Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet (Herring)

Joseph Herring's scholarly biography of Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet, published by the University Press of Kansas in 1988, drawing on missionary, government agent and Kickapoo oral records. It traces Kenekuk's emergence in the 1820s as a religious reformer who preached temperance, agricultural settlement and a syncretic doctrine blending Kickapoo tradition with elements of Catholic practice, using a prayer stick with carved symbols as a mnemonic device for his followers, and documents how his leadership helped the Kickapoo resist removal pressure and retain a land base in Kansas that outlasted many neighboring nations' relocations. Its strength is careful use of multiple, cross-checked nineteenth century documentary sources on a figure otherwise thinly recorded. Its limit is that, Kenekuk having left no writings of his own, his theology is necessarily reconstructed through outside observers' accounts.