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Chapter Seventeen THE KASHAYA AND THE NYINGMA Identities and Boundaries T:HERE is a large stretch ofcoastal land in Sonoma County, California , that belonged to the Kashaya Indians long before Russian traders came in the early nineteenth century to establish the settlement now called Fort Ross. By 1985, only about a dozen Kashaya families were left on a forty-acre reservation. On my way to it in April of that year, driving through magnificent hills in the thick, cool northern California fog along Tin Barn Road, I passed the enormous, resplendent temple of the Nyingma Buddhists, called Odiyan. The Nyingmas, under the leadership of a Tibetan monk, had obtained 650 acres on which to build their nearly completed temple of gold leaf, copper, and beautiful California woods. Behind the high, locked fence that kept visitors from entering without special permission, Odiyan would soon receive Buddhist disciples from all over the world. Two miles farther inland along Tin Barn Road I arrived at the small Kashaya reservation, where, with the help of five young white men and one white woman who lived nearby, the Kashayas were completing a simple wooden roundhouse with an earthen floor to serve as the center for dancing, song, and worship at their annual two-day spring strawberry festival celebrating the renewal of life. The following weekend the Kashayas would welcome other Indians, white visitors, and anyone who wished to come from Odiyan. Speaking ofthe newcomers at Odiyan, the Kashaya spiritual leader explained that they were one more group in a line of powerful outsiders who knew how to manipulate the world, a group whose friendship might be helpful to the Indians. Determined to penetrate the high chain link fence built around Odiyan's land, he spoke ofthe importance to the Kashayas ofsharing spiritual and healing knowledge (what the Kashayas call weya, or energy) with the Nyingma sect. It was their way, he explained, but to judge from their fence, the Nyingma would keep to themselves. Six months after my visit to the Kashaya, a much larger Indian tribe, the Cherokees of Oklahoma, elected Wilma Mankiller as their principal chief, choosing a woman for the first time. Born forty years before in a small community, Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma, to a Cherokee father and a white mother, Wilma Mankiller had moved with her family to San 326 IDENTmES AND BOUNDARIES 327 Francisco when she was eleven. Stirred by Indian protests against injustice , she participated in the occupation by Indians of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and later moved back to Oklahoma to use her college and graduate school training in social work to help the tribe, whose registered number had risen in a decade from twelve thousand to sixtyseven thousand adults and children.l Ms. Mankiller's history illustrated a growing and distinctive pattern in the American ethnic landscape: openness to and interaction with others combined with revived ethnic consciousness and mobilization. The Nyingma represented a common tribal pattern found elsewhere in the world, in which a strong group identity entails tight boundaries difficult to pass. There is room for the Nyingma in the U.S., as there is for the Old Order ofMennonites, the Hutterites, Hasidim, and other groups whose requirements for membership are strict, whose suspicion of the outsider is strong, and whose techniques ofinternal control are powerful. For most Americans, ethnic ties of loyalty and affection, widely felt and openly expressed in the 1970S and 1980s, became, as they were for the Kashaya, increasingly subjective, a matter of individual choice. The Kashaya more than the Nyingma Buddhists represented the dominant American ethnic pattern in the kaleidoscope of the 1980s: increased ethnic consciousness and visibility and, at the same time, growing interaction with outsiders and the crossing of ethnic boundaries. Permeable Ethnic Boundaries and Intermarriage Intermarriage was so common in the postwar era that by 1980 the vast majority ofAmericans had relatives, through birth or their own marriage, from at least two different ethnic backgrounds. Only one-fifth of husbands and wives born after 1950 came from the same single ethnic ancestry (outside of the South, only 15 percent). Intermarriage was extensive for descendants of all major European ancestry groups. Persons with Irish, French, or Scotch ancestry and others whose immigrant forebears were likely to have arrived before the twentieth century had the highest proportion of mixed backgrounds, but even about half of the men and women with only Italian ancestry married entirely outside that group, and 60 percent of persons with Polish ancestry were...

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