jennifer S. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Canada, Pre-Confederation (To 1867), North America, Social History, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Ethnic Studies, Canadian Studies
ISBN: 9781771991735
Google: 0E9TzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T01:41:13+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The Wasitay Religion

Prophecy, Oral Literacy, and Belief on Hudson Bay

Ever since Anthony F. C. Wallace’s seminal work on revitalization movements (e.g., Wallace 1970), the concept of revitalization has served to frame discussions of religious innovations and renewals in post-contact Indigenous societies. Yet the phrase may also become a substitute for deeper descriptions and explanations. The analysis of any religious movement presents challenges, especially when the subject matter leads us across cultural borders and into historical situations beyond our range of observation. For one thing, the writers of the documentary sources we must use were usually outsiders (fur traders and missionaries, in the events studied here). Their cultural and religious views shaped what they thought they saw—their perceptions of what was going on among the people they wrote about. We who later try to analyze what these old sources tell us are doubly removed from the events and actors in question.

Another problem is that in searching for effective ways to formulate and conceptualize prophetic movements in terms considered effective and intelligible within our academic disciplines, we risk exoticizing them, distancing ourselves from the people involved, and neglecting the historical and cultural perspectives that their descendants could offer. There is also a risk of idealizing these movements. Their themes of energy and hope, rebirth, revival, and innovation (“revitalization”) in the face of deprivation or cultural loss may win favour but may obscure their negative aspects. Their success may have served some community members’ needs and interests well but could be hurtful to others. Leaders may fail or become self-serving or predatory, leaving a mixed legacy that celebratory traditions about them may not capture.

The subject of this essay is a Hudson Bay Cree prophetic movement of 1842–43, which I first wrote about in 1982. Two decades later, I had opportunities to discuss the movement with an Omushkego (Swampy Cree) scholar and storyteller, Louis Bird, who had heard stories about it. He thoughtfully reflected on it and on some questions of language and narrative that it brought to mind. His comments enriched my perspectives and encouraged me to take a new look at the topic, in conversation with other scholars studying comparable movements elsewhere. The invoking of Omushkego memories and views of these events and of narratives about them provides a reminder that the concept of “revitalization movement” is itself emic to social science and is not readily translatable into Cree or other Indigenous languages. To illuminate nineteenth-century spiritual and religious experience on the west coast of Hudson Bay, we need to consult not only outsiders’ documents and anthropological models but also the rich insights that the Cree language and Omushkego stories and scholarship can provide.1

The main events of the prophetic movement of 1842–43 have been outlined in earlier studies (Brown 1982, 1988; Long 1989). Here, I explore the generative role played in it by a Cree syllabic writing system that had just been introduced in the region by a Methodist missionary. I then look at some intellectual and symbolic aspects of the

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