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13: American Indians Religious Traditions
- Baylor University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
257 Liberation: harmony and Balance Many American Indians refer to october 11, 1492, as the last day of perfect freedom on these continents called amerika.1 This is, first of all, a political commentary and not primarily a religious or cultural one. Yet freedom is important at deeply cultural and religious levels for Indian peoples in north America.2 So, to attend to the notion of liberation in American Indian religious traditions, we will have to keep this political inference firmly in mind. Indeed, the postcolonial reality of Indian peoples (everything since 1492) has been a perpetual struggle to reestablish some semblance of our precolonial state of personal and communal harmony and balance. harmony and balance—that would be the American Indian ideal of freedom, envisioning a moment when our communities and the world around them are in perfect balance with all of our “relatives” in our world: two-leggeds, four-leggeds, flying ones, and living-moving ones. This has been far less possible since the advent of european colonialism in our hemisphere. The phenomena called NativeAmerican religions pose an interesting and complex problem of description and interpretation—one that has persistently captured the imagination of european immigrant peoples , albeit in paradoxically disparate ways. When the modern concept of liberation is thrown into the mix, the complexity more than doubles . Native American religious traditions have been misunderstood, maligned, romanticized, and misappropriated.3 paradoxically, these 13 aMeRICan InDIans ReLIGIoUs tRaDItIons —Tink Tinker 258 — Tink Tinker traditions have either been disparaged and condemned as primitive, savage, bizarre, and/or evil, or they have been fetishized and romanticized as an exotic colonial fantasy. When an excuse was needed to legitimize the conquest, including the murders and theft that accompanied it, the aboriginal owners of the land were accused of engaging in uncivilized savagery. The early english invaders made it clear that the aboriginals’ uncivilized state extended to their complete lack of religion, having seen no evidence of church buildings in their villages . At other times, finding it impossible to maintain their argument that Indians lacked any religious attachment, the english colonialists merely insisted on the inadequacy of Native religious practice or on their charge that Indian religious practices were satanic and evil. In any case a murderous colonial response to the aboriginal owners of the land was invariably legitimized. More recently, new age fetishists have discovered the romantic allure of a primal state of religious being and have engaged in a colonialism of mimicry and commodification of everything from religious artifacts (such as eagle feathers, drums, and herbal medicines) to the theft and replication of actual ceremonies. Indian religious traditions have proven to be a compelling exotic attraction to the imagination of some euro-western settlers from the first invasion of these shores up to these contemporary colonialist cross-dressers and mimics. Since the new age folk tend to see themselves as politically liberal, Whites once again can rationalize their invasion of the Indian world as a moral and political good. And while they experience their misappropriation of and involvement in Indian spirituality as personally liberating of themselves, they also see their presence in Indian communities as somehow liberating for those communities. Yet their mimicry and misappropriation actually increase the bondage of Indian folk. The new age attention actually causes mutation in Native beliefs as many Native folk try to capitalize on White interest in our spiritual ways. As we shall see below, new age aficionados introduce the european virus of individualism in ways that both further erode the communal value system of Native peoples, as deliberately as have the missionaries and the U.S. government, and further disrupt the communal balance of our traditional world. When we turn to the authoritative sources of information about Indian peoples, the problem becomes even more pronounced. In almost every case the authoritative and definitive analyses of particular Native American religious traditions have been written by non- [3.88.16.192] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:35 GMT) American Indians Religious Traditions — 259 Indians, and thus non-adherents, who lacked the lifelong habits and experiential basis for engaging their analyses. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first european century it seems that deeply held Indian traditions and beliefs have been politicized, on the one hand by academic experts, and on the other hand by new age aficionados who have mistaken Indian spirituality as a new trade commodity and as the hottest self-help curriculum of the moment. It has become increasingly clear that those...