ABSTRACT
Resistance to white settler pressure on Creek lands and the plan being promoted by Hawkins took the form of what one writer has termed a ‘sacred revolt’, the sudden emergence and rapid growth of a nativist spiritual movement that urged rejection of American culture in all its manifestations and a return to the ‘Golden Age’ that presumably existed before the arrival of the white man.17 This classic ‘revitalisation’ movement appears to have had its origins in contact between Creek shamans and the Shawnee Prophet and his followers. The impressions carried away from Prophetstown and propagated in the Alabama and Georgia towns by Creek pilgrims were reinforced by a visit by Tecumseh to the Creek homeland during his tour of Indian country in 1811. The Shawnee leader and his entourage introduced a new war dance to their Creek hosts, known as the ‘Dance of the Lakes’, which would enjoy great popularity, but, more importantly, Tecumseh seems to have left behind a powerful prophecy, that the anger of the Great Spirit with the corruption of his Indian peoples by contact with the Americans would shortly manifest itself in a great shaking of the earth.
