Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (review)

Many American Indians have long lamented the appropriation and adaptation of their traditional religious beliefs and practices by non-Indians. They have pointed out that their traditions cannot be accurately practiced outside of Indigenous cultural contexts, especially by people who are unfamiliar with their languages, histories, and often-subtle cultural protocols. Native Americans, of course, have many reasons to be upset by the resulting corruption of their beliefs and practices. Because the appropriators of Native American traditions are so much more visible to the average American than are Native traditionalists, the average American is likely to assume that the decontextualized, pan-Indian practices of the appropriators are accurate expressions of Native American religion. For this reason, misunderstandings of Native American cultures are often perpetuated by those who claim to respect and represent them. There are other consequences of the appropriation and adaptation of traditional religious beliefs and practices by non-Indians too. Many traditionalists suggest that the improper practice of their ceremonies may be dangerous; these ceremonies, after all, involve communication with other, powerful beings. These beings may take offense to being communicated with by selfish individuals, who ignore long-established protocols governing such communication. Despite all this, and despite other criticisms and consequences, the desire of the non-Indian public to practice their own versions of Indian traditions shows no signs of abating. Scholars thus face the difficult task of making objective sense of this phenomenon, while at the same time acknowledging its negative impact upon Native Americans. It is this task that historian Richard Jenkins takes on in Dream Catchers: How Native America Discovered Native Spirituality.

Jenkins is largely successful. With Dream Catchers, he presents a broad history and analysis of the non-Indian fascination with Indian traditions. Jenkins begins his history in the seventeenth century, by documenting the very negative but very public opinions of Native American cultures held by early settlers. He then examines the romanticization of these cultures that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, he looks at the active transformation of Native American cultural practices by "New Agers" and others in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century—a transformation that is still occurring. Jenkins highlights the fact that this transformation has resulted in a corruption of traditional beliefs and practices, and he affirms that this corruption is of great concern to Native Americans. At the same time, though, he argues that the resulting "neo- or pseudo-Indian spirituality has now achieved the status of an authentic new religious movement," because of its popularity (5).

Jenkins shows that a fascination with Native American cultures existed in the United States from the very birth of the nation. This early fascination, however, was negative. Jenkins points out, for instance, that such prominent figures in Euro-American history as John Smith and Cotton Mather regarded Native Americans as devil worshippers (22). Many others associated Native American religious practices with witchcraft. Jenkins writes that the very Christian and ethnocentric "colonial Americans connected witches and Indians just as naturally as Continental Europeans linked witches to Jews" (25). Jenkins also addresses the prejudices against Native Americans that continued to exist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many Euro-Americans in these centuries regarded Native Americas as "superstitious," "primitive," or "unusually violent," if not downright evil (27, 31, 33). Sadly, Jenkins points out, such prejudices influenced the treatment of Native Americans, contributing to the suppression of the Ghost Dance movement, the banning of Native American ceremonies, and many other tragedies as well (43, 44–45).

Jenkins writes that the views of Indians and their cultures held by some non-Indians began to change for the positive in the mid-1800s. He tells us that this change was brought about largely because of increased ethnographic activity (51). Figures such as George Catlin and Francis Parkman made earnest efforts to understand Native American cultures and to represent them accurately (51, 53). They helped many of their fellow Euro-Americans to...