Alice B. Kehoe
I first saw Adolf Hungry Wolf at the 1972 Kainai Days powwow on the Blood Indian reserve in Alberta. Dancing with rapt intensity, he wore black longjohns under his impressive ground-trailing tailfeathers bustle, and his two black braids looked like a wig (among the Blackfoot, men wear three braids, women two). In one hand, he carried a tomahawk, as if he were an illustration in one of Karl May’s German fantasies about Indians (see Honour 1975:242-43). Adolf Hungry Wolf stuck out like a sore thumb at the Blood powwow. He was dancing in the beginning of the afternoon, when only children and a few old people go into the arena. His attempt to cover up his North European paleness with black cloth added a stark darkness to the brilliant colors of others’ dyed turkey feathers and rayon dresses. And most of all, his tense concentration on his dancing contrasted with everyone else’s relaxed, happy appearance.
Adolf Hungry Wolf, born Adolf Gutohrlein, felt a strong attraction to nature and the American Indians even as a boy in his native Germany. Immigrating with his parents to the United States, Adolf grew up in postwar California to be a counterculture flower child. Like many of his generation, he and his woman came as pilgrims to a mountain valley, building a log cabin, keeping goats. From ethnographies and craft books, he cobbled together paperbacks on Indians to bring in a little cash. Typical of popular writers on Indian spirituality, he sprinkled capital letters with great liberality: “Good Medicine is a Way to live in Harmony with Nature . . . following the Path of the Sacred Circle ... in the Light of Today” (Hungry Wolf 1973:4). More sincere than many purveyors of the Way to Live, Adolf looked for a guru in a genuine Indian community, the Blood reserve in southern Alberta, Canada. His efforts met with limited success: he did find a couple of elderly men who let him try to apprentice himself to learn the ways of the Blood (a Blackfoot group), and he did marry a young woman, Beverly, from one of the reserve families, who became his collaborator in retelling Blackfoot culture. The time came, however, when Adolf (Gutohrlein) Hungry Wolfs intrusions became too troublesome, and he found himself outcast from the reserve. This odyssey he recounts in Shadows of the Buffalo (1983).
Thousands of Americans and Europeans believe, as Adolf Gutohrlein had, that American Indians retain a primordial wisdom that could heal our troubled world. American Indians are supposed to be Naturvölker (natural peoples), in contrast to the civilized nations alienated from Nature. Personified as Mother Earth (see chapter 7), Nature is the embodiment of life and thus the hope of a future. She may be called Gaia (from Ge, as in geology), the living goddess; heedless greedy civilized men rape her, tearing ores from her womb and crops from her bosom. Naturvölker respect her, taking only what she freely and lovingly offers, wild foods and regenerating materials. Her gifts to her human children include medicines, so among the Naturvölker are “medicine men” (and women) with knowledge infinitely older and truer than that of graduates of accredited medical colleges. From this supposition, a number of practitioners of “Indian” medicine and spiritualism have gained comfortable livings.
The belief that there exist founts of true goodness and knowledge among savage peoples can be traced back to the earliest documents of Western thought, Homer’s Iliad (c. 700 B.C. [Fontaine 1986:118]) and the Europa of Ephorus in the early fourth-century B.C. (Lovejoy and Boas 1965:288). In a magisterial survey, Lovejoy and Boas called this idealization “cultural primivitism . . . the discontent of the civilized with civilization.” That discontent gives rise to “one of the strangest, most potent and most persistent factors in Western thought—the use of the term ‘nature’ to express the standard of human values, the identification of the good with that which is ‘natural’” (1965:7, 11-12).
These authors point out that the Scythians were to the Classical Greeks what North American Indians have become to modern writers—repositories of virtues lost in urban societies. Strabo claimed, in the first century B.C., “our mode of life has caused the deterioration of nearly all peoples, introducing among them softness and the love of pleasure and evil arts and greed in its myriad forms” (translated by Lovejoy and Boas 1965:289-90). Äke Hultkrantz, professor of comparative religion at the University of Stockholm, follows Strabo when he claims that a problem “of modern western life is our inability to lead authentic lives” (Vecsey 1981 :xii). Hultkrantz, like young Adolf Hungry Wolf, was from boyhood attracted to “the romantic image of Indians as lovers of nature, as people at harmony with their world . . . the mysteries of American Indian life” (Vecsey 1981 :x). Encouraged as a student by his professor in the department where he himself then taught, Hultkrantz pursued field research from 1948 to 1958 among the Shoshoni on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Through his university position, Hultkrantz has supervised graduate students studying American Indian religions, teaching them his classical Western primitivist premise.
In an oft cited essay, anthropologist Edward Sapir distinguished “genuine” from “spurious” culture (1956). Sapir, like Hultkrantz and Hungry Wolf, supposed that American Indians enjoyed real satisfactions in their daily lives, “authentic” lives of “genuine” culture. Like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, however, Sapir was decrying the construction of a spectator society in which the mass of Americans control neither the activities of their daily employment nor the enactment of art and ritual, now reserved for professionals. Hultkrantz and Hungry Wolf have no real interest in analyzing or understanding European and Euro-American culture. Convinced of its “inauthenticity,” they define for themselves the mission of bringing their “knowledge” of American Indian spirituality to the peoples of modern Europe and America.
They are not alone. By a curious twist of logic, hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Americans, alienated by our culture pushing us toward mere passive existence, do not strive simply to engage themselves more in direct production and performance. Instead, they look to representations of non-Western cultures for “authentic” experiences. To gain “genuine” culture, they seek instruction in non-Western spiritual exercises, Asian or American Indian. Historian Calvin Martin embraces and expresses this quest succinctly: “These people [American Indians] key their speculative philosophies to an overarching and undergirding biological system. The biological focus bequeaths to its adherents and practitioners a profoundly different set of . . . key and fundamental questions of human existence” (1987:8). Both the scholarly work of professionals like Hultkrantz and Martin and the popular books of Hungry Wolf and his ilk assume an immense difference, a Great Gulf between “these peoples” and the rest of us.
Nature is life, culture is artificiality—this assumption becomes the primal vision. The authentic life is not merely that in which one retains a sense of control, in which a “captain of industry” can, as Sapir noted, enjoy genuine culture: the authentic life must be lived close to nature, away from artificiality. Modern American Indians are seen as “natural people” because their reservations are rural and there they live largely free of the encumbrances of machines. That these conditions are due to political acts of the dominant society is ignored. Reservation Indians are outside Euro-American cities and thereby, ergo, they must live “authentic” lives infused with spiritual meaning.
When Pope John Paul II was scheduled to fly into Fort Simpson, North West Territory, in 1987 to meet with Indian leaders, reporters were “as usual searching for mystical explanations from the Indian people. . . . What did it mean when the pope’s plane couldn’t land in 1984? He had to cancel his trip. No, I mean, why did it happen? It was too foggy . . . [Searching for significance to the early morning rain, [a reporter] asked a young Dene man, what did they call it? The young man paused, looked skyward, and then said, ‘We call it the 20-per-cent-chance-of-rain rain’” (Johnson 1988:17). The amused correspondent from the Indian-published bimonthly had seen it before, the unshakable conviction that Indians represent Harmony with Nature, the Spiritual Way.
The Primal Mind, published in 1981 by Jamake Highwater and soon made into a television film, quickly became a best-selling gospel of the primitivist concept of a primordial and therefore true religion among a “natural people,” American Indians. Exactly who Jamake Highwater is has been subject to controversy. He claims to be Blackfoot and also Cherokee;1 he admits to having been a choreographer in San Francisco under the name J. Marks; he denies being a Greek-American film-maker from Toledo, Ohio, named Gregory J. Markopoulos. Whatever he once was, Highwater is a talented popular writer whose assertion of American Indian identity has lent credibility to his representation of Indian religion as “primal vision.”
The central place of the visionary experience in “American Indian” religion was popularized long before Highwater in Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt, poet laureate of Nebraska. The focus of Black Elk Speaks is a magnificent vision the old man remembered from his boyhood, a revelation that he believed empowered him to cure and to lead. In his old age, Black Elk regretted failing to live faithfully according to his vision. Unknown to Neihardt, he had been employed for decades as a catechist for the Catholic Indian mission (Castro 1983:94; DeMallie 1984). Seizing the opportunity presented by John Neihardt’s efforts to obtain details to enliven his own epic Cycle of the West, Nick Black Elk engaged the poet to inscribe and present the message of his boyhood vision to the world. The lyrical beauty of Neihardt’s version of what Black Elk spoke carried the book to an eventual huge popularity.
An admirer of Black Elk Speaks, Joseph Epes Brown, later made a pilgrimage to Pine Ridge Reservation to see the visionary. To his delight, the aged Nick Black Elk had more to give the reading public. Brown, one of Hultkrantz’s students, assisted the Lakota former Catholic catechist to codify Oglala rituals and beliefs into seven sacraments unified by the pipe as central symbol (Brown 1953). This was clearly an effort by the old visionary, aided by scholar Brown, to make Oglala religion over into a straightforward alternative to the Catholicism he had formerly taught. The effort succeeded; the one-to-one correspondence between crucifix and pipe, Christ and White Buffalo Woman, sacrament to sacrament, produced an easy transfer of allegiance from Christianity to “Indian religion.” Unquestionably this syncretism has been instrumental in establishing Black Elk’s version of Oglala supernaturalism as the Indian religion, just as nineteenth-century Lakota costume has become the Indian dress. But Black Elk’s vision, and Black Elk’s religion, were never presented as primordial. “Primal vision” is a step—no, a leap—beyond anything Black Elk spoke.
It was Joseph Epes Brown, not Black Elk, who vaulted from Oglala concepts to traditional Western cultural primitivism. As Brown expressed it, “American Indian religions represent pre-eminent examples of primal religious traditions that have been present in the Americas for some thirty to sixty thousand years. Fundamental elements common to the primal nature of those traditions . . . survive into the present among Indian cultures of the Americas” (1982:1). These seemingly authoritative statements by a professor of religious studies begin with the premise that contemporary North American Indian religions incorporate “elements” unchanged for thirty to sixty millennia. Many archaeologists would insist that except for an undated carved llama pelvis from a late Pleistocene stratum at Tequixquiac in the Valley of Mexico, the scanty imperishable remnants of human habitation in Pleistocene America, securely dated only to about 12,000 B.C., cannot by any stretch of analogy be interpreted to signify religious concepts (Kehoe 1981:chap-ter 1). Brown’s enterprise is built upon an unverified and probably un-verifiable premise.
Brown spells out “fundamental and universal characteristic[s] of Native American cultures, as indeed of all primal or primitive cultures” (1982:x; emphasis added). He goes on to write that,
“religion” ... is not a separate category of activity or experience [but] is in complex interrelationships with all aspects of the peoples’ life-ways. [S]hared principles underlie sacred concepts that are specific to each of nature’s manifestations and also to what could be called sacred geography. [I]n addition, a special understanding of language in which words constitute distinct units of sacred power. [S]acred forms extend to architectural styles so that each dwelling ... is an image of the cosmos [Brown 1982:x], Mysticism, in its original and thus deepest sense, is an experiential reality within Native American spiritual traditions. (Brown 1982:111; emphasis added)
“Primal religion,” such as Brown describes, is nothing more than Euro-American cultural primitivism. It has been an integral part of that nineteenth-century evolutionism popularized by Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan, and accepted by John Wesley Powell, founder of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology (Kehoe 1985). Closely allied to the assumption of the persistence of an unchanged primal culture among American Indians was the invention of an unbridgeable difference between Indians and Europeans. Powell wrote in his Annual Report, published in 1896, of “a difference so profound that few civilized men ever comprehend the mental workings of the uncivilized man, while it is doubtful whether any uncivilized man ever comprehends the mentation of his cultured brother” (Powell 1896: xxiii-xxiv).2
These twin chimeras of primal persistence and radically contrasting “mentations” fostered policies that still bedevil American Indians. Ben Reifel, Brulé Sioux on his mother’s side, Harvard Ph.D., congressman from South Dakota, in 1967 remembered the assumptions behind the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934:
Mr. [John] Collier [Commissioner, Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1933-1945] had the feeling, and I’ve heard him say that the Indians are in the vanguard of this world-wide loop back into the land . . . About 1928, and with the Merriam survey, [the B.I.A.] began to bring in professionally qualified people—more doctors, more nurses, more teachers—and the New Deal sort of built right on this. One of the misfortunes among the Indians, I feel personally, was the part where education was concerned. That the cause of this whole national feeling of reversion to the land, and that the Indians were in the vanguard, leadership in the Indian education was . . . goats brought in, little projects where the little kids would work with chickens or rabbits and gardens, and they tended to be losing sight of learning to read and write and to figure. (Reifel 1971:125-6)
Collier’s notion of an ideal Indian education reflected the influence of John Dewey. Even more, Collier’s programs for American Indians stemmed directly from long-standing conventions of cultural primitivism, views reinforced by his association with the wealthy art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, herself seeking authenticity living beside Taos pueblo (Kelly 1983:52, 118-20).
In 1974, when Gary Snyder received a Pulitzer Prize for his poems and essays in Turtle Island, the loop back into the American land that Collier had envisioned received its widest acceptance. An anthropology major from Reed College in Oregon, Snyder developed a sophisticated ecological orientation that borrows images from Indian sources, archival and contemporary (Castro 1983:chapter 6). “Turtle Island” is a phrase drawn from Siouan cosmology describing the earth resting on the backs of a pair of primeval turtles, and the phrase also resonates to the common collocation of turtles with the countryside and natural bodies of water. Snyder is convinced that—as a poet—he shares an openness to primal experiences with those Indians who like himself have avoided the appurtenances of Euro-American urban culture. Primitivism to Snyder is a practical option, a design for living that can be chosen by anyone, whatever their cultural heritage.
In contrast to Snyder, Joseph Epes Brown seems to consider American Indians the sole repositories of authentic religiosity: “[B]y taking the pains to learn what one can from Native American traditions one who as yet is unaffiliated with a true tradition will be aided in knowing what a tradition is in all its complexity, depth, and richness of cultural expressions” (Brown 1982:113; his emphasis). Why this could not be achieved by taking instruction in Roman Catholicism, Greek or Russian Orthodoxy, or German Lutheranism, Brown does not explain. His privileging of American Indian traditions as “true” above all others shares in a trend that has become highly profitable to many more charismatic and entrepreneurial than Professor Brown.
“Plastic Medicine Men,” an Austrian Friends-Of-The-Indian group calls them, the gaggle of pay-up-front impresarios and conductors of “American Indian” spiritual exercises. The notion that the Naturvölker know the secrets of health is part of cultural primitivism (Lovejoy and Boas 1965:155). Around 1860, “Indian doctors” were listed among medical practitioners in the Washington, D.C., city directory (Moldow 1987:13), and others like them could be found in many American settings. Then as now, the claim that one has studied the healing art with Indians seemed sufficient to attract clients. There has been a significant change, however. Through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth-century, practitioners of “Indian” medicine dispensed herbal potions, ointments, oils, and other “simples,” natural medications used to treat specific bodily ailments. But in this last quarter of the twentieth century, “Indian medicine men” have concentrated on mental disquiet and spiritual malaise. Today, because these “medicine men” are believed to combine spiritual insight and “natural” medicines, as opposed to licensed medical doctors who are said to be coldly rational, followers of “Indian” practitioners revere them as spiritual gurus as much as healers.
One of the best established and most popular “medicine men” is Sun Bear, who told an interviewer that he is a Chippewa from White Earth Reservation, Minnesota (Shorris 1971:130-133). Sun Bear spent his first twenty years there but left to sell real estate in North Dakota, worked in Hollywood as an actor and “technical advisor,” and has been married twice, each time to a non-Indian. In 1970 he was employed seeking grants and loans for businesses on Indian reservations, and he also published an Indian lore magazine. By the 1980s, he had privately developed an enterprise called the Bear Tribe, an outlet for the sale of packaged Indian rituals and easy-to-read books on Indian spirituality. Sun Bear named himself Chief of the Bear Tribe Medicine Society, “a group of people striving daily to relearn their proper relationship with the Earth Mother, the Great Spirit, and all their relations in the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms ... a tribe of teachers responsible for sharing . . . lessons of harmony” (Sun Bear 1970:book cover).
Joseph Bruchac, himself an Indian, in 1983 attended one of the Bear Tribe’s Medicine Wheel Gatherings. Hundreds of others attended, too, paying $100 each for three days of events, camping, and six meals. The Medicine Wheel itself was a large circle of stones laid out near the lake in a Catskills summer camp. The idea of a potent “Medicine Wheel” entered pop Indian spirituality through Hyemeyohsts Storm’s much criticized Seven Arrows, where it is said to be “the very Way of Life of the People” (1972:1). Storm, who is flatly called “non-Indian” by Michael Castro (1983:155), in his turn seems to have lifted the medicine wheel from George Bird Grinnell’s classic ethnographic study of the nineteenth-century Cheyenne. However, Grinnell unmistakably describes these “wheels” as a minor item in Cheyenne life, little wooden hoops used primarily in a game of skill (1972 11:296). Storm creatively embellished this older Cheyenne practice, converting the medicine wheel into a symbolic figure constructed of pebbles, perhaps borrowing that form from the boulder construction marked on Wyoming road maps as the Big Horn Medicine Wheel.3
This practice of spiritual license continues. Participants in Sun Bear’s 1983 “East Coast Gathering,” for instance, were invited to place a small tobacco offering and their own “personal stones” within the camp wheel. They could steam themselves in the sweat lodge, puff on the communal pipe, and take part in the Child Blessing and the Give-Away. Wait, there was more! All attending could broaden their experience through “Traditional East Indian Fire Ceremony at the Medicine Wheel” and a “Conscious Movement exercise at the Social Hall with Vyasananda.” There were, of course, free periods available for purchasing Sun Bear’s Earth Astrology, bear claws, tobacco, and sage, healing crystals, and cassette tapes of sacred songs.
Bruchac, the eyewitness commentator, raises a profound issue when he comments (1983:21), “you could make up new rituals as you went along, just as long as you were sincere” (1983:21). Ongoing revelation through personal visions has been integral to Plains Indian religious practices, but it is counteracted by the custom of a recognized older religious leader “straightening out” (interpreting) a younger person’s vision.4 American Indian religious leaders strongly rooted in Indian communities usually discuss innovations with others in their own and neighboring communities before adopting them. This submission to collegial evaluation is missing in the usually quite standardized fêtes conducted by touring pop medicine persons for the enlightenment of their American clientele.
Rolling Thunder is another peripatetic medicine man, in the business as long as Sun Bear. In a book on psychic healing, he is described in his Nevada home, “sitting underneath a stuffed eagle,” identified earlier in this same account as “his totem bird” (Krippner and Villoldo 1986:9, 6). Can Rolling Thunder really possess supernatural power so great that he can sit calmly beneath so blasphemous a sight as an eagle “totem” stuffed and hung upon a living-room wall? Most of Rolling Thunder’s clientele seem to be from California, where he is frequently encountered (Boyd 1974). Said to be a Shoshoni, Rolling Thunder at sunrise purveys a standard pipe offering to the Four Winds (apparently omitting the other two sacred directions of traditional Indians, zenith and nadir). For Americans who have had disease-causing feathers and stones magically shot into their innards, he also delivers a sucking-doctor shamanic healing routine (similar to that amply described in anthropological publications and films such as Porno Shaman). Rolling Thunder’s wife is named—What did you expect?—Spotted Fawn.
Wallace Black Elk is genuinely Lakota, though (when pinned down) not related to Nick Black Elk of the Pine Ridge Oglala (Cameron 1985:32). Wallace, like Sun Bear, is well known to the avocational Indians of Europe (see chapter 16). He toured the continent in 1983 accompanied by an anthropologist, William S. Lyon, and in 1986 he joined Lyon in advertising seminars on Indian shamanism featuring an “enactment over a five-day period of the Lakota inipi (‘sweat-lodge’) purification ceremony.” Lyon promises Wallace will also perform “routine shamanic duties such as shamanic healing via the ‘sacred-pipe,’ precognitive experiences, the leading of traditional ceremonies, and other such normal shamanic activities” (Lyon 1986). Wallace must compete with another trading on the fame of Black Elk, Hilda Neihardt Petri, daughter of the Prairie Poet Laureate, Black Elk’s amanuensis. Petri had accompanied her father and sister to Pine Ridge in 1931, and transcribed for her father what Nick Black Elk spoke in 1944 for Neihardt’s second book with him. She now is advertised as “one of the last living links with the traditional Indian culture” and she will retail her memories in a “poetically haunting and spiritually enriching” narration from her father’s works. Hilda’s customers can use the most modern forms of communication to reach out and touch her, by dialing (918) 747-POET to reserve a presentation of “the natural culture and profound wisdom of the American Indians” (Handy 1985).
A variant of the plastic medicine man is the Indian artist-healer. John Redtail Freesoul is one such. He claims to be “Cheyenne-Arapahoe,” and like Sun Bear he heads an “inter-tribal medicine society,” in this case, the Redtail Hawk Medicine Society. Freesoul and his ex-wife, “Riverwoman,” identified as Cherokee, carve and sell pipes and “my Northern Plains style of southwestern fetish which I call ‘spirit fetishes’” (Freesoul 1986:199). The Redtail Hawk Medicine Society is described by its “sacred pipeholder” Freesoul as a “warrior society . . . organized by Nantan Lupan and James Bluewolf ... in 1974 . . . fulfilling a] Hopi prophecy that new clans and societies shall emerge as part of a larger revival and purification of the Red Road” (Freesoul 1986: 105-106). This entrepreneur’s own clan is also “intertribal, one of the changes in tradition as a result of the Indian unity movement of the 1960s” (Freesoul 1986:143). From astrology, Freesoul borrows animal, vegetable, mineral, and time-of-day associations—totems, he calls them (1986:58-59). His “totems” were originally the grizzly, the mullein plant (appropriately, a European import), jet (a coal-like mineral), and sunset, a set supposedly inherent in persons born in autumn. As he broadened his experiences, he acquired additional “totems”—“the golden eagle, the redtail hawk,” and “phases of Grandmother Moon.” To cap his pilgrimage, Freesoul has been born again in Jesus Christ—Praise the Lord! (Freesoul 1986:chapter 16).
On the shelves of bookstores catering to New Age devotees are a dozen competitors of Freesoul’s all-in-one handbook. According to the introductory pages of another, Eagle Walking Turtle (otherwise known as Gary McClain) has “the natural Choctaw sadness that was his heritage by birth, yet there was also an Irish wisdom and laughing acceptance” (Hausman 1987:9). The jacket of McClain’s book—which consists of a series of paintings accompanying excerpts from Black Elk Speaks—describes it as “a universal, salvific message that transcends politics, governments, and religions. It is the medicine way on how to achieve peace, harmony, and the healing and cleansing of ourselves and the earth.”
The earth-cleansing theme is a favorite of the New Age questers. British chemist James E. Lovelock, for example, pictures our planet as basically a self-regulating feedback system “which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet” (1979:11). Adopting the suggestion of novelist William Golding, Lovelock bestowed upon his system the Greek name “Gaia.” Though he carefully referred to his Gaia as a scientific hypothesis, Lovelock tends to slip into anthropomorphisms, as when he writes that his system “seeks” optimization. He opened the door to cultural primitivism when he explained, “The Gaia hypothesis is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears, and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here. It is an alternative to that pessimistic view which sees nature as a primitive force to be subdued and conquered” (1979:12).
Gaia has been developing into the central icon of a New Age cult with primitivist overtones. She is merged into Mother Earth, also described as a Global Brain (Russell 1983), a “living organism with a lattice of geometric lines—energy fields—running through it” (Paulson 1987). Like others of his vocation, Rolling Thunder echoed the theme, “earth is a living organism” (Krippner and Villoldo:6). Plastic medicine men fit easily into New Age workshops such as one advertised for October 17, 1987, where between the hours of 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., for only $30 including lunch, refreshments, and materials, seekers could learn about the “Gaia Hypothesis, Mayan Calendar, Global Brain Theory, Power Points, Polar Shift, Transpersonal Psychology, Esoteric Teachings, Native American Spirituality, Planetary Grid System [the ‘energy fields’], End Times Theology, Age of Aquarius, and the Matriarchal Principle,” all “Converging Perspectives on the Coming Transformation” (Paulson 1987).
The “Matriarchal Principle,” related of course to Gaia and Mother Earth, pulls in yet another audience: women and the men who love them. The size of that flock created bestsellers for Lynn Andrews, who describes herself as a “warrioress of the rainbow ... a bridge between the two distinct worlds of the primal mind and white consciousness” (Andrews 1985:xi). She began producing such wisdom in 1981 with Medicine Woman, opening with a quote from her “Cree” guru, Agnes Whistling Elk:
There are no medicine men, without medicine women. A medicine man is given power by a woman, and it has always been that way. A medicine man stands in the place of the dog. He is merely an instrument of woman . . . Woman is the ultimate . . . Mother Earth belongs to woman, not man. She carries the void. (Andrews 1981 :i)
What red-blooded American female could resist such promise of primal power? Especially so when on the next page we are in Los Angeles at a trendy gallery opening, then on to a party in a Bel Air mansion with a French maid declaring Mademoiselle’s “black silk crepe kimono” to be “magnifique!” Who should be at this party but Hyemeyohsts Storm (if it were Carlos Castaneda, the reader might be tipped off too easily. See chapter 12).5 Storm directs our heroine to “the Cree Reserve north of Crowley, Manitoba” to find Agnes Whistling Elk, “a heyoka, as they call some medicine women” (Andrews 1981:17).
There is a town in California called Crowley; there is none by that name in Manitoba. Andrews rents a car at Winnipeg Airport and thirty minutes later is “out in the Canadian tundra,” not the plain prairie ordinary people find a half hour’s drive from Winnipeg (1981:21). When she arrives at the hamlet of “Crowley,” Andrews must first inquire for Whistling Elk’s friend Ruby Plenty Chiefs. Ruby, she is told, used to live nearby “up on Black Mesa,” an odd name for any place close enough to the flatlands around Brandon, Manitoba, for shopping (1981:179). Ruby, and the other Indians on the reserve at “Crowley,” call Andrews wasichu, the Lakota—not Cree—word for Euroamericans, with spelling following Neihardt’s in Black Elk Speaks. Heyoka is another Lakota word; it refers to persons who have been chosen by the Thunder Beings to communicate blessing through performing the ritual of that name (DeMallie 1987:36-37). Why a rural Manitoba woman from a Algon-quian Cree community would go through a Siouan ritual, and why these Cree would use a language foreign to them, Andrews never explains. Possibly Ruby and Agnes are really Dakota Sioux, who in fact have several reserves around Brandon, and possibly Andrews has never become aware of the substantial differences between Cree and Sioux?
Nit-picking will never deter readers from the excitement of Andrews’ apprenticeship to medicine power, power she desperately needs, we find out, because she is pursued by the evil Red Dog (a man, of course). One chapter ends with Agnes saying, “I hope you don’t die. Now, young lady, you will have to face the passions of Red Dog” (1981:148). Happily, fifty-two pages later “Red Dog was shriveling up and growing old . . . the eerie light was gone, and all that was left was an ancient white-haired man.” In the Epilogue, Agnes orders Andrews to go back to Beverly Hills, to “write a book and give away what you have learned. Then you may come back to me” (1981:204).
Whether she gave away what she learned might be debated. But come back she did—with a book nearly every year. Flight of the Seventh Moon (1984), declared on the flyleaf to be “a true story,” describes Andrews’ hard-won initiation into the secret Sisterhood of the Shields. Here we learn of forty-four medicine women with magical Women’s Shields (also called mandalas! 1984:xii). Andrews may have drawn inspiration from Storm’s imaginative paragraphs about Twelve Sacred Shields: “Over the Earth there are Twelve Great Tribes. Two of these Peoples are the Indian Peoples. The Other Ten are the Other Peoples of the Earth. These Twelve Peoples are the Sacred Shields” (1972:8-10). Storm once again may have been dipping into and expanding on Grinnell’s classic study of the Cheyenne, this time from that serious scholar’s sober description of Cheyenne shields (1972 1:187-202). But Grinnell explicitly indicates that only “men of years and discretion” owned shields with spiritual power (1972 1:188).6
Jaguar Woman in 1985 continued Andrews’ mind-boggling adventures in Indian country. This saga starts with our heroine mushing along behind a dogteam toward her guru’s cabin, apparently relocated from southern to northern Manitoba. Once there, she steps outdoors and has a vision of a Butterfly Woman with a crystal sword. The scene shifts, to Andrews’ impulsive trip to Yucatán, where Agnes awaits her in the hut of a Mayan medicine woman. For good measure, there’s a medicine wheel thrown in (1985:119). In Star Woman (1986), Andrews rides Arion, the “magnificent white stallion” of every young girl’s dreams. Subsequently, in Crystal Woman (1987), the loyal reader finds Andrews and her guru Agnes in a Land-Rover bumping along toward an Aborigine camp near Ayers Rock in “primeval” Australia. There a native Australian medicine woman guides them to the secret women’s village, where magic is performed with crystals (compare Bell 1980:244). Always, the women’s nemesis Red Dog lurks around; every Andrews book is a bodice-ripper, a Harlequin Romance liberally laced with inflammatory feminist rhetoric plus pop-Zen enigmas galore.
Calmer by far than Andrews, a Peacekeeper rather than a Warrioress, is she who calls herself Dhyani Ywahoo, the twenty-seventh generation of the Ywahoo lineage of the “traditional Etowah Band of the Eastern Tsalagi (Cherokee).” Dhyani works out of her Sunray Meditation Society, “a gadugi (society) affiliated with Igidotsoiyi Tsalagi Gadugi of the Etowah Band” (1987:xi), located not in the Cherokees’ native North Carolina, but in Vermont. “Until 1979,” Ywahoo informs unsuspecting readers, “it was illegal in the United States for Native Americans to practice their traditional religions,” (1987:1), immediately establishing her tenuous hold on simple facts. Ywahoo’s lineage began, she states, with “the Pale One” whose “teachings flourished throughout the Americas” (1987:2).7 Her Pale One “rekindled the holy fire and renewed the original instructions encoded within the Crystal Ark, that most sacred crystal that ever sings out harmony’s beauteous note . . . The duties of each Ywahoo are to care for the Crystal Ark . . . and the crystal-activating sound formulas and rituals” (1987:2-3). There were, of course, “twelve original tribes . . . the people were the dream children of the angels, their dreaming arising with the primordial sound” (1987:10) which, be it known, “is sung by the quartz crystal . . . it vibrates at 786,000 pulses per millisecond . . . the axis of the universe” (1987:33).8 “Christ energy is symbolized by the ruby” (1987:251), “the shape of the quartz crystal, its hexagonal structure, is the double triangle or the Star of David” (1987:253). Join in, all ye nations! or as Ywahoo says, in the Lakota phrase we read in Black Elk Speaks, “all my relations” (1987:7).
The publication of Ywahoo’s book was timed to a momentous event announced by the New Age’s favorite art historian, José Argüelles. “The new cycle of thirteen heavens began August 30, 1987, thirteen days after Fifth World ended” (Ywahoo 1987:7). Argüelles calls it the Mayan Factor: the Tzolkin of the Maya, “More than a calendar,” we are informed, “the Mayan Harmonic Module . . . evokes . . . the I Ching for Hexagram 49 . . . the phenomenon that I have come to understand as a galactic master-code” (1987:20-21). Argüelles’ earlier books were densely packed with references to scholarly figures such as Johann Winckelmann, Odilon Redon, and his dissertation subject, Charles Henry, a student of the psychology of perception. By 1975, Argüelles realized “the split in favor of the left cerebral hemisphere . . . was overtly to come in . . . 1519 when the mental condition of the human race slipped out of balance . . . [into] the Fifth Sun, the Sun of Movement’ (1975:14). “The balance maintained by the ‘transformative visionaries’ is nothing less than a dialog between the two hemispheres” (1975:15). So through two applications of the word “hemisphere,” conflict between East and West on the planet merges with conflict between art and cold rationality in the brain, all to be healed beginning August 16, 1987, as Argüelles reads the Mayan calendar (or was it August 30?).
The Indian-published periodical Daybreak reported an interview with a Guatemalan Maya, Don Miguel Ajpu, in which the writer mentioned to Don Miguel the “harmonic convergence.”
He said at first he was soundly perplexed . . . Coming back, he . . . said . . . “it is only a mental construction he [Argüelles] made up. Dozens have speculated in this way, but they don’t really know our reality, our ceremonies, our ancestor stories, our languages . . . the convergence message, this time, tell the world, it wasn’t from us” (Ismaelillo 1987:20).
From “Indian doctors” in antebellum Washington to art historians prophesying the healing of the world, the purported wisdom of American Indians is invoked to allay the malaise of civilization. The “Indians,” or their disciples, who proffer the desired wisdom are curiously remote from actual Indian communities.
With no change in the basic thinking, “Indian” has replaced the Classical “Scythian” as the label for the fabled Naturvölker. Cultural primitivism, constructed as the opposition to civilization with its discontents, has been part of Western culture for close to three thousand years. This fiction is picked up by credulous scholars and by common charlatans, by neo-romantic writers and by earnest counterculture pilgrims. Borrowing from and serving one another, poets and plastic medicine men earn a living from the hoary tradition of ascribing virtue to nature. The tradition will not die. Its invented Indians are eternally reincarnated Scythians from the primal Gaia of the Western imagination.
1For comments on Highwater’s pedigree, see Akwesasne Notes 16(4): 10-12; 17(6):5. The Cherokee are one of the most favored tribal identities assumed by aspirant marginal “Indians.” An identity as Cherokee and Blackfoot was also elected by Sylvester Long, the tragic “Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance,” who was bom as a Black in North Carolina (Smith 1983 and 1988).
2Ironically, Powell’s conjectures were published in the same volume with James Mooney’s masterpiece of field observation and reasoning, The Ghost Dance Religion (see Kehoe 1988).
3See Kehoe and Kehoe 1979 for a discussion of the boulder constructions called medicine wheels.
4For an example of this practice, see the description of the elder, Black Road, counseling the young Black Elk at the end of chapter XII, Black Elk Speaks (Neihardt 1932).
5For more on that equally prolific primitivist, Castaneda, see Richard De Mille’s essay, chapter 11 in this volume; also Needham 1985:chapter 9; and Zolla 1981.
6Incidentally, Grinnell also refers to a Cheyenne named Whistling Elk (1972 1:196-197). Andrews may have borrowed Agnes’s name from the same source.
7By “the Pale One” Ywahoo is apparently referring to the Aztecs’ Quetzal-coatl. Exactly where she got this is not cited, but for an example see Hansen 1963.
8During the early nineteenth century a much-favored explanation of the origins of American Indians was that they were the Lost Tribes of Israel.
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