Thoughts on Indigenous Spirituality June 2019

Recently I took a class at the University of Maine on Gender and Religion, which helped me to better understand why women are so angry about the past. I learned that the women born into the “religions of the books (the Bible, the Q’uran, the Torah) have clearly suffered more over the years as a consequence of religion than have the indigenous women of North America.  This was certainly the case in China and India, as well.  Pre-Christian North American indigenous society was more flexible in gender relations than these other cultures.  Women had more choices.  There was not necessarily only one right way to do things. 

Contemporary aboriginal women are remembering the power and knowledge of their maternal ancestors.  For example, the words of a song, “Okisikôwak,” written and performed by the indigenous women’s music trio, Asani, enunciates these memories:

Those very same hands stroke the face of a child

Warrior within, not meek or mild

Every step that she takes is clearing the way

Inspiring a change, for generations today.

Women were seen as warriors, every bit as much as men.  During the worst periods of government oppression of aboriginal people, Shalin Jobin tells how the women kept their knowledge and power alive through the stories they carried and passed to future generations (see Chapter 2, written about her Cree ancestors in Kermoal, N., Altamirano-Jiménez, I., & Altamirano-Jimenez, I. (2016). Living on the land: Indigenous women's understanding of place. Edmonton, CA: Athabasca University Press).  Jobin writes how the residential school system aimed to create a “double consciousness” in which the indigenous person could not help but look at himself or herself through the eyes of the colonizers and that her ancestors resisted this double consciousness through their commitment to the stories.

Raymond Bucko's book, The Lakota Sweat Lodge was his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Nebraska, where he currently (unless he has recently moved) teaches (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).  Bucko’s book also speaks to the flexibility and lack of a hierarchy of North American indigenous spirituality. Each family does things differently and it’s always correct for those who do it that way in the place where it’s done.  However, were he to write this book today, he would need a new title.  Elders tell us that we should not refer to this ceremony as a “sweat lodge.”  The word in Lakota is inipikaga, which is best translated as “revitalization ceremony.”  We hear that the Jesuits called this ceremony a “sweat lodge” because they saw sweat.  For the Lakota, this was not sweat, but was toxins exiting the body in its process of revitalization. In Bucko’s book, he discovered that no right way to do a sweat lodge exists.  He discovered that no central authority existed to say what should be done and that each family does things a little differently, though some basic similarities are present.  He similarly writes that no central authority exists for deciding what Native American spirituality is.  Felix Cohen is correct, I believe, in saying that Native Americans in the United States are at the bottom of the pecking order.  What happens to Native Americans will happen to other minorities eventually.  Bucko makes the point that this insanity of the governmental imposition of Christianity began at least as early as the time of Thomas Jefferson's presidency.  It actually began much earlier.  An infamous community in Massachusetts began to hang Indians who weren't Christians around 1640.

Bucko made another point that hit home -- that the contemporary pan-Indian identity arose as a shared opposition to the European invasion.  The shared reality of the oppression eventually led to a shared response, though not until the 20th century.  In the 19th century, tribes were still working against each other with one tribe serving as scouts or helpers to the U.S. Army in attacking their traditional enemies.

Before the Blood Quantum Act of 1904, no concept of being half-Indian existed.  One was either a member of the Nation or not.  During the time of the forced march of the Cherokee to Oklahoma (The Trail of Tears and Death), the head chief of the Cherokee, John Ross, would have been only 1/8 Cherokee by today's standards.  By the standards of that time, he was 100% Cherokee.  In 1904, the U.S. Congress invented Native Americans as a separate breed in the same way that horses or dogs are considered as half this or half that.  The goal of the blood quantum system was to eventually eliminate the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Here's how it works.  If a Lakota person marries a Cree person, then their children are only half Lakota.  They are also half Cree, but that doesn't make them 100% Indian.  It leaves them half-Indian.  Then if the child marries a Crow person, their children are only 25% Lakota.  One more marriage to a non-Lakota and this person is removed from the BIA roles, even though they have only married other Native Americans.  It actually doesn't matter if they marry a non-Indian; anyone outside the tribe counts toward diluting the percent Indian.  What is amazing is that the numbers of Native Americans are growing anyway.  This is because of young women having multiple children.  Bucko quotes Marshall Sahlin as describing the extended kinship Native American family, which is inclusive of everyone.  That seemed entirely accurate to me, though he left out the dogs. 

O'Brien calls attention to the tremendous abuses of the Franciscans, which virtually destroyed the tribes of California.  Schooled by the Spanish Inquisition, the methods of the Franciscans were brutal.  The Jesuits were more subtle, but ultimately equally destructive, for they engaged in epistemological genocide, the destruction of people's ways of seeing the world. The New England Protestants created towns for indigenous people to shed all of their culture and religion and completely embrace the ways of the colonizers.

However, indigenous North Americans had difficulty relating to the religious ideas of Europeans.  The idea of a collection of rules that determined one's afterlife seemed absurd. In all the traditions I know, everyone goes to the spirit world and no punishment is inflicted there.  Whatever evil one accumulates in this life is left behind.  We are all so much better in the Spirit World.  The conflicts and disharmonies of this world are left behind.  The emphasis on eternal punishment would not fit within the Native American world view.  I can remember my grandmother telling me, if there were a hell, it would be here on earth.  The Creator wouldn't make such a thing, she said.  The idea of a limited number of spirits seemed strange as well.  Everything has a spirit.  The Visibles have spirits and the Invisibles are spirits.  The idea of limiting eligibility to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost seemed bizarre.  Also, the idea that one needed a priestly intercessor to speak to the spirits for one would have seemed equally bizarre.  However, many people converted out of necessity and continued their indigenous spirituality while tolerating the religion of the colonizers.  Others were so hopeless and distraught that they accepted the beliefs of the conquerors entirely.

The Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819 provided money for Christian clergy to proselytize indigenous people and to create boarding schools to teach Native children English, the Christian faith, and European methods of farming. Here was the government violating its own principals of keeping church and state separate.  O'Brien describes Major John Chivington of the U.S. Army, who orchestrated the Sand Hill Massacre, in which he killed almost 400 Cheyenne, mostly women, and children, and then mutilated their sexual organs and scalped them to display to cheering crowds in Denver.  He was chided by the Army but not punished.  The Chief of the Cheyenne was in favor of peace and was flying an American flag at the time he was killed.

The Cherokee had tried to emulate the Europeans in every way but giving up their sovereignty, even to the point of changing their gender relationships and becoming patriarchal, though this strategy did not succeed in preventing the forced relocation to Oklahoma. 

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 established a large reservation for the Lakota, which was progressively whittled down, especially with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills.  Gold was the worst-case scenario for indigenous people in North America.  Once discovered, the rest is downhill.

In the indigenous cultures of North America with which I am familiar, Creator is genderless.  Gender only enters later in the process of elaboration of creation.  Some versions of the Maine creation stories have a male creator, but these have clearly been shown to be revisionist stories influenced by Christianity.  Some people think that the Lakota have a male creator, because of the use of the word tunkashila, which means grandfather.  However, elders have explained to us that the elders of the time of first contacts were trying to explain their concepts to the Europeans and actually said, "your creator loves you as a grandfather would love his grandchildren," which is a powerful concept in Lakota kinship systems.  They didn't mean to say that the creator was a grandfather.  They abandoned this attempt at an explanation when the Europeans misinterpreted them.  Now the word Dakuskanskan is used, which is the proper term.  Literally, it means that (plural) which is the whitest.  The best interpretation of this is the spirit which is higher than the highest of the sky spirits. Similar, some people misstate rocks as grandfathers.  We hear people talking about bringing the grandfathers into the inipi ceremony (the hot stones).  They are not actually grandfathers, either, for the proper word is inyan, which means stone.  Stones are considered to be masculine and are the oldest inhabitants of our world, which is why perhaps the ancients thought to explain to the Europeans that they were like grandfathers. The Europeans didn’t understand that the Lakota were using metaphors, perhaps because they couldn’t step away from their assumption that indigenous people were primitive and stupid.

While rocks are male, the earth is considered feminine.  However, in Lakota, Dakuskanskan, has a male messenger Tate, or the wind, and a female messenger, Wohpe, or the White Buffalo Calf Woman.  In a famous story about the creation of the four directions and time itself, Wohpe is sent to the earth to tell Tate that it is time to create the four directions because people are coming, and they will need time and direction.  

There is a famous women's song associated contemporarily with Sissy Goodheart of Yates, North Dakota, that tells how women are sacred for they give birth to the Nation through their hearts, minds, bodies, and souls.  The song says that they are the heart of the Nation and are asked, therefore, to bring their highest selves to their task of being the heart and soul of the people. 

Paula Gunn has written about the respect which women received and the sacredness of menstruation and of the power of menstrual blood.  In the Lakota language, one word is used to refer to things of power and mystery, which is wakan.  This word can be translated as holy, sacred, or mysterious.  There really isn't a word that corresponds to the usage of the English word "taboo."  The word wogluze refers to something sacred or forbidden, a spiritual taboo or ceremonial restriction (as a certain animal or animal part that cannot be eaten because of a vision one has received or things that are forbidden to do during a pipe ceremony).  The other word is wahtani, which means to fail to perform a vow or to violate a tribal law.  However, in my experience wogluze is never absolute, but always subject to exceptions and alterations.

Problems are rampant in European translations of indigenous languages as in North Dakota, where a word that meant "lake of the spirits," was translated as "Devil's Lake," which is the current name of that town and that lake.  The general understanding is that one doesn't mess with things or beings that are wakan, unless one has a full understanding of how to use that medicine or power.  The word for power and the word for medicine are the same also.  I know women elders who have the power to work with menstrual blood and women with menstrual disorders, and I know male elders who stand in awe of that power.

Sweat Lodge, Prayer, and Community

"Long long ago the Muscogee Creek people lived in a dark misty fog and they were cold. They felt along the walls of something damp and realized they were moving upwards. Slowly they emerged from the Earth and the fog blinded them. Unable to see and stricken with fear, the people and even the animals cried out until the wind blew away the fog so that they could see... In all four cardinal directions, the forces of fire confronted the people, and they had to make a decision. From the south, a yellow fire faced the people, a black fire burned in the West, a white fire was aflame in the East, but the people chose the red fire from the North. The fire of the North warmed the people and provided bright light over the world and enabled the plants to grow, so that the Muscogee Creeks learned to respect all of the elements for life".Should the people fail in their respect for nature and forget the ceremonials, the people would disappear from the land and it would fall beneath the waters of the ocean." Muscogee Creek traditional story, 1922, from Donald Fixico, p. 1-2 The American Indian Mind in a Linear World This weekend I had the opportunity to lead an inipi, or sweat lodge ceremony, for a group of health care providers from the American Institute for Medical Education's annual February Creativity and Madness conference, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Given the subject matter of the conference, it's not surprising that more than half of these providers were in the mental health field. After three hours of preparation on Sunday afternoon following the formal closing of the conference, we convened on a bright, blue, sunny, but windy Presidents' Day morning in the mountains outside of Santa Fe, at the Heyokah Center, a facility started by our recently departed friend, Julie Rivers, who also founded a not-for-profit organization called Supporting Women Across Nations (SWAN -- Julie's mascot animal) over 30 years ago. SWAN and Heyokah continue thanks to Julie's sister, Donna. SWAN began to support indigenous women around the world to overcome gender-related oppression and to be encouraged to bring forth their own cultural healing traditions that women have carried for centuries, sometimes in secret when governments have been particularly suppressive. We were there on a similar mission -- to bring some of the wisdom of Native North American into the mainstream world of medicine and psychotherapy. We were there to remind our attendees (10 people from a conference of over 200) about the importance of keeping the ceremonials, as emphasized above by the story told by Fixico. The inipi, or sweat lodge ceremony has been well-described elsewhere, so I will be brief. I understand its primary purposes to be prayer and community building. Sweat lodges, with rare exceptions, provide a place and a context in which people pray. I was taught to "think globally, but pray locally." "Pray for things you can see come true in four days," was another teaching. I learned to pray that sick people still be with us and even feel a bit better by the upcoming Full Moon. In this way, we can see that prayers are answered and that awareness will build our faith so that progressively larger prayers can come true. The notion of prayer and the importance of community are two concepts which have largely disappeared from contemporary health care. Our goal in leading this ceremony was to show these practitioners that the values of prayer and community are important, and to experience how they can be built. The sweat lodge is a low dome-like structure, covered with sheets and blankets and canvas tarps (once upon a time, covered with animal skins). Bucko has described the many variations in just the Lakota Nations sweat lodges, but some basics persist, including heating rocks in a fire outside the lodge until they are sufficiently hot to bring into the lodge. Water is poured upon the rocks to generate steam, and the people sit inside on the earth around the rocks. Generally everywhere, four cycles of door closing to door opening exist. The cycles are often called rounds. At some point a sacred pipe is smoked to signify prayers being answered, people sing, and people pray. Ubiquitous is the sense of connectedness and belong that occurs through participation in the ceremony. I wrote in Coyote Medicine about the style of sweat lodge I learned to lead. It came through the Black Elk family lineage. In this style, we begin with a ritualistic filling of the pipe with tobacco after singing a traditional song. Ceremony prepares the pipe to do its job of translating our human prayers into a form that can travel straight to the Creator. Stones are brought into the lodge, sage is placed upon them, the first seven are placed in each direction and blessed by the pipe, the pipe is placed upon the altar, water is brought inside, the door is closed, and the round begins. Water is poured upon the stones to create steam and four songs are sung. This first round is for purification and release, dedicated to the West and the Sacred Beings who dwell there. The door opens, people rest a bit, more stones enter, the door closes, a song is sung, and each person gets an opportunity to pray. When we have gone around the circle and everyone has prayed, the door opens, medicine water is brought inside for people to drink, and the people rest again. Then, more stones enter, the door closes, four more songs are sung, and the door opens again. The second round is dedicated to the North and the beings who dwell there and the strength and endurance they bring us. The third round is dedicated to the East and to receiving vision, guidance, and direction. While the door is open between the third and fourth rounds, the pipe is brought inside for the most sacred part of the ceremony. It is smoked as it passes around the circle. During the last round stones are brought inside, the door is closed, a song is sung, and each person gets an opportunity to pray, sing, talk, or even tell a joke. This last round is more relaxed because the people have purified, prayed, been doctored by the medicine, received guidance and direction, and their prayers have been answered. Then the ceremony ends with a final song and the people leave. We conducted this ceremony. The people began as relative strangers. As each person prayed, the intimacy in the dark deepened. We felt each other's humanity. We shared each other's pain. We felt the common tragedies that underlie human life. By the fourth round, when people spoke again, the trust had deepened and more heart-felt prayers emerged, coupled with quiet testimonials to difficulties and tribulations, songs, and words of gratitude. After our feast, we concluded the day with a talking circle in which people shared their experience one after the other, clockwise. Uniformly at the end of the day, everyone recognized how important it was for people to have opportunities to be in ceremony together, to share their common humanity, to tell their difficult stories to an audience who cared, and to feel as if they belonged. This is what the inipi ceremony provides and what modern people so desperately need. Donald Fixico writes that "'Indian Thinking' is "seeing' things from a perspective emphasizing that circles and cycles are central to the world and that all things are related within the universe." This is what we are trying to teach experientially when we bring mainstream health care providers into the sweat lodge -- the power of circle and how to see our interconnectedness. Many traditional indigenous people experience this directly in their daily lives. Participation in the sweat lodge ceremony also teaches us about the indigenous experience of a metaphysical world. The ceremony creates an opportunity to participate in that metaphysical world. Contemporary health care has eliminated the metaphysical completely in favor of empirical evidence. Ceremony allows us to see the connection between two or entities or beings, some of which are non-physical, and to see how ourselves in relationship to these entities and all others. Fixico (p. 3) says, "This holistic perception is the indigenous ethos of American Indians and how they understand their environment, the world, and the universe." Native Americans who are knowledgeable of their culture see things in more than just a human-to human context or from within the constraints of materialism. The sweat lodge is an educational laboratory in which anyone can learn this way of perceiving the world. Participation in this world view is healing in and of itself, meaning that it leads toward a greater sense of wholeness, connectedness, and belonging. Sometimes, this greater sense of harmony and balance leads to greater physical health, sometimes not, but the opposite seems much more often true, that isolation, alienation, fragmentation, and disharmony, lead to illness. Achieving belonging and community is an antidote for so many of our modern ails -- stress disorders, back pain, arthritis, and more. Bringing people together brings our bodies back together. Within the circles of humanity, we need counselors and storytellers who encourage us to tell our own stories, who provide a role model for others to believe that things can be different. We all originate from nations of storytellers and all of our houses were houses of prayer.