The community continued to innovate its social and religious practices throughout the 1840s and 50s, always politely hearing out Christians who came to convert them before rejecting them in favor of Kenekuk’s teachings. In fact, the Prophet’s community and church lasted for more than 75 years, its durability due, in large part, to the successful transition its later practitioners made into alphabetic literacy as a supplement to the symbol system found on the prayer sticks. After Kenekuk’s death, a Potawatomi congregant named Wansuk took over the duties of pastor. At some point in the 1850s, he transcribed the Prophet’s teachings into an alphabetic form and made it into a manuscript codex. He was succeeded by four successive disciples who led the church until at least 1907, all of whom employed some combination of the prayer sticks and alphabetic manuscript in their services. The typed manuscript pictured above was copied from the manuscript in 1906.  

In addition to opening to our view of hitherto unrecognized Native literacy practices that supported the sovereignty of one indigenous community, the Kickapoo texts also shed light on how such items were eventually collected by ethnographers, and how and why the archive of American literary texts has thus far excluded them. The Prayer Stick and alphabetic text were collected by amateur ethnographer Milo Custer in 1906. Custer was the member of an antiquarian club who sought out ceremonial mounds and other elements of America’s indigenous past in an effort to preserve them. In 1906, Custer appears to have become aware of the Kenekuk Church, traveling to the community to interview surviving members of the congregation. When he arrived at the Kickapoo Nation, Custer befriended the pastor of the Kenekuk Church, John Masquequaqua, who agreed to help him gather the history of his faith. Masquequaqua gave Custer the prayer stick that is pictured above as gift of friendship. He also agreed to show Custer the manuscript liturgy that had been handed down to him by previous leaders of the church. The text Custer saw was about 30 pages long and “written in Pottawatomie with English letters.” Custer had copied only a few pages when a tribal elder came to Masquequaqua’s house to ask that the transcribing be halted. Although Custer interpreted the elder’s request as a result of “superstition,” he acquiesced and stopped copying the manuscript. Upon discovering that Custer had been given a prayer stick, the elder tried to get it returned, offering to allow Custer access to the manuscript liturgy if he returned the sacred object. Custer declined, and what our archive now shows is a text whose meaning was fraught with local and national significance, and which was not freely given to outsiders. Whether or not these texts should be public, as they are in the National Archive and the archives of the Kansas Historical Society, is thus an open question, one that only the combined Kickapoo and Potawatomi community can answer. They appear here, for now, as a springboard for debate about indigenous literacies, sovereignties and intellectual property.