The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men (review)

The purpose of Vine Deloria Jr.'s book, The World We Used to Live In, is to inspire an audience of American Indian readers to seek contemporary inspiration and power from their ancestral spiritual traditions. It is a collection of stories about the old times when the everyday decisions were based on a spiritual understanding of the workings of the natural world—a moral legacy that has the potential to reinvigorate and revitalize our secular lives today.

The book presents personal experiences and historical accounts of medicine men and their extraordinary and inexplicable range of powers. Deloria notes that "American Indian medicine traditions are a wholly North American phenomenon" based primarily in relationships with the land and nature (53). These historical spiritual traditions are distinct for each indigenous culture, yet a general hilosophical approach is shared across cultures.

The time frame of the book includes colonial times, western expansion, and the early twentieth century. The geographical focus is the northern Plains, the author's homeland, with a few examples from the Southwest and east of the Mississippi.

A central characteristic of the book is the extensive use of historical quotations to document American Indian spirituality. Quotes function as evidence of the existence, diversity, and veracity of American Indian medicine men. Multiple sources are effectively used to demonstrate the workings of old-time spirituality. These accounts were written by anthropologists, missionaries, soldiers, trappers, traders, and Native scholars (Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Francis La Flesche, John Stands in Timber, and Ella Deloria). Although anthropologists are both praised and criticized for their reporting of spiritual events, Deloria makes ample use of excerpts from ethnographic onographs by Frances Densmore, John Swanton, James Murie, Morris Opler, Paul Radin, Frank Speck, Ray DeMallie, and Peter Nabokov. The book also provides brief accounts of several powerful medicine men, such as Black Elk, Geronimo, Goose, and Horn Chips. They describe personal experiences with the spirit world and their cultural communities that they sought to help through their powers.

The book is organized into eight thematic chapters. Within each chapter, Deloria makes his argument through the use of relevant documentary accounts that illustrate the abilities of medicine men. The patchwork of stories from various cultures and times is woven chapter by chapter into a whole cloth of native philosophy—a spiritual way of thinking and acting about life. The author then shows the reader how the sacred universe is manifest through dreams, healings, interspecies communication, sacred places, and objects.

Chapter 1 focuses on dreams and vision quests as pathways to revelation, instruction, knowledge, and sacred power. The stories offer alternative ways to understand our physical world as an animated spiritual universe; it is a sacred domain revealed by supernatural powers to medicine people through dreaming. Chapter 2 explores the abilities of medicine people as diagnosticians and healers with specialized knowledge. The roles of guardian spirits and animal helpers are discussed, along with the centrality of breath and breathing in healing. Chapter 3 describes an earlier world characterized by close relationships between the spirits and the living, a relationship mediated through ceremonies and demonstrations of power by medicine men (such as the Algonquian's shaking tent or spirit lodge). Chapter 4 continues to develop the theme of communication across species to demonstrate the "unity of life on the spiritual level" (112), as, for example, when sacred power is manifested through birds and animals, or when animals come to the assistance of humans.

Chapter 6 exemplifi es the book's focus on the northern Plains, including several extracts from Frances Densmore's ethnographies. It presents several accounts of the power of sacred stones in Blackfeet, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Mandan, and Sioux spiritual traditions to fi nd or call game, predict future events, locate lost objects, and control the weather. Deloria discloses a family connection to Sioux sacred stones: "My great-grandfather Saswe had a stone that would cause rain. All that needed to happen was for the stone to get wet...