Sacred Places: How the Living Earth Seeks Our Friendship by James A. Swan (review)

Reviews 173 ceremony suggest that McGaa has found a spiritually hungry and naturecentered non-Indian following in the “New Age” movement. The credulity of the skeptical may be stretched here and there, but McGaa’s book is by no means part of a superficial fad or marginal movement. Its clearly articulated vision, focus on practical application in our troubled ecological age, and freedom from ethnohistory and ritual as museum pieces make this book a useful reference. KEITH ATWATER Whitworth College Sacred Places: How the Living Earth Seeks Our Friendship. By James A. Swan. (Santa Fe: Bear &Company, 1990. 237 pages, $12.95.) Originally James Swan studied to become a game biologist, but after some years of study he realized “that all environmental problems arise in the human mind.” So, although the title of his Ph.D. thesis was “Resource Planning and Conservation,” his committee agreed it wasreally “environmental psychology.” He began teaching this concept at the University of Michigan but soon moved west and started private practice as a therapist. A particularly vivid dream about wild geese, which he shared with Rolling Thunder, changed his life. Rolling Thunder told him to look into the Lapps. He began to recognize his own Samish (Lapp) ancestry, thus starting his travels and study of sacred places. The book, Sacred Places, provides a good introduction to this concept. Of particular interest to readers of this journal is Chapter 2, “Varieties of Native American Sacred Places” and Chapter 4, “Sacred Places on Trial.” In the latter chapter he gives some good examples of the present legal decisions which deprive the Indians of their rights to worship in places considered sacred to them, in defiance of the treaty rights we guaranteed them. Unfortu­ nately Swan devotes only a couple oflines to the infamous 1988 Supreme Court decision by Justice Sandra O’Connor, who ruled that it was all right to log on the disputed site in northern California. More space should have been given to explain the crucial importance of this decision, which effectively undermines every effort to preserve a particular natural site in this country. I found that the only periodical which succinctly explained the horror of this decision was the May 20th issue of The Wall Street Journal, which noted that her decision “dangerously extended the erosion of religious freedom.... To rule that wiping out religious practices—and the sacred space that makes them possible—does not coerce people to violate their religious beliefs isperverse.” Swan covers a number of sacred sites around the world, but in such a rapid survey there is no way to delineate the millenia-long inter-relationship of the humans and their land which led to the particular “sacredness” of that place. 174 Western American Literature Rather than travelling all over the world, as so many do, visiting “sacred places,” I agree with Swan’s hope that each community might find its own place of power and begin to celebrate its relationship to that place. For those who are specifically interested in the legal aspects of saving places which are sacred to American Indians, I recommend Jay Vest’s “Tradi­ tional Blackfeet Religion and the Sacred Badger-Two Medicine Wildlands” in The Journal of Law and Religion, v. VI, no. 2 (1988). DOLORES LACHAPELLE Way of the Mountain Center, Silverton, Colorado Passages Toward the Dark. Thomas McGrath. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1982. 150 pages, $10.00.) This is not Tom McGrath’s most recent volume. But no matter. His fans will find the same power they have come to expect from his lines. Those (few) who do not already know him will discover that pow'er for themselves in his provocative lines. They will find the range of his poetic style from the short tonka and haiku-like presentations of images to the longer narrative of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, complete with the unconventionalities that mark his style (such as the blank lines that may “constitute the key to the whole poem”). The section of Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Part III) included here contains CHRISTMAS SECTIONS I & II. True to the title of the volume, figurative darkness pervades even the white snow of w'inter, beginning...