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Books Native cultures face corporate, New Age abuse
NATIVE AMERICAN
RELIGIOUS IDENTITY: UNFORGOTTEN GODS By Jace Weaver, editor Orbis
Books, 230 pages, $18, paperback |
By CONGER BEASLEY
JR.
Native American religions are firmly grounded in a sense of place.
Unlike the abstract concept of Christianity, which can be worshiped anywhere,
Native American religions are linked to the hills, rivers, buttes and trees of
ancestral native land. The features of the land function as catalysts to evoke
the deepest feelings for the Great Mystery, known variously by different
peoples as usen (in Athabascan), wakan tanka (in Lakota),
nilch (in Navajo) and so forth.
The appearance of the white man on these lands 400 years ago
changed everything for the original inhabitants. We know about the military
conflicts, the raids, the warfare, the pitched battles and massacres; what we
dont know much about are the profound changes wrought by Christian
missionaries, who systematically spread their gospel from tribe to tribe across
the continent.
Two factors helped facilitate this process: the intense
spirituality of the Indian sensibility, which made them naturally curious about
other ways of worship; and their innate courtesy and generosity, which enabled
the majority of missionaries to proselytize without interference.
Jace Weaver (Cherokee), an attorney and assistant professor in the
American Studies Program and Religious Department at Yale University, has
compiled an intriguing collection of essays by Indian writers. Ranging from
first-person accounts to scholarly exegeses of historical and ecclesiastical
trends, the essays examine the impact of Christianity on a broad spectrum of
native people. The result is a generous sampling of contemporary Indian
thought, written by dedicated people from every walk of life who share a common
desire to balance their native traditions with the realities of Christian
conversion.
As these essays make abundantly clear, white colonialization of
Indian land remains a relentless and ongoing process. Overt military occupation
may have ended, but the process continues on a corporate level, with energy
companies seeking to extract uranium, coal and other minerals from Navajo,
Cheyenne and Arapaho lands. Additionally, waste disposal companies in recent
years have tried to turn Lakota, Paiute, and Mescalero Apache properties into
dumping grounds for urban and industrial refuse.
New Age spiritualism presents a more subtle but no less damaging
form of exploitation. Indians have what many white people at the close of the
millennium desperately covet: spiritual authenticity. Grounded in the visible
features of a specific locale, weathered by generations of hardship and
persecution, venerated by complex rituals and ceremonies, Indian religion
exerts a magnetic appeal upon a new generation of affluent and disaffected
consumers, who, in addition to sports utility vehicles, seek to garnish their
lives with the trappings of a genuine spirituality.
Every summer at powwows and festivals across the country, hordes
of white wannabes appear wearing buckskin and embroidered headbands,
brandishing buffalo skulls and Catlinite pipes, eager to participate in sun
dances, vision quests and sweat lodge ceremonies. Reading through the essays in
this piece, one comes to understand more of the spiritual treasures to which
these seekers, albeit clumsily, aspire.
Choctaw writer Homer Noleys piece on the sacrifices of early
Christian Indians was revelatory to this reviewer. A young Choctaw man named
Kanchi martyred himself to help other Choctaws cross the Mississippi River
during the infamous removal of southeast tribes to Oklahoma in the 1820s and
30s. After his death, groups of teenagers gathered around the campfire at
night to read passages from Kanchis Bible, thus forming the nucleus of a
newfound Christian community that was to play a pivotal role during the
tribes difficult transition to the Indian Territory.
Viola Cordova (Mescalero Apache) dissects the roots of Christian
duality, the schism between spirit and substance that has bedeviled European
thought since the Enlightenment. Albert Einsteins discovery of the
physical principles underlying the basis of material reality helped
rehabilitate the reputation of earlier philosophers such as Spinoza, who were
vilified for contending that a universal energy (monism) infused all animate
and inanimate things. Its a concept that Indians embrace intuitively but
that causes no end of turmoil to European minds.
Part of the problem, Cordova suggests, is linguistic. Compared to
the fluidity of Hopi, for example, standard European languages are incapable of
interpreting the inexhaustible variability of the physical world. In the
static universe of [European languages] nothing happens without a cause or an
agent of causation, says Cordova. In the dynamic model of [the Hopi
language] something is always happening without an agent because that is what
the universe, by its very nature, does.
Most stimulating to this reviewer was the Rt. Rev. Steven
Charlestons call for a global reappraisal of religious sociology in an
effort to protect both our diminishing resources and the intricate tapestry of
our human populations. My goal, the Choctaw cleric declares in his
eloquent essay, is to reconstitute our [Indian] culture as the original
and continuing oppositional force to Western state colonial capitalism in North
America.
To those weary of the same old political saws dutifully parroted
by Democrats and Republicans in meaningless sound bites, Charlestons
essay will ring like a clarion call.
Conger Beasley Jr. is the author of We Are a People In
This World: The Lakota Sioux and the Massacre at Wounded Knee (University of
Arkansas Press, 1996).
National Catholic Reporter, August 28,
1998
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