Charles August Olsen was speaking Mohave. He sat on the porch of his new home in Needles, California, and Mohave people stopped to talk, to read the Bible, to rejoice in miraculous healings, and to pray for the healings of relatives. Fannie Rowe was amazed. Olsen had left Los Angeles to work as a missionary among the Mohave people only eight months earlier, in August 1899. He had not known a word of the Mohave language when he arrived, but now he claimed to be fluent. Rowe and Olsen both believed that the preacher's newfound language ability was a restoration of the gift of tongues—the miraculous ability to speak new languages that the first Christians had received on the night of Pentecost. The supposed gift of tongues awed Rowe, but she was also impressed by the fledgling community that gathered around Olsen as he led revival meetings. The congregation consisted primarily of Mohave Indians who had come to Needles to look for work and to escape the harsh conditions on nearby reservations. The community also included several Anglo-Americans and at least one Latino worshipper. The Needles Revival had produced a multiracial community that believed in the modern restoration of the gift of tongues.Footnote ¹

The most salient features of the Needles Revival emerged when Olsen brought the theology and practice of the Holiness movement into the Southern California borderlands. The Holiness movement's emphasis on evangelization and the supernatural gifts of the spirit produced multiracial, tongues-speaking communities because Southern California's political economy encouraged new forms of boundary crossing. The violent dispossession of Native people and the rapid modernization of the region had produced a plethora of racial and political boundaries designed to secure white supremacy. Subaltern communities learned to survive by slipping across these boundaries, generating new identities and networks in the process. When Holiness preachers began to move through these networks, they generated the sort of racially mixed communities and tongues-speaking phenomena that would soon mark early Pentecostalism in California.Footnote ² Soon, men from the Mohave community assumed leadership positions in the local Holiness movement. One of these men went on to forge ties between the Mohave in Needles and the Azusa Street Revival, a pivotal event in the early history of Pentecostalism. The Azusa Street Revival began in 1906, when a multiracial community of believers gathered in Los Angeles to speak in tongues and proclaim the Holiness message. Like the community in Needles, this revival's most distinctive features were shaped by the arrival of Holiness doctrines in Southern California's borderlands.

Charles August Olsen arrived in Needles during the heat of summer with a tent and a firm sense of vocation. He had been sanctified and received the Holy Ghost five years earlier in San Francisco. After his conversion, he felt called to serve as a missionary and spent time working in Holiness ministries around Southern California, discerning where God would send him. It was during this time that he learned about the Mohave Indians. He felt that God was calling on him to travel to the desert and evangelize the community. With the support of the El-Bethel Mission Society, he departed for Needles. Once there, he pitched his tent on a vacant lot between the town and the train tracks, assembled five benches, and began preaching. A crowd of Indians gathered, and a handful came forward to seek sanctification and receive the Holy Spirit.Footnote ³

These individuals formed the nucleus of a small worshipping community. Soon, Olsen was holding revival meetings every night. During these meetings, Olsen preached on the key tenets of the Holiness movement: the importance of living a life free from sin, the necessity of baptism in the Holy Spirit, the possibility of divine healing, and the coming End of Days.Footnote ⁴ Olsen urged each of his followers to receive the Holy Spirit and, thus, to empower themselves for new lives as Christians. Along with preaching, these meetings included readings from the Bible, communal prayer, singing, and miraculous healings.Footnote ⁵ Olsen even reported that the congregation enjoyed the music so much that they would continue singing long into the night. Along with the nightly meetings, the community gathered for informal Bible studies in Olsen's home and baptismal services in the Colorado River. As the congregation grew, Olsen began to pray that God would send him additional rope and canvas to expand the revival tent. The Mohave congregation surprised him, however, by deciding to build an adobe church.Footnote ⁶

The emerging Holiness congregation had come into existence only when Olsen decided to cross the color line and literally pitch his tent among the Mohave Indians who were living on the outskirts of Needles. At the same time, this Native community was itself an outgrowth of longer patterns of boundary crossing and resistance by indigenous people. Mohave were attracted to Needles by the jobs provided by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. It was at Needles that the railroad crossed the Colorado River and intersected with the riverine transport that connected settlements along the Colorado to the outside world. As a transportation depot, Needles facilitated the exploitation of the Mohave people's homeland; it also, however, presented opportunities. Hundreds of Mohave chose to live and work on the outskirts of Needles rather than remain under the harsh authority of reservation officials.Footnote ⁷

The Mohave people had lived on the shores of the Colorado River long before the first white intruders arrived. After a series of conflicts in the late nineteenth century, they were confined to two reservations, one at Fort Mohave, north of Needles, and one to the south near Parker, Arizona. On these reservations, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials pursued a program of deliberate cultural erasure. Children were separated from their families and placed in boarding schools, and adults were compelled to labor at unfamiliar tasks. Traditional religious practices were officially suppressed, and BIA officials even tried to eliminate the Mohave language.Footnote ⁸

To escape these conditions, hundreds of Mohave people settled in Needles, supporting themselves with work on the railroad. This community was not isolated from on-reservation Mohave settlements; instead, many individuals and families moved back and forth between Needles and the reservations, strategically exploiting the opportunities presented by both. This subaltern community intentionally positioned itself beyond the surveillance of federal officials, and so few records survive describing the community's life. Members appear as a specter in the writings of Charles McNichols, the Indian agent stationed on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. McNichols complained that the Mohave living in Needles were

McNichols went on to describe crushing poverty among the Mohave living in Needles.

McNichols’ grim portrayal of the Needles community is rooted in a desire to justify his own work on the reservation. In his report, McNichols constructed the Needles community as a foil to the reservation, where he claimed that his civilizing project was progressing apace. McNichols used terms such as barbarism to describe traditional Mohave practices, while describing the Mohave living under his authority on the reservation as civilized. His value judgments reflect the racist mindset typical of Anglos at the time, but his words make one underlying fact clear: The Mohave who went to Needles were able to preserve some of their culture and self-determination. McNichols also likely exaggerated conditions in Needles to heighten the contrast. McNichols alleged that prostitution was rife in Needles; however, no Holiness workers mentioned it. No written account from an indigenous resident of Needles remains, and so it is difficult to gauge fully the standard of living in the community. Still, Mohave individuals’ frequent decisions to live in Needles instead of the reservation provide a mute testimony to the material conditions in both places. Apparently, life in Needles, despite low wages and crime, could be preferable to life on the reservation.

Needles was a site of Native resistance, where strategic engagement with the cash economy enabled families to provide for their material needs while still living on the banks of the Colorado River, their ancestral home. Mohave Indians worked to preserve their culture and autonomy by selectively incorporating elements of the outside world that seemed useful to them. Mohave men would slip in and out of the wage economy at will. One Anglo anthropologist noted, “They make valuable laborers, except that they are rarely dependable for long periods. When they have enough, nothing can hold them to a job.”Footnote ¹⁰ This attitude to work was not, as the anthropologist claimed, a result of the Mohave's racial type. Rather, it was a strategic approach to the capitalist economy, by which Mohave men could cross in and out of the cash economy to meet their own needs. These were the Mohave people who formed the backbone of the Needles Revival. They were receptive to the Holiness message, finding in it new sources of empowerment. Olsen was delighted to share his message with them.

Despite the interest of the congregation, Olsen encountered a challenge: He was unable to speak the Mohave language. He worried that the linguistic boundary was holding back his evangelization. Olsen was not the first Holiness preacher in Southern California to confront language barriers. Evangelists were active in the barrios and Chinatowns of the region. Unlike Olsen's proselytizing among the Mohave people, however, these operations were always tied to the foreign mission field. The Holiness movement included a global network of missionaries, many in China and Latin America. Thus, domestic Holiness missions to Chinese immigrants and Latinos had been able to draw on missionaries fluent in Chinese and Spanish to minister to non-English speakers. Furthermore, new Holiness missionaries hoping to leave for China and Latin America trained in Los Angeles, honing their language skills by working closely with returned missionaries and converts.Footnote ¹¹

Transnational flows of migration and evangelization produced opportunities for missionaries to study Chinese and Spanish, but learning a new language was still a laborious process. Some hoped to circumvent it by supernatural means. A year before Olsen departed for Needles, an article in Reality magazine, a periodical published by Southern California's branch of the Christian and Missionary Association, asked, “Did the Apostles Speak in Foreign Tongues?” The author answered in the affirmative. He argued that, after the descent of the Holy Spirit described in the book of Acts, the apostles had gained a supernatural ability to speak new languages and had used this gift as they traveled the polyglot Mediterranean. The publishers of Reality, like other Holiness believers, were interested in imitating the early church and claiming all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that had been present among the first Christians. This ability to speak in new languages is not the only way to understand New Testament references to the gift of tongues, but it was the one favored by late-nineteenth-century Holiness believers. This understanding of the gift of tongues was especially appealing for publishers of Reality because they could save precious time outfitting missionaries for foreign fields. Supernatural linguistic gifts would make language training unnecessary and enable missionaries to enter the field years earlier. This time was precious, the author claimed, because Christ's imminent return made every moment valuable. Here, several threads of Holiness theology—the desire for supernatural gifts of the Spirit, belief in a rapidly approaching Apocalypse, and an emphasis on evangelization—intertwined.Footnote ¹²

Like other Holiness preachers in Southern California's multiracial spaces, Olsen struggled to acquire a new language. Unlike an aspiring missionary hoping to learn Chinese or Spanish, Olsen had no transnational support network upon which to rely. He began practicing Mohave, but he also turned to a supernatural solution for his problem. He wrote a letter to the Christian and Missionary Alliance, stating, “I am learning their language very fast; which they like very much. One of the promises Jesus gave before He went to the Father was, ‘they shall speak in new tongues’; and I know that He will let me speak Mohave very soon. Praise His name!”Footnote ¹³ Olsen's desire to speak a Native language was rooted in his experience trying to build a new community among people marginalized by Californian white supremacy. His solution was drawn from the unique ferment of the late-nineteenth-century Holiness movement. During the twentieth century, Pentecostals and scholars of Pentecostalism came to associate the gift of tongues with ecstatic utterances and hotly debated the nature of these speech acts. Scholars have distinguished glossolalia—ecstatic utterances in no known language—from xenolalia—the purported supernatural ability to communicate in a language foreign to the speaker.Footnote ¹⁴ Olsen, like the author in Reality, was interested in xenolalia.Footnote ¹⁵

Readers following the progress of the mission in the pages of Reality would have learned the exciting result four months later: “God has given Brother Olsen the gift of the Indian language, as he said he believed He would. Sister Olsen writes the fact in these words ‘I only wish you could hear my beloved speak Mohave; I think you would call him a white Mohave; so plainly he speaks, just like them, that it wins and delights them so much.’”Footnote ¹⁶ Here, the gift of tongues enabled Olsen to cross the color line that separated white and Mohave and to preach to the Indians in their native language. Of course, the nature of the account raises some doubts. Olsen's fluency in Mohave, here and elsewhere,Footnote ¹⁷ is only ever attested to by white observers. Olsen's wife indicates that the Indians are impressed by Olsen's fluency, but it is possible that she is exaggerating or that the Native congregation exaggerated Olsen's skill. They may have been trying not to offend the new preacher, or they may have been eager to see God's hand at work in the mission and imputed to Olsen a greater degree of fluency than he ever possessed. Olsen may have been speaking with at least a modicum of proficiency. He had been living in Needles and attempting to learn Mohave for four months before anyone claimed that he received supernatural fluency. If Olsen learned Mohave the conventional way, it could explain the difference between his speech in Mohave and the phenomenon later Pentecostals identified as the gift of tongues. Olsen was able to speak Mohave not only in moments of ecstasy but also during more quotidian conversations, as would be expected if he was beginning to learn Mohave on his own. Whatever his actual level of language proficiency, Olsen and his contemporaries certainly perceived the manifestation of divine power. As Reality testified, Olsen was blessed: “[W]hat with conversions, healings, the gift of tongues, and above all his own name written in heaven, our brother is a happy man.”Footnote ¹⁸

Olsen's xenolalia contributed to Mohave enthusiasm for the Holiness message. To understand the significance of Olsen's Mohave utterances, it is necessary to place the Needles community in the broader context of American colonialism. The Mohave language was under attack on the reservations. Federal Indian agents worked hard to extirpate the language, most obviously by forbidding its use among children at boarding schools but also by policing its use in other reservation facilities.Footnote ¹⁹ The off-reservation community at Needles was a site where the Mohave language could be preserved. Olsen's preaching in Mohave was an implicit affirmation of the language itself. Indeed, by attributing his miraculous new language ability to the Holy Spirit, Olsen was subtly saying that God Himself valued the Mohave language. When Mohave worshippers prayed or shared their testimony in their natal language, they were marking off the revival as a site where their heritage was valued and accepted.Footnote ²⁰

Olsen's willingness to embrace the Mohave language rather than extirpate it may be indicative of a broader openness to Mohave culture. As Jay Riley Case has argued, many Holiness missionaries operated with an antiformalist ethos that rejected the so-called civilizing process touted by mainline missionaries. The antiformalists did not believe that converts necessarily needed to adopt Anglo culture to be real Christians, and so they focused on organizing emotional revivals instead of establishing schools and other institutions that spread the norms of Anglo respectability. Olsen seems to have embraced an antiformalist approach to missions. Unlike McNichols, who used his power as an Indian agent to enforce Anglo cultural norms on the reservation, published accounts of Olsen's ministry give little indication that he hoped to replace Native American traditions with Anglo norms.Footnote ²¹ Rather than attempting to re-create a racial hierarchy in his mission community that could train Native people to imitate Anglo culture, Olsen seems to have delighted in transgressing the bounds of respectability. During his first month in Needles, he scandalized white neighbors by walking down the street arm-in-arm with a Mohave convert. In this context, Olsen's desire to speak Mohave, rather than to teach English, begins to appear almost subversive.Footnote ²²

Olsen's use of Mohave is striking, but it is not the only purported case of xenolalia in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands prior to the Azusa Street Revival. Accounts claim that, on at least two other occasions, white faith healers used the gift of tongues to address indigenous listeners. Neither incident is as well documented as the Needles Revival, but they both show how the region provided a perfect setting for stories of missionary tongues. First, in July 1895, Francis Schlatter was drawing crowds in Albuquerque for his reputed healing abilities. Schlatter, an Alsatian by birth and a shoemaker by trade, was staying in a house in Old Town, a Hispanic neighborhood. According to one secondhand account, as he was laying hands on the sick, a group of Zuni men came through the crowd leading a blind man from their pueblo. When the Indians saw Schlatter, they threw themselves on the ground at his feet. Schlatter, speaking in the Zuni language, said to them, “Don't prostrate yourselves before me, I want none to kneel to me.”Footnote ²³ The second case of xenolalia was reported by Finis Yoakum, a Los Angeles–based faith healer who was active in Pentecostal circles after the Azusa Street Revival. Years later, after the gift of tongues had come to be accepted as a mark of Pentecostal authority, Yoakum also claimed to have spoken in tongues around the year 1900. Yoakum recounts that, as he was traveling in Mexico, he was preaching to a large crowd of Mexicans and indigenous people. At first, he was speaking through an interpreter, but, after suddenly feeling a gust of wind, he opened his mouth and began to talk in Spanish. He continued to preach in Spanish for half an hour, apparently prompting thirty of his hearers to come to the altar and be saved.Footnote ²⁴

These two anecdotes show the possibility of boundary crossing promised by xenolalia. For Yoakum, an American who had crossed into Mexico, his miraculous ability to speak Spanish enabled him to connect to his audience. For Schlatter, an immigrant to the United States from the borderlands of France and Germany, his brief Zuni statement allowed him to convey a message to his Zuni hearers, but it also awed his Hispanic and Anglo audience with another manifestation of the supernatural. In both instances, xenolalia was embraced in cases where circuits of migration connected faith healers and audiences that were generally separated by racial and political boundaries. These incidents also show the connection between xenolalia and divine healing. Schlatter and Yoakum were both primarily known as healers. Likewise, Olsen's ministry among the Mohave prominently featured healing.

In accounts of the Needles Revival published in Reality, the healings that accompanied Olsen's gift of tongues were also an important testament to the Holy Spirit's presence. For both his indigenous congregation in Needles and the Holiness audience who followed his reports in Los Angeles, stories of healing were crucial for attracting attention and gaining legitimacy for his mission. In one instructive example, an article relates how a Mohave elder named Pennawa was skeptical of the faith, but he brought his son's brother-in-law to be healed and “said if [the Holiness people's] God would heal him he would believe that He was a living and a true God and would accept him as their God.” Mohave healers had been unable to cure the man, but, when Olsen and the converts prayed over him, he began to recover.Footnote ²⁵ Olsen touted stories such as this as evidence of the Holiness message's legitimacy. These stories often spread through Mohave kin networks. In other reports from the Mohave missions, Olsen provides examples of Indians bringing family members to be healed or bringing the Olsens into their homes for healings after one relative had already been converted.Footnote ²⁶

These families’ willingness to seek out healing from a Holiness preacher may be explained by certain similarities in traditional Mohave practice and Holiness divine healing. Mohave healers were men who experienced a call to work as healers after dreaming. One healer, speaking to the anthropologist Edward Curtis, described a portion of his dream, saying, “A female bug came to me and said: ‘I am the one who made the sun, the moon, the stars. I will give you something. My breath is blue, my breath is green, my breath is red. I give you my breath to cure sickness.’ This was Mastamho, the creator, speaking through the bug, for Mastamho never speaks to men himself.”Footnote ²⁷ The dream was an interior experience in which the Mohave received healing as a gift from outside of himself. After such a dream, a man would begin to heal others. Healers would be called by relatives of the sick to sing at the bedside of the ill and usually to breathe on or apply spittle to the sick. The breath of the healer, it was hoped, could bring relief to the sufferer.Footnote ²⁸

These Mohave healing practices share some similarities with divine healing as understood by the Holiness movement. Holiness workers associated healing with the power of prevailing prayer—the belief that, because the Holy Spirit dwelled inside a believer's soul, they could ask God to alter the physical world, and God would oblige.Footnote ²⁹ For many early Pentecostals like Yoakum, the Holy Spirit even manifested as a gust of wind, not unlike the breath of a Mohave spirit. Healers in the Mohave and Holiness traditions received power to heal as a result of internal, personal experience. Healing itself involved not just the physical but also the spiritual renewal of the healed. Finally, the moment of healing was one of physical intimacy between the healer and the healed. The Mohave healer blew and administered his spittle to the sick, while the divine healer laid hands on the suffering. Thus, Pennawa and his family would have been able to understand Olsen and his claims to healing power in terms familiar to their own traditions.Footnote ³⁰ The published accounts of healings at the Needles Revival are all brief and include few details. These miracle narratives, presented in a few sentences, fail to capture the emotional intensity of these healings.

A more detailed account of a Holiness healing in a Native community is available, describing an incident at a different revival on a reservation near Needles. This narrative shows how the emotional intensity of healings strengthened bonds between white and indigenous believers. During the summer of 1901, a group of students and teachers from the Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers traveled to rural San Diego County to preach to a Native American community and there prayed for the healing of a Native American. The incident shows not only the importance of faith healing in evangelization but also the emerging role of nonwhite revival leaders.Footnote ³¹ The group chose their destination at the behest of Filomena Amago, an indigenous woman who had left the reservation to attend the Perris Indian School, a boarding school in Riverside, California. After finishing at the Perris School, she herself experienced a miraculous healing and enrolled at the Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers, where she studied, prayed, and worshipped alongside the white students. Soon, she felt a call to spread the gospel among her community on the reservation and set out with a group of Holiness people for that end. They traveled in the “Gospel Carriage,” a wagon specifically outfitted for mobile revivals, and parked the wagon at the Amago family home on the reservation. Amago's patterns of mobility and boundary crossing were hardly unique for students at the Perris School.Footnote ³² However, her decision to combine mobility with Holiness praxis soon produced a dramatic string of events. When Amago and her white companions reached the reservation, the novelty of the Gospel Carriage and Amago's connections to the community soon drew a crowd, and several Native people testified to conversion experiences.

The team from Los Angeles also prayed with the Amago family for the healing of their son, Edwardo. Like the healing services conducted by Olsen in Needles the same year, this healing required Holiness believers to cross the color line to evangelize, relying on indigenous kin networks to do so. Anna Johnson, a University of Southern California graduate who became close with Filomena at the Interdenominational Training School and worked as her partner during the revival in rural San Diego, described the event. The missionaries and the Amago family gathered around the boy, praying and sobbing. Johnson described “Filomena kneeling at her brother's side pleading with God. The power of God swept over us in wave after wave. I was compelled to stand and anoint him in the name of Jesus Christ, commanding him in His name to rise up and walk. As I laid my hand on his head, a thrill of power went all through me.” The physical intensity of the spiritual experience and the emotional intensity of the moment built to a crescendo as Edwardo struggled to rise up and walk. His father reached out to help him, but Edwardo waved him back. Fear and doubt mingled with hope and faith, as Johnson began to question whether the boy would really be healed. “Oh, will the devil conquer?” she worried. “The deep settled peace and faith in my heart answered: it shall be done! God's word was at stake. Six times he struggled; but victory! Jesus has conquered! He is standing!” The family and the missionaries now wept with joy, embracing one another as Edwardo ran across the room.Footnote ³³

The emotional and spiritual intensity of multiracial healings such as this one affected not only the healed but also the healers and onlookers. Healings could be intensely communal, as family and friends, who often brought the sick to be healed, prayed along with the healer, punctuating the moment with ecstatic outbursts and hoping for a miracle but uncertain of the outcome. These intense spiritual experiences were also moments of racial boundary crossing. Johnson was a white woman laying hands on an indigenous man, a transgressive act in its own right. The shared weeping and hugging by the Amago family and the missionaries also highlights the ecstatic interracial opportunities healing produced. As the healing appeared to succeed, the unconverted members of Amago family were caught up in the collective effervescence of the moment.

The interracial aspect of the healing in the Amago home was not lost on Holiness believers at the time. When Leslie Gay, who ran the Interdenominational Training School, wrote to the oil magnate Lyman Stewart requesting funds, he included Johnson's account of the healing. Gay emphasized the connection between Holiness eschatology and the marginalized peoples of California. As Gay wrote, “One of the reasons of my belief in the Lords [sic] coming soon is the fulfillment of the Lords [sic] last orders to his servants ‘Go out into the byways and hedges and compel them to come in that my table may be full.’ And the fact that with these workers has given forth and is now working among the Indians, the Mexicans, &c. as never before the Holy Spirit.”Footnote ³⁴ In his letter, Gay referenced the parable of the great banquet recorded in the Gospel of Luke.Footnote ³⁵ In this story, Jesus describes a wealthy man who hosts a great banquet. When his neighbors refuse his invitation, the rich man sends his servants to invite beggars and cripples from the city and people from isolated rural areas. Gay gave an eschatological reading of the parable, connecting the feast with the Parousia and arguing that Holiness people who worked among marginalized people were filling the role of the servants. Thus, California's Mexican and Indian population—and the Holiness preachers working among them—were placed at the center of salvation history, not in spite of their marginality, but because of it.

Accounts of the revival in Needles also spread throughout the Holiness network in Southern California. Stories of healing and xenolalia in the multiracial community on the banks of the Colorado River piqued believers’ hunger for dramatic spiritual gifts. When Fannie Rowe described her visit to Needles in Reality, she included stories of several healings along with Olsen's xenolalia, writing back, “As we heard Brother Olsen speaking Mohave all day, day after day, we realized as never before that the gifts are for the church to-day.”Footnote ³⁶ Along with the new and impressive gift of tongues, Rowe described the healing of a consumptive woman after her husband—himself recently healed of rheumatism—brought her to the mission. Witnessing these events among Native people quickened her Holiness theology “as never before.”

Two months later, Rowe published a longer essay in Reality, “The Supernatural and the Natural; Or, The Supernatural in Healing,” which laid out her theological position on healing. Rowe was broadly in line with the views of other divine healing advocates in the Holiness movement.Footnote ³⁷ Like others, Rowe emphasized that healing came through unification with Jesus Christ, especially in His atonement. Jesus Christ had reconciled humankind and God on the cross, so the argument went, so human beings could participate in the harmony and vitality of the divine through their connection to Jesus. Most Christians saw some version of this atonement at the root of their personal salvation, but Rowe and others connected metaphysical deliverance from sin with physical deliverance from illness. Rowe portrayed healing as a process of self-integration, writing, “There is a common belief among Christians that the soul-life should be super-natural and the physical life natural. This is dividing the man, placing one part of his being in the supernatural and one part in the natural…. There never can be perfect harmony in the life, until the whole man, soul and body, is given to God for his care and keeping.”Footnote ³⁸ Rowe wrote this article shortly after her visit to Needles, and her encounter with the multiracial community there shaped her thinking. She believed that healing should overcome the boundary between body and soul, just as the community in Needles had struggled to overcome the boundary between white and indigenous. Gloria Anzaldúa has noted that this exact form of healing—which conflates self-integration and boundary crossing—has long been a feature of life in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.Footnote ³⁹

The healings, along with the ecstatic worship gatherings and the community visits conducted by the Olsens, served to build an integrated, multiracial faith community. The gift of tongues was especially useful in this regard. Whatever Olsen's actual level of fluency, observers agreed that the Mohave were pleased to hear a sympathetic outsider speaking their language. Olsen was able to show his respect for the Mohave by inculturating his message through his use of the Native language, thus forging connections across racial boundaries. The community was not, however, merely Mohave congregants and an Anglo preacher. There are a few scattered references to even greater diversity at the prayer meetings. Because Olsen had traveled to the desert to preach to the Mohave, his appeals for support tended to focus on the Native Americans. Still, others participated in the Holiness meetings. Some Anglo youth from Needles attended, including even the son of the saloon keeper. Olsen also reported that a Mexican laborer had experienced a conversion and planned to be baptized in the Colorado River.Footnote ⁴⁰

It may appear that, despite the diversity in the pews, the revival still mirrored the racial hierarchies of the day, with Olsen leading the entire affair. Several developments challenge that assumption. First, Olsen was formally adopted into the Mohave nation. During a special gathering of the Mohave, Olsen and his wife were formally adopted and given Mohave names. Afterward, they were treated as members of the tribe. This may seem merely ceremonial, but Native communities in the Southwest had a long history of porous national boundaries. By adopting the Olsens as members of the tribe, the Mohave were troubling the racial hierarchy that divided Anglos from indigenous people. Outsiders may have still perceived the Olsens as white, but their Mohave congregants sought to erase the racial boundary between the preacher and themselves through the adoption.Footnote ⁴¹

The Mohave community soon produced Holiness leaders of their own. George Mutcumalya and others traveled to Los Angeles for training and then returned to lead the congregation in Needles. These Native leaders worked with white Holiness revivalists and training institutions based in Los Angeles but assumed prominent roles for themselves. Angela Tarango has argued that the most notable feature of Native American Pentecostalism is a commitment to the “indigenous principle.” This principle, shared across Pentecostal groups to varying degrees, argues that religious leaders should arise from within a community and that a major goal of missions should be the cultivation of local leaders. Tarango focuses on the Assemblies of God's work in the mid-twentieth century. The Mohave Indian revival and George Mutcumalya show that indigenous leadership was emerging within the Holiness movement before, during, and immediately after the Azusa Street Revival.Footnote ⁴²

George Mutcumalya and his wife, Bessie, traveled to Los Angeles in 1903, where he enrolled at the Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers, located in the Boyle Heights neighborhood. This was the same institution that had trained Filomena Amago and sponsored the mission to Native communities in San Diego. The Mutcumalyas traveled to Los Angeles with William Dixon, a Holiness worker associated with the El-Bethel Mission Society. While in Los Angeles, the Mutcumalyas not only received training, but also traveled with Dixon to local churches to appeal for funding for the missionary work among the Mohave.Footnote ⁴³

Mutcumalya arrived in Los Angeles as a “protégé” of Dixon, but he retained his indigenous identity. Dixon did not intend for Mutcumalya to remain in a subordinate role or to fully assimilate to white ways, and Mutcumalya himself preserved his Native identity while he was in Los Angeles. This is clear from the descriptions of Mutcumalya's distinctive appearance. Newspaper articles that note his arrival in Los Angeles describe Mutcumalya's long, dark hair and facial tattoos. While he could not remove his tattoos, Mutcumalya's decision to keep his hair long was a conscious choice to retain a marker of his indigenous identity, despite Anglo-American gender norms. Indian Agents on the reservations pressured Mohave men to cut their hair, but Mutcumalya and the other men living and working in Needles were free to wear their hair long. Choosing to keep his hair long was a bodily act of cultural preservation on Mutcumalya's part, one made possible by the Needles Indian community's liminal position. Maintaining his traditional hairstyle even as he traveled to Los Angeles was a conscious act, one that shows Mutcumalya discerning for himself which aspects of Anglo-American culture to adopt and which to reject.Footnote ⁴⁴

While in Los Angeles, Mutcumalya also decided to join the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. This was not an abandonment of his Holiness principles; Holiness practitioners could be found in many denominations, and, as the name suggests, the Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers welcomed all of them. Mutcumalya's decision to join the Quakers does, however, indicate his spiritual agency. Mutcumalya also transferred from the Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers to an institution managed by the Quakers and primarily focused on equipping missionaries for work in China. Here, he studied for several more months before returning to Needles.Footnote ⁴⁵

In Needles, Mutcumalya served as the leader of the Native Holiness community. There was no white missionary serving among the Indians, and so his speedy rise from convert to student to revival leader marks an early instantiation of the indigenous principle. Even before the Azusa Street Revival, California had at least one Holiness community led by a Native American preacher. Mutcumalya's rise also demonstrates the ways that Holiness evangelization in the Southwest launched boundary crossings. Mutcumalya moved between the world of Anglo Los Angeles and the Mohave community in Needles, retaining elements of his Native identity and seeking out spiritual knowledge and training for ministry while building a network of supporters for the mission. Soon, he sent back four more members of the Mohave nation, including his cousin Patrick Jethawana, for instruction at the Training School. These students, in turn, moved back and forth between the reservation and Los Angeles.Footnote ⁴⁶

Mutcumalya would later seek to expand this network by connecting his Mohave congregation with other, more isolated, non-Christian Indians. As the Mohave Holiness group connected the revival center in Needles, outlying Mohave and other Indian settlements, missionary training centers, and churches in Los Angeles, they were constructing what Samuel Truett has called “fugitive landscapes.” Truett argues that the American Southwest has always been a region where locals construct networks at the edge of empire, and marginalized communities leverage these networks to cross boundaries. These networks flourished during the Spanish period, and Natale Zappia has shown that the Mohave were deeply enmeshed in them. Truett claims that these landscapes persisted and flourished in the shadows of the modernizing project in the West, experiencing an efflorescence in the early twentieth century. Mutcumalya's career shows that Mohave Holiness workers were moving through a fugitive landscape of their own.Footnote ⁴⁷

These fugitive landscapes enabled just the sort of boundary crossing and community formation that Virgilio Elizondo has recognized as the driving force behind the borderlands’ religious dynamism. As Mutcumalya and other Mohave believers crossed among reservations, outlying communities, Needles, and Los Angeles, they learned to adapt to their new surroundings and to borrow whatever useful practices they encountered. Elizondo has argued that the American Southwest has become a site of religious innovation among marginalized groups and that this innovation is a result of subaltern groups responding creatively to the systems of exclusion erected by the American state. The cultures formed through these new forms of resistance are both transcendent, because they break out of old dichotomies and enable new spiritual transformations, and practical, because they enable believers to navigate the power structures of the borderlands. This same combination of transcendence and practicality is, for Grant Wacker, the key to understanding early Pentecostalism. The Needles Revival fits the pattern. In early-twentieth-century Southern California, both the conditions described and the results predicted by Elizondo were present, as Truett and Wacker, respectively, have shown.Footnote ⁴⁸

As Mutcumalya and these other Mohave Holiness leaders traveled across their fugitive landscape, they knit together the community on the reservation and the broader Holiness movement in Southern California. Obviously, the young Indians who traveled to Los Angeles for spiritual training would have brought Holiness and Quaker ideas with them when they returned to their community in the desert. More intriguing is the—perhaps unanswerable—question of what these Native people brought to the Holiness community in Los Angeles. In their conversations with other students, funding appeals to local churches, and at least one address to a Quaker yearly meeting, these men would have brought their unique perspective to bear on Christian texts and missionary practices. Furthermore, these men were all familiar with, and probably eyewitnesses to, Charles August Olsen's revival on the reservation. A handful of Native Americans with firsthand experience of the gift of tongues were studying, praying, and worshipping alongside local Holiness believers, and all of this just two years before the famous revival on Azusa Street.

The Azusa Street Revival, like the earlier revival in Needles, included a multiracial congregation and members who claimed to exercise the gift of tongues. Some scholars have seen it as the birthplace of modern Pentecostalism, whereas more recent scholarship has argued that the revival in Los Angeles was only one of several Pentecostal revivals at the time, all of which owed their character to a transnational network of Holiness believers.Footnote ⁴⁹ Azusa Street was preceded by important revivals in Wales and India, and word of these revivals spread through a network of Holiness missionaries and periodicals. Olsen and the Needles Revival were one more manifestation of Pentecostal fires burning before Azusa Street. Despite these antecedents, the revival at Azusa Street was still a seminal event in the emergence of Pentecostalism. It became a flashpoint for the eschatological longings nurtured in the global Holiness movement, and many believers who came to Azusa seeking the power of the Holy Spirit left Los Angeles with the explicit goal of carrying the revival across the world. Even if the Pentecostal community in Los Angeles never wielded significant institutional authority over the movement, it occupied a central place in many Pentecostals’ self-understanding.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Azusa Street Revival was a local manifestation of a transnational phenomenon, and its location mattered. The Azusa Street Revival placed a heavier emphasis on the gift of tongues than did its peers, such as the Mukti Revival in India.Footnote ⁵¹ It also had a much more diverse congregation and more nonwhite leadership than other revivals, such as those in Chicago or the Carolinas.Footnote ⁵² The Mohave congregation in Needles is unique among the revivals that antedate Azusa Street because it occurred in Southern California and also because it emphasized the gift of tongues and multiracial community. These features, which appear at both Needles and Azusa Street, show that the patterns of boundary crossing inherited from the California borderlands shaped early Pentecostalism.Footnote ⁵³ Native Americans, including members of the Needles community, directly participated in the Azusa Street Revival and its immediate offshoots. Native Americans had learned to survive in California by slipping across borders erected by the modernizing American state. When they encountered local manifestations of the transnational Holiness movement, these indigenous Pentecostals used speaking in tongues to cross racial boundaries and forge interethnic worshipping communities. In the process, they helped shape a revival that would come to dominate the Pentecostal imagination.

Mutcumalya himself may have contributed to the Azusa Street Revival from its earliest days. In spring 1906, just as the revival broke lose, Mutcumalya had returned to Los Angeles. He was attending the Interdenominational Training School for Christian Workers again and had the opportunity to witness, and even participate in, the birth of modern Pentecostalism. Mutcumalya was attending the Training School in Boyle Heights. This meant he was in daily contact with some of the most active members of the Los Angeles Holiness movement. Surely, students and faculty at the school were intensely interested in the Pentecost in their own city. Mutcumalya may have even learned of the Azusa Street Revival before it arrived on Azusa Street.Footnote ⁵⁴

The revival began when William Seymour, a one-eyed black preacher newly arrived from Arkansas, was praying with his hosts and their neighbors in a bungalow on Bonnie Brae Street. One of the neighbors was a woman named Leora Maris, the treasurer of the Interdenominational Training School and the head of its outreach to Native Americans. No documents conclusively prove that Leora Maris or George Mutcumalya were present at the prayer meeting where Seymour first spoke in tongues, but the meeting drew large crowds that gathered outside of the bungalow to participate and to gawk at the ecstatic prayers. If Maris was in the neighborhood, she would have been able to see the meetings and could have brought news of the revival to the Interdenominational Training School. Maris was indubitably close with Mutcumalya, and she could have shared the news with him. However, the exact role that he—a Native American with direct experience of the gift of tongues in his own community—played in the Azusa Street Revival remains unclear.Footnote ⁵⁵

Other Native Americans were certainly involved with the Azusa Street Revival. The emerging Pentecostal movement published a periodical, Apostolic Faith, which showed the involvement of Native people in the movement, literally from page one. The first article in the newspaper announced that, for the people assembled at Azusa, “The gift of languages is given with the commission, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.’ That Lord has given languages to the unlearned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Zulu and languages of Africa, Hindu and Bengali and dialects of India, Chippewa and other languages of the Indian, Esquimaux.”Footnote ⁵⁶ From the very beginning of the Azusa Street Revival, believers felt that the Holy Spirit miraculously enabled non-Indians to speak in indigenous languages. Furthermore, they believed that these languages were imparted so that believers could break down the boundaries between Native and non-Native communities.

The attendees were only able to recognize these indigenous languages because some attendees at the revival spoke them. When the participants at Azusa Street spoke in tongues, they were often overcome with ecstasy. They had no conscious knowledge of the words they spoke, or even the language they were speaking. It was only later, when an observer claimed to recognize the language, that they would identify the language that had been spoken.Footnote ⁵⁷ The crowd at Azusa Street included worshippers, either Indians or those who had worked closely with them, who were able to speak Native languages.Footnote ⁵⁸ The polyglot community of Los Angeles and the Southern California hinterlands had fostered this phenomenon by bringing together Native people and Holiness workers who earnestly sought the gift of xenolalia.

As the revival spread around the American West, this potential was realized in other locations where Anglo Holiness groups brushed up against Native American communities. In Oregon, Apostolic Faith reported that a woman in a fit of ecstasy began to speak Klamath. Another article described a Creek Indian cowboy who wandered into a Pentecostal revival in Colorado and was amazed to hear a worshipper proclaiming the gospel in Creek.Footnote ⁵⁹ When a splinter group left Azusa Street and began publishing Apostolic Faith in Portland, Oregon, they printed several accounts of Native people in Washington converting after they recognized their own language coming from a white Pentecostal speaking in tongues.Footnote ⁶⁰ Another article reported that a Native man converted after he saw his wife healed. After receiving the Holy Spirit, he spoke for hours in “what sounded like Chinese.”Footnote ⁶¹

Speaking in tongues helped some worshippers to cross the color line, but a Native convert reported the Holy Spirit's assistance with a far more literal form of boundary crossing. A Native man recounted that he had been crossing the Salish Sea into Canada when a terrible storm began—a storm strong enough to sink a non-Native boat. In a story redolent of Christ on the Sea of Galilee, the indigenous mariner prayed for safety and arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, without even taking on water. Later that night, as the Native Pentecostal was praying in his canoe, he saw a tongue of fire descend on the craft, thus sanctifying a vessel that was at once part of a long sea-going tradition and a technology of boundary crossing that enabled Native people to survive in the U.S.–Canada borderlands.Footnote ⁶²

Far to the south, one indigenous man from central Mexico experienced a dramatic conversion at the Azusa Street Revival. According to an article in Apostolic Faith, he could not speak English, but he came to the meeting anyway and was amazed to hear another attendee—a German woman—proclaiming the gospel in his own language. He immediately decided to join the new Pentecostal movement and felt led by the spirit to lay hands on a consumptive woman and heal her. This incident illustrates the continuity between the revival in Needles and the Azusa Street Revival. In both cases, multiracial congregations, drawn from the diverse communities of Southern California, came together for worship. Speaking in tongues served as a bridge between communities. When white worshippers were apparently able to speak indigenous languages, it drew Indians into worship. As it had in Needles, healing accompanied the gift of tongues at Azusa Street. Much as Needles's place along rail networks and at the edge of reservations had drawn a variety of people into Olsen's revival tent, so, too, did the cosmopolitan context of Los Angeles shape the crowd at Azusa Street. Mexican indigenous people and German immigrants mixed freely. Furthermore, Los Angeles existed on the lines of transit and exchange that connected the United States and Mexico, and, so, an American who could understand the native language of the Mexican Indian—perhaps a missionary—was available at the revival to interpret after the fact. These people had been brought together by transportation networks and patterns of boundary crossing that typified the fugitive landscapes of the region. The space in which they encountered each other, however, was shaped by the transnational Holiness movement's emphasis on spiritual gifts and dramatic conversions. The result was an indigenous man using the gift of tongues to forge interethnic solidarity.Footnote ⁶³

Soon after the revival in Los Angeles began, Mutcumalya returned to Needles. There, he continued to preach Holiness ideals and led a congregation that embraced the gift of tongues. This community soon became part of the emerging network of Pentecostals that included Azusa Street and other revival centers. Thomas Hezmalhalch reported on the community in the pages of Apostolic Faith, introducing the Mohave to a new network of readers in Los Angeles and around the world. Hezmalhalch was a preacher active in Southern California's Holiness circles and a participant in the Azusa Street Revival. In 1907, he left Los Angeles to spread the Pentecostal message across the United States. He had not planned on visiting Needles, but he claimed that, as he was traveling by train from Los Angeles to Pueblo, Colorado, he felt the Holy Spirit prompting him to disembark, and so he stopped in Needles. The train later derailed.Footnote ⁶⁴

In Needles, Hezmalhalch worshipped with Mutcumalya and his congregation and identified the gift of tongues as an essential feature of their time together. As Mutcumalya and other believers testified in Mohave, other worshippers translated into English, and, as Hezmalhalch addressed the meeting, Mutcumalya translated his remarks into Mohave. Hezmalhalch claimed that the precision and simultaneity of these translations proved the presence of the Holy Spirit. Mutcumalya and others had spent long stretches of time in Los Angeles, so their fluency in both languages and skill in code-switching may have had less supernatural origins. More dramatic is Hezmalhalch's claim that he was able to understand Mohave during the meeting. As it had for Olsen, and as the editors of Reality had hoped, the gift of tongues enabled intercultural connection. Mutcumalya delivered the main message at the meeting, while Hezmalhalch and a multiracial congregation listened, supernaturally assisted by the Holy Ghost.

When Mutcumalya preached, he presented the Holiness movement's account of the gospel, telling his congregation: “When God-Father forgive you all your wrong doing, through God-Jesus, you have first make Indian (yourself) all naked from wrong. Then God-Father forgive. But you no naked in heart. God-Holy Ghost no occupy till Jesus make naked in heart.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Like the worshippers at Azusa Street, Mutcumalya embraced a three-step process in which justification was followed by entire sanctification, which was then, and only then, followed by an indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Hezmalhalch was no doubt eager to find this theology in the Indian community because it could further bolster his own stance. Hezmalhalch likely embellished the pidgin phrasing of Mutcumalya, who had studied in Los Angeles.

However, the metaphor of nudity for sanctification is almost certainly original to Mutcumalya. The comparison is unique in Holiness-Pentecostal literature of the time.Footnote ⁶⁶ Therefore, Mutcumalya was adapting the theology he had learned at the revival in Needles and later in Los Angeles and re-presenting it in new language intended to resonate with his Native congregation. The association of clothing with sin and nudity with sanctification would have been difficult for the sexually conservative Holiness movement, but it may have been easier for Native Americans, especially groups such as the Mohave assembled in Needles. Mohave Indians needed to don Anglo styles of clothing—stifling in Needles’ summer heat—when they came into town to work or attend the boarding school, but they were freer in their apparel away from Anglo eyes. Thus, Mutcumalya augmented his Holiness preaching with metaphors drawn from the patterns of boundary crossing and identity construction that helped Mohave survive in the crevices between repressive reservations and the aggressively modernizing American economy.

The congregation that listened to Mutcumalya was mixed, including Native people, white believers, and one African American. While preaching, Mutcumalya gestured to the entire crowd, including himself and Hezmalhalch, and said that God desired them all to be joined in one “Holy Ghost Tribe.” This new worshipping community, united by the blood of Christ, would also include the Indians living in the mountains outside of Needles. These people were, as yet, unreached by missionaries, and Mutcumalya intended to evangelize them. Thus, his “Holy Ghost Tribe,” like the banquet feast envisioned by Lesley Gay or the congregation assembled at Azusa Street, was both multiracial and evangelistic in character. It was the very act of reaching out—of preaching to unreached Southern California communities by the power of the Holy Spirit—that would enable multiracial community to form. Hezmalhalch claimed that he was able to understand Mutcumalya's sermon because the gift of tongues enabled him to understand Mohave. Nine years earlier, Olsen had used that gift to preach to a Mohave congregation. In 1907, Hezmalhalch used it to listen to a Mohave preacher.Footnote ⁶⁷

When Hezmalhalch arrived in Needles, fresh from Azusa Street, he found a multiracial community that accepted speaking in tongues as a mark of baptism in the Holy Spirit. Nothing in the Apostolic Faith article indicates that Hezmalhalch realized this Native-led congregation on the banks of the Colorado antedated the revival at Azusa Street by seven years. Hezmalhalch may not have realized that Charles August Olsen, inspired by the same transnational discourse of Holiness as the first worshippers at Azusa Street, had claimed the gift of tongues to evangelize in Southern California's borderlands. Hezmalhalch may not have known that Olsen's time in Needles had ignited a revival that drew in Native, Anglo, African American, and Latino worshippers. If he had known, he may not have been surprised. Many early Pentecostals acknowledged that major revivals had occurred prior to and contemporaneous with Azusa Street.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Needles Revival is significant to the broader sweep of American religious history not merely because it antedates Azusa Street but because it also demonstrates the influence of Southern California on both revivals. Needles provides a second example of the transnational Holiness movement's theology and praxis combining with patterns of boundary crossing in the California borderlands to produce a multiracial congregation that claimed the gift of tongues. Olsen had spoken in tongues because the doctrines of the Holiness movement encouraged him to seek divine aid as he evangelized. His strategy was also shaped by the local context of Needles, where a group of Native people were struggling to preserve their language and culture at the ragged edge of the American empire. As these Indians participated in the Needles Revival, they added their voices to the chorus of tongues that ushered in the Pentecostal movement.