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The American Indian Quarterly 29.1&2 (2005) 302-304



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Peter Furst. Visions of a Huichol Shaman. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2003. 106 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

The Absence Of The Shaman, In The Presence Of The Sacred

When I offered to review Peter Furst's book, I have to admit it was for self-serving reasons. I thought: "here's a way to read something pertaining to my dissertation on Indigenous traditional-based health services and get myself in print at the same time!" I expected another uninformed, paternalistic, disrespectful, misleading, wordy, non-Indigenous translation of Indigenous experience and was ready to apply my graduate-level arsenal of academic training to the book's deconstruction. I was wondrously stopped in my tracks.

When I took Visions of a Huichol Shaman out of the box it came in, I was strongly impacted by the bold colors and designs of the cover. Many thoughts flowed through me at the same time, in a way that had only happened during the receipt of my own visions. I had been preparing for my own spiritual journey to my ancestral Ojibway lands, and there was kawashkesh, the Great Deer, who is the leader of my paternal clan, transforming before my eyes. As a wannabe painter of my own visions I delighted in the realization that I would be reviewing a book of Art. As I thumbed through the book, my thoughts continuously jumped between the paintings of my favorite artist, Norval Morriseau (see Sinclair and Pollock's The Art of Norval Morrisseau), and the yarn paintings of José Benítez Sánchez, whose works are presented in Visions of a Huichol Shaman.1

Both Sánchez and Morriseau are Indigenous shaman-artists who paint their visions as personal narratives using bold colors and complex, culture-based symbols. Both are using their art as a vehicle for representing and communicating the sacred or realms of the spirit. In symbolic form, legends, spirits, and concepts [End Page 302] of balance, relationship, and order in life, death, and transformation are repeatedly represented. Both artists are described as able to work quickly and confidently with divine inspiration and without the aid of models or drafts.

Differences between the artists lay in their materials and in their approach. Sánchez helped to expand yarn painting from its early decorative function to larger vision-inspired pieces made of commercial yarns and the wax from an Indigenous bee. Morriseau's work developed from birch bark, cheap paper, pencils, and paints, to commercial oils and acrylics on prepared canvasses or silk screen prints and has been at the forefront of the eastern woodlands Indigenous genre. Both artists have been able to work in all measures of scale, from small pieces to mural size. Where Morriseau wrestles with themes of intercultural conflict as an Ojibway artist transgressing community prohibitions against documenting the sacred, Sánchez is represented as a Huichol artist working in congruence with ancient traditions in the extension of sacred art forms into commercial realms. This contrast begs an old question: "In what ways can and do cultures continue in the face of intercultural conflicts?" While this question isn't answered directly, it is an underlying theme in both books.

As similar as Visions of a Huichol Shaman is to The Art of Norval Morriseau, a distinction becomes apparent when we consider how the paintings are discussed and portrayed. Some of this difference may be explained by the different orientations of the authors: Peter Furst is an American, a veteran Mesoamerican field-worker, museum curator, and notable anthropological scholar, whereas Lister Sinclair and Jack Pollock have prestigious backgrounds in Canada: Lister's is in mathematics; the fine arts; writing for theatre, film, radio, and television, and Sinclair's is in teaching, gallery curation and the promotion of young artists. In The Art of Norval Morriseau, the artist does as much writing as the authors, mainly about his origins, inspirations, development, and paintings. In effect, we are given a unique triangulation of representations and reflections from which we...

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