Customer Reviews

Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet

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Though containing many pages of references, this little history isn't laborious, just an informative narrative.

By learning of Kenekuk, and his diplomatic speeches to various US government representatives, I was motivated to obtain this volume sometimes referenced by other authors about the charismatic spiritual chief of the Vermillion band of Kickapoo Indians. Kenekuk was estranged from his people at an early age, becoming a drunken orphan and day laborer. But he was taken in by a Catholic Priest, learned fluent written and spoken English, and even studied the Father's classical library selections. In short, Kenekuk made up his own mind how the Christian gospel could translate into the lives of his own native roots.

Reports of what exactly he preached are sometimes contradictory. But his stubbornness, maintaining a Ghandi-like pacifistic defiance against the US Government threats and demands to vacate Indian homelands, until the state itself actually crowded out the Indians East of the Mississippi, illustrates a willfulness to take Catholicism and uncanonize it.

In contrast to the self mutilations of the Sioux Sun Dancers who pierced themselves on bone hooks, dancing about the pole to which the hooks are attached, Kenekuks Vermillion Kickapoo Indians believed in personal atonement through public institutional flagellation. This might nearly correlate to the practice of Cane-ing.

[Wiki article]
"The size and flexibility of the cane and the mode of application, as well as the number of the strokes, vary greatly--from a couple of light strokes with a small cane across the seat of a junior schoolboy's trousers, to 24 very hard, wounding cuts on the bare buttocks with a large, heavy, soaked rattan as a judicial punishment in south-east Asia."

Oddly, such self discipline served a unifying purpose/function of group survival.