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• 1 2020-01-21T21:03:07+00:00 Page 2 - The Purpose of Prayer Sticks 3 Round page 2 plain 2020-02-11T16:17:20+00:00

  To understand how the Prayer Sticks did this, we must follow Kenekuk’s own life story, whose arc in many ways parallels the historical trajectory of his nation. Kenekuk, who became known as the “Kickapoo Prophet,” was born about 1790 near the Wabash River in Indiana. Local people there remembered him as an abusive alcoholic in his youth who left the community just before the War of 1812 and wandered the countryside without purpose. Sometime during the war, however, Kenekuk had a vision that changed him forever. The Great Spirit reached out to him in his misery and gave him “a piece of his heart, which he was to share with his fellow Kickapoos “to instruct them in the ways of peace and love.”3 Kenekuk fashioned a symbolic representation of the Creator’s message into narrow ten-inch walnut boards he inscribed with a private symbol system. These were arranged into a five-character group toward the bottom of the stick, followed by an eleven-character cluster near the top. The apex of the staff was often carved into a diamond shape, reminiscent of the point of a crown. The rectangular head of these staffs also featured an escutcheon whose left side depicted a building with a similar diamond on its roof, and whose right side featured what early ethnographers thought were a row of corn stalks.4 

  When returned to his village, the Vermillion Band of Kickapoos who lived along the Vermillion and Wabash Rivers, the message of his vision spread. Soon, Kenekuk rose to the leadership position of trusted council to Little Duck, an important leader in the community. As the Americans began hounding the Kickapoos for their land, Little Duck fell ill, and ceded his authority to Kenekuk, who refused to negotiate with the Americans. It was during this period that Kenekuk founded a church based on the teachings he received in his vision. Every member of the community who wished to join the congregation had to acquire one of Kenekuk’s Prayer Sticks. When asked about them by outsiders, the congregants of Kenekuk’s church called them “the Bible,” and (according to Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy) “[n]o Indian thought of retiring for the night without first consulting his board.” When a member of the church died, his prayer stick was buried with him.5 

  Although some outside observers thought the prayer sticks were imitations of the Catholic missionaries’ rosary beads, they are actually quite different. There are no crosses, no Christ, and no Mary. Instead, they incorporate graphic marks unrelated to Catholicism. The diamond is not a cross, and corn is not a sacramental plant for Christians. But these images do indeed have important spiritual valences for the Native Americans who followed the Prophet’s teachings. Most importantly, they appear to have fostered a reading practice that was unique to this Kickapoo community. A contemporary witness to one of Kenekuk’s church services described how the prayer stick functioned: 

  Congregational worship is performed daily and lasts from one to three hours. It consists of a kind of prayer, expressed in broken sentences, often repeated in a monotonous sing-song tone, equaling about two measures of a common psalm tune. All in unison engage in this; and in order to preserve harmony in words each holds in his or her hand a small board . . . upon which is engraved arbitrary characters, which they follow up with the finger until the prayer is completed.6

  This depiction of the congregation “reading” clearly shows that the wooden staffs functioned as texts. The sticks helped the congregation “preserve harmony,” that is, to constitute themselves as a united community whose shared oral performances confirm their membership. By using their fingers to trace up the prayer stick toward its diamond-shaped head, the parishioners enacted an embodied material practice by which reading became a devotional activity. Further evidence of the ceremonies surrounding the use of the prayer sticks suggest that the liturgy they encoded served a new kind of anti-assimilationist ideology that helped to voice Kickapoo sovereignty in the face of the Removal Act.