Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990

7. The One Who Flies All around the World

Wealth, like human lives, comes from wes?onah, “the sky”: “creation,” “the world.” People today usually concur that dance regalia, especially, simply “comes” to people who are “good,” although traditionally wealth was a principal object of men’s sweathouse training, particularly packing sweathouse wood, and of elite women’s menstrual austerities (Buckley 1988). What “interrupts” (to use Calvin Rube’s term) the flow of such beneficence “from the Creator” is people’s greed and selfishness. All wealth, each item of which itself has a “life” or “spirit,” wewecek, is “a person ,” attracted by generosity and purity, repelled by stinginess and pollution . (Dance regalia moves around quite a bit, from family to family within the region, as it always has.) 205 7 The One Who Flies All around the World There is a seeming conflict here. Wealth is the “measure” of spiritual acumen, in the ideal model (Harry Roberts), but greed and selfishness drive wealth away. It is on this paradox that Erik Erikson’s comparison of Yurok and non-Indian “money-mindedness” and Walter Goldschmidt’s more sophisticated ethnological comparison of Calvinist and Yurok world views both founder (Erikson 1943; Goldschmidt 1951). Wealth (again, in an ideal system that contemporary Yuroks evoke in their testimony) comes to individuals and is maintained by kin groups that consistently use their wealth for the good of the community—“the world”—by letting it out to dance. The highest forms of wealth, dance regalia, come to and stay with people who are dedicated to “fixing the world” through, particularly , the great dances. Wealth, then, does not indicate an individual’s personal salvation, as in Calvinist Christianity as understood by Max Weber (1958), but his or her fitness, through spiritual discipline, to contribute to the good of creation itself, an ethic quite distinct from the dualistic Protestant one with which it has so often been compared (cf. Bushnell and Bushnell 1977). When you pray in the hills and mountains, an elder asserts today, “you must pray for everybody, not just yourself; you must pray for the whole world.” Knowledgeable people say that what these men have been doing all along has not been comparable to the self-interested action of non-Indian materialists; that all training, not just that done in conjunction with world renewal ceremonials, is for the good of “the world.” It is a sociocentric , or even cosmo-centric, system, rather than one that is ego-centric and overwhelmingly secular. By extension, all training, as an expression of “the Creator’s purpose,” helps the community (which is, in part, why the community supports individuals’ training). While individuals undeniably gain prestige and influence through acquiring and maintaining familial wealth, they do so because it is understood that the spiritual purity of their lives, achieved through discipline, is manifested in their wealth, which is, then, manifestly suitable for the spiritual work of fixing the world (again, speaking in terms of an ideal native system). One might expect this wealth to be richly symbolic in conventional senses. However, apart from his apparent indifference to the intricate spiritual significance of wealth objects, A. L. Kroeber seems to have been on 206 u n d e r s t a n d i n g s the right track in declaring that ceremonial feather work, baskets, skins, flints and the rest have no “symbolic” significance—that they are “wealth only” (Kroeber and Gifford 1949). Aside from their general spiritual significance , these things do not stand for something else in most contemporary local views. As sacramental objects they are quite different from those most common in Christianity where, for instance, the Eucharist stands for (or in the Roman Catholic view, is) the body and blood of Christ. Whatever psycho-symbolism Erikson and others have attributed to them (chapter 8), for most native northwestern Californians of my acquaintance these objects are simply themselves. In themselves, beautiful and alive (the part that Kroeber seems not to get right), they exemplify the world’s beauty and aliveness. Thus they are suited to use in fixing the world, when the messy lives of human beings have polluted and obscured its true nature, which is “beauty.” Yet, from the standing ground, from outside of the cultural system, at least (and for a few native intellectuals as well), wealth seems iconic, manifesting ulterior meanings as well as its own and the world’s “beauty.” Like Yurok doctors, dance regalia is probably best understood...