Monday, February 7, 2011

In Search of Eco-paganism 6

So why didn't 'Native American spirituality' become a genre of Neopaganism, but was linked with it only as subsumed under 'Neo-shamanism'?

I'm not sure. There was much interest in 'American Indians' in the Sixties Counterculture years. Black Elk Speaks, if it wasn't readily available earlier, was rereleased as a paperback in 1972, and that book disseminated Lakota spirituality like nothing else around, I think. I was greatly affected by the accounts of Black Elk's visions. The amazing Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm was published in 1972 as well, though I only discovered that much later. Vine Deloria Jr's God Is Red came out the next year. And no doubt there were other powerful presentations of Indian spirituality I missed or can't recall. There was also Carlos Castenada's Don Juan books, the first three of which came out in 1968, 1971, and 1972. These were something different, about sorcery rather than religion, and were categorized as 'shamanism', which was already known through Mircea Eliade's Shamanism. I read one of the Don Juan books at the time and was frightened by the melding of drug-induced hallucination and reality as described in harrowing scenes of confusion and supernatural menace. About the same time, I read about 'lucid dreaming' and had the same response--'No way do I want to go there!' There were also then creepy UFO-aliens books featuring abductions, sinister 'men in black', black helicopters, and other expressions of the black paranoia of the Seventies. Hypnotic regression tape-transcripts of the 'contactees' frightend me as much as the Don Juan accounts, though I withheld judgment on their veracity and was very leery of the UFO books after The Mothman Prophecies. Then I read articles sceptical of Castaneda's accounts . In both cases, I was not drawn to the dark weirdness-- I was by that time seeking spiritual sanctuary in the aftermath of the waning of the Counterculture. For me, Christianity was out, though many turned back to it in the Seventies. The pure spirituality of romantic moonlight through a cathedral's stained glass windows, etc. (Christmas card Christianity), still had appeal, but I was more drawn toward Buddhism and would have become a Buddhist, despite its grim cosmology, if I could have believed in karma and reincarnation. But I am not a 'believer'.

As for Native American spirituality, I don't think it attracted the kind of people drawn to Wicca, but it drew a good number of hippie-type American youth. In the Seventies, there were a number of top-40 songs about Indians, mostly as victims. The American Indian Movement made Indian grievances widely known. Liberals had developed a sensitivity to 'ethnic minorities' like 'Blacks' and Indians-- which may be why, outside the 'do what you will' Counterculture, it was considered bad form to dress-up like an Indian. But especially out West, hip youth might wear turquoise-and-silver jewelry, moccassins (or desert boots), headbands, or a kind of 'Indian look', as did working-men, businessmen, and retirees. Some of the young males were really 'into' Indianness. The peyote-partaking Native American Church was talked about among white hippies, was confused with the white jokester Neo-American Church, which was for partaking drugs-in-general. And the Don Juan books were widely read among serious psychedelicists. But apart from Sun Bear's Bear Tribe that was open to whites-- and he soon learned that hippie types were too self-indulgent and wayward to be other than a drag on the community-- I don't know of whites forming Indian spirituality groups comparable to witchcraft covens. So 'Neo-paganism', as that term became current, seemed to be more about witchcraft and similar magic-and-spitiuality groups. But I knew nothing about all this until the late 70s/early 80s. The New Age movement quickly outgrew these underground expressions with popular-oriented books and therapies and organizations with mystical/metaphysical human potential movement/self-help/pseudoscience formulas. As Native American attacks on white 'cultural appropriation' of their religions penetrated to the non-native world, white liberal sensibilities and solidarity would have inhibited the formation of 'white Indian' groups. But whether they would have formed otherwise, I don't know. Maybe some did. But Neopaganism in the Seventies was mostly in the vein of the European occult/romantic traditions. Since then, interest in 'primitive' peoples like Australian aborigines and pan-American indigenous peoples has grown in Neopaganism, with Native Americans as a sub-genre. In the Sixties, Hindu religion and Zen Buddhism and meditation had become popular, and since then, Tibetan Buddhism has become, too (though Buddhism is hardly Pagan, despite pagan elements in the Tibetan form). The 'Celtic thing' crowded out Sixties eclecticism in Wicca, and from the mid-80s, countercultural Druidry became an addition to the Neopagan roster of major genres, particularly in England. Heathenism, despite being tainted as neo-Nazi, and a victim of the 'Celtic-good/Germanic-bad' prejudice, gradually became a major genre.

But whether labeled Neopagan or not, and if so, 'Neo-shamanist', my sense is that, however you classify, interest in Native American religion and spirituality continues, and its appeal is often as a model of ecological virtue. But can a non-native identify as an Indian? Not readily, I think, and that limits its appeal, and its potential for Neopagan development ('neocolonialist cultural appropriation and syncretizing of...'). Which is good and bad at once. There's also the problem that nothing like the traditional Indian way of life can be approached in this hi-tech computerized world we inhabit-- it's a problem for Native Americans as well. Their essentially Stone Age cultures were too different in their material basis and way of life for us to hope to be able to acquire their consciousness, however much we might want to. And for non-natives, Europic or not, when your ancestors came from other continents, how can you reconcile the two culture-worlds? As a Neopagan, I have found this problem ultimately unsurmountable-- my ancestry and acculturation is European, and I find it hard to feel really at home in North America. Instead, I feel unrooted. If there were any way to comfortably meld, say, Celtic/Germanic gods and wights with Native American ones, I might be able to feel more grounded here. But I haven't been able to manage that degree of eclecticism, and at best, as in the Shaggy Mythos, I must be European-based but try to remain universally-applicable, and I have drawn on lore from Asian traditions, of India and China. There's also the problem of moving away from one's birthplace and camping serially in far-flung cities, and of the sense of 'homeland' being destroyed for one by the devastations done to one's early home-place by development and destruction of the landscape. And, too, with no 'people' to belong to-- no tribe-- well, I guess almost all of us feel unrooted anywhere.

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