North American Indigenous Prophecy

The North American prophetic material has to be read together with the pressure that produced it and with the intermediaries who transmitted it.

The recurring structure, an original instruction, a corruption, a cleansing, a remnant who kept the instruction, and a restored world, is real and appears in several traditions. The Lakota branch of the structure runs through The White Buffalo Calf Woman. So is the problem that most of what circulates in English has passed through non-Native hands: missionaries, ethnographers, enthusiasts, and in the twentieth century a publishing market with a strong appetite for prophecy.

The Hopi case is the best documented and the most instructive. The years around 1900 saw Oraibi divided over how to respond to American schooling, land allotment, missionary activity and federal authority. The dispute was genuine and political, and prophecy supplied the vocabulary in which it was argued. In 1906 the village split, with one faction leaving to found Hotevilla. Reading the prophecy tradition without that history produces mysticism; reading the history without the prophecy misses how the participants understood their own choices.

The photograph above shows part of the mechanism. Anglo spectators are seated on Hopi rooftops watching a ceremony. Tourism, ethnography and prophecy circulated together, and material recorded for outsiders was shaped by the knowledge that outsiders were listening. Some Hopi commentators have said directly that widely published prophecy texts do not represent them.

The post-1948 diffusion complicates matters further. Statements addressed to the United Nations, later pamphlet compilations, and the New Age market all reworked the material for audiences with their own expectations. What reaches a reader in English today is frequently several removes from any village-level teaching, and the removes are rarely marked.

The useful discipline is to ask, of any given text, who wrote it down, for whom, and what they wanted from it. The Cherokee four-cords telling, recorded by Mooney in the same decades, is the tradition's most compact statement of end as demolition and rebuild: see The Cherokee Earth and the Four Cords. The land where the Hopi and Lakota accounts are kept is described under United States.

The transmission question organizes everything recorded here. Mooney worked a generation after Ghost Dance; Walker's Lakota material came through informants writing for a government ethnologist; Waters's Book of the Hopi was assembled by a non-Hopi writer from named Hopi consultants and has been publicly criticized by Hopi spokespeople since the 1970s. The prophecies nearly all describe worlds ending under pressure, and the records were made by the pressure's agents or beneficiaries, which does not make them worthless but does mean every reading passes through a double filter: what was said, and what the recorder needed heard.

The traditions themselves mark the difference between their own teachings and their popular circulation. Hopi commentators have objected to the New Age compilations in print since the 1980s; Lakota religious leaders have issued declarations against the sale of ceremonies. The corpus records both the prophecies and the objections.

What survives the filtering is consistent in shape: an original instruction, a corruption, a cleansing, and a remnant who kept the instruction, with the end contingent on conduct rather than scheduled on a calendar.