God Is Red
Apr. 28th, 2018 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormsewerPreamble
I read a short story recently, "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™", by Rebecca Roanhorse, that reminded me of a post I started writing a while back but never quite finished. The story stirred similar questions and conflicts to those I was trying to grapple with (about the relationship of white Americans to Native Americans and their religion), so I decided it was time to finally finish it out. One reason I've been hesitant to put it out there is that in the political circles I generally find myself in these days, white guys opining on minority issues can quickly find themselves making a lot of people angry. But as someone trying to be an ally in amplifying marginalized voices, I hope I can be granted patience with any errors in judgment. With that said, I've collected some of my thoughts on interactions between white and Native Americans, particularly as regards Native spirituality, and I thought it might be interesting or useful to some if I made those thoughts public. So here we go.
Experiences with Native American culture in my youth
I spent the first twelve years of my life in a town that bordered the Shoshone-Bannock Indian Reservation. My first clear memory of racism is from when I was about seven, and I went with my mother to buy some wool for her weaving. The (white) woman who produced the wool had a daughter around my age, and she and I went off to play while our mothers did business. We wandered through a trailer park and came upon two Native American kids about our age sitting on a front step. I tried to engage them, to get them to play with us, but they just stared at me and said nothing. Noting my confusion, the girl said, quite loudly, "Whaddya wanna talk to them for? They're just a coupla dumb Indian kids." That only increased my confusion, but it did make it clear to me for the first time that there are invisible, illogical, but very real divisions between people in this world.
As I grew older it became clearer to me that many of the whites in my town did not view Indians very favorably[1]. My parents took pains to counter this, of course, but a subtle feeling that Indians and their ways were of little interest did take hold of me, and my lessons in Idaho history in fourth grade only seemed to encourage that.
I can remember a few surges of interest here and there, but for the most part I didn't think about Indians very much. Kenneth Thomasma's Amazing Indian Children books, each written from the perspective of a Native American child from a different tribe, growing up before or around the time of first contact with Europeans, were perhaps the high point, when I was around ten. I remember meeting him at some community event where he performed an 'authentic' Indian coming-of-age ceremony for the children my age, and being very impressed. I think he signed some books for me, but I don't know whatever happened to them. Of course, Googling his work now there are numerous problems with it (for example), and yet, as the only thing I encountered growing up that even really tried to depict the world from the Native perspective, I can't entirely divest myself of the warm feelings I have towards those books.
Then at age twelve we moved to another town, fifty miles further north, that didn't have much contact with Indians, and I thought of them even less. We did do a unit on Native American mythology in seventh grade, but to me the stories, while fun, were obviously fanciful and difficult to take seriously. I'm ashamed to say I even remember feeling that it was a little uninspiring living in a place with so little history, as opposed to the great cities of Europe and Asia.
And yet, and yet... There was something else underneath it all. I remember wishing that our family's genealogy work would turn up some Indian ancestors, so I could feel more of a connection to this place, more of a right to be here beyond the fact that my ancestors killed or chased off the people who used to live here. I was born here; it's the only home I've ever known, and yet there's was still this sense that I was part of an invasive species.
Lies My Teacher Told Me and a shift in attitude
I was in my mid-twenties and living in Japan when I encountered a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen. It revolutionized my thinking about American history and my heritage as a U.S. citizen. There are a number of reasons why [2], but one specific region of my brain that got deconstructed was my attitude toward Native Americans and their religions.
In the book, Loewen discusses the way school textbooks treat Native Americans and their beliefs. Essentially, the institutional goal of teaching US history is to make students feel good about how US history turned out. This is obviously hard to do when it comes to Native Americans (and many other groups), and so the strategy typically taken (not necessarily consciously) is to minimize the extent of the loss by depicting their religious beliefs as silly and their culture as not particularly interesting (and thus not worth preserving), and glossing over the fact that Europeans and their diseases wiped out nearly all of them in an apocalypse that makes the Black Death look jolly [3]. One passage in particular made it clear as the sun and moon what these textbooks do to trivialize Indian spirituality, by describing Christianity in the same terms:
"These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son’s body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died."
This all made me feel angry and ashamed. Native American culture is, of course, as fascinating, intricate, deep, and wise as any other that ever existed on this planet. The loss that occurred on this continent is staggering and heart-breaking. How could my education have so subtly convinced me otherwise? And how could I have just let myself be convinced?
Loewen recommended the book God Is Red, by Vine Deloria, Jr., for a presentation of Indian religious beliefs the way Indians actually understand them. It took me a few years, but I did get around to reading it.
God Is Red: A summary
Vine Deloria, Jr. was a leader in the native civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s. While I can't say all of God Is Red sat well with me [4], the book did enrich my understanding of what spirituality and religion are and can be. Following is my understanding of the key aspects of Native American spirituality according to Deloria (for the rest of this post, quotes are Deloria's unless otherwise noted):
1. Sacred places, not sacred words or ideas, are of paramount importance. This is perhaps the fundamental point of the book. He contrasts the spatial perspective of tribal cultures to the temporal focus of the major world religions. In other words, natives don't concern themselves so much with where humanity came from, for what purpose, and to what destiny. They are more concerned with how they fit into the world where and when they are.
"Changing the conception of religious reality from a temporal to a spatial framework involves surrendering the place of teaching and preaching as elements of religion. Rearrangement of individual behavioral patterns is incidental to the communal involvement in ceremonies and the continual renewal of community relationships with the holy places of revelation. Ethics flow from the ongoing life of the community and are virtually indistinguishable from the tribal or communal customs. There is little dependence on the concept of progress either on an individual or community basis as a means of evaluating the impact of the religious practices. Value judgments involve present community realities and not a reliance on the part of future golden ages toward which the community is moving or from which the community has veered."
2. This respect for physical places of course leads to respect for the land and everything that lives on it, a desire to live in harmony with the natural world, and a trust that nature will provide. This is perhaps the aspect of Indian spirituality most apparent to non-Native Americans.
"Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence of the sacred in our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibilities to the rest of the natural world that transcend our personal desire and wishes."
"We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as 'wild.' Only to the white men was nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it 'wild' for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the 'Wild West' began." –Chief Luther Standing Bear
3. This in turn leads to a minimal fear of death, and also to a relatively small concern about what happens after death, since it is all part of natural processes. The chapter on "Death and Religion" was perhaps my favorite in the whole book, and has many instructive anecdotes about how Indians faced imminent death in the times when it was an all too common experience for them [5].
4. The focus on place also means that specific religions are for specific groups of people who inhabit a specific area. This is why many ceremonies are not open to outsiders and why it is not a simple matter for an outsider to "convert" to a native religion. It is not a question of what you believe, but who you are in the context of your family and community and their historical relationship with the land that is venerated.
"The existence of a specific religion among a distinct group of people is probably a fundamental element of human experience. Once religion becomes specific to a group, its nature also appears to change, being directed to the internal mechanics of the group, not to grandiose schemes of world conquest or the afterlife."
5. This in turn leads to the acceptance of the idea of different religions for different peoples, and a reluctance to interpret one's own religious beliefs as absolute truths holding for everyone, everywhere. This does not preclude their taking their tribe's ceremonies and customs extremely seriously, however.
"'A missionary once undertook to instruct a group of Indians in the truths of his holy religion. He told them of the creation of the earth in six days, and of the fall of our first parents by eating an apple.' The courteous savages listened attentively, and, after thanking him, one related in his turn a very ancient tradition concerning the origin of maize. But the missionary plainly showed his disgust and disbelief, indignantly saying: 'What I delivered to you were sacred truths, but this that you tell me is mere fable and falsehood!' 'My Brother,' gravely replied the offended Indian, 'it seems that you have not been well grounded in the rules of civility. You saw that we, who practice these rules, believed your stories; why, then, do you refuse to credit ours?'" (this story is attributed to Charles Eastman)
"At no point does any tribal religion insist that its particular version of the creation is an absolute historical recording of the creation event or that the story necessarily leads to conclusions about humankind's good or evil nature. At best the tribal stories recount how the people experience the creative process which continues today."
"In tribal religions no effort is made to define religion as a system of doctrinal truths about the nature of the world. It cannot, therefore, be verified, and only in a certain sense can it be experienced by a specific community. Over a long period of time, however, the cumulative experiences of the community become a truth that has been manifested for the people."
Localized religion in human history
Studying world history, it seems that before the major missionary religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) came on the scene, this sort of approach to spirituality was the norm most everywhere. It was the unique innovation, if you can call it that, of the Jews and Hindus to capitalize God, to say "No, not only is my god mine, He is yours, too, whether you like it or not. He just likes us better." While the devotion and urge to proselytize that these religions induce in their adherents makes it seem inevitable that they would eventually overwhelm the idiosyncratic and insular religions that preceded them, it's hard not to feel like we lost something precious in the process.
I do know of one such religion that managed to survive and perhaps even thrive in the modern world, and that is Japanese Shinto. In fact, while reading God Is Red I was repeatedly struck by the similarities: a focus on sacred places, a sense that a specific religion is for a specific group of people who have historically inhabited the area around those sacred places, veneration of nature, little formalized dogma or moral framework, and no apparent concern about what happens after death. Maybe Shinto gives us a peek at what Native American religion might look like if they had managed to survive as modern independent nations [6].
White people and Native religion
So, alright. I'm a white guy who doesn't want to ignore Indian spirituality. I learn about it, and I think it's pretty cool. I start thinking I might want to adapt some of these ideas to my own spiritual practices. And thus the pendulum swings from Ignorance to Appropriation, and we run into a new set of problems.
"Tribal religions have been trivialized beyond redemption by people sincerely wishing to learn about them."
A lot has been written about cultural appropriation, and I don't want to get it into it here, except to point out that Rebecca Roanhorse's story seems to be aiming at helping the reader understand how it feels to the people whose culture has been appropriated [7]. Instead, I want to discuss Deloria's thoughts on whether it's even possible for white people to really be a part of Native American religions the way Native Americans are. Spoiler alert: He thinks it's not.
"The problem of contemporary people, whatever their ethnic or cultural background, lies in finding the means by which they can once again pierce the veil of unreality to grasp the essential meaning of their existence. For people from a Western European background or deeply imbued with Christian beliefs, the task is virtually impossible. ... Religion has become a comfortable ethic and a comforting aesthetic for Westerners, not a force of undetermined intensity and unsuspected origin that may break in on them."
My whitejerk reaction to that claim is to get angry. After all, the religions I'm most accustomed to bill themselves as ultimate objective truth, and that truth should be available to everyone. But upon reflection, I think he might be right [8].
I can't say I have a particularly deep connection to place. In fact, if anything, I'm defined by my wanderlust, which is also a deep-seated characteristic of the modern American psyche, generally. I'm not even sure I want to change this; I value this flexibility, this openness to new experience. But it does make it harder for me to be truly connected to a place and a community in the way that traditional Native American religions seem to be. Even if we white folk were able to develop a spirituality with a deeper relationship with place, community, and nature, for that truly to work, it could not come from us simply trying to appropriate Native religions.
"A very difficult task lies ahead for the people who continue to believe in the old tribal religions. In the past, these traditions have been ridiculed by disbelievers, primarily missionaries and social scientists. Today injuries nearly as grievous are visited on traditional religions by the multitude of non-Indians who seek entrance and participation in ceremonies and rituals. Many of these non-Indians blatantly steal symbols, prayers and teaching by laying claim to alleged offices in tribal religions. Most non-Indians see in tribal religions the experiences and reverence that are missing in their own heritage. No matter how hard they try, they always reduce the teachings and ceremonies to a complicated word game and ineffectual gestures. Lacking communities and extended families, they are unable to put the religion into practice."
Inconclusion
All the same, Deloria makes the point that if we intend to survive long-term, we desperately need the deep spiritual connection to our environment that Native religions provide their adherents.
"It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naïve conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political."
This makes Deloria's denial that this shift in viewpoint is even possible for the vast majority of Americans all the more vexing. It does sometimes seem like the whole problem with the modern psyche is that the old religions just aren't adequate for many of us anymore, and yet we have not managed to replace the essential functions those religions performed for our ancestors, leaving us adrift. And our actions betray us as dangerously unconcerned about the environment that supports us and the other living things we share it with. What are we to do?
I don't know. But when it comes to relationship of white Americans to this land, I have trouble getting the words of Chief Seattle out of my head:
"Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless."
Notes
[1] After reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, I began to see this attitude in terms of cognitive dissonance. The whites can't help but notice that their position in the world is much better than that of the Indians, and they can't help but know that the reason for this is that their ancestors took nearly everything the Indians had (including most of their lives). As a beneficiary of all this, the easiest way to process it is to convince yourself that the respective groups must deserve what happened to them. Therefore racism. Or, as Nietzsche put it, "Memory says, ‘I did that.’ Pride replies, ‘I could not have done that.’ Eventually, memory yields."
[2] In summary, growing up I always considered American history to be eye-glazingly dull, but Lies My Teacher Told Me explained to me both why I felt that way and why I was wrong.
[3] In passing, did you ever wonder how it came to be that English-speaking Squanto just happened to be around to help out the pilgrims? It turns out that six years earlier he had actually been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Spain by a compatriot of John Smith. Eventually he managed to escape to England and then back to America, where he found his entire tribe had been wiped out by disease. After helping the pilgrims avoid starvation and massacre, he got sick and died himself. His is an amazing story, worthy of a grimdark Hollywood blockbuster treatment, and I'm frankly flabbergasted at the bowdlerized version I got growing up. Oh, and did you know that Pocahontas was also dead of disease by age twenty-one? The pre-Columbian population of the Americas is estimated to be on the order of 50 million people, and may have been as high as 100 million. By 1700, the population had dropped at least 90%, and most of the rest were gone by 1900.
[4] He's at his best when arguing in favor of Indian beliefs. While I love a good Christian takedown as much as the next agnostic, his critiques of Christianity aren't always quite fair (though turnabout is fair play, I guess). And his ideas about science are really hard for me to swallow. But in that respect I guess the book is not that different from much academic theological work in the Christian realm. I was also surprised to find that he considers secularism an evil. To me the live-and-let-livism of secularism is one of the main reasons Native religions can continue on despite Christianity's dominant position in the culture as a whole. But I think to Deloria, religion does not have its proper power unless it is the unified practice of the whole community.
[5] Unfortunately I didn't find an anecdote on Indian attitudes toward death that I felt was short enough or made enough sense out of context to reproduce here, though the Chief Seattle quote at the end is from this chapter.
[6] Why did Shinto survive when so many other local religions got crushed? I think it's partly the unique character and geography of Japan, and partly a lucky accident. The Japanese were historically always rather isolated, and yet never entirely cut off from developments on the mainland. This led to long periods of independent development, with periodic infusions of new ideas from the outside. Japan has a long tradition of remixing influences from outside but never really letting them overwhelm the local way of doing things. Even so, after the introduction of Buddhism, Shinto began to go into decline and seemed like it might disappear. It was only after repelling the Yuan (Mongol) invasion that Shinto began to be emphasized again as a cultural means of differentiating themselves from the outside world (a totem, if you will). A similar near death and renaissance of Shinto took place over the course of the 1800s as Japan was shaken out of complacency and isolation by the incursions of Western colonial powers. For better or worse, Shinto and Japanese nationalism have long had a tightly symbiotic relationship.
[7] The Oscar-winning film Get Out does something similar for African American culture; I wonder if that inspired Roanhorse?
[8] Not that that makes me feel happy about it.
I read a short story recently, "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™", by Rebecca Roanhorse, that reminded me of a post I started writing a while back but never quite finished. The story stirred similar questions and conflicts to those I was trying to grapple with (about the relationship of white Americans to Native Americans and their religion), so I decided it was time to finally finish it out. One reason I've been hesitant to put it out there is that in the political circles I generally find myself in these days, white guys opining on minority issues can quickly find themselves making a lot of people angry. But as someone trying to be an ally in amplifying marginalized voices, I hope I can be granted patience with any errors in judgment. With that said, I've collected some of my thoughts on interactions between white and Native Americans, particularly as regards Native spirituality, and I thought it might be interesting or useful to some if I made those thoughts public. So here we go.
Experiences with Native American culture in my youth
I spent the first twelve years of my life in a town that bordered the Shoshone-Bannock Indian Reservation. My first clear memory of racism is from when I was about seven, and I went with my mother to buy some wool for her weaving. The (white) woman who produced the wool had a daughter around my age, and she and I went off to play while our mothers did business. We wandered through a trailer park and came upon two Native American kids about our age sitting on a front step. I tried to engage them, to get them to play with us, but they just stared at me and said nothing. Noting my confusion, the girl said, quite loudly, "Whaddya wanna talk to them for? They're just a coupla dumb Indian kids." That only increased my confusion, but it did make it clear to me for the first time that there are invisible, illogical, but very real divisions between people in this world.
As I grew older it became clearer to me that many of the whites in my town did not view Indians very favorably[1]. My parents took pains to counter this, of course, but a subtle feeling that Indians and their ways were of little interest did take hold of me, and my lessons in Idaho history in fourth grade only seemed to encourage that.
I can remember a few surges of interest here and there, but for the most part I didn't think about Indians very much. Kenneth Thomasma's Amazing Indian Children books, each written from the perspective of a Native American child from a different tribe, growing up before or around the time of first contact with Europeans, were perhaps the high point, when I was around ten. I remember meeting him at some community event where he performed an 'authentic' Indian coming-of-age ceremony for the children my age, and being very impressed. I think he signed some books for me, but I don't know whatever happened to them. Of course, Googling his work now there are numerous problems with it (for example), and yet, as the only thing I encountered growing up that even really tried to depict the world from the Native perspective, I can't entirely divest myself of the warm feelings I have towards those books.
Then at age twelve we moved to another town, fifty miles further north, that didn't have much contact with Indians, and I thought of them even less. We did do a unit on Native American mythology in seventh grade, but to me the stories, while fun, were obviously fanciful and difficult to take seriously. I'm ashamed to say I even remember feeling that it was a little uninspiring living in a place with so little history, as opposed to the great cities of Europe and Asia.
And yet, and yet... There was something else underneath it all. I remember wishing that our family's genealogy work would turn up some Indian ancestors, so I could feel more of a connection to this place, more of a right to be here beyond the fact that my ancestors killed or chased off the people who used to live here. I was born here; it's the only home I've ever known, and yet there's was still this sense that I was part of an invasive species.
Lies My Teacher Told Me and a shift in attitude
I was in my mid-twenties and living in Japan when I encountered a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen. It revolutionized my thinking about American history and my heritage as a U.S. citizen. There are a number of reasons why [2], but one specific region of my brain that got deconstructed was my attitude toward Native Americans and their religions.
In the book, Loewen discusses the way school textbooks treat Native Americans and their beliefs. Essentially, the institutional goal of teaching US history is to make students feel good about how US history turned out. This is obviously hard to do when it comes to Native Americans (and many other groups), and so the strategy typically taken (not necessarily consciously) is to minimize the extent of the loss by depicting their religious beliefs as silly and their culture as not particularly interesting (and thus not worth preserving), and glossing over the fact that Europeans and their diseases wiped out nearly all of them in an apocalypse that makes the Black Death look jolly [3]. One passage in particular made it clear as the sun and moon what these textbooks do to trivialize Indian spirituality, by describing Christianity in the same terms:
"These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son’s body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died."
This all made me feel angry and ashamed. Native American culture is, of course, as fascinating, intricate, deep, and wise as any other that ever existed on this planet. The loss that occurred on this continent is staggering and heart-breaking. How could my education have so subtly convinced me otherwise? And how could I have just let myself be convinced?
Loewen recommended the book God Is Red, by Vine Deloria, Jr., for a presentation of Indian religious beliefs the way Indians actually understand them. It took me a few years, but I did get around to reading it.
God Is Red: A summary
Vine Deloria, Jr. was a leader in the native civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s. While I can't say all of God Is Red sat well with me [4], the book did enrich my understanding of what spirituality and religion are and can be. Following is my understanding of the key aspects of Native American spirituality according to Deloria (for the rest of this post, quotes are Deloria's unless otherwise noted):
1. Sacred places, not sacred words or ideas, are of paramount importance. This is perhaps the fundamental point of the book. He contrasts the spatial perspective of tribal cultures to the temporal focus of the major world religions. In other words, natives don't concern themselves so much with where humanity came from, for what purpose, and to what destiny. They are more concerned with how they fit into the world where and when they are.
"Changing the conception of religious reality from a temporal to a spatial framework involves surrendering the place of teaching and preaching as elements of religion. Rearrangement of individual behavioral patterns is incidental to the communal involvement in ceremonies and the continual renewal of community relationships with the holy places of revelation. Ethics flow from the ongoing life of the community and are virtually indistinguishable from the tribal or communal customs. There is little dependence on the concept of progress either on an individual or community basis as a means of evaluating the impact of the religious practices. Value judgments involve present community realities and not a reliance on the part of future golden ages toward which the community is moving or from which the community has veered."
2. This respect for physical places of course leads to respect for the land and everything that lives on it, a desire to live in harmony with the natural world, and a trust that nature will provide. This is perhaps the aspect of Indian spirituality most apparent to non-Native Americans.
"Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence of the sacred in our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibilities to the rest of the natural world that transcend our personal desire and wishes."
"We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as 'wild.' Only to the white men was nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it 'wild' for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the 'Wild West' began." –Chief Luther Standing Bear
3. This in turn leads to a minimal fear of death, and also to a relatively small concern about what happens after death, since it is all part of natural processes. The chapter on "Death and Religion" was perhaps my favorite in the whole book, and has many instructive anecdotes about how Indians faced imminent death in the times when it was an all too common experience for them [5].
4. The focus on place also means that specific religions are for specific groups of people who inhabit a specific area. This is why many ceremonies are not open to outsiders and why it is not a simple matter for an outsider to "convert" to a native religion. It is not a question of what you believe, but who you are in the context of your family and community and their historical relationship with the land that is venerated.
"The existence of a specific religion among a distinct group of people is probably a fundamental element of human experience. Once religion becomes specific to a group, its nature also appears to change, being directed to the internal mechanics of the group, not to grandiose schemes of world conquest or the afterlife."
5. This in turn leads to the acceptance of the idea of different religions for different peoples, and a reluctance to interpret one's own religious beliefs as absolute truths holding for everyone, everywhere. This does not preclude their taking their tribe's ceremonies and customs extremely seriously, however.
"'A missionary once undertook to instruct a group of Indians in the truths of his holy religion. He told them of the creation of the earth in six days, and of the fall of our first parents by eating an apple.' The courteous savages listened attentively, and, after thanking him, one related in his turn a very ancient tradition concerning the origin of maize. But the missionary plainly showed his disgust and disbelief, indignantly saying: 'What I delivered to you were sacred truths, but this that you tell me is mere fable and falsehood!' 'My Brother,' gravely replied the offended Indian, 'it seems that you have not been well grounded in the rules of civility. You saw that we, who practice these rules, believed your stories; why, then, do you refuse to credit ours?'" (this story is attributed to Charles Eastman)
"At no point does any tribal religion insist that its particular version of the creation is an absolute historical recording of the creation event or that the story necessarily leads to conclusions about humankind's good or evil nature. At best the tribal stories recount how the people experience the creative process which continues today."
"In tribal religions no effort is made to define religion as a system of doctrinal truths about the nature of the world. It cannot, therefore, be verified, and only in a certain sense can it be experienced by a specific community. Over a long period of time, however, the cumulative experiences of the community become a truth that has been manifested for the people."
Localized religion in human history
Studying world history, it seems that before the major missionary religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) came on the scene, this sort of approach to spirituality was the norm most everywhere. It was the unique innovation, if you can call it that, of the Jews and Hindus to capitalize God, to say "No, not only is my god mine, He is yours, too, whether you like it or not. He just likes us better." While the devotion and urge to proselytize that these religions induce in their adherents makes it seem inevitable that they would eventually overwhelm the idiosyncratic and insular religions that preceded them, it's hard not to feel like we lost something precious in the process.
I do know of one such religion that managed to survive and perhaps even thrive in the modern world, and that is Japanese Shinto. In fact, while reading God Is Red I was repeatedly struck by the similarities: a focus on sacred places, a sense that a specific religion is for a specific group of people who have historically inhabited the area around those sacred places, veneration of nature, little formalized dogma or moral framework, and no apparent concern about what happens after death. Maybe Shinto gives us a peek at what Native American religion might look like if they had managed to survive as modern independent nations [6].
White people and Native religion
So, alright. I'm a white guy who doesn't want to ignore Indian spirituality. I learn about it, and I think it's pretty cool. I start thinking I might want to adapt some of these ideas to my own spiritual practices. And thus the pendulum swings from Ignorance to Appropriation, and we run into a new set of problems.
"Tribal religions have been trivialized beyond redemption by people sincerely wishing to learn about them."
A lot has been written about cultural appropriation, and I don't want to get it into it here, except to point out that Rebecca Roanhorse's story seems to be aiming at helping the reader understand how it feels to the people whose culture has been appropriated [7]. Instead, I want to discuss Deloria's thoughts on whether it's even possible for white people to really be a part of Native American religions the way Native Americans are. Spoiler alert: He thinks it's not.
"The problem of contemporary people, whatever their ethnic or cultural background, lies in finding the means by which they can once again pierce the veil of unreality to grasp the essential meaning of their existence. For people from a Western European background or deeply imbued with Christian beliefs, the task is virtually impossible. ... Religion has become a comfortable ethic and a comforting aesthetic for Westerners, not a force of undetermined intensity and unsuspected origin that may break in on them."
My whitejerk reaction to that claim is to get angry. After all, the religions I'm most accustomed to bill themselves as ultimate objective truth, and that truth should be available to everyone. But upon reflection, I think he might be right [8].
I can't say I have a particularly deep connection to place. In fact, if anything, I'm defined by my wanderlust, which is also a deep-seated characteristic of the modern American psyche, generally. I'm not even sure I want to change this; I value this flexibility, this openness to new experience. But it does make it harder for me to be truly connected to a place and a community in the way that traditional Native American religions seem to be. Even if we white folk were able to develop a spirituality with a deeper relationship with place, community, and nature, for that truly to work, it could not come from us simply trying to appropriate Native religions.
"A very difficult task lies ahead for the people who continue to believe in the old tribal religions. In the past, these traditions have been ridiculed by disbelievers, primarily missionaries and social scientists. Today injuries nearly as grievous are visited on traditional religions by the multitude of non-Indians who seek entrance and participation in ceremonies and rituals. Many of these non-Indians blatantly steal symbols, prayers and teaching by laying claim to alleged offices in tribal religions. Most non-Indians see in tribal religions the experiences and reverence that are missing in their own heritage. No matter how hard they try, they always reduce the teachings and ceremonies to a complicated word game and ineffectual gestures. Lacking communities and extended families, they are unable to put the religion into practice."
Inconclusion
All the same, Deloria makes the point that if we intend to survive long-term, we desperately need the deep spiritual connection to our environment that Native religions provide their adherents.
"It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naïve conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political."
This makes Deloria's denial that this shift in viewpoint is even possible for the vast majority of Americans all the more vexing. It does sometimes seem like the whole problem with the modern psyche is that the old religions just aren't adequate for many of us anymore, and yet we have not managed to replace the essential functions those religions performed for our ancestors, leaving us adrift. And our actions betray us as dangerously unconcerned about the environment that supports us and the other living things we share it with. What are we to do?
I don't know. But when it comes to relationship of white Americans to this land, I have trouble getting the words of Chief Seattle out of my head:
"Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless."
Notes
[1] After reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, I began to see this attitude in terms of cognitive dissonance. The whites can't help but notice that their position in the world is much better than that of the Indians, and they can't help but know that the reason for this is that their ancestors took nearly everything the Indians had (including most of their lives). As a beneficiary of all this, the easiest way to process it is to convince yourself that the respective groups must deserve what happened to them. Therefore racism. Or, as Nietzsche put it, "Memory says, ‘I did that.’ Pride replies, ‘I could not have done that.’ Eventually, memory yields."
[2] In summary, growing up I always considered American history to be eye-glazingly dull, but Lies My Teacher Told Me explained to me both why I felt that way and why I was wrong.
[3] In passing, did you ever wonder how it came to be that English-speaking Squanto just happened to be around to help out the pilgrims? It turns out that six years earlier he had actually been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Spain by a compatriot of John Smith. Eventually he managed to escape to England and then back to America, where he found his entire tribe had been wiped out by disease. After helping the pilgrims avoid starvation and massacre, he got sick and died himself. His is an amazing story, worthy of a grimdark Hollywood blockbuster treatment, and I'm frankly flabbergasted at the bowdlerized version I got growing up. Oh, and did you know that Pocahontas was also dead of disease by age twenty-one? The pre-Columbian population of the Americas is estimated to be on the order of 50 million people, and may have been as high as 100 million. By 1700, the population had dropped at least 90%, and most of the rest were gone by 1900.
[4] He's at his best when arguing in favor of Indian beliefs. While I love a good Christian takedown as much as the next agnostic, his critiques of Christianity aren't always quite fair (though turnabout is fair play, I guess). And his ideas about science are really hard for me to swallow. But in that respect I guess the book is not that different from much academic theological work in the Christian realm. I was also surprised to find that he considers secularism an evil. To me the live-and-let-livism of secularism is one of the main reasons Native religions can continue on despite Christianity's dominant position in the culture as a whole. But I think to Deloria, religion does not have its proper power unless it is the unified practice of the whole community.
[5] Unfortunately I didn't find an anecdote on Indian attitudes toward death that I felt was short enough or made enough sense out of context to reproduce here, though the Chief Seattle quote at the end is from this chapter.
[6] Why did Shinto survive when so many other local religions got crushed? I think it's partly the unique character and geography of Japan, and partly a lucky accident. The Japanese were historically always rather isolated, and yet never entirely cut off from developments on the mainland. This led to long periods of independent development, with periodic infusions of new ideas from the outside. Japan has a long tradition of remixing influences from outside but never really letting them overwhelm the local way of doing things. Even so, after the introduction of Buddhism, Shinto began to go into decline and seemed like it might disappear. It was only after repelling the Yuan (Mongol) invasion that Shinto began to be emphasized again as a cultural means of differentiating themselves from the outside world (a totem, if you will). A similar near death and renaissance of Shinto took place over the course of the 1800s as Japan was shaken out of complacency and isolation by the incursions of Western colonial powers. For better or worse, Shinto and Japanese nationalism have long had a tightly symbiotic relationship.
[7] The Oscar-winning film Get Out does something similar for African American culture; I wonder if that inspired Roanhorse?
[8] Not that that makes me feel happy about it.
