Native Spirits, Shaker Visions: Speaking with the Dead in the Early Republic

Abstract

Historians have largely ignored native spirit narratives: the hundreds of pages of extant manuscript sources describing Shaker communications with (mostly fictional) deceased Indians. These sources were generated during the Era of Manifestations (1837-1840s), a period of intense spiritualistic activity among the Shakers that coincided with the Second Great Awakening. Native spirit narratives reveal complex discourses about American Indians. Even though many native spirits partook of crude stereotypes of Indian savagery and ignorance, they also offered sharp critiques of the racism exhibited by whites – Shakers included. Shaker mediums, mostly young and female, likewise used the appearance of native spirits to voice implicit critiques of patriarchal violence. The Shaker spirit narratives thus reveal how one religious society appropriated Indian images available in the Early Republic to express nuanced views about the legacy of colonialism and white male violence, via the group’s characteristic method of speaking with the dead. Because such contact with departed spirits was at the center of Shaker religious practice, and because this practice drew thousands of spectators and generated numerous published descriptions, the Shakers and their native spirits demonstrate the widespread interest in speaking with the dead that would emerge as séance spiritualism after 1848.

Shaker dance and the religious production of spectacle

“…Shakers described an outpouring of gifts both during meetings and outside of them in which mostly young women became instruments of the dead founder Ann Lee, as well as a host of other local spirits (Native Americans, other important deceased Shaker leaders). Once under the influence of these spirits, the young women communicated specific messages, drew heavenly images, sang new songs, and danced in a manner directed by their spirit visitors (Seeman, 2015). These “gifts” became physical proof of the spirit's presence and expression, and especially in the case of the drawn images and multi‐media letters, these gifts persist in the Shaker archive (Promey, 1993).…”

“…1 1 Shakers were predominantly white, but the racial dimension of their dancing and trances was complicated by the small presence of Black Shakers and their frequent possession by non‐white spirits. Robert P. Emlen has also demonstrated a strange tradition of black Shaker minstrelsy, a version of minstrelsy that drew on the small proportion of Black Shakers to render all Shakers as Black (Seeman, 2015; Emlen, 2010). …”