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Abstract. While there is no doubt that the prophet Neolin, in seeking to reform Delaware religious culture, drew upon ideas borrowed from EuroAmerican Christians, scholars have often overlooked or understated the ways in which Neolin incorporated those ideas into an indigenous context and added elements which resonated with traditional themes. This article analyzes the interplay of traditional and alien elements in Neolin's thought.
In challenging European colonial expansionism and cultural hegemony, Third World nativist revitalization movements have commonly used ideas borrowed from the dominant power. Students of those movements disagree as to whether the key to understanding revitalization ideology is to be found in their appropriation of Judeo-Christian concepts of providence and divine judgment or in their reaffirmation of indigenous beliefs and practices.l It is thus not surprising that while some analyses of the Delaware (Lenape) prophets of the eighteenth century portray them as traditionalists who incorporated some borrowed ideas into an inherited body of beliefs and practices, others argue the prophets were radical innovators whose core message was grounded in concepts of sin and redemption borrowed from Christian missionaries. A classic and extreme example of the latter interpretation is found in a I97I study of the Delaware prophets which concluded that "by the mid-eighteenth century, the Delaware had internalized white culture to the extent that they could no longer distinguish it from their own." Accordingly, the Delaware nativist revival could not have been "an outgrowth of indigenous tradition," but rather must be seen "as a basically European innovation expressed in native idiom." 2
This article seeks to demonstrate, through a reexamination of their teachings, that those who have portrayed the religious innovations of the Delaware prophets as essentially nonindigenous not only overstate their case but also misconstrue the basic nature of the prophets' appeal. Admittedly, the prophets made use of certain ideas about God and the Devil and about heaven and hell that were not only borrowed from Christianity but that, on the surface, appear to have few if any counterparts in traditional beliefs. In calling for certain changes in religious practice they also sometimes echoed Christian missionaries in condemning their traditionalist rivals as witches and devil worshippers. But preoccupation with their indebtedness to Christian teachings can too easily divert us from the...