Both the Native and Non-Native parties held religious beliefs and spiritual practices. We thought this would be a worthy topic of analysis because of the importance of these beliefs to each party, as well as the differences in practices between parties. However, their frequent interactions with one another resulted in an exchange of spiritual, religious, and cultural beliefs, which we believed was worthy of analysis.
How were religious and spiritual practices transferred between Native and non-Native peoples between 1750s and 1820s?
In order to gain more perspectives into this issue, we decided to look at two separate questions:
- How did frequencies of mentions of the other party’s religion and spiritual practices change over time?
- How did the use of “Great Spirit” by the Europeans change over time
How did frequencies of mentions of the other party’s religion and spiritual practices change over time?
Methodology
For this question, we decided to focus on treaty councils specifically, rather than a larger corpus related to Native/Non-Native interactions. This is because both parties had more or less equal time represented in the treaty councils, whereas a broader corpus would be have data that is more biased towards the Non-Native perspective, since most of those documents were accounts written by Europeans.
We split the speeches into a Native corpus and a Non-Native corpus, and used Voyant Tools to create word frequency dispersion plots. The keywords we identified as religious or spiritual terms for analysis were “great spirit” (Native term), “god” (Non-Native term), and “christian” (Non-Native term).
Hypotheses
We expect that there would be increased mentions of Non-Native religious terms by the Natives, and vice-versa, as time went on. This is based on the assumption that over time, each party would assimilate religious terms from the other into their own speech due to a natural transfer of ideas and a desire to be more relatable to the other party, as well as to leverage the other party’s religious principles when negotiating.
Exhibits
Non-Native Lexical Dispersion Plot for Religious Terms
Figure 1
Native Lexical Dispersion Plot for Religious Terms
Figure 2
Analysis and Findings
For the Non-Natives, if our hypothesis were true, we would expect to see an increase in the use of “great spirit” as we progressed through our corpus. However, if we look at figure 1, we don’t see this trend. What we do observe is a spike in the usage of Great Spirit near the middle of the corpus.
For the Natives, if our hypothesis were true, we would expect to see an increase in the use of “god” and “christian.” As it turns out, the word “christian” was never mentioned by a Native speaker, and while “god” was mentioned slightly more in the later half of the corpus, that increase does not appear to be significant.
Conclusion
In either case, we cannot conclude that there has been significant transfer of religious and spiritual terms from one party to the other, as indicated by usage of those terms in treaty councils. If we had a larger corpus that was included more treaty councils, or perhaps other types of text, we may obtain different results.
How did the use of “Great Spirit” by the Europeans change over time?
Hypotheses
When designing this question we came up with few questions: What was the frequency of “Great Spirit’s” use with the British? And what was the significance of its usage in the frame of the council talks that were occuring between the Native Americans and the British.
Methodology
We used Voyant Tools in order to analyze the contents from the “TreatyCouncils-BySpeaker” corpus and the “Indigenous-Related-Records” corpus. In order to test the frequency overtime of the word “Great Spirit” we used a combination of the context tool in Voyant and cross-referenced a custom Google Sheets document regarding the use of “Great Spirit” in combination with the two documents.
Analysis and Findings
Figure 1
Above is the frequency for the use of “Great Spirit” by the Non-Natives throughout the split corpus. The use of the word “Great Spirit” is rather minimal. However, this just makes these few entries all the more significant.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 2 is a screenshot of the work in the Voyant Context Tool. The corpus we used to generate this result was sorted version of the “TreatyCouncils-BySpeaker” corpus and the “Indigenous-Related-Records” corpus. The only speakers present within this corpus are Non-Native speakers. The yellow items in Fig. 2 are positive sentiments that we deduced from sight reading. The grey item is an entry that was neutral. And the pink entries are all negative sentiments. we then traced these documents back to their speaker and dates via the Google Sheet. In Figure 3, we ordered each item chronologically by the date within a Google Sheet. Blue entries are positive sentiments. While the red entries are the negative. we blacked out the Native Speakers because our question only addresses the sentiments of the Non-Natives. As we can see here the sentiments towards the Great Spirit in 1778 were overall positive or neutral. Usually giving thanks to the Great Spirit and asking the Great Spirit for help. However, the documents that contained the highest amount of threatening and twisted depictions of the Great Spirit appeared quite later on in 1792.
Conclusion
This change in mentality may have been due to being tired of playing along with Native traditions. The Anglo-Americans may have eventually tried to speed up their grab for land by placing threats of divine intervention. These documents would also show the use of “Great Spirit” being used to belittle the Natives. We see this mixture of positive and negative sentiments in the Links tool within Voyant. “Pleasure,” “meet,” and “nations,” refers to the Anglo-American’s thankfulness that the “Great Spirit” was allowing them to meet for these council meetings. However, “angry,” depicts the twisted and threatening nature that later manifested in the semantics of Anglo-American vocabulary.
Overall Synopsis:
Our analysis gives us insight on our main question: how were religious and spiritual practices transferred between Native and non-Native peoples between 1750s and 1820s? Taking a look at the frequencies of mentions of the other party’s religion and spiritual practices change over time, we ultimately find that there was no major transfer of religious or spiritual beliefs between Natives and non-Native peoples. The small amount of relevant documents within our corpus with religious keywords such as ‘Great Spirit’ and ‘God’ leads us to no clear confirmation of religious transfer. However, we do know that in order for the non-natives to gain Native trust and trust, non-Natives needed to appease to the Natives with their traditions. Our insights on the religious and spiritual transfer between Natives and non-Natives showcase how traditional spiritual ceremonies were used as a median between the Natives and non-Native people in order to conduct meetings and negotiate in the early 19th century.