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“Holy Ghost Tribe:” The Needles Revival and the Origins of Pentecostalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2019
Abstract
In 1899, a religious revival in Needles, California, included the first recorded instance of tongues-speech in California. The revival was begun by a white Holiness preacher and included a predominantly Native American, but ethnically mixed, congregation. The Mohave Indians at the heart of the Needles Revival had survived in the Southern California borderlands by crossing boundaries and building new communities in the shadow of the modernizing state. As they participated in the Needles Revival, Mohave believers and others combined this pattern of boundary crossing with the theology and praxis of the Holiness movement to develop a local manifestation of the emerging Pentecostal movement. During the early twentieth century, a series of revivals around the world and a network of Holiness groups and missionaries developed into modern Pentecostalism. The most prominent of these revivals took place on Azusa Street in Los Angeles and emphasized speaking in tongues and multiracial community, not unlike the earlier revival in Needles. Taken together, these two revivals show the influence of Southern California on early Pentecostalism. Speaking in tongues enabled early Pentecostals to cross boundaries imposed by California's racial hierarchy, and the multiethnic communities they formed were a testament to the cultural dynamism of the region. As Mohave converts embraced Pentecostalism and eventually assumed leadership of the Needles congregation, they brought their legacy of survival and adaptation to the movement. In the process, they helped to shape modern Pentecostalism.
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- Copyright © 2019 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
The author wishes to thank William Deverell, Richard Fox, Yesenia Navarette-Hunter, Lloyd Barba, Jordan Keagle, William Cowan, Jillaine Cook, Andrea Johnson, Daniel Ramírez, and the anonymous reviewers for Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation.
1 “The Mohave Mission,” Reality 3, no. 10 (May 1900): 227.
2 Harvey Cox has argued that the two most distinctive features of the Azusa Street Revival, and the earliest years of the Pentecostal movement in general, were speaking in tongues and interracial community. Cox is correct that these were the signal features of the Azusa Street Revival; however, Gary McGee has argued that these features were not universal to early Pentecostalism. Therefore, an emphasis on the gift of tongues and multiracial community should be seen as an especially Californian form of early Pentecostalism, which appeared first in Needles. See Cox, Harvey, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995): 25–78Google Scholar; for interracial community, see especially 58–59, 63–64. McGee, Gary B., “‘Latter Rain’ Falling in the East: Early-Twentieth-Century Pentecostalism in India and the Debate over Speaking in Tongues,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 68, no. 3 (September 1999): 648–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 “Mission to the Mohave Indians,” Reality 3, no. 3 (October 1899): 57.
4 For an excellent overview of the Holiness movement's doctrines, see Dayton, Donald, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1987), 63–173Google Scholar.
5 Here and elsewhere in this article, I have chosen to narrate events as eyewitnesses describe them, even events such as miraculous healings. I approach eyewitness accounts of healings and other miracles with a hermeneutic of inclusion and epistemic humility. Therefore, I strive to include and value the voices of early Pentecostals and to assume that marginalized people were capable of narrating their own lives. Epistemic humility requires that I hesitate before imposing any totalizing theological schema of what is and is not possible. I also offer more naturalistic explanations for some phenomena, but only when the sources themselves contain sufficient evidence to warrant those conclusions.
6 ”The Mohave-Indian Mission” Reality 3, no. 4 (November 1899): 81–82.
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11 For Holiness work among California's Latino population, see “Home-work among the Spanish Speaking People,” Reality 3, no. 8 (March 1900): 178–79; “Spanish Mission Training School,” Reality 3, no. 2 (September 1900): 33; “Brother and Sister Bailly,” Reality 4, no. 3 (October 1900): 57; and “South America as a Missionary Field,” Reality 4, no 3. (October 1900): 58. For Holiness work among Chinese immigrants, see “Our September All-Day Meeting,” Peniel Herald 1, no. 13 (October 1895): 1; Emma Sturgiss, “Santa Monica Chinese Mission,” Reality 3, no. 1 (August 1899): 10; “Farewelling Chung Ben,” Reality 3, no. 3 (October 1899): 58; and “Christianizing the Chinese,” Reality 3, no. 5 (December 1899): 105.
12 “Did the Apostles Speak in Foreign Tongues?” Reality 1, no. 5 (November 1897): 123. For the importance of missionary tongues among early Pentecostals, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001): 44–51; for more on the sense of apocalyptic urgency, see pages 260–61. Allan Anderson has also shown that a desire for the gift of tongues emerged from the global network of Holiness missionaries. See Anderson, Allan, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (London: Orbis Books, 2007): 40–49, 57–65Google Scholar.
13 “Mission to the Mohave Indians,” 57.
14 For an excellent discussion of glossolalia and desires for xenolalia in early Pentecostalism, see Wacker, Heaven Below, 35–57. Other scholars, such as Robert Anderson and Harvey Cox, have discussed the role of tongues in Holiness and early Pentecostal circles. Both agree that an earlier desire for xenolalia was soon eclipsed by an actual practice of glossolalia, although they diverge sharply on the value of glossolalia. See Anderson, Robert Mapes, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 10–27Google Scholar; and Cox, Harvey, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995), 81–99Google Scholar. Gary McGee has argued that there was substantial continuity between attempted xenolalia and glossolalia. McGee, Gary, “‘The New World of Realities in which We Live’: How Speaking in Tongues Empowered Early Pentecostals,” Pneuma 30 (2008): 108–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Needles, the same desire for xenolalia described by Wacker, Cox, Anderson, and McGee found a slightly different expression. The theological justifications were the same, but it appears that Olsen associated the gift of tongues with the acquisition of workaday language proficiency, not just with ecstatic utterances. Much like purported moments of ecstatic xenolalia at Azusa Street and elsewhere, however, the gift of tongues in Needles was understood to be both evidence of the speaker's baptism in the spirit and a tool for crossing language barriers for the purpose of evangelization.
15 The Californians were not alone. For more on the desire to use xenolalia in foreign missions, see McGee, Gary, “Shortcut to Language Preparation? Radical Evangelicals, Missions, and the Gift of Tongues,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 25, no. 3 (July 2001): 118–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 “El-Bethel Missions,” Reality 3, no. 6 (January 1900): 130.
17 “The Mohave Mission,” Reality 3, no. 10 (May 1900): 227.
18 “El-Bethel Missions,” 130.
19 Correspondence from Charles McNichols to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, April 16, 1899, in Colorado River Agency Books, vol. 12, 2–3.
20 Tupamahu, Ekaputra, “Tongues as a Site of Subversion: An Analysis from the Perspective of the Postcolonial Politics of Language,” Pneuma 38 (2016): 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tupamahu primarily discusses glossalia's value to decolonial practice, but he also argues that early Pentecostals’ openness to xenolalia constituted a similar form of resistance to colonial hegemony.
21 There is one reference to his wife instructing Native people not to paint their faces, but this may be rooted in a Holiness desire to eschew all personal adornment and not an effort to specifically target Native cultural expressions. “The Mohave Indians,” Reality 4, no. 9 (April 1901): 202.
22 “Mission to the Mohave Indians,” 57.
23 Magill, Harry B., Francis Schlatter, The Healer, with His Life, Works, and Wanderings (Denver, CO: Schlatter, 1896), 39–40Google Scholar.
24 “When Dr. Yoakum Spoke in ‘Tongues,’” Confidence 4, no. 11 (November 1911): 225.
25 “The Mohave Mission,” Reality 3, no. 9 (April 1900): 203.
26 For examples, see “El-Bethel Missions,” 130; “The Mohave Mission,” Reality 3, no. 10 (May 1900): 227; “The Mohave-Indian Mission,” 81; “El-Bethel Missions,” 130–31; “The Mohave Indians,” 202.
27 Curtis, Edward S., The North American Indian, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1908), 55Google Scholar.
28 For contemporary observations of Mohave healing, see Kroeber, A. L., Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925): 775–78Google Scholar; and Curtis, The North American Indian, 53–55.
29 Wacker, Heaven Below, 25–28.
30 For more on healing in the Holiness movement, see Hardesty, Nancy A., Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 27–86Google Scholar and passim.
31 Jay Riley Case has traced a similar phenomenon among American evangelical and Holiness missionaries who operated overseas. Case, Jay Riley, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Whalen, Kevin, “Beyond School Walls: Indigenous Mobility at Sherman Institute,” Western Historical Quarterly 49, no. 3 (July 2018): 275–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Anna Johnson, “The Gospel Carriage among the Indians,” Witness and Training School News (August 1901): 1–3.
34 Lesley Gay to Lyman Stewart, November 10, 1901, Lyman Stewart Papers, Biola University Archives and Special Collections, La Mirada, California.
35 Luke 14:15–24. The parable can also be found in Matthew 22:1–14. The version recorded in Matthew, however, describes a servant being sent to gather anyone he finds on the streets, whereas the version in Luke emphasizes drawing in the poor, the crippled, and the marginalized. Luke's differing emphasis, and Gay's preference for the version recorded in Luke, is likely connected to the text's intercultural emphasis. The Gospel of Luke is intended for a more Hellenized audience and was written alongside the Acts of the Apostles, which includes the account of Pentecost and Paul's missionary work among the gentiles. Gay's purpose, like the author of Luke and Acts, is to show that the Holy Spirit empowers believers to cross boundaries and spread the gospel message.
36 “The Mohave Mission,” Reality 3, no. 10 (May 1900): 227.
37 Hardesty, Faith Cure, 87–100, and passim.
38 Fannie Rowe, “The Supernatural and the Natural; Or, The Supernatural in Divine Healing,” Reality 3, no. 12 (July 1900): 265–69.
39 Anzaldúa, the Chicana cultural theorist and poet, has argued that the spiritual dynamism of the borderlands is rooted in the ability of boundary crossers and other liminal groups to not only move between cultures but also to integrate aspects of the self that the dominant Anglo society has artificially sundered. The mystical and the rational, the male and female, and the spiritual and material can be united because “people who inhabit both realities are forced to live at the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes. Such is the case with the india and the mestiza.” For Anzaldúa's spiritual adepts, these moments of crossing come through spiritual peak experiences, ecstatic and transcendent states. The intense prayer meetings held in Needles and at the Amago home provided a venue for these experiences. Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 37Google Scholar. For more on ecstatic experiences, what Anzaldúa calls the coatlicue state, see 41–52, 69–75.
40 “The Mohave-Indian Mission,” 81.
41 For more on the permeable ethnic boundaries around Native groups in the Southwest, see Brooks, James F., Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 27Google Scholar and passim. For an application of some of Brooks’ ideas to the Mohave and their neighbors, see Zappia, Traders and Raiders, 11–12 and passim.
42 Tarango, Angela, Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 “Two Mohaves,” The Witness (June 1903): 18; “Two Unclipped Indians to be Missionaries,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1903, 10.
44 “Two Unclipped Indians to be Missionaries,” 10. For efforts by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to force Mohave men to wear their hair short, see reference 10. McNichols, Annual Report, 12:93. McNichols drew an explicit contrast between Native men in Needles who, absent the authority of the state, wore their hair long, and men on the reservation who were compelled to cut their hair according to Anglo styles.
45 California Yearly Meeting of Friends, Official Minutes (Whittier, CA: Register Press, 1904): 53–54.
46 California Yearly Meeting of Friends, Official Minutes, 53–54, 67, 71, 79; “Young Indians Want to Be Missionaries,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1904, 14.
47 Truett, Samuel, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 6–9Google Scholar, passim; Zappia, Traders and Raiders, 75–79. For case studies that analyze the networks and opportunities created by the borderlands, see Young, Julia, Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Perales, Monica, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
48 See Elizondo, Virgilio, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000), xiv–xvGoogle Scholar and passim; Wacker, Heaven Below, 10 and passim.
49 For an excellent overview of the debate, see Anderson, Allan, “The Emergence of a Multidimensional Global Missionary Movement: Trends, Patterns, and Expressions,” in Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism, ed. Miller, Donald E., Sargeant, Kimon H., and Flory, Richard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robeck, Cecil M., “Launching a Global Movement: The Role of Azusa Street in Pentecostalism's Growth and Expansion,” in Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism, ed. Miller, Donald E., Sargeant, Kimon H., and Flory, Richard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 42–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Joe Creech has argued that the Azusa Street Revival's influence on American Pentecostalism was more symbolic than substantive. See Creech, Joe, “Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa Street Revival in Pentecostal History,” Church History 65, no. 3 (September 1996): 405–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Others have argued that Pentecostalism emerged first not at Azusa Street but from the transnational network of Holiness missionaries and converts. See Anderson, Allan, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007)Google Scholar; and Case, An Unpredictable Gospel, 209–56.
50 Many early Pentecostals understood that the Azusa Street Revival was the culmination of transnational developments and an important—but not isolated—event. E. A. Sexton, writing from Atlanta, told her readers, “Several years before the work in Los Angeles, a spirit of supplication was given to the people of God that extended all over the Christian world. Prayers ascended daily for a worldwide revival and for the Pentecostal showers to fall; and like droppings before a great cloudburst, saints were receiving here and there.” Sexton claimed that the cloudburst came at Azusa Street and that preachers and missionaries soon came to receive the “Holy Ghost fire” and carry it away to all the world. Sexton emphasizes the centrality of Azusa Street, but her account presupposes a global network of Holiness workers that antedates Azusa Street. See E. A. Sexton, “Some Interesting Facts about the Pentecostal Movement,” Bridegroom's Messenger (February 1, 1911): 1.
51 McGee, “‘Latter Rain’ Falling in the East,” 648–65.
52 Creech, “Visions of Glory,” 405–24.
53 For more on the influence of the borderlands on early Pentecostalism, see Ramírez, Daniel, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 23–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 34–39, and passim.
54 Mutcumalya appears in a photo of the Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers’ students, dated March 1906. See Otto, Ken, Azusa Pacific University (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2008), 18Google Scholar.
55 “Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers,” Witness and Training School News (August 1901): 4.
56 “Pentecost Has Come,” Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 1.
57 See, for example, “The Second Chapter of Acts,” Apostolic Faith 1, no. 2 (October 1906): 2.
58 “The Promised Latter Rain Poured Out on the Humble People of God All over the World,” Apostolic Faith (Portland) 2, no. 15 (August 1908): 1; “Rivers of Living Water,” Apostolic Faith (Portland), no. 10 (October 1909): 1.
59 Untitled, Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (December 1906): 3; “In Denver Colorado,” Apostolic Faith 1, no. 8 (May 1907): 1.
60 “Port Angeles, Wash,” Apostolic Faith (Portland), no. 15 (1910): 4; Untitled, Apostolic Faith (Portland), no. 13 (March or April 1910): 5. The dates of publication for some issues of the Portland edition are imprecise because the paper was printed irregularly and left undated.
61 Untitled, Apostolic Faith (Portland), no. 13 (March and April 1910): 5.
62 “Port Angeles, Wash,” Apostolic Faith (Portland), no. 10 (October 1909): 5. For more on Native mobility in the Salish Sea borderlands, see Wadewitz, Lissa, “Pirates of the Salish Sea: Labor, Mobility, and Environment in the Transnational West,” Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 4 (November 2006): 597CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Untitled, Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 3. This moment, and the lacunae in the historical record surrounding it, have been discussed Ramirez, Migrating Faith, 4–6.
64 For Hezmalhalch's visit to Needles, see “Among the Indians in Needles, California,” Apostolic Faith 1, no. 5 (January 1907): 3. For his decision to disembark from the train, see Untitled, Apostolic Faith 1, no. 5 (January 1907): 1.
65 “Among the Indians in Needles, California,” 3.
66 In all the periodicals accessible through the Consortium of Pentecostal Archives digital collection, Mutcumalya's remarks are the only time the phrase “naked” is used to describe an absence of sin.
67 “Among the Indians in Needles, California,” 3.
68 Frank Bartleman wrote, “The present world-wide revival was rocked in the cradle of little Wales, it was—‘brought up’ in India, following; becoming full grown in Los Angeles later.” Bartleman, Frank, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles, 2d ed.(Los Angeles, CA: Independently published, 1925), 21Google Scholar.