God is Red

Until the occupation of Wounded Knee, American Indians were stereotyped in literature and by the media. They were either a villainous warlike group that lurked in the darkness thirsting for

the blood of innocent settlers or the calm, wise, dignified elder

sitting on the mesa dispensing his wisdom in poetic aphorisms. Strangely, the malevolent image can be attributed to the movie caricature while the benign image comes from anthologies, pageants, and the fervent wish by non-Indians to establish some personal sense of Jungian authentication.

As the Civil Rights movement began to be eclipsed by antiwar protests, and Martin Luther King, Jr., linked Vietnam with American domestic problems, the public began to turn to other minorities for the reassurance that they were, in spite of themselves, good guys. American Indians were a natural choice for public attention: their protests had so far taken place in remote areas of the country, they wanted to be left alone, they would not be purchasing homes in one’s neighborhood, and they were a very colorful part of America’s past isolated from modern problems. With a growing interest in America’s history and the heightened visibility of American Indians in 1967, the publishing industry made a deliberate effort to feature Indian books. A year later Stan Steiner’s The New Indians described the recent exploits of younger Indians “leading the way” in the 1960s.

Many of the Indians appearing in Steiner’s book were sought out by publishers and contracts were given out freely. The publication of Custer Died for Your Sins helped focus the anger of young Indians on specific targets such as the anthropologists, the BIA, and the Christian churches. A year later Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, a well-written accounting of the Indian wars, presented another dimension of the American Indian experience to the reading public.

These books stand out in the literature about the American Indian because the rest of the field is so easily classified and deals primarily with a fantasy image of Indians, the kind of Indians that many groups of Americans would like to believe exist. The Indians occupying Wounded Knee knew they could benefit from the publicity that the book had already achieved. Insofar as they believed that the existing literature on Indians would provide people with additional background to help explain their struggles, they were sorely disappointed. A review of the literature available on American Indians during the years when the activist movement was so predominant indicates the tremendous conceptual barrier they were facing.

With the exception of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn, and Hal Borland’s When the Legends Die, Stay Away, Joe, there have been few successful novels

about modern Indian life. Little Big Man, Thomas Berger’s very successful novel of the old West, covers Indian life and culture obliquely, and its time period could hardly be said to relate to contempor-

ary Indian life. Many novels have not even had the success of Little Big Man. In attempting to present, in fictional format, Indian life as it

was experienced in the last century, most novels have fallen into a

“go-in-peace-my-son” style, with the credibility of the plot dependent on the lonely white trapper, gunfighter, or missionary who comes across the Indian princess. The parallel between the unexpected and fortunate event in the Horatio Alger stories that catapults the

hard-working hero to fame and the fortunate “salvation” event that makes the Indian tribe accept the white hero in the Indian novel is

no mistake. It is virtually impossible to change cultures or economic status without what would appear to be an almost supernatural intervention.

Where other fields of literature have so successfully enabled people to empathize with conditions and cultural variances, novels about Indians have been notably bereft of the ability to invoke sympathy. Rather they have been dependent on an escapist attitude for their popularity. As a consequence the Indian activist movement could not make contact with a group of informed, sympathetic readers for there were none. There is no emotional unconscious that Indians and non-Indians share that can be tapped on behalf of American Indians, insofar as they are people, like other people. Their sufferings are historic and communal; this is the lesson that America has learned from its literature on Indians.

The communal nature of Indian personal existence is further supported by the presence of a large body of literature on the histories of the respective tribes. For generations it has been traditional that all historical literature on Indians be a recital of tribal histories from the pre-Discovery culture through the first encounter with the whites to about the year 1890. At that point the tribe seems to fade gently into history, with its famous war chief riding down the canyon into the sunset. Individuals appear within this history only to the extent that they appear to personalize the fortunes of the tribe. A mythical Hiawatha, a saddened Chief Joseph, a scowling Sitting Bull, a sullen Geronimo; all symbolize not living people but the historic fate of a nation overwhelmed by the inevitability of history.

Some of the earliest Indian protests challenged this image of Indians and the numerous false stereotypes projected by this type of literature. Sincere but uninformed whites honestly asked Indians during the height of the activist movement if we still lived in tents, if we were allowed to leave the reservations, and other relevant questions, indicating that for a substantial number of Americans, we were still shooting at the Union Pacific on our days off. On one memorable evening as a guest of the Bill Barker show in Denver, I was asked by a radio listener how the Indians celebrated Christmas before the coming of the whites. Bill and I broke out laughing and he had to punch in a commercial so I could compose myself before trying to answer this silly question. There were constant protests directed to whites writing books on tribes to include something about modern Indians in their books. The result of this protest was that several writers of books on Indians added a final chapter in which a quick sketch of the contemporary condition of the tribe was reviewed.

As late as 1964 many publishers thought (1) Indians could not write books, and (2) any book written by an Indian would be “biased” in favor of Indians.l Whenever the subject of Indians writing their own books arose, even the friendliest of non-lndians stated that a great many Indians had written books and that we should be content with what they had left. The trail of books written by Indians is significant if considered as the recorded feelings of a race once extant, but insignificant if it is meant to communicate modern social and legal problems that have created and intensified poverty conditions among a segment of the American population.

It was disconcerting to realize that many people felt that the old books on Indians were sufficient to inform the modern American public about the nature of Indian life and to give sufficient information about Indians to make an intelligent choice as to how best to support Indian goals and aspirations. One historian wrote that there are already a sufficient number of books by Indians, and that books chronicling contemporary outrages should not be published because they stir up bad feelings between Indians and whites.2 He recommended Sun Chief (the autobiography of a Hopi, published in 1942), The Son of Old Man Hat (the autobiography of a Navajo, published in 1938), and Black Hawk’s autobiography (published in 1833). Could these books have correctly informed the reader on the struggle of the Navajo and Hopi against Peabody Coal Company at Black Mesa or explained the protest at the Gallup ceremonial?

This fundamental gulf between the available information

about Indians and information that Indians wanted communicated about particular and pressing problems came to dominate Indian concerns. For that reason the activists made maximum use of television and greatly simplified the issues that concerned them. When the National Indian Youth Council was coming into existence and young Indians were attempting to get sympathetic non-Indians to listen to their story, a non-Indian law professor replied that he was very interested in the plight of Indians and had recently read Ishi in Two Worlds (a story about the last member of a California Indian tribe, who spent his final days as a mascot of a California museum in the first decade of this century). As a result, Indians, particularly young, educated Indians in their twenties who wanted to do something about conditions, were very frustrated.

The tension being experienced by young Indians, the awareness that something was dreadfully wrong, was recorded in Steiner’s The New Indians. In this book Steiner reviewed the developments within Indian country since World War II. He pointed out that the tremendous sums the federal government had spent for Indian education were beginning to produce results. Rather than a quiet group of civil servants, however, the younger Indians had become political theorists, activists, and cultural revivalists. Steiner warned of the impending landslide of concern, which was bound to manifest itself in continuing protests against federal policies that had never taken into account the nature of Indian society or the historic feeling of betrayal that the Indian community has held throughout the twentieth century.

However, the reading public, the literary critics, and many of the people directly concerned with the problems of modern Indians were attracted to two other books also published in 1968. Alvin Josephy published The Indian Heritage of America, and Peter Farb published the book with the long title, Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State. Both books were best-sellers and popular book-club selections. Josephy devoted all of 20 pages in a 365-page book to the period from 1890 to 1968, failing to cite any contemporary Indian political leader at all and mentioning the National Indian Youth Council once in passing.

Farb did a brilliant analysis of prehistoric Indian cultures, covered items that had not previously been on any anthropological agenda, and cleverly wove together almost all of the relevant information on Indian cultural traditions into a 332-page book. His work was considered by reviewers as a major step forward in understanding the American Indians. He did not, however, mention the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which has formed the basis for communal survival in the postwar world. He did not mention the Indian Claims Commission of 1946, which attempted to redress the injustices of land confiscation through relitigation of land claims. Farb frankly stated that he would leave such a job to another. How he came to figure that he had taken Indians up to the modern industrial state, however, is another question, since his book appears chronologically to stop shortly after the Dawes Act of 1887.3

The incongruity of the impact of the three books became more apparent with the addition of other facts. Josephy and Farb were among the inner circle of consultants upon whom then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall relied for his knowledge regarding the formation of policy for American Indians. Steiner was regarded as a itinerant relic of the Jack Kerouac school of wanderers, a person who could not conceivably possess any information on Indians that would be relevant to the formation of policy. In 1968 the inherent schizophrenia of the Indian image split and finally divided into modern Indians and the Indians of America—those ghostly figures that America loved and cherished.

In the next four years it seemed as if every book on modern Indians was promptly buried by a book on the “real” Indians of yesteryear. The public overwhelmingly turned to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox to avoid the accusations made by modern Indians in The Tortured Americans and Custer Died for Your Sins. The Red Fox book alone sold more copies than the two modern books. It was later revealed to be a reprinting of an older book that “Chief Red Fox” had simply copied.4 Each takeover of government property only served to spur further sales of Brown’s review of the wars in the 1860s. While the Indian reading public was in tune with The New Indians, The Tortured Americans, The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal, a Canadian Indian, and other books written by contemporary Indians on modern problems, the reading non-Indian public began frantically searching for additional books on the Indians of the last century.

The result of this intense, non-Indian interest was the publication of a series of books that were little more than cut-and-paste jobs, the anthologies. Touch the Earth by T. C. McLuhan and I Have Spoken by Virginia Armstrong consisted of a series of excerpts of the speeches by famous chiefs with a few short quotations from living Indians to give the book a timely flavor. McLuhan inserted a number of sentimental sepia pictures of old chiefs riding along the crest of canyon to add further maudlin emotions to an already overemotional book. The public took McLuhan to heart, and Touch the Earth also hit the book clubs. There were also dozens of other anthologies printed following the success of these books but they simply recycled some 150 quotations between new covers. They added nothing new about contemporary Indians and events. Unfortunately this kind of book still continues to be produced with equally dismal results.

In addition to the sentimental anthologies, a number of books were rushed into print and hopefully to judgment; they were little more than editing jobs on reports to government agencies. Among them was American Indians and Federal Aid by Alan Sorkin, a study done by the Brookings Institution under a grant from the Donner Foundation. The book featured numerous tables demonstrating Indian poverty but was devoid of any mention of the forces then moving in Indian affairs that sought to combat poverty and racism. Big Brother’s Indian Programs with Reservations by Sar Levitan and Barbara Hetrick, a study funded by the Ford Foundation, was published shortly after Sorkin’s book. It was distinguishable from Sorkin’s book chiefly through its use of photographs as if there really were Indians alive today, its big words, and its utter lack of knowledge about hiring Indians.

In the fall of 1972 there were no less than seventy-five books on American Indians released. Most staggered into print, received few reviews, and collapsed. It was plain that the initial phase of interest in Indians was over. Then, just before Election Day, the Trail of Broken Treaties arrived in the nation’s capital, ready to do battle with the Nixon administration. In little over a week the Administration, the tribal leaders, and a great segment of the American public sat stunned as the Indian activists completed their destruction of the Bureau collected some $66,000 in travel money from the federal government, and set off to terrorize the headquarters of some tribes and BIA field offices. Somehow American Indians had arrived in the twentieth century.

In order to understand why this particular event occurred, we must try to understand the reception that modern Indians received when they have tried to communicate their immediate problems to an uncomprehending society. When a comparison is made between events of the Civil Rights movement and the activities of the Indian movement one thing stands out in clear relief: Americans simply refuse to give up their longstanding conceptions of what an Indian is. It was this fact more than any other that inhibited any solution of the Indian problems and projected the impossibility of their solution anytime in the future. People simply could not connect what they believed Indians to be with what they were seeing on their television sets.

Let us pretend that the black community received the same reception in the Civil Rights struggle that the American Indian community received when its movement was attracting public attention.in its struggle.

It is 1954, and the Supreme Court has just handed down its famous case, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education; the Civil Rights movement is beginning to get under way. Soon there is a crisis in Montgomery, Alabama, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., begins to emerge as a credible leader of the Civil Rights forces.

At a news conference King is asked about the days on the old plantation. He attempts to speak on the bus boycott, but the news media rejects his efforts. It wants to hear about Uncle Tom, the famous black of literature. The news conference ends with the newsmen thoroughly convinced that King is merely a troublemaker, that everything is fine down on the old plantation, and that everything will be all right if the blacks simply continue to compose spirituals. Sympathetic supporters stand in the background dressed in slave costumes cheering him on.

Two books are published recounting the blessed days of slavery on the one hand and the cultural achievements of the tribes of black Africa in the 1300s on the other. They are almost immediate successes on the best-seller lists. The American public now worries about the Muslims confronting the primitive tribes of the interior of the African continent and changing their culture. Mohammed becomes a public villain. In a desperate effort to raise the issue of Civil Rights in American society, Martin Luther King, Jr., writes Stride Toward Freedom. Outside of a few people who seem to intuit that things are not well down South, King’s ideas are ignored. Two new black writers, James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones, publish books that have a sporadic, perfunctory reception, and they are ignored.

The movement continues to grow with television coverage and feature-length descriptions of the poverty conditions of the black community, prefaced by quotations from Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver to the effect that blacks should remain separate until earning the right to participate in American society. The Freedom Rides begin, sparking a series of anthologies of Negro spirituals about traveling to the promised land. A Negro Travel Book, showing the great migrations in Africa in the 1300s, becomes a best-seller. Boy Scout groups drop their camping activities and begin to perform minstrel shows complete with authentic black dialog.

Finally the movement grows intense as plans are made for a march on Washington. People rush here and there, preparing for the march; the activists down in the Deep South are in trouble. Some have been killed for attempting to register voters. On the literary front, however, things are different. A new book, Bury My Heart at Jamestown, has rocketed to the top of the best-seller list. More than 20,000 copies a week are being purchased. People reading the book vow never again to buy and sell slaves. Sympathy for the slaves is running at a fever pitch, while Martin Luther King, Jr., is downgraded because “he doesn’t speak for all the Negroes.”

As the march gets under way, television finds a new hero. Field Hand Boggs, an elderly black who claims to be 101 years old and a nephew of Nat Turner, is discovered almost simultaneously by The New York Times and the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” Field Hand Boggs has copied 13,000 words from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and is passing it off as his “notebooks” laboriously compiled over a century of struggle. Field Hand Boggs becomes the number one folk hero of America, and he recounts for thrilled television audiences his glimpse of Abraham Lincoln and General Grant sitting on the White House lawn the day that he gained his freedom. The march is conducted in virtual isolation.

As the Civil Rights movement proceeds, the literature shifts its emphasis; old government and foundation reports complete with charts and graphs are trotted out with fancy dust jackets that make them appear to be the latest battle communiqués from Atlanta. Anthologies of spirituals become very popular, and those that are interspiced with faded photographs of slaves working in the cotton fields prove the most popular. Introductions to these anthologies sternly inform us that we must come to understand the great contributions made by slaves to our contemporary culture, “More than ever,” one commentary reads, “the modern world needs the soothing strains of ‘Sweet Chariot’ to assure us that all is well.”

And finally Watts. As the section of Los Angeles burns, people resolve to do better. Government officials ask for full prosecution of the rebels, all the while handing out $100 bills to the rioters and advising them to go back to Virginia and South Carolina and sin no more. A task force is created of officials of various government departments to study the federal relationship to Civil Rights problems and to report back its findings no later than six months after it authorization.

In the summer of 1967, spontaneously in all parts of the country, professional and amateur archaeologists invade black graveyards. They disinter skeletons, label them, and send them to the city museums for display. Down South people rush to isolated slave graveyards with bulldozers, hoping to find some artifacts of that time when it was possible to own a human being. The National Park System locates sites where the underground railroad once ran and sets them aside for tourists, charging a minimal fee. Anthropologists rush to the defense of the looter explaining that it is necessary for anthropologists to have the bones of blacks because they derive immense scientific knowledge from them, but they refuse to publish any reports of this precious information.

What seems ludicrous in the black situation as recounted here is precisely what happened in the American Indian situation without anyone cracking a smile. For example, at the height of the Civil Rights struggle, would anyone have seriously entertained the idea that a 101-year-old man with a tenuous claim to black blood or heritage would truly represent the struggles of the black community? Certainly no intelligent critic would be taken in by such a hoax (fraud is rarely used when discussing minority groups).5 Yet it not only happened to American Indians, but a substantial portion of the public yearned for it to happen.

What we dealt with for the major portion of a decade was not American Indians, but the American conception of what Indians should be. While Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was selling nearly twenty thousand copies a week, the three hundred state game wardens and Tacoma city police were vandalizing the Indian fishing camp and threatening the lives of Indian women and children at Frank’s Landing on the Nisqually River. It is said that people read and write history to learn from the mistakes of the past, but this could certainly not apply to histories of the American Indian, if it applies to history at all.

As Raymond Yellow Thunder was being beaten to death, Americans were busy ordering Touch the Earth from their book clubs as an indication of their sympathy for American Indians. As the grave robbers were breaking into Chief Joseph’s grave, the literary public was reading his famous surrender speech in a dozen or more anthologies of Indian speeches and bemoaning the fact that oratory such as Joseph’s is not used anymore.

The most remarkable body of literature in the years preceding the emergence of the Indian movement was the beginnings of a serious literature on Indian religions. Ruth Underhill’s Red Man’s Religion presented a quick survey of the various religious beliefs of the tribes, but it was phrased in traditional anthropological concepts and had the expert-lecturing-to-novice point of view. While it provided information, the subject could just as well have been the pottery styles of long-vanished peoples. Anthony F.C. Wallace examined the religion of Handsome Lake in The Death and Rebirth of the Senecas. It was a respectable effort but again plagued with the detachment of a historical point of view that gave no sense of urgency to the religious feelings then stirring in the younger generation of Indians.

Father Peter Powell completed his great two-volume work, Sweet Medicine explaining tribal religion in a serious vein. Powell’s work, particularly his style of exposition, was based primarily on conversations with reservation people and reflected their language. An Anglican priest who operated St. Augustine’s Indian Center in Chicago, Powell viewed all religious expressions as sacred and consequently treated the Cheyenne tradition with respect. His book did not take the superficial approach of listing the quaint beliefs of the Cheyennes as if the reader and the author were beyond such superstitions. Sweet Medicine impressed Indians with the validity of their own traditions.

The two most popular books dealing with Indian religion were Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt and The Sacred Pipe by Joseph Epes Brown. Some universities had already installed American Indian studies programs by the early 1970s and almost every course included the two Black Elk books as required reading. Consequently they formed a kind of sacred national Indian religious canon by themselves. The Sioux teachings were phrased in a universal manner. Because they had close relationships in theological concepts with the beliefs of other tribes, many Indian young people who had grown up in the cities and who now formed the backbone of the activist wing of Indian affairs, believed them to be an accurate statement about Indian religions.6

As Indian country was tensing for the eventual showdown in the fall of 1972, two major books on Indian religion were published. One was Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, an autobiography of a Sioux holy man. The book revealed a great deal about the general conditions of reservation life and had an immediate clientele among the very people who had decided to march on Washington. It also had a saucy style typical of the well-experienced Sioux elder making cynical but incisive comments on human behavior. Readers accustomed to the pious rigidity of Protestant tracts on the devotional life were shocked at Lame Deer’s casual approach to such taboo subjects as death, sex, growing old, and religion. Yet from the pages of the book shone a wisdom found in few devotional materials.

The second book, Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm, was even more controversial. Seven Arrows was unique because it tried to make a contemporary religious statement using traditional stories, mythologies, and symbols of the Cheyenne people. In a sense it modernized and simplified some of the ideas articulated by Powell in Sweet Medicine. People expecting to find a record of ancient Cheyenne rituals and ceremonies were stunned to see garish quasi-psychedelic shields, modernistic representations of culture heros, and the advocacy of the so-called “medicine wheel” that was supposed to enable a person to adjust their lives in order to solve pressing personal problems.

Seven Arrows had an incredible impact on young non-Indians. Accustomed to simplistic teachings from their own churches they found the key to an exotic religion that they had been led to believe was very complicated. Younger Indians living in isolated urban areas away from the reservation ceremonials also liked the book and believed that it was a true representation of their own tribal religions even though it was written for the 1960s. Seven Arrows provided a linkage between the emerging groups of non-Indians who were adopting non-Western religious traditions and the Indians who were asserting or relearning their own religious traditions. While it helped to create a groundswell of support for the Indian occupations of federal buildings, it also brought the subject of tribal religions into the marketplace of ideas for the increasing number of people looking for a personal religion and new kinds of religious experiences.

Several years before Storm’s book a “cult” following for Indian religion had already been created by a series of books written by Carlos Castaneda, beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality, and a succession of clever titles. In this series of narratives Castaneda purported to have spent several years as an apprentice to a Yaqui medicine man Don Juan who lived in the Sonoran deserts and other obscure places in Mexico. Castaneda had learned very quickly all the secrets of the shaman’s trade until the current book sales began to wane and he would pick up the narrative and reveal even further sophistications about making reality in your own mind. The Don Juan books were just what young whites needed to bolster their shattering personal identities, and the books were immensely popular.7

Movies did not keep pace with the Indian image during these years. The movie Indian was a thinly disguised young white who wished to have both the simplicity of nature and the modern involvement with social and political issues. The most popular movie alleged to deal with Indians was Billy Jack, a mixed-blood Indian and a war veteran who was an expert in the martial arts. He demonstrated his commitment to peace by breaking people’s limbs in a spectacular fashion. One scene showed Billy Jack dancing in an abandoned Pueblo ruin and allowing a rattlesnake to bite him as he danced purporting to be some kind of ceremony that enabled him to be a brother to the snakes. The scene was pure Lutheran theology since Billy Jack’s faith was supposed to make him immune to snake poison. Sequels to this movie did not do as well. The phenomenon was a passing fad but an extremely important one because it informed young non-Indians that their goals and the Indian goals were identical, that through mastering Indian religious ceremonials they could become invincible and heroic.

Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, starring Robert Redford and Katharine Ross, chronicled an earlier incident in this century in which a sheriff’s posse pursued a young California Indian. The movie had a ring of authenticity regarding both the reservation and the historical period. Because it did not show the Indian using magical tricks or being particularly religious, Willie Boy did not attract the great crowds that attended Billy Jack, and few people connected the conditions of Indians on California reservations with the demands of the protestors in Washington.

If we compare at the image of Indians projected in literature and somewhat in film with that of the Indians who marched on Washington one thing stands out clearly—underneath all of the symbols and ideologies is a religious context and religious motivation. But there was no way to communicate the complexities of this worldview to non-Indians and there was no way that Indians could articulate how this religious perspective could resolve existing problems. Two entirely different views of the world, of human beings, and of human history were about to clash and there was not a single bridge over which the exchange of ideas and sentiments could take place. Moving from the BIA occupation through the Wounded Knee occupation, the trials and the investigations by the American Indian Policy Review Commission, one of the first pieces of legislation passed to resolve Indian problems was the American Indian Religious Freedom Resolution (1978). So there could be no doubt that religion played a critical, if unarticulated, role in the Indian movement.

Two entirely different developments characterize the period from 1972 to 1990. First, Indians in their respective tribes began a serious revival of their religious traditions. Ceremonies that had long been discarded or suppressed were once again performed. Traditional people were sought out for their knowledge of ceremonies and customs. Young Indians all over the country felt it imperative to experience a vision quest, and some groups even reinstituted a version of the ghost dance. The movement even intruded upon the congregations of Christian Indians as Indian priests and ministers sought to combine the teachings and practices of both religions. Some traditional ceremonies were even carried out in Protestant churches so that it became difficult to tell whether one was going to attend a hymn-singing or a healing ceremony when people gathered.

The reasoning behind this integration of two religious traditions is interesting because it goes to both the nature of religion and the nature of cultural identity for answers. Christian Indian priests and ministers felt no sense of guilt in conducting traditional ceremonies because they felt that the ceremonies were as much Indian cultural expressions as religious acts. Additionally, with the argument that there was but one deity, the difference in religions was merely one of choice and expression. Hence a universal sense of religious feeling replaced what had been rather precise formulations of religious beliefs. Some Indians expressed the thought that every culture was in effect an “old testament” with the “new testament” topping them off and making sense of all earlier cultural reaching toward God.

The churches eagerly embraced this new movement for the most part. Their congregations had been declining drastically for years as reservation residents gained more mobility and small settlements on the reservations could no longer support churches and chapels that had been founded during the 1880s and 1890s, a period of impressive conversions. Much nonsense occurred during this period. Episcopal bishops, already looking silly in ecclesiastical costumes standing on the South Dakota prairies looked absurd when this dress was topped off with awkward fitting war bonnets. Indian Christians and traditionals alike were offended when masses were held coincident with the sun dance in spite of the arguments given for merging the two traditions.

Christianity among Indians has fared rather badly during recent years. When placed next to traditional religions, it has very little to say about responsibilities to family and community; most Christians deal simply with the church as if it were the deity. Indian symbolism is not symbolic in the same way that Christian symbolism is; therefore, mixing liturgical objects has become anathema to many Indians. Indian cultural traditions provided an easy explanation for certain kinds of religious acts whereas Christian religious acts depended primarily upon the acceptance of Western culture. It was this cultural and historical perspective that Indians rejected. The result we see today is the rapid movement away from secularism and Christianity toward a more serious traditional religious life.

The second development that emerged following the cresting of the Indian movement was the intense interest in tribal religions by non-Indians and the seemingly wholesale adoption of some of their beliefs and practices by significant segments of white society. The medicine wheel was the symbol most easily adopted by whites through workshops, conferences, and gatherings. The seven directions to which the Plains Indians pray with the pipe became a means of orienting people to the natural world so that the pipe and some semblance of Indian ceremonies were also taken over. Whites then began making and using drums and feather fans for their own use in ceremonies they were holding. The first wave of appropriation, therefore, was simply the symbolic costumes that non-Indians believed would place them closer to nature.

As the demand for authenticity increased so did the fees paid to real Indians to hold ceremonies. Sun Bear, a Chippewa from Minnesota, created his own tribe, the Bear tribe, and found a way to bring non-Indians into his own version of Indian ceremonial life. Eventually he expanded and had an advertisement in Shaman’s Drum, a magazine devoted to educating the thousands of young whites who wished to be Indians—and shamans. The ad featured a nice picture of Sun Bear with the caption, “Sun Bear needs spiritual warriors.” This ad exemplified the motivation of non-Indians—they wanted some kind of power so they could deal with their own culture and be successful.

A variety of Indian medicine men and purported medicine men moved into white society where there were easy pickings. Whites would pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of sitting on the ground, having corn flour thrown in their faces, and being told that the earth was round and all things lived in circles. The next step was performing sweat lodges for non-Indians. Another step was to cut out the best-looking blonde for a “special ceremony” in which she would play Mother Earth while the medicine man, or whoever had conned the blonde, would be Father Sky. They would couple to preserve the life on the planet. In short, the arena between cultures became a scene of intense exploitation.

Added to this confusion was the elevation of whites once again to be the primary exponents of Indian religion and culture. This phenomenon was triggered unexpectedly by Ruth Beebe Hill in a badly written novel entitled Hanta Yo. Hill purported to “know” the Dakota language before missionaries had written it down and therefore ruined it. She claimed to have written a 1,500-page book in this language, translated it from an early English dictionary in order to get authentic English sentence structure, and published it. Her informant was a strange Santee Indian named Chucksa Yuha. Otherwise known as Lorenzo Blackmith, his personal history and claim to ancient knowledge was refuted by investigators at every turn. Hill’s major thesis was that she alone knew the truth about the original Dakota/Lakota Indians, that their descendants were pale imitations, and that the original resembled nothing less than Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, rugged individuals who bowed to nothing including the deity.

Hanta Yo, according to its editor, was thrown over the transom (in other words, came in unsolicited), read avidly, and seen immediately as a classic—the first time anyone had rendered an accurate version of traditional Sioux life. Without delay it was announced that the book was an Indian Roots and that David Wolper, who had produced the original Roots, had somehow acquired the television rights to the work. Indians protested vigorously and slowed down production of the television movie. A group at Pine Ridge, however, could not resist the money being offered by Wolper and endorsed the film. It was finally shown under the title Mystic Warrior and thankfully disappeared.

Ruth Beebe Hill had proved a very important point. As interested as whites were in Indian culture and religion, they preferred to learn from non-Indians who posed as experts in the field. Thus, the books on Indian religion written by Thomas Mails, complete with very good drawings of Indians and sacred objects, and the books by Richard Erdoes, confidant to a group of traditional people on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, did a brisk sale and continued to be popular. These books were within the scope of respectable offerings because so much of their material was taken directly from existing literature and was sullied only by their own occasional personal interpretations of events and activities.

Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through present time, the literature on American Indians includes not only books on Indian religion written by non-Indians but also anthologies and treatises on ecology allegedly using Indian principles. One example of this fantasy literature are books by Lynn Andrews, a talented show business performer. Andrews has demonstrated that it is possible to say almost anything and have it believed providing it is packaged correctly; at that job she is without peer.

Andrews’ first offering was Medicine Woman in which she purported to have been an apprentice to a Canadian medicine woman named Agnes Whistling Elk. The narrative is thrilling because almost without pain or discomfort Andrews is given all the secrets that every white person has sought for centuries. We learn in the last chapters of the book that her mission is not to live among the Canadian Indians performing simple healing and condolence ceremonies like other medicine practitioners. Instead she is commissioned to go throughout the world revealing religious secrets of the Indians. Following Medicine Woman are an incredible number of books in which Andrews visits the outstanding medicine women in the world and is accepted immediately into secret societies that have been preserving the ancient knowledge for thousands of years.

The concept of proselytizing on an apostolic commission inspired some Indians to claim similar missions. Today an alleged shaman can explain his or her absence from the reservation or absence of Indian blood with the excuse that after being trained by elders, the individual has then been authorized and commanded to go among all peoples and preach the Indian gospel. It seems that this surplus of shamans could severely tax the credibility of these practitioners. How can there be so many medicine people who have been commissioned to hold ceremonies for non-Indians while their own people suffer without religious ministrations?

In what has been called the “New Age” circuit Indians have devised a clever answer to this question. They insist that they are “pipe carriers,” an office that has rather hazy historical and cultural antecedents. No definition is ever given of the exact duties of the pipe carrier except that he or she can perform all the ceremonies that a shaman can perform without being called to account when nothing happens. This status was just what non-Indians need to avoid the accusation that they are practicing traditional ceremonies without any real knowledge or understanding of Indian ways. Now everyone from movie stars to gas station attendants has claimed to be an authorized pipe carrier. The belief is that one need only recite these magic words to turn aside all criticisms and skeptical expressions of the listeners.

In the l990s, Indian religions are a hot item. It is the outward symbolic form that is most popular. Many people, Indian and non-Indian, have taken a few principles to heart, mostly those beliefs that require little in the way of changing one’s lifestyle. Tribal religions have been trivialized beyond redemption by people sincerely wishing to learn about them. In isolated places on the reservations, however, a gathering of people is taking place and much of the substance of the old way of life is starting to emerge. Some keen observers predict that within a decade people serving on tribal councils will have to have a full traditional ceremonial life to get elected.