Shaking Tents

Early European explorers of the New World came across many extraordinary phenomena, not least of which were ‘shaking tents’. The first known written account of these ‘talking tepees’ came from Samuel de Champlain, founder of the Canadian province of Quebec.

In 1609, while accompanying a group of Huron, Algonquin and other American Indian tribes warring against the Iroquois, Samuel de Champlain was surprised that they posted no night sentries. He was told that their jossakeed, or conjurer, would divine the enemy’s actions. After a sturdy-looking wigwam was constructed out of hides, the conjurer crawled inside and began singing an incantation. The tent started to twitch back and forth ever more furiously as he talked to the spirits. The skeptical Champlain regarded the whole performance as a charade.

Even so, ‘shaking tents’ have been observed by traders and anthropologists ever since. In the 1930s American researcher A. Irving Hallowell examined such tents among the Ojibwe people in northern Manitoba, Canada. He described one conjuring lodge framed by three sspruce and three birch poles, each pole 3 meters long, slanted firmly into the ground in a circle with a 1 –meter diameter. Branches were bound horizontally around the top like the hoops of a barrel. The framework was covered with birchbark, and caribou hooves were then tied on to rattle as the tent moved. After sunset several dozen onlookers gathered around while the conjurer crawled inside. Soon the tent frame began to shake.

The conjurers told Hallowell that they sat normally in the tents, with one hand merely resting upon a pole, and the tent shook as spirits came and perched on the upper hoops. Assistants gave tobacco to onlookers to honour the spirits with pipe smoke. Each spirit announced who it was-moose, Iynx or other – in song. The people especially awaited Great Turtle who, according to Hallowell, spoke in ‘a throaty nasal voice’, which was compared to Donald Duck’s. participants would ask the spirits about causes of misfortune or new of distant relatives. The spirits either answered directly or travelled through the air to gather information. Hallowell himself inquired about the health of his father in far – off Philadelphia.

As great Turtle journeyed to the city, the shaking of the tent died down, then increased as Turtle returned to say that Hallowell’s ill father ‘was no worse’, which Hallowell found was true when he arrived home.

Hallowell reported that men, and occasionally older women, became conjurers after having four dream visits by spirits. Every Ojibwe community had several of these people to play host to the singing, tent-shaking spirits. Hallowell believed that the conjurers’ many experiences of shaking tents, together with their intense desire to help people in distress, enabled them to perform without being fully aware of their won active participation.