Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [123]
3d No Indian was to be runing after the women; if a man was single let him take a wife.
4th If any married woman was to behave ill by not paying proper attention to her work, etc., the husband had a right to punish her with a rod, and as soon as the punishment was over, both husband and wife, was to look each other in the face and laugh, and to bear no ill will to each other for what had passed.
5th All Indian women who were living with whitemen was to be brought home to their friends and relations, and their children to be left with their fathers, so that the nations might become genuine Indians.
6th All medicine bags, and all kinds of medicine dances and songs were to exist no more; the medicine bags were to be destroyed in presence of the whole of the people collected for that purpose, and at the destroying of such medicine, etc., every one was to make open confession to the Great Spirit in a loud voice of all the bad deeds that he or she had committed during their lifetime, and beg for forgiveness as the Great Spirit was too good to refuse.
7th No Indian was to sell any of their provision to any white people, they might give a little as a present, as they were sure of getting in return the full value in something else.
8th No Indian was to eat any victuals that was cooked by a White person, or to eat any provisions raised by White people, as bread, beef, pork, fowls, etc.
9th No Indian must offer skins or furs or any thing else for sale, but ask to exchange them for such articles that they may want.
10th Every Indian was to consider the French, English, and Spaniards, as their fathers or friends, and to give them their hand, but they were not to know the Americans on any account, but to keep them at a distance.
11th All kind of white people’s dress, such as hats, coats, etc., were to be given to the first whiteman they met as also all dogs not of their own breed, and all cats were to be given back to white people.
12th The Indians were to endeavour to do without buying any merchandise as much as possible, by which means the game would become plenty, and then by means of bows and arrows, they could hunt and kill game as in former days, and live independent of all white people.
13th All Indians who refused to follow these regulations were to be considered as bad people and not worthy to live, and must be put to death. (A Kickapoo Indian was actually burned in the spring of the year 1809 at the old Kickapoo Town for refusing to give up his medicine bag, and another old man and old woman was very near sharing the same fate at the same time and place).
14th The Indians in their prayers prayed to the earth, to be fruitful, also to the fish to be plenty, to the fire and sun, etc., and a certain dance was introduced simply for amusement, those prayers were repeated morning and evening, and they were taught that a diviation from these duties would offend the Great Spirit. There were many more regulations but I now have forgot them, but those above mentioned are the principal ones.
Source: “The Code of the Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa,” in Emma Helen Blair, The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1912), v. 2, appendix 2, 274–78.
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29. The Witch Hunt at the White River Mission, 1806
This account of the Shawnee prophet’s witch-hunting activities comes from the pen of two Moravian missionaries, John Peter Kluge (1768–1849) and Abraham Luckenbach (1777–1854), who lived with Kluge’s family (he had a wife and children) and a small number of Delaware Indian converts at the Moravian mission on the White River in Indiana Territory. Kluge was born in Prussia and came to the United States after serving as a missionary in Suriname. Luckenbach was born in Pennsylvania.1
The Moravians were a Christian denomination that emerged in the eighteenth century in Germany. Moravians had settled in Pennsylvania and North Carolina