General Discussion

spirituality are White European Anericans who claim to have studied under a "great shaman" who taught them all the "secrets" of Native spiritual power. It's BS of course.

True, a lot of customs, beliefs, legends,and languages were lost and some whole tribal nations were wiped out. But despite attempts to wipe out all Native people through conquest and destroy their cultures through boarding schools, a remarkable amount of culture survived considering the circumstances.

Example: Once forced onto reservations, Native people were forbidden by law from practicing their religions. Fort commanders and Indian commissioners did not understand that, in many Native cultures, circle dances are sacred, a form of prayer. They thought that all such dances were war dances. So some Native cultures got around that by celebrating Native festivals on Christian holidays or saints' days. They dressed in Euro-American clothing with a few of their own sacred cultural symbols included in the form of a bracelet or woven into a woman's shawl or a man's shirt. The soldiers who controlled the rez did not know the meaning of the symbols, but the knowledge was passed on to the younger people who helped elders prepare for the celebration.

So a supposed Christmas celebration might actually have been a disguised sacred winter solstice festival.

Navajo is still widely spoken in AZ and NM on the rez.

In NY, The Seneca are actively revitalizing their language for everyday use. Much of it was preserved in the early 1800s by a missionary couple, Asher and Laura Wright, who developed a written form of Seneca and translated hymns and parts of the Bible into Seneca. Laura wrote down several Seneca legends to preserve them. While most missionaries did great harm to Native cultures, the Wrights respected the culture. Their niece married a Seneca man and his grandson became a NY State archeologist and ethnologist. He became director of a cultural museum at Rochester, NY where he collected several cultural artifacts and published numerous papers on Seneca customs, practices, food recipes, etc. He was only 1/4 Seneca biologically but ineligible for tribal membership because this Seneca heritage was through his father and they are matrilineal. But, due to his service to the Seneca nation, he was adopted into a clan.

I am familiar with that background because that Seneca archeologist, Arthur Parker, was a contemporary of my paternal grandparents and a distant cousin to my grandmother, who also had mixed Seneca and English Ancestry. He and my grandmother shared a common ancestor who, in the very late 1700s and early 1800s developed a religion that preserved Seneca festivals and traditions while integrating some Euro-American customs.

I agree completely with your statement about the inherent racism in the noble savage image of Native Americans. Unfortinateky, many non Natives who reject the noble savage characterization often just drop the noble part and revert back to just plain savage. I had a history professor who did that.

They are just people like any other people whose cultures, even when altered by another culture, still have some distnctive characteristics and perspectives on life.

Regarding shaman, Native Americans resist that term. They prefer medicine man or sometimes medicine woman or just healer. A true medicine man studies several years, like an apprentice, under an older, established practitioner before taking on the role. They do not sell their knowledge in classes for outsiders. They do not charge fees for a sweat lodge, which is sacred.

There are some younger Native people who do not know their own culture and get caught up in a phony facsimile promoted by non Natives.