In Search of Ecopaganism 5

...the Sixties happened! For me, the Sixties began with the Coming of the Beatles in early 1964. But 1962 was the year of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and 1963 was the year Kennedy was assassinated, but pick your own heralds of the new zeitgeist. I would date 'the Sixties' as a countercultural era as roughly from the early 1960s into the early 1970s.

I can't remember much specifically about Indians from the actual 1960s, though, apart from the kind of TV shows and movies I have described. But notable in my 60s spiritual chronology was when I closed the door on Christianity when I was 12 or 13. I had doubts about what I was being told in Sunday-school and I more or less read the whole Bible to try to see if I could believe. But the whole book shocked and revulsed me, and I had an unpleasant waking dream of grim Jehovah up in the sky. That was it. Then I discovered the Romance of Eastern spirituality in Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, and was carried away. When the paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings came out mid-60s, I found a literary realm in which my feeling for Nature was reflected. I tried to live in Middle Earth. There was a strong environmentalist element in the story, though not really ecological, unfortunately, but as Margot Adler points out, 'ecology' was unknown until Earth Day 1970. But as with Hindu mysticism, I was once again awakened and sent off in a new direction.

After Silent Spring had come out and awakened the world to the environmental threat to Nature, there was more and more in the news about 'the environment' being polluted and destroyed, and a series of environmental books by Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, David Brower, Rene Dubos, William O. Douglas, and others came out over the decade, seeking to turn the tide against destruction. In this, American Indians figured as an example of a people who lived without harm to Nature before the White Man came and ruined it all. Everyone alive then should remember the famous 'crying Indian commercial', in which a mature Indian in a canoe looks on at different scenes of industrial defacement and pollution and public littering, and at the end, we see a tear rolling down his face. It was very moving, and an amazingly effective graphic means of waking people up to what we were doing, exploiting that well-worn image of the Indian as the Noble Redskin. But by that time, I had graduated from J. R. R. Tolkien to D. H. Lawrence, who featured Indians in some of his works, but it was mainly the Nature-mysticism that affected me, and the 'blood-consciousness' of his characters. He had been affected by the Indians and their landscape at Taos, New Mexico, but as far as I can tell, he got his ideology from the German counterculture at first or second-hand.

When I hit college in the fall of 1969, I started reading about American history as it concerned attitudes toward and treatment of Nature, and learned much about the Indians, as well as about Thoreau and John Muir and other Nature-mystic/prophets. The first Earth Day came the next spring, and I was told about it by a biology major, and attended the ceremony out near the middle of campus where the flagpole was, but there wasn't a big turn-out, probably because there was so much anti-war turmoil going on at the time, and it seemed that most of the people there were from the Biology department (it figures). There were statements made, but it wasn't a big, showy spectacle. I can't now remember the event very well-- was the new ecology flag raised up the flagpole? I was, as usual, an observer rather than a participant-- I never got a buzz being in a crowd or attending a ceremony, and Earth Day didn't strike me then as a major event, even though I was very 'environmentally concerned'. There was so much else going on-- it was a mad scene, and I was confused and freaked-out by it all. But as it turned out, Earth Day was a major event.

I think it was after this, maybe the next year, that 'the Indian' finally appeared. A bus-caravan of American Indians arrived on campus calling themselves The White Roots of Peace. Margot Adler mentions them in Drawing Down the Moon, saying that they toured from northern Canada to southern Florida. Once again, my memory is foggy, but what most impressed me was the older Indian man, in the traditional get-up, who reminded me of the 'medicine man' I had seen on TV shows and in movies, and of the 'Crying Indian', and I was greatly affected by his message of peace among men and with Nature, as well as astounded by all the young Indians with him. I had actually never seen a real, live Indian before*, this being the East, and it was like seeing Robin Hood or King Arthur stepping out of the world of legend into the real world. Once again, I was very shy and bystanding, but then I dropped by the room of the girl who had urged me to attend the Earth Day observance, and she gushed at me, "I'm in love!" Soon there appeared a young Indian in his get-up, not very tall, but well-set-up and very attractive, with hair like a black, shining pelt. Really, the most striking human figure I had yet seen in my life ('the gods walk among us'). Of course, I was socially paralyzed in his presence, but it was enough to have encountered him. And for a while, the effect of the White Roots of Peace lingered like an afterglow, but with so much late-60s turmoil going on, without and within, it, too, faded.

*No, that's not true-- as a kid, I went to a classmate's house after school, and his mother was Indian and was making fried eggplant which she said was an Indian dish, and she gave me some to eat. But I never went back there, being the autistic type, clueless and passive about social relations, totally inept at friendship.