God is Red

Tribal Religions and

Contemporary

American Culture

We have seen some examples of the deviations created in religious behavior when a culture defines a religion. In a great many areas, tribal religion defined culture. This aspect of Indian life can be seen fairly clearly in the speeches and attitudes of the old chiefs and warriors. Their refusal to consider land as a commodity to be sold and their insistence that the lands held a great and sacred place in their hearts and the hearts of their people must be understood in its context of the last century, when they faced the momentous decisions of giving up some of their lands in an effort to preserve the remainder of it for themselves and their children.

There can be no doubt that not only times have changed

but also cultures since the white man first set foot on the continent. Tribal cultures have shifted to confront the changes forced on the people by the tidal wave of white settlement. The recent Indian activist movement has attempted to recoup the lost ground and return to

the culture, outlook, and values of the old days. The fundamental question facing tribal religions is whether the old days can be relived—whether, in fact, the very existence of an Indian community in

the modern electronic world does not require a massive task of relating traditional religious values and beliefs to the phenomena presenting themselves.

One small example might indicate the extent to which this problem is a daily irritation to Indian people. In some of the traditional pueblos, modern conveniences are rejected, even electricity. The children of the pueblo attend the public school system, however, and have become accustomed to having cold milk. For the children to have cold milk at home, the pueblo must install electricity. But this innovation will violate the people’s religious beliefs. A generation gap of no small distance emerges. What decision do the tribal elders make about the nature of the tribal religion and the demand of the little children for cold milk?

Again and again Indian people are faced with a puzzling unveiling of the distinctions between the Western Christian world and themselves. Sacred bundles of the tribe reside in the state museum; for centuries they were revered by the people, serving to focus their attentions on their religious experience as a people. During the period of religious oppression, the government forbade the practice of Indian religions, and one day the sacred bundle was given or sold to the museum or stolen from the tribe. Everyone had given up on the idea that they would ever again be allowed to practice their own religion, and the sacred bundles were considered as the remaining artifacts of paganism. In a scene being played out across the country today the younger people of the tribe, trying to revive the tribal religion, need the sacred bundles. An old man has been found who has preserved the tribal religion. He is old, and unless he can train the young, the religion will be lost. What can be done? The sacred bundles are no longer in Indian hands. Do we storm the museum? Will the whites understand why we need the sacred bundles back?

We have been taught to look at American history as a series of land transactions involving some three hundred Indian tribes and a growing U.S. government. This conception is certainly the picture that emerges when tribal officials are forced to deal with federal officials, claims commissioners, state highway departments, game wardens, county sheriffs, and private corporations. Yet it is hardly the whole picture. Perhaps nearly as accurate would be the picture of settlement phrased as a continuous conflict of two mutually exclusive religious views of the world. The validity of these two religious views is yet to be determined. One, Christianity, appears to be in its death throes. The other, the tribal religion, is attempting to make a comeback in a world is as different from the world of its origin as the present world is different from the world of Christian origins. Can tribal religions survive? Can they even make a comeback?

Even where the two religious systems have clashed, the picture is not clear as to villain and hero. Father A. M. Beede, a missionary to the Sioux at Fort Yates, North Dakota, told Seton, “I am convinced now that the Medicine Lodge of the Sioux is a true Church of God, and we have no right to stamp it out.’’1 Yet they did try to stamp it out while recognizing the wrong they were doing.

Some Christian missionaries successfully bridged the cultural gap and became more important to the tribes than most of their own members. The Reverend Samuel Worcester, a missionary to the Cherokees in the 1830s, remained a faithful friend to the tribe in defiance of the State of Georgia. He persisted in his recognition of the Cherokees as a people, following their cultural development, obeying their laws, and giving continual assistance. For his loyalty he was imprisoned by Georgia, and his appeal for release was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous case Worcester v. Georgia2 in which Chief Justice John Marshall gave the definitive statement on the status of Indian tribes under the Constitution.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Reverend John M. Chivington, an infamous Methodist minister from Denver, Colorado. Chivington served briefly as a colonel in the Colorado Volunteers during the Civil War. Finding no Johnny Rebs to fight, he turned his attentions to the Indians. He planned, led, justified, and celebrated the massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado, in an unexpected dawn attack on a friendly band of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in which hundreds of helpless people were needlessly slaughtered. The actions of the Colorado Volunteers remain, even today, as one of the most barbaric examples of human behavior.

Between these two extremes are hundreds of cases of Christian people who reflected well both their religious beliefs and their cultural values in their relationships with Indians. Some were staunch defenders of the tribes they knew; others behaved in a rigid, authoritarian manner without a trace of human feeling. In fairness one cannot judge the religion of the whites as either good or bad when it came into contact with the tribal religions, only that no consistent set of values ever emerged as peculiarly and gloriously Christian.

After four centuries of pressure and religious imperialism, many tribal religions disappeared. Some disappeared because the tribes were destroyed or were reduced to such few members that the survivors, dropping their own religion, joined larger tribes and accepted the practices of the host tribe. It has only been in fairly recent times that a number of religions have emerged that cross tribal lines. Foremost of these has been the Native American Church, which uses peyote in its ceremonies. Although universally respected among Indians, the Native American Church has come afoul of the drug laws of the various states and now faces severe repression. Oppression of the people who use peyote sacramentally, connecting them with the drug war, is ludicrous. Very few people belong to the Native American Church and its services are always held in the most isolated locations and attended by a handful of people. Traffic in peyote is almost non-existent, and it has been used successfully in helping Indians escape from alcoholism. But it is, culturally and theologically, foreign to American culture and consequently is seen as a threat to social stability.

The establishment of reservations generally involved the creation of mission stations at agency headquarters. Some of the treaties gave the missionaries lands on which they promised to build schools, houses for teachers, hospitals, and farms. The tribes failed in many cases to appreciate that allowing the missionaries to enter the tribal lands would inevitably result in religious conflict and dissension among tribal members. We have already seen how Chief Joseph refused to have missionaries around fearing that they would teach the people to quarrel about God.

As the reservations became more permanent, the churches devoted themselves wholeheartedly to converting the people. Religious controversies increased, and missionaries soon became one of the most vocal forces in demanding that tribal political activity be suppressed because it was apparent to them that the religious and political forms of tribal life could not be separated. Soon plans were underfoot to ban tribal religious ceremonies. The ignorance of the Indian agents assisted the missionaries in their endeavors because they interpreted any Indian ceremonial as a war dance.

By the time of the Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act), almost every form of Indian religion was banned on the reservations. In the schools the children were punished for speaking their own language. Anglo-Saxon customs were made the norm for Indian people; their efforts to maintain their own practices were frowned on, and stern measures were taken to discourage them from continuing tribal customs. Even Indian funeral ceremonies were declared to be illegal, and drumming and any form of dancing had to be held for the most artificial of reasons.

The record of Indian resistance is admirable. When people saw that they could no longer practice their ceremonies in peace, they sought subterfuge in performing certain of the ceremonies. Choosing an American holiday or Christian religious day when the whites would themselves be celebrating, traditional Indians often performed their ceremonies “in honor of” George Washington or Memorial Day, thus fulfilling their own religious obligations while white bystanders glowed proudly to see a war dance or rain dance done on their behalf. The Lummi Indians from western Washington, for example, continued some of their tribal dances under the guise of celebrating the signing of their treaty. The Plains Indians eagerly celebrated the Fourth of July because it meant that they could often perform Indian dances and ceremonies by pretending to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In 1934 under the Indian Reorganization Act, Indian people were finally allowed religious freedom. The missionaries howled in protest, but the ban on Indian religious ceremonies was lifted. Traditional Indians could no longer be placed in prison for practicing old tribal ways. Ceremonies began to be practiced openly, and there were still enough older Indians alive that a great deal of tribal religious traditions were regained. The great Black Elk, today perhaps the best remembered of the Sioux holy men, was still alive in 1934. It is said that he had frequent conferences with the holy men from other parts of the tribe living on different reservations.

For several decades the tribal religions held their own in competition with the efforts of the Christian missionaries. But a whole new generation had grown up, educated in mission and government schools and living according to the bureaucrats’ dictates; these young Indians rigorously rejected old religious activities as a continuation of paganism. Yet as more Indians went off the reservation, went to war, attended college, and lived in the cities, the situation began to change. The Indian people had always been somewhat in awe of Western technology. It seemed to imply that their god was more powerful than their tribal religions and medicine. The great expansion of the American Indian horizon in the 1950s had a tremendous effect on attitudes toward tribal religions, which provided a very important link with the tribal past. Often through healing ceremonies performed by the holy people of the tribe, sicknesses were cured that urban white doctors could not cure. In one decade many American Indians began to see that whites and their Christian religion had fatal flaws.

In the last several decades tribal religions have seen a renewal that astounds many people. The Pueblos of New Mexico and the Navajos of Arizona managed to retain much of their ceremonial life throughout the period of religious suppression. The Hopi in particular preserved many of their ceremonies with relative purity. The Apaches also kept a number of their tribal ceremonies. In the Northwest some of the tribes kept their ceremonies by holding them in secret on the isolated reservations lacking sufficient federal resident staff to prohibit them. These tribes quite frankly continued their ceremonies by making them once again a total community affair to which everyone was expected to come.

Other tribes have experienced an increasing interest recently as specific ceremonies become the objects of people’s affection. Naming ceremonies in some tribes have become more numerous as urban Indians seeking a means of preserving an Indian identity within the confusion of the city have asked reservation people to sponsor naming ceremonies for them. They travel sometimes thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars to be able to participate in such events.

Religious conflict has become pronounced on some reservations as Christian Indians have had to make room for traditional Indians in tribal affairs. The continuous conflict on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York is a classic example of such strife. For nearly two centuries the Roman Catholic church dominated the affairs of the Mohawks who remained on this side of the border after the Revolutionary War. Edmund Wilson recounts how he visited a cemetery where many of the Christian Mohawks sat silently in the night, listening to the songs and activities of the traditional Mohawks being held a short distance away. Such was the overt situation until recently.

In 1972 open conflict broke out at St. Regis as the impending wave of traditionalism threatened the political stability of a few figurehead Christian Mohawks who had been dominating tribal affairs for nearly a generation. The largest Indian newspaper in North America, Akwesasne Notes, operated by traditional Mohawks on a sharing-the-cost-by-contribution basis, was harassed continuously. Questions were raised about whether Canadian Mohawks and their adopted friends should be allowed to live on the reserve. The fundamental question was that of defining contemporary Mohawk culture and outlook. The traditionals appeared to be strongly appealing to the rest of the people. In 1989 and 1990 violence broke out in Mohawk country as traditional people attempted to forestall the installation of gambling on their reservations. Both the Canadian and U.S. governments were placed in a difficult situation because it appeared as if tribal sovereignty and the viability of the tribal government was at stake. There is no question that the traditional Mohawks held the high moral ground, but there was also the difficulty of recognizing the informal, traditional government because it would not endorse the continued intrusions into community life that the organized tribal council condoned.

As tribal religions emerge and begin to attract younger Indians, problems of immense magnitude arise. Many people are trapped between tribal values constituting their unconscious behavioral responses and the values that they have been taught in schools and churches, which primarily demand conforming to seemingly foreign ideals. Alcoholism and suicide mark this tragic fact of reservation life. People are not allowed to be Indians and cannot become whites. They have been educated, as the old-timers would say, to think with their heads instead of their hearts.

Additional problems face any revival of tribal religions that originated in times when the tribes were small and compact. Whenever a band got too large to support itself and required a large game source to feed everyone, it simply broke into smaller bands of people. The two bands would remain in contact with each other. Often they would share war parties and ceremonials of some importance. At treaty signing times they would congregate and act as a national unit. Their primary characteristic, however, was their manageability. For political decisions, religious ceremonies, hunting and fishing activities, and general community life, both the political and religious outlook of the tribe, was designed for a small group of people. It was a rare tribal group that was larger than one thousand people for any extended period of time.

Today tribal membership is determined on quite a legalistic basis, which is foreign to the accustomed tribal way of determining its constituency. The property interests of descendants of the original enrollees or allottees have become determining factors in compiling tribal membership rolls. People of small Indian blood quantum, or those descended from people who were tribal members a century ago, are thus included in the tribal membership roll. Tribes can no longer form and reform on sociological, religious, or cultural bases. They are restricted in membership by federal officials responsible for administering trust properties who demand that the rights of every person be respected whether or not that person presently appears in an active and recognized role in the tribal community. Indian tribal membership today is a fiction created by the federal government, not a creation of the Indian people themselves.

In the 1860s the Navajo bands who were gathered up and marched to New Mexico to be imprisoned by Kit Carson numbered somefour thousand people. The basis of their unity as a people was similarity of language and occupation in a commonly defined area. It was not a political unity. When they were returned to Arizona and given a reservation in the most desolate part of the state, they then fictionally became a distinct tribe, although they had previously composed several distinct independent bands. Today that same tribe numbers close to 200,000 people. The Navajo have not had sufficient time to develop an expanded religious or political structure to account for this tremendous population explosion.

The Oglala Sioux once formed a large-numbered tribe but one that was dominated by a series of brilliant and charismatic chiefs such as Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, American Horse, Standing Bear, and Little Wound. They had a number of bands virtually acting independently of each other. Thus Crazy Horse and his people spent most of their time in Montana with the Cheyennes fighting Custer while Red Cloud and his people were living in South Dakota several hundred miles away from that area. It would have been absurd for Red Cloud to have signed a treaty for the Oglala Sioux without having Crazy Horse and the other chiefs also signing for the tribe.

Today the Oglala Sioux number at least fifteen thousand people, perhaps twenty thousand. A substantial number live off the reservation and participate only sporadically in community life. Yet the people must find a way to define what it means to be an Oglala Sioux in today’s world. When such a process is rigidly controlled by federal officials fearful that the Sioux may gain control over their lives, then incidents such as the confrontation at Wounded Knee in 1973 are inevitable.

While the AIM received a lion’s share of the publicity at Wounded Knee, it was merely the external symbolic group of which the public was made aware. AIM had been asked to come to the reservation to mount the protest by members of the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Association, a group formed a year earlier to protest conditions on the reservation brought about by the tribal council’s refusal to guarantee civil rights to individual Indians. Cooperating with the two groups was the Black Hills Treaty Rights Council. This council was composed of the elder traditional leaders on the reservation who had tried to preserve the older form of tribal political organization. They had been working all their lives to see that the federal government fulfills its commitments to the Oglalas as promised in the Treaty of 1868 and the Agreement of 1876.

The situation was further complicated by two other organizations supporting the protest. One, the Landowner’s Association, was composed of individual Indians who owned allotments of land and wished to use their lands in community cooperatives to form grazing units for the local communities. The BIA, with the concurrence of the tribal council, had placed their lands in larger grazing units and leased these large units to white cattle ranchers. The individual Indians were thus deprived of the use of their lands and were given small rental checks by the federal government. They were kept in a perpetual state of poverty while the white ranchers enjoyed the benefits of economic prosperity during the great rise in the price of beef.

The fourth group involved in the protest was the Inter-District Council. As the conditions on the reservation grew worse during 1972, the people of the different reservation districts formed their own shadow government known as the Inter-District Council. They had representatives from every one of the eight districts on the reservation and were discussing ways to get a federal law passed to give the people of the local communities political control over their lives through a new constitution. Naturally the existing tribal council and the BIA were violently opposed to such a reform because it would have unseated the tribal council and reduced the power of the bureaucrats. During the Wounded Knee confrontation the Inter-District Council tried desperately to get the federal government to understand how the conditions on the reservation had led to the protest and how the protest could be peacefully resolved.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Wounded Knee protest was that the holy men of the tribe and the traditional chiefs all supported the AIM activists and younger people on the issues that they were raising. Some people were fearful of the violence that threatened their lives, but the strong ceremonial life and the presence of medicine men in the Wounded Knee compound diffused a great deal of the criticism that would have been forthcoming from members of the other Indian tribes. No Indian could keep up a sustained criticism of the confrontation upon knowing that the people at Wounded Knee had their sacred pipes and that the medicine men from both the Pine Ridge and the neighboring Rosebud Sioux reservations were performing the ceremonies.

The Wounded Knee protest was dreaded by Indians but it was not unexpected. The federal government had taken the original rolls of the allotment period and insisted that the descendants of those original allottees be considered members of the tribe whether they had sufficient Indian blood to qualify for membership or whether they lived in the communities on the reservation. The internal social mechanisms that ordinarily would have operated to define community membership were forbidden by federal law—if they operated, they were given no legal status or recognition.

We have just begun to see the revival of Indian tribal religions at a time when the central value of Indian life—its land—is under incredible attack from all sides. Tribal councils are strapped for funds to solve pressing social problems. Leasing and development of tribal lands is a natural source of good income. But leasing of tribal lands involves selling the major object of tribal religion for funds to solve problems that are ultimately religious in nature. The best example of this dilemma is the struggle over the strip-mining at Black Mesa on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. Traditional Indians of both tribes are fighting desperately against any additional strip-mining of the lands. Tribal councils are continuing to lease the lands for development to encourage employment and to make possible more tribal programs for the rehabilitation of the tribal members.

A substantial portion of every tribe remains solidly within the Christian tradition by having attended mission schools. They grew up in a period of time when any mention of tribal religious beliefs was forbidden, and they have been taught that Indian values and beliefs are superstitions and pagan beliefs that must be surrendered before they can be truly civilized. They stand, therefore, in much the same relationship to the tribal religion as educated, liberals now stand to the Christian and Jewish religions. Both groups have lost their faith in the mysterious, the transcendent, the communal nature of religious experience. They depend on a learned set of ethical principles to maintain some semblance of order in their lives.

A great many Indians reflect the same religious problem as do the young whites who struggled through the last several decades of social disorder. They are somehow forced to hold in tension beliefs that are not easily reconciled. They have learned that some things are true because they have experienced them, that others are true because everyone seems to agree that they are true, and that some things are insoluble and cannot be solved by any stretch of the imagination.

One of the primary aspects of traditional tribal religions has been the secret ceremonies, particularly the vision quests, the fasting in the wilderness, and the isolation of the individual for religious purposes. This type of religious practice is nearly impossible today. The places currently available to people for vision quests are hardly isolated. Jet planes pass overhead. Some traditional holy places are the scene of strip-mining, others are adjacent to superhighways, others are parts of ranches, farms, shopping centers, and national parks and forests. The struggle of the Taos people to get their sacred Blue Lake away from the Department of Agriculture indicates the tenuous nature of some tribal religious practices in a world of complicated transportation services and radio and television.

If modern conditions were not sufficient to prevent the continuance of traditional ceremonies, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it almost impossible to perform some ceremonies on federal lands. In 1988 in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association,3 the Court dealt with the question of whether the Forest Service could construct a 6-mile segment of road for the convenience of the logging industry in the high country of Northern California where the Yurok and Karok tribes traditionally conducted religious ceremonies. Relying on the American Indian Religious Freedom Resolution, the Indian demonstrated to the Forest Service and to the lower courts that to construct the road would damage the traditional religion beyond repair. Yet the Court turned away their argument noting that it could not order the government to protect a religion of this kind. The majority decision compared it to a sudden rush of religious feeling by someone who had gazed upon the Lincoln Memorial, a dreadful and perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of the religious principles involved.

Education itself is a barrier to a permanent revival of tribal religions. Young people on reservations have available an increasingly complicated educational system. Perhaps like conservative Christians, older Indians see the educational system as basically godless and tending to destroy communities rather than create them. As more Indians fight their way through the education system in search of job skills, their education will increasingly concentrate on the tangible and technical aspects of contemporary society and away from the sense of wonder and mystery that has traditionally characterized religious experiences. In almost the same way that young whites have rejected religion once they have made strides in education, young Indians who have received solid educations have rejected traditional religious experiences. Education and religion apparently do not mix.

Tribal religions thus face the task of entrenching themselves in a contemporary Indian society that is becoming increasingly accustomed to the life-style of contemporary America. While traditional Indians speak of a reverence for the earth, Indian reservations con-tinue to pile up junk cars and beer cans at an alarming rate. While traditional Indians speak of sharing the structure of jobs, insurance, and tribal politics, education prohibits a realistic sharing. To survive, people must in effect feed off one another, not share with each other.

In the old days leadership depended on the personal prestige of the people whom the community chose as its leaders. Their generosity, service to the community, integrity, and honesty had to be above question. Today tribal constitutions define who shall represent the tribe in its relationships with the outside world. No quality is needed to assume leadership except the ability to win elections. Consequently tribal elections have become one of the dirtiest forms of human activity in existence. Corruption runs rampant during tribal elections, and people deliberately vote in scoundrels over honest people for the personal benefits they can receive. Much of the formal resistance to federal programs for increasing tribal independence comes from the Indian people’s mistrust of their own leadership, present and future. Many tribes want the tribal lands and assets so restricted that no one can use them to the tribe’s detriment—or benefit.

One of the greatest hindrances to the reestablishment of tribal religions is the failure of Indian people to understand their own history. The period of cultural oppression in its severest form (1887–1934) served to create a collective amnesia in contemporary people. Too many Indians look backward to the treaties, neglecting the many laws and executive orders that have come to define their lives in the period since their first relationship with the United States was formed. Tribal people are in the unenviable position of dealing with problems the origins of which remain obscured to them.

The disruptions of tribal religions for a period of fifty years have resulted in the loss of a well-accepted recent tradition of ceremonies, religious leaders, and other ongoing developments characterizing a living religion. Contemporary efforts to reestablish tribal religions have come at too rapid a rate to be absorbed on many reservations. In some instances ceremonials are considered part of the tribal social identity rather than religious events. This attitude undercuts the original function of the ceremony and prevents people from reintegrating community life on a religious basis.

Most tribal religions, as we have seen, have not felt that history is an important aspect of religious life. Today as changes continue to occur in tribal peoples, the immediate past history of the group is vitally important in maintaining the nature of the ceremonies. The necessary shift in emphasis to a more historical approach can be seen in the various Indian studies programs that have attempted to fill in the missing tribal history. Indian tribal religions thus find themselves in the position of earlier Christian communities that were forced to derive historical interpretations to account for unfulfilled prophecies.

We may find the incongruous situation of many Indian people leaving Christianity to return to traditional religions, creating a tribal history to solve social problems, and falling into the historical trap that has plagued Christianity. It would seem that history itself is a deceremonial process that continues to strip away the mystery of human existence and replace it with intellectual propositions. As the mainstream of Christianity begins to face ecology and the problems inherent in its traditional doctrine of creation, tribal religions are running the risk of abandoning the traditional Indian concerns about the creation in favor of a more historical and intellectual religion.

Tribal religions in the old days did not create an external ethical system. Cultural considerations involving total tribal life enabled people to merge all societal functions into a unity from which all forms of behavior derived. With tribal members spread across the country today and the conditions on the reservations subject to radical shifting at every change of federal policy, there is not that continuity of experience or homogeneous community of people present that would enable Indian people to avoid creating ethical systems based on traditional values.

The closest parallel that we find in history to the present condition of Indians is the Diaspora of the Jews following the destruction of the temple. A surprising number of Indian activists have made this comparison without considering that the exile of the Jews was for a significant period of time and that the Jewish people almost immediately developed a strong scholarly tradition to preserve their ceremonies and beliefs in exile. The Indian exile is in a sense more drastic. The people often live less than 100 miles away from their traditional homelands; yet in the relative complexities of reservation and urban life, they might be two thousand or more years apart. It is not simply a spatial separation that has occurred but a temporal one as well.

Many traditional leaders have recognized this problem. In the 1970s an intertribal ecumenical council was formed to meet every summer to discuss ways of keeping the people focused on the nature of tribal religions and their meaning for the future of the tribes. The ecumenical council met most often on reserves in Canada because the Canadian Indians seemed more perceptive in defining the problem of reviewing the traditional way. In the summer of 1972 some five hundred people attended the sessions. The number of participants grew each year until it was apparent that the gatherings had deteriorated into pleasant sessions of reviewing the past because people were unwilling to forge into the future. Then the council ceased to exist.

One of the chief past functions of tribal religions was to perform healing ceremonies. This function was impaired by lack of any rights to train new people to perform the ceremonies and a general lessening of dependence on tribal medicine men because of the presence of Public Health Service hospitals on the larger reservations. Indian healers were generally considered as superstitious magicians by the missionaries and government officials, and healing arts were lost in many tribes.

Today healing remains one of the major strengths of tribal religions. Christian missionaries are unable to perform comparable healing ceremonies, and a great many still regard Indian healers as fakers and charlatans. This particular field is thus open for Indian religious figures who have received particular healing powers, and traditional healing ceremonies are being recognized by the Public Health Service as competent complementary healing practices. Some special grants have been given to train more healers and shamans and to have them work closely with doctors trained in internal medicine.

The modern world has lost a large number of healing medicines because of the arbitrary rejection of Indian religions. Some tribes had special roots and herbs that had amazing properties. Only a few have remained in use in some tribes while the vast majority have been lost for a number of reasons. Restriction of Indian people to the reservations has meant that long trips to particular places to gather specific kinds of roots and herbs have stopped. Gradually people have forgotten which plants were used for what purpose. As the older people have died off knowledge about a substantial number of medicinal plants has also been lost.

The great orgasm of dam building that hit the West following World War II also destroyed a number of Indian medicines. The dams flooded the smaller creek and river bottom lands where many plants grew, leaving only the higher reservation land above water. Even those plants and herbs that had been remembered and used regularly by the people were thus sometimes lost because the places where they grew were under water. A comparable situation exists on the land that has been reduced to farmland from its original state. Some medicinal plants grew wild on certain parts of the prairie or in certain places in the forests. The prairie in large part has now been reduced to erosion-ridden wheat and corn fields, and in most places the forests have given way to farmlands and cities.

When one remembers that a substantial number of people of each tribe lives in urban areas away from the reservation, the problems faced by Indian healers come into sharper focus. Only rather hopeless cases or those presenting an extreme problem will reach traditional Indian healers from people outside the reservation. The task of healing will thus take on an Oral Roberts dimension in the future. People will indeed expect miracles. Unless there is a determined effort to gather individual knowledge of healing plants, herbs, and earths as well as a general acceptance of the necessity of rebuilding tribal use of healing people, the impact of healing on Indian religions will continue to decline in spite of temporary successes. Perhaps religious healing will lose validity as a ceremonial experience in another generation.

A counterpart of the healing ceremonies are the rites performed by the religious practitioners that allow them to predict the future in part or in whole, to give advice on courses of action, and to give general advice and admonitions on a variety of subjects. Divination and foretelling the future were once major parts of religion; with the coming of Christianity, they appear to have lost their respectability. The result of this loss has been the survival of astrology, fortune-telling through cards, and the use of the I Ching in recent years in Western civilization. Discovering the future was once a major function of tribal religious leaders. It remains today as one of the major strengths of traditional religious people.

In the last two decades traditional healers have significantly increased the scope and depth of their ability to foretell the future. The impending earth catastrophes are appearing more and more in these rituals and this prospect had meant a great increase in the number of Indians returning to traditional ways. Unlike some Western efforts to predict specific personal fortunes, the information received by Indian religious leaders generally describes situations and conditions that are likely to come to pass, given existing circumstances. There is a sophisticated principle of probability here reminiscent of modern explanations of modern physics. So this aspect of tribal religion bears watching and reflection.

One can hardly speculate on either the problems or the changes this field will experience in the immediate future. The most important aspect that stands out is the insufficient number of people who can perform this special function. In many tribes it is a power given to people only after special ceremonies have been undertaken, and it is a power not always given. It would seem to be a gift most urgently needed by Indian people, as decisions of crucial importance are being forced on Indian people daily, particularly on tribal governments. Yet one can be forewarned and do nothing as Julius Caesar did. Learning the future will receive a great impetus if some of the present predictions do come to pass. The big danger is that this gift, which must remain a property of the Indian community, may become part of the popular New Age activities and the Indian religious leaders will lose this talent by secularizing it.

The rapid expansion of the New Age physic phenomena has been unusually detrimental to traditional religions. Non-Indians can pay very attractive fees to Indian shamans, and there has been a good deal of pressure on traditional healers to spend their time working with non-Indians and neglecting their own communities. Unfortunately there have also been an unusual number of Indian fakers who have invaded suburbia offering to perform ceremonies, primarily sweat lodges, for anyone with the money to pay. A regular circuit has been established that these people tour in search of gullible whites. It should be clear to non-Indians that if shamans really had significant powers, they would obtain these powers through constant ceremonial practice in their homeland, and they would not be out hustling the workshop circuits. But the hunger for some kind of religious experience is so great that whites shown no critical analysis when approaching alleged Indian religious figures.

A warning light should flash when the Indian practitioners say that their elders told them to go out into the world and teach the traditional ceremonies. If one were to gather the great number of Indians now alleging this divine commission and listen to their patter, it would be clear that they all spent their childhood in the wilderness with traditional people who had never seen whites and they learned secrets that had been hidden for thousands of years. It would be exceedingly interesting to compare this roster with tribal employment rolls of two decades ago because a good many of the names would be the same. Yet this alleged background is so irresistible to many whites that, even what blatant frauds are exposed, most of them cling to the belief that they have met a real, traditional Indian.

The situation, however, is far from hopeless. On the reservations we are seeing amazing resiliency in restoring the old ceremonies. A massive shift in allegiance is occurring in most tribes away from Christianity and secularism and back towards the traditional ways. A surprisingly high percentage of Native American clergy are also doing traditional ceremonies and urban area churches are often the scene of traditional healing ceremonies. The Native American clergy are to be congratulated for their efforts to bring the two religious traditions together, but it is clear that no synthesis will take place. In almost every instance the effect of merging the two traditions is to bring attention to traditional ways to the detriment of the particular Christian denomination. The result is that the semblance of a national Indian religion is being born that incorporates major Indian themes. As people are sensitized to this new religious milieu, being dissatisfied with the lack of specificity in this religious activity, they return to the more precise practices of their own tribes. Thus, it appears that traditional religions in some form will transcend the inroads that contemporary American culture has made.