Native Americans Gregory E. Dowd-

Native Americans Gregory E. Dowd- The Indians Great Awakening In his The Indians Great Awakening, Gregory Evans Dowd recounts the struggle for resistance of a few American Indian tribes against the British- American expansion. Dowd gives an unique and very interesting interpretation of the events taking place during the mid- eighteenth during the colonization of the Native Americans.

The particularity of his view lies in the fact that he sees the Indians' spiritual and political resistance to the Anglo-American expansion in terms of an "awakening" of their sense of unity as a people, in spite of the tribal division and the geographical or linguistic differences deriving from this. Gregory Dowd's book, A Spirited Resistance. The North American Indian Struggle for Unity 1745-1815, was published in 1992 and appeared in the context of many other Native American history books which related the same events.

Unlike most of the other texts of the same period however, Dowd's book gave a unique perspective of the events: it tried to reconstruct history from the point-of-view of the Native Americans, focusing on their own perception of the Anglo- American invasion, and relying for this description on specific Native American cultural, spiritual and political sources. Thus, Dowd's book endeavored to look at the British colonization from the inside, from the perspective of the Native Americans who faced it.

The Indians Great Awakening presents the resistance of the Native Americans to the British colonization, and observes the double character of this movement: it is both a spiritual and a political resistance, or in other words, the political resistance is backed up by a spiritual regeneration of the Indians, who rediscover their traditional religions and rituals in their effort to preserve their identity in front of the colonists. Moreover, the nativistic movement has yet another character apart from the spiritual and the political ones, according to Dowd.

The sudden awakening of the Indians is not a mere spiritual revival, but a finding of a sense of unity as a people. They Native Americans felt that they were a separate nation, and a separate race, as different from either the white or black people: In its most important aspect, it was an awakening to the idea that, despite all the boundaries defined by politics, language, kinship and geography, Indians did indeed share much in the way of their past and their present.

It was an awakening to the notion that Indians shared a conflict with Anglo-America, and that they, as Indians, could and must take hold of their destiny by regaining sacred power." (Kupperman 2000, 428) Dowd supports this idea with examples of the visions and revelations that came from the prophets among the Native Americans. For instance, the Indians new awareness of their identity as a people is supported by their view of the divine creation of men and of the world.

They began to see themselves as a separate nation, a separate race of people for which God intended other purposes than for the Europeans: The people of this Delaware village asserted their identity. They drew distinctions that separated Indians from blacks and whites. The distinctions, they felt, were God given.

Rejecting Presbyterian attempts to establish a mission among them they explained: ' God first made three men and three women, viz.- the Indian, the negro and the white man.' "(Kupperman 2000, 429) Thus, Dowd pertinently interprets the new prophecies and visions of the Native leaders, as signs of the birth of a spirit if unity among the Indians. The colonization was, first of all, a threat of their sense of identity as a people and a separate race.

Therefore, they react against this by going back to the roots of their identity and by giving it a religious justification.

To this result, the best known prophets of the Delaware tribe in this period, Papoonan, Wangomed and Neolin all have visions in which vices and sins are identified or symbolized by the white people and their habits: Neolin drew a path from earth to heaven, along 'which their forefathers use'd to assend to Hapiness.' The path however was now blocked by a symbol 'representing the White people.' Along the side of the chart were many 'Strokes' representing the vices brought by the Europeans.

" (Kupperman 2000, 431) This spiritual resistance was blended with a political form of resistance as well: for them to preserve their identity as a people, as God had ordained it, the Indians had to be purified of all the vices of the Europeans, among which the drinking of alcohol was most often blamed.

But, Dowd makes it clear that it was not only the vices as such that the Delaware people wanted to give up, they actually wanted to renounce any kind of exchange of goods with the British and to rely exclusively on their own means of subsistence and on their own knowledge about the world.

This fact once more emphasizes the notion that the resistance of the Native Americans was not only a spiritual one, but also one based on the preservation of their identity as a people: Neolin not only drew a cosmographic distinction between Anglo- Americans and Indians he preached a rejection of the dependence on the British through the avoidance of trade, the elaboration of ritual, and the gradual (not the immediate) abandonment of European-made goods.

" (Kupperman 2000, 431) Thus, the rituals of purification that the Indians adopted to avoid the British ways, some of them very drastic, like the habit adopted by the Native inhabitants of Wakatomica, which consisted of the special ritual of the consumption of a certain herbal tea that induced vomiting, all point to the desperate measures that the Indians took to maintain and assert their identity through the preservation of specific Native lore and traditions.

Gregory Dowd also emphasizes that the Indians' conviction that they form one people is what actually made resistance possible, especially during the wars, such as the Pontiac war of 1763: The nativist conviction that Indians were one people under God, at least equal to, but.