The Shawanese prophet and Tecumseh / Huyot. (Wood Engraving)

Library of Congress - Wood engravings--1810-1890.

Tecumseh,--Shawnee Chief,--1768-1813

Tenskwatawa,--Shawnee Prophet

 Created / Published [between 1814 and 1890]

 The Shawanese prophet and Tecumseh / Huyot.

Print shows Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, and Tecumseh, 

with other Natives and tipis in the background.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Digital Id

cph 3a20703 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a20703

Library of Congress Control Number

2012645311

Library of Congress Link:

https://www.loc.gov/item/2012645311/

Visit the Official Website of the Piqua Shawnee:

www.piquashawnee.com

History of the Shawnee Indians: From the Year 1681 to 1854 by Henry Harvey (1855)

History of the Shawnee Indians: From the Year 1681 to 1854, Inclusive

Henry Harvey

Ephraim Morgan & sons, 1855 - Shawnee Indians - 306 pages

Author Henry Harvey, member of the Religious Society of Friends spent time with the Shawnee Indians learning their history and culture.  Although the intent was to teach the Shawnee doctrines and principles of the Christian Religion Henry Harvey took account of the Shawnee people and their history.  This is his account of his time with the Shawnee. 

Reference links:

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Shawnee#/State-recognized_tribes

https://books.google.com/books?id=-egNAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false

Harvey, Henry (1855). History of the Shawnee Indians: From the Year 1681 to 1854, Inclusive. Cincinnati: Ephraim Morgan & Sons. p. 18.

Tecumseh and the Shawnee Resistance Movement from the Oxford Research Encyclopedias

Tecumseh and the Shawnee Resistance Movement  

Stephen Warren

Subject: Early National History, Native American History

Online Publication Date: Jul 2016

DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.309

Summary and Keywords

Described as a “chief among chiefs” by the British, and by his arch-rival, William Henry Harrison, as “one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things,” Tecumseh impressed all who knew him. Lauded for his oratory, military and diplomatic skills, and, ultimately, his humanity, Tecumseh presided over the greatest Indian resistance movement that had ever been assembled in the eastern half of North America. His genius lay in his ability to fully articulate religious, racial, and cultural ideals borne out of his people’s existence on fault lines between competing empires and Indian confederacies. Known as “southerners” by their Algonquian relatives, the Shawnees had a history of migrating between worlds. Tecumseh, and his brother, Tenskwatawa, converted this inheritance into a widespread social movement in the first decade and a half of the 19th-century, when more than a thousand warriors, from many different tribes, heeded their call to halt American expansion along the border of what is now Ohio and Indiana. Tecumseh articulated a vision of intertribal, pan-Indian unity based on revitalization and reform, and his ambitions very nearly rewrote early American history.

Primary Sources

For an excellent, chronologically arranged collection of sources related to both Tecumseh and the Shawnees, historians should first consult the Shawnee Papers, housed in the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Archives at Indiana University’s Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology. This collection contains a wealth of primary sources, gathered together by an exceptional team of anthropologists and historians through their work on behalf of the Indian Claims Commission. As such, this collection offers a useful springboard into more difficult and harder-to-reach archival sources.
Tecumseh’s own words come to us through Anthony Shane and Stephen Ruddell, white captives of the Shawnees who were raised alongside Tecumseh. The oral historian and archivist Lyman Draper interviewed both men about Tecumseh in the 1840s, years after his death. Draper also interviewed and corresponded with a host of Tecumseh’s adversaries, and their recollections can be found in the Tecumseh Papers of the Lyman Copeland Draper Collection, which have been microfilmed by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Colonizers left behind a rich, but terribly biased, source record on Tecumseh. For example, many of Tecumseh’s speeches can be found in the papers of his foremost adversary, William Henry Harrison, published by the Indiana Historical Society. Similarly, the papers of Thomas Forsyth and Simon Kenton offer useful, but adversarial, perspectives on pan-Indianism. Historians should also consult British perspectives on Tecumseh, including the papers of John Askin, William Claus, and the McKee family. In the 19th century, neither British nor American historians bothered to interview Shawnees about Tecumseh and his legacy. A century later, the ethnohistorian Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin interviewed Shawnees about Tecumseh, and her papers are housed at the Newberry Library.

Read the complete version at:
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-309

Visit the Official Web Site of the Piqua Shawnee at piquashawnee.com

Shawnee Spirituality

Shawnee Spirituality

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Ojibwa

 

The Shawnee, whose name means “Southerners”, once occupied a vast region west of the Cumberland mountains of the Appalachian chain in what is now part of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. Like the other Algonquian-speaking tribes of the western part of the Northeast Woodlands Culture Area, the Shawnee had a traditional economy based on farming (corn, beans, and squash), hunting, and gathering wild plants.

As was common among hunting tribes, spirituality was an important part of hunting. In his book The Shawnees and the War for America, Colin Calloway writes:  “In the Shawnee world, humans and animals communicated, hunters dreamed the whereabouts of their prey and offered prayers to the spirits of the animals that gave their bodies so that the people might live.”

In order to maintain the harmony between humans and the animal people, and between humans and the plant people, it was necessary to conduct certain rituals to keep the world in balance.
Among many of the woodlands tribes sacred medicine bundles were important. The Shawnee at one time had a sacred bundle – mishaami – for each of the five divisions of the tribe. The Shawnee were a confederacy of five political units: Chillicothe (Chalahgawtha), Hathawekela (also spelled as Thawekila or Thawegila), Kispoko (Kispokotha), Mequachake (Mekoche or Maykujay), and Piqua (Pekowi). The bundles contained not only items which were sacred, but also included ritual concepts and songs.

The Shawnee were originally given their bundles by Our Grandmother at the time of creation. Since that time, items have been added to the bundles. According to James Howard, in his book Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native American Tribe and its Cultural Background:  “Each of the sacred bundles is assigned to the care of a designated custodian, who is always a man, and a person of high moral character.”

The bundle was traditionally kept in a structure which was separate from the keeper’s home. James Howard also writes:  “The bundles are treated much as human beings, and it is believed that they may become cramped from resting too much in one position.”  Therefore, the position of the bundles is regularly shifted.

The Dakwanekawe or Bread Dance was an important Shawnee ceremony which was traditionally held in the spring and in the fall. The ceremony was given to the Shawnee by Our Grandmother who sometimes appeared on earth to observe the ceremony and to participate in the singing. In the spring, the role of women in the ceremony was predominant and this ceremony asked for fertility and good crops. In the fall, the men led the dancing and their role as hunters was emphasized. The spring dance asked for an abundant harvest while the fall dance expressed thanksgiving and asked for abundant game.
The Green Corn Dance was held in August and marked the first corn harvest. Charles Callender, in his chapter on the Shawnee in the Handbook of North American Indians reports:  “On this occasion persons were absolved of misconduct, and all injuries except murder were forgiven.”  The Green Corn Dance lasted from 4 to 12 days.

The Buffalo Dance was generally held in late August or early September. The dance was originally given to Tecumseh by the Buffalo, his guardian spirit. Two kettles of corn mush were prepared for the dance as this dish was favored by the buffalo. The ceremony included body painting and eight sets of dances which were performed by men and women. The final element of the dance was a mock battle for the corn mush, which was then eaten. Social dances often followed the ceremony.
The Buffalo Dance was conducted outside of the ceremonial grounds used for other ceremonies because it did not come from Our Grandmother.

Among the Shawnee, funeral rites usually lasted four days. The body was buried on its back in an extended position with the head toward the west. Prior to burial, friends and relatives would dress and paint the body. Before the grave was filled, friends and relatives would sprinkle small amounts of tobacco over the body and ask the soul not to look back or to think about those remaining behind.

History Channel - Tecumseh

Native American History - Tecumseh

History Channel (2009) www.history.com

Shawnee Indian political leader and war chief Tecumseh (1768-1813) came of age amid the border warfare that ravaged the Ohio Valley in the late 18th century. He took part in a series of raids of Kentucky and Tennessee frontier settlements in the 1780s, and emerged as a prominent chief by 1800. Tecumseh transformed his brother’s religious following into a political movement, leading to the foundation of the Prophetstown settlement in 1808. After Prophetstown was destroyed during the Battle of Tippecanoe, the Shawnee chief fought with pro-British forces in the War of 1812 until his death in the Battle of the Thames.

Born at Old Piqua, on the Mad River in western Ohio, Tecumseh grew to manhood amid the border warfare that ravaged the Ohio Valley during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1774, his father, Puckeshinwa, was killed at the Battle of Point Pleasant, and in 1779 his mother, Methoataske, accompanied those Shawnees who migrated to Missouri. Raised by an older sister, Tecumpease, he accompanied an older brother, Chiksika, on a series of raids against frontier settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee in the late 1780s. He did not participate in the defeat of Gen. Josiah Harmar (1790), but led a scouting party that monitored Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s advance (1791) and fought at Fort Recovery and Fallen Timbers (1794). Embittered by the Indian defeat, he did not attend the subsequent negotiations and refused to sign the Treaty of Greenville (1795). 

By 1800 Tecumseh had emerged as a prominent war chief. He led a band of militant, younger warriors and their families located at a village on the White River in east-central Indiana. There in 1805 Lalawethika, one of Tecumseh’s younger brothers, experienced a series of visions that transformed him into a prominent religious leader. Taking the name Tenskwatawa, or ‘The Open Door,’ the new Shawnee Prophet began to preach a nativistic revitalization that seemed to offer the Indians a religious deliverance from their problems.

Tecumseh seemed reluctant to accept his brother’s teachings until June 16, 1806, when the Prophet accurately predicted an eclipse of the sun, and Indians from throughout the Midwest flocked to the Shawnee village at Greenville, Ohio. Tecumseh slowly transformed his brother’s religious following into a political movement. In 1808 Tecumseh and the Prophet moved their village to the juncture of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers, where the new settlement, Prophetstown, continued to attract Indians. After the loss of much Indian land at the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), Tecumseh gradually eclipsed his brother as the primary leader of the movement. He traveled throughout the Midwest urging tribes to form a political confederacy to prevent any further erosion of their lands. In November 1811, while Tecumseh was in the South attempting to recruit the Creeks into his confederacy, U.S. forces marched against Prophetstown. In the subsequent Battle of the Tippecanoe they defeated the Prophet, burned the settlement, and destroyed the Indians’ food supplies. After returning from the South Tecumseh tried to rebuild his shattered confederacy. But when the War of 1812 broke out, he withdrew to Michigan where he assisted the British in the capture of Detroit and led pro-British Indians in subsequent actions in southern Michigan (Monguagon) and northern Ohio (Fort Meigs). When William Henry Harrison invaded Upper Canada, Tecumseh reluctantly accompanied the British retreat. He was killed by American forces at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813.

Tecumseh’s political leadership, oratory, humanitarianism, and personal bravery attracted the attention of friends and foes. He was much admired by both the British and the Americans. After his death (his body was never recovered), a considerable mythology developed about him, and he has become an American folk hero.

Visit the Official Site of the Piqua Shawnee Tribe at www.piquashawnee.com