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• 1 2020-01-21T21:07:33+00:00 Page 3 - Outsiders' Perspectives 2 Round page 3 plain 2020-02-11T16:22:38+00:00

  Kenekuk’s congregation “steadfastly refused to speak English, and they always performed their traditional music and dancing at religious ceremonies.”7 Like Protestant congregations a century earlier, Kenekuk’s church separated men and women, making gender difference manifest in a bifurcated seating arrangement that split the two sexes with the middle aisle. But Kenekuk went even further, and in a distinctly vernacular direction. Menstruating women were expressly forbidden to attend services, in a gesture that re-affirmed centuries-old Kickapoo practice. Even more scandalous to outsiders, the Kenekuk Church regularly featured the self-flagellation of confessed sinners. 

  The Prophet’s religion earned praise from such American travelers as the painter George Catlin (1796-1872), who was “singularly struck by the noble efforts of this champion of the mere remnant of a poisoned race, so strenuously laboring to rescue the remainder of his people from the deadly bane . . . of drinking whisky.”8  When the Black Hawk War erupted in 1832, however, the Kickapoos realized their residence on the banks of the Vermillion would no longer be tolerated by the Americans. So, in early 1833, Kenekuk and about 400 followers, including over a hundred Pottawatomi converts, removed to settle along the west bank of the Missouri River, a few miles north of Fort Leavenworth. After a short time, Kenekuk’s congregation had established a prosperous village there.  

  John Irving, an American touring the west in 1833, visited Kenekuk’s village and found a bucolic scene. The settlement was situated on a  

  prairie dotted with wild-flowers. Three of its sides were enclosed by a ridge of hills, at the foot of which meandered a brook with a range of trees along its border. The fourth side was hemmed in by a thick forest, which extended back to the banks of the Missouri.9

  To Irving, it was “a retired, rural spot, shut out from the world, and looked as if it might have been free from its cares also.”10 It is noteworthy that Irving thought the village was “shut out from the world, especially since he didn’t know that Kenekuk’s band had sheltered in that location precisely in order to regroup as a distinctly indigenous society, resisting missionizing and land-grabbing at every turn.