Other peoples performed a sanitized version of the dance for tourists, wearing harnesses instead of piercing their flesh. The Indian Reorg an ization Act of 1934 revoked the ban on piercing, and eventually led to a large-scale revival in the 1960s, as Native Americans began to reassert their cultural identity. The Sun Dance is now widespread, and has become a major religious event. It is currently attracting many adherents away from the Native American Church (see pages 130–31).
Revivals and Cults
A long series of Native Americans religious revivals arose in response to European encroachment, starting in the east in the seventeenth century. These movements had a strong moral dimension, which interpreted Indians’ suffering as a punishment for unethical conduct and held out the hope of renewed happiness through repentance.
Revival movements could take the form either of peaceful separatism or of violent confrontation. One of the most enduring of the peaceful sects was the Gaiwiio (“Good Word”) move ment, founded in 1799 by the Seneca medicine man Hand some Lake. Gaiwiio called for a return to traditional ways, using the Christian form of preaching to deliver its message. Other movements were violently anti-white, such as the armed insurrection led by the Shawnee pro phet Lalawe thika in 1805.
In 1889–90, the desperate plight of the peoples of the Great Basin and the Plains, caused by white ex - pansion, led many to participate in the Ghost Dance. This messianic movement was led by Wovoka, a Paiute holy man who had experienced a vision in which the Great Spirit told him that if Indians devoted themselves to tireless dancing, their ancestors (“ghosts”) would return to usher in a renewed era of peace and plenty. As Wovoka’s message spread, groups of devotees danced for days on end, often collapsing from exhaustion.
This Pawnee ghost Dance drum (c. 1890) is decorated with an image of the Thunderbird, a spirit that was invoked during the ritual.
Wovoka’s movement began peacefully, but turned violent when it spread into the neighboring Plains region, with its proud warrior tradition. Many people were attracted by promises of a return of the buffalo herds and the expulsion of the whites. The movement ended tragically in Decem ber 1890, when US troops massacred a Lakota Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Earlier in the same month, the Hunkpapa Sioux chief Sitting Bull was killed by Native police during his arrest for supporting the Ghost Dance (see page 101).
Despite the demise of the Ghost Dance, the establishment of reservations at this time brought diverse Nat ive American groups together and fostered the spread of other pan-Indian movements. The most im por tant of these was the peyote cult, which began in Mexico in the 1880s. This cult en - couraged the use of peyote, a cactus containing the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. Peyotism contained a mixture of Native American and Christian elements. Its hybrid nature, together with the fact that it made visions accessible to anyone without disciplined ritual, antagonized traditionalists. Yet the cult, renamed the Native American Church in 1918, continued to flourish, especially in the Midwest and Southeast.
The legends associated with peyotism reflect its controversial nature. Adherents of the cult identify the cactus with a myth prophesying that the Navajo will find a plant more powerful than any of their existing medicines. However, Navajo op posed to the Native American Church link pey ote with the myth of the “Great Gambler of Pueblo Bonito,” who used the plant to trick the original inhabitants of the pueblo—the Snake People—out of their women, their land and even their lives.
A ghost Dance shirt. Dancers believed that such garments were imbued with magical properties that would protect them from bullets. The massacre at wounded Knee in 1890 showed their faith to be tragically misplaced.
THE ALIEN EYE
From the earliest years of European exploration in North America, artist-explorers recorded the appearance, habitats and customs of indigenous peoples. However different their style and content, the images they produced from the sixteenth century onwards all display a high regard for their subjects and show the artists’ commitment to render realistically the new world they encountered. Everything was of interest: styles of dwelling, tribal distinctions and methods of hunting and fishing. These early records provide us with a view of Native Americans before their cultures and beliefs were seriously affected by the influence of whites.
John white, who visited America in 1586, was one of the earliest british artistexplorers to document Native American life. This watercolor of the village of Pomeiooc, virginia, was one of twenty-three produced for a book for sir walter raleigh.
People of North Carolina fishing with spears, nets and fish traps in a watercolor of 1587 by John white
The copperplate of a Native virginian is taken from Hollar’s Foreign Portraits by wenceslas hollar (1607–77).
Expansion westwards by whites from the 17th to the late 19th century brought artists into contact with new ways of life. A Dakota woman and Assiniboine child are depicted in Karl bodmer’s Travels into the Interior of North America, 1832–34
while J. verelest’s 18th-century painting shows the proud and impressive King of the maguas, sa ga yeath Qua Pieth Ton (left).
These highly decorated war canoes belong to the makah of the Northwest Coast. The artist, Paul Kane (1810–71), produced many such studies of tribal life in Canada for the hudson bay Company.
THE NATIVE AMERICAN LEGACY
In a continent dominated by newcomers, Native American peoples have an ancient and distinctive view of the relationship between human beings and the Earth they inhabit and of the continuity between past, present and future generations. After decades of being ignored or suppressed, Native American culture has experienced a resurgence since the 1960s. Its proponents argue that the ancestral wisdom it embodies has much to teach modern society.
A common thread running through Native American attitudes to the natural environment is that the Earth, which existed long before the advent of humans, possesses a consciousness of its own. Every living person is believed to gain a sense of belonging and historical continuity by learning about their specific locality, the place where their ancestors lived and died. A modern Western Apache elder has expressed this affinity in the following terms: “The land looks after us. The land keeps badness away.” Past and present are linked by the constant narration of events that took place in particular locations. Communal myths about how the world came to exist in its present form, stories about one’s own ancestors and personal recollections from one’s own lifetime all contribute to this body of wisdom. As the contemporary Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko has said, it sometimes seems as if the land itself is telling the story.
Myth thus coalesces with autobiography; in -deed, Native Americans employ similar techniques of storytelling in each genre. Narrators will often recount their own life stories using mythological tales and songs, crating a legend about themselves whose form is reminiscent of that of familiar collective myths.
Myths will often be told on particular occasions when they have a special meaning for an individual. For example, when a Tlingit man who had served overseas during the Second World War finally returned home, his mother sang him a song about the adventures of Kaakha’achgook, a famous ancestor of the Tlingit. Despite bad omens warning him to stay at home, Kaakha’achgook had been compelled to go hunting sea mammals in order to feed his wives. He was blown off course and marooned for a long time on a small island, where he devised ingenious ways of staying alive. Eventually, he found his way home, but he had difficulty coming to terms with all the changes that had taken place during his absence. In performing this song, the modern soldier’s mother was acknowledging the hardships that he had endured, as well as suggesting the problems he would face in adjusting to civilian life.
An 1880s poster advertising the “wild west fair” in New york’s madison square garden. staged by the hunter-turned-entrepreneur william f. (“buffalo bill”) Cody, this pageant presented a highly romanticized picture of life on the Plains. Cody respected indian values, and he persuaded the
Lakota chief sitting bull to appear, but his show helped form a patronizing and trivialized image of indian life that prevailed for almost a hundred years.
The Impact of Christianity
From the beginning of the white presence in the Americas, the theft of Indian lands was matched by a systematic destruction of their religion. There were strong incentives for Indians to convert to Christianity in order to secure trade concessions or protection from traditional enemies.
In many respects, Christianity was wholly unfamiliar to Native Americans. The Christian emphasis on Heaven was alien to the holistic Indian view of the universe, and the hierarchy and liturgy of organized religion counter to their notion of voluntary communion with the divine. Yet other features were more familiar. The fortitude and suffering of Catholic saints resembled that of Native American hero figures, while the element of sacrifice central to the Eucharist found an echo in the self-sacrifice of the vision quest and the Sun Dance.
While indigenous religious traditions assimilated many elements of the white settlers’ religion, such tolerance and openness were not displayed by the Christian Church. Ecclesiastical and government agencies forced Indians to destroy their masks and other sacred objects and enacted hostile legislation. In 1883 the US Code of Religious Offenses banned many important Native rites, while around the same time Canada outlawed the vital Northwest Coast potlatch ceremony.
A Pueblo indian hide painting of the madonna (1675) gives evidence of early influence by spanish missionaries.
The Western Apache habitually forge a strong link between event and location by beginning and ending their myths and stories with the phrase, “It happened at such-and-such a place.” Moreover, these narratives are often intended to exert a moral influence on the listener. The Apache say that they “shoot each other” with stories, as they would with arrows. Telling a story, then, can be a warning that the listener is behaving badly in some way, and if he does not change his ways, something un pleasant will happen to him. The person “shot” can resolve to “pull the arrow out” by addressing the problem.
Traditional Western Apache stories also serve as a way of transmitting ethical values to future generations. Children who are ignorant of stories relating to their homeland are said to be “losing the land” and are expected to encounter difficulties in later life. In educating through storytelling, Apache teachers always ensure that they relate the action and location of the story to the child’s personal situation.
A sandpainting titled Homes of the Buffalo People (1979), by the Navajo artist herbert ben, sr. sandpainting is just one of many Native American art forms that continue to thrive in North America.
From Myth to Literature
Traditional Native arts such as storytelling and dancing are often now recast in modern idioms—for example, the theater. In this way, they both reach a wide audience and take on a pan-Indian identity. At the same time, many writers aim to bridge the gap between Native American and white cultures. Much Native American poetry tries to preserve the rhythms of Native American languages even when written in English. This is a difficult endeavor, as the oral tradition does not easily lend itself to translation into the written word. A Washo story tells how, in 1910, a man who later became a shaman was cured by his uncle, who pulled a piece of printed matter out of his patient’s head and told him that he had fallen ill from studying books, which belonged to the white people’s world. By contrast, the contemporary Native American poet Duane Niatum writes that a Native American writer “must train himself to become sensitive to the many facets of the English language, with the same devotion that a shaman had for his healing songs a thousand years ago.”
Since the 1960s, the modern Native American experience has been the subject of several notable novels, such as House Made of Dawn (N. Scott Momaday), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko) and The Death of Jim Lonely (James Welch). A situation of conflict is immediately established in the fact that the central characters are (like their authors) of mixed blood and are torn between reservation and city life. However, the conflict is ultimately resolved when the characters restore their relationship with the land and its tribal traditions. Similarly, for the authors the very act of writing is a cathartic reaffirmation of their Native American roots.
The telling of stories and myths is integral to the healing process. The message of much Indian literature is that white people are out of sympathy with the land because they are driven to conquer and dominate it, whereas the Native approach is to listen to what the land has to say and discover a way of living in harmony with it. In a disorienting world, such literature aims to make people whole again by reference to ancient patterns of order and meaning that are enshrined in the oral tradition of storytelling.
Red and White Roads
The way in which Native American artists and writers reflect on their own situation contrasts dramatically with the portrayal of Native Americans by white society. The brutal racism of the “Wild West,” reinforced by countless films, stereotyped Indians as cruel barbarians. Another convention, epitomized by James Fenimore Coo per’s The Last of the Mo hicans (1826), cast the Indian as a doomed romantic figure. This partially represented the truth: at that time many Indian communities were beset by depression, alcoholism and violence, their sacred bundles confiscated by missionaries and their ancestors’ skeletons stolen and publicly displayed in museums. Yet even many sympathetic early images of Native Americans reflected white prejudice and misconception: merely because the Inuit had never resisted white domination, they were shown as happy and naïve.
A positive evaluation of Native American culture by large sections of white society only began with the “counterculture” of the 1960s, a period that also witnessed the rise of Indian militancy. John G. Niehardt’s book Black Elk Speaks, ignored since its publication in 1932, came to be regarded as the great religious classic of twentieth-century North America. Similarly, a series of books by Carlos Castañeda, purportedly documenting his apprenticeship to a Yaquí shaman, Don Juan, and his subsequent mystical experiences, stimulated huge interest in Native American spirituality. Castañeda’s works became best-sellers on both sides of the Atlantic. Young people, in particular, came to think of Native North Americans as possessing a spirituality that their own society had lost, and hoped to learn from their traditional beliefs. However, the wholesale appropriation of Native forms of worship by some whites was denounced by many in the Indian community as a new form of imperialism.
At the same time as white interest in Indian religions was growing, Indians themselves formed pressure groups to lobby for a restitution of their rights. One result of this movement was the passing, in 1990, of an Act of Congress that finally required all government-sponsored institutions to return Nat ive American ancestral remains for proper burial and sacred objects for correct devotional use.
Perhaps the greatest lesson that Native American culture can teach contemporary society concerns the environment. In 1992 Chief Oren Lyons of the Houdenosaunee, or Iroquois, pointed out that, although the Iroquois Con federacy had helped to draft the constitution of the United States in the 1780s, the new country had unwisely chosen not to adopt Indian provisions for safeguarding the earth for future generations.
A powwow in bismarck, North Dakota. These secular gatherings are important occasions for Native Americans publicly to reaffirm pride in their cultural identity.
Glossary
adobe Building material made of earth mixed with straw and baked in the sun; constructed of adobe.
Algonquian A family of languages spoken in the Northeast and on the Plains; also used to refer to any people speaking an Algon - quian language, such as the Cree, the Micmac and the Cheyenne. Also spelled Algonkian.
Anasazi An ancient culture of the Southwest that flourished c.AD700–1300; of or pertaining to this culture.
Athabascan A family of languages spoken in the Subarctic and the.Southwest; also used of any people speaking an At
habascan language, such as the Beaver and the Navajo. Also spelled Athapascan and Athapaskan.
buffalo In this book, “buffalo” always refers to the North American buffalo, or bison.
butte A flat-topped hill, geologically similar to a mesa but covering a smaller area.
caribou A large species of ungulate inhabiting the northern tundra. The domesticated form of the animal is known as reindeer.
clan A group comprised of a number of related families from several households; the most important unit of social organization among many Native American peoples, notably on the Northwest Coast.
crest An image of a creature, typically a blend of the animal, human and supernatural, used as a heraldic device by clans and families, who trace their origins and even recent histories back to their encounter with such beings.
earthdiver A being which, in one common type of Native creation myth, dives to the bottom of the primeval waters to retrieve soil, from which the first dry land is then formed.
Iroquoian A family of languages spoken in the Northeast; also used to refer to any people speaking an Iroquoian language, such as the Iroquois and the Huron.
Iroquois The collective name given to several Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Specifically, it refers to six Iroquois peoples who formed an alliance known as the Iroquois League or the Six Nations (the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora).
Native American Myths and Beliefs Page 17
