Native Americans and
Shamans
A tall young man in jeans and a fringed buckskin jacket holds a football-sized quartz crystal, pale purple and translucent, above his head. Peering through his small round gold-rimmed glasses, he gazes past the crystal into the misty gray sky and offers a prayer to the Great Spirit. Then he kneels and places his special rock on the rim of a large circle marked on the grass.
Nearly a hundred other participants carefully position similar stones along the perimeter of the sacred medicine wheel as they sing, "The dawning of a new time is coming." The ceremony is over. Just in time! The skies open in a drenching downpour, and the worshipers run for cover.
Medicine wheels of stone once spread across the North American continent. Constructed by the original native inhabitants, these wheels were ceremonial centers, high energy areas where the people sought knowledge and sensed the forces of the Earth and the cosmos.
In 1980, Sun Bear, a Chippewa Indian teacher and medicine chief, had a vision that medicine wheels should return as places for teaching, sharing, and "channeling love and healing energy to the Earth Mother."
On Halloween 1987, I was one of several hundred people — a mixture of ages and races, Indians and New Agers — who attended a Medicine Wheel assembly in Southern California's Malibu Mountains. This was the twenty-fourth
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two-day event of its kind sponsored by Sun Bear's teaching and healing community, Bear Tribe. Tucked away in the wooded hills of eastern Washington, Bear Tribe is a center for publishing, organic gardening, and the training of contemporary medicine men and women.
"This modern Medicine Wheel gathering," explained Singing Pipe Woman, director of the gathering, "brings together Native American medicine people, Hawaiian kahunas, and other sacred teachers to share their traditional philosophies, ceremonies, and prophecies." Added Sun Bear, a friendly hulk of a man who has been a stunt man and a consultant for western films: "You begin to realize your interconnectedness with the Earth and with all other life."
Sun Bear's medicine wheel consists of thirty-six stones (not counting those placed around the perimeter by participants); each stone represents a part of the universe. The ceremony begins by smudging, a purification ritual for those approaching the sacred wheel. Pungent smoke from burning herbs such as sage and sweetgrass is wafted around each person by an attendant who waves an eagle feather back and forth over the incense as it smolders in an iridescent abalone shell.
Next, participants make prayer "ties" by placing pinches of tobacco into small colored cloth squares and wrapping them with string. The ties are hung around the edge of the circle, with the four colors segregated according to the directions of the compass. Thirty-six preselected participants enter the wheel, one at a time, and honor the powers that each of the stones represents. After blessing the stones with cornmeal, participants "become" their power by acting out its representation — for example, "coyote the trickster," or "the frog clan" (water). Sun Bear leads off by placing a buffalo skull in the center of the wheel to represent the Creator, the central power object and the "hub of the universe." The colorful ceremony is topped off with singing, dancing, drumming, and chanting.
Sun Bear is one of an increasing number of modern-day medicine men and women — shamans — who combine reverence for the circle of life and traditional native healing methods with New Age technologies and assumptions.
The way of the shaman (pronounced SHAH-maan) is spiraling beyond the Native American circle, however. For
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couched inside this magical worldview is a sophisticated and powerful cosmology that appeals to spiritually adventuresome Americans who seek transcendence. Many want "something a little closer to home than, say, Tibetan gong meditation."1
I first became aware of the resurgence of Native American tribal religions in 1985 when I was researching a story about the clash of foresters and Indians in the rugged Six Rivers National Forest of Northwestern California.
I discovered that ceremonial sites for traditional religious dances, long unused, were being reconstructed at spots with exotic names like Ishi Pishi Falls, Weitchpec, and Kota-Mein. The latter, in Karuk language, means "center of the world." In the summer of 1984, the Yoroks — for the first time since 1939 — held the sacred Jump Dance, part of the tribe's World Renewal ceremonies intended to stabilize the Earth and preserve the human race from catastrophe and disease.
Some Native American youth, formerly embarrassed by their Indian heritage, are now seeking to reestablish their cultural and religious roots. Part of that quest involves trips into the high country wilderness to "receive power" in visionary experiences. Those in training fast and meditate in sacred spots like Medicine Mountain and Doctor Rock, where their ancestors talked to the "Great Spirit" and prepared to be medicine women and men.
The crisis came when logging interests wanted to develop paved roads through these sacred sites, forcing local tribes to consider ways to preserve Indian identity and religious practice. It also awakened the long-slumbering beat of the primitive American medicine drum.2
"The outer rituals may have been lost, but the knowledge wasn't; it's still within the vibrant nature of this land," Jack Norton, a Hupa Indian dancer and professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University, told me during a visit in his Indian style home in Hoopa, California.
Many Indians believe these ceremonies, practiced thousands of years before the first contact with the white man, were initiated by prehuman spirits, or "Beforetime People," who inhabited the world and brought all living things and cultures to mankind. These elaborate rites, taught by the "Immortals," were repeated in precise fashion by priests and
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"spiritual specialists" in ritual centers scattered along the steep canyons of the Klamath, Trinity, and Salmon rivers near the California-Oregon border.
Other tribes throughout America have remarkably similar traditions. In many, the death and rebirth of the world are reenacted by building sacred structures, such as dance arenas and underground sweat lodges, and by creating sacred fires, rock walls, and medicine wheels related to the acquisition of power by shamans. Noted ethnologist Mircea Eliade has described these individuals as "technicians of ecstasy and the sacred."3
Norton told how seekers of "mystical visions" open themselves to "cosmological forces" in high country training, often fasting and dancing for hours at a time while shouting to the "spirits": "Sometime during that time on the mountain, there will be a visitation, a confirmation. A song might come to you on the wind, and this, though yours, could be given for the healing of the tribe . . . If you are very fortunate, a white [albino] deer would come before you, or a pileated woodpecker."4
Many anthropologists and historians of religion see these rites as an integral part of a Western society that has teetered on the edge of extinction, and which, like the condor, must be saved. Indian artifacts serve as "a hidden symbol of a raped and decimated culture," says Jon Magnuson, a Lutheran campus pastor and cochairman of the Native American Task Force of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. It is a symbol that raises questions "about the price we have paid to reduce religion to art, spirit to craft, ceremonial mask to museum display."5
In recent years various church bodies have confessed participation — much of it unconscious — in the past destruction of Native American religions and the forced assimilation of Indians into white culture. During his September 1985 swing across Canada, Pope John Paul II told a group of Indians near Quebec City of his concern for native peoples and urged them to preserve their cultural identity. The message followed a papal letter to Canadian tribal peoples asking forgiveness for the insensitivity and presumption of generations of missionary effort.
The rise of Indian tribal self-consciousness coupled with
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the vogue of penitence by conscience-striken non-Indians for sins of exploitation and neglect comes at a propitious time for the New Age movement. For affirming native spirituality is more than the "call to justice" envisioned by Magnuson.6 It is also the belief that the secret power of the high places has not passed away but only awaits the New Age we are now entering.
But, as Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin point out in Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, the spiritual affinity the New Age culture feels with Native Americans is not a "new primitive shamanism" but "a rediscovery of certain motifs of shamanism as effective counters to the values of a technological, rationalistic culture in historical time . . . The new shaman's role is to serve as charismatic center of a cultus, around which a new symbolic cosmos, and ultimately transformed world (through processes really mystical or apocalyptic rather than historical), will form itself."7
New Age shamans include Carlos Casteneda's Yaqui Indian sorcerer-warrior Don Juan, who imitates many of the attributes of the age-old shamanistic lifestyle. The largely fictitious Don Juan testifies that a warrior must be an expert in visions and obscure arts, and he must contend with the mysterious energies and dangers of the invisible world through power places and power animals and spirit guides. That is not unlike the shaman's legendary role to safeguard the tribe against disasters, unexpected evil forces, and enemy attacks, as well as to use magic power to heal sickness and ensure good hunting and plentiful crops.
But the neo-shamans seem more intent upon individualistic endeavors in a pluralistic society that offers them no clearly defined social roles. These latter-day shamans, says Brooks Alexander, "are psychospiritual soldiers of fortune, seeking wisdom and power. They are both autonomous and rootless."8
Even so, the cultural influence of neo-shamanism is pervasive.
Shamanistic body-mind healing techniques are promoted by Michael Harner, an anthropologist at New York's prestigious Academy of Science. In his widely influential book, The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Prayer and Healing, Harner
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gives explicit directions to those who wish to become "professional shamans." This instruction, he says, should include "wilderness wandering, the vision quest, the shamanic experience of death and resurrection, the Orphic journey, shamanism and afterlife, journeying to the Upper-world."9
Environmental psychologist Jim Swan edits Shaman's Drum, a New Age journal that explores the ecstatic and altered states that "transcend all cultures." Paid circulation jumped to 18,000 within two and a half years of the publication's start up, Swan told a New Age gathering.10
And Leslie Gray, a Cherokee who holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, has blended ancient native wisdom with Western technology in her "shamanic counseling" practice. Her "Speaking With Spirit Tongue" workshops are popular on the New Age circuit.
Shamanism in the 1980s and 1990s "is what Zen and yoga were in the 1960s and '70s," she says, adding that "the United States, not the Himalayas or Tibet, is the Holy Land . . . . Now I can tell people I'm a shaman and they understand what I'm talking about."11
In the early 1980s, Harley Swiftdeer, of mixed Cherokee and Irish descent, founded the Deer Lodge and its related teaching unit, Dreamweavers, for serious students of the Native American spiritual path.12 And then there's Rolling Thunder, an aging medicine man born in the Cherokee nation, a favorite of show biz and music personalities such as Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, James Coburn, and Candice Bergen. Rolling Thunder travels about spinning Indian yarns and promoting shamanistic healing.
But Native Americans aren't the only ones taking shamanistic journeys these days.
Lynn Andrews, known as the "Beverly Hills medicine woman" and the female Carlos Castaneda," has put legions of upscale suburban women on the path to Native American spirituality. Though not an Indian herself, Andrews spent the better part of fifteen years as an apprentice to indigenous women shamans, all the while gathering material for her five best-selling books on adventures of enlightenment, which one reviewer categorizes — along with the Castaneda series — as a new genre: "visionary autobiography."13
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When she's not at her Benedict Canyon cottage, where she writes and gives private spiritual counseling at $150 an hour, Andrews is apt to be with her Native American teachers — especially Cree medicine woman Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Plenty Chiefs, in Manitoba, Canada.
Andrew's shamanistic journeyings do stretch the imagination, as do her counseling techniques, which include the use of rattles and bells "to balance the electromagnetic energy field surrounding the body."14 Some Indians resent her "crash course" in shamanism, saying it takes nearly a lifetime to become expert. Others think she exploits Native American spirituality and shouldn't charge specific fees for her services.
But Andrews, a former art dealer and documentary producer, says the wampum comes with the territory. Anyway, she insists, Agnes Whistling Elk told her to spread the word. And, says she, her brand of urban shamanism is a vital link to the ancient, mystical knowledge of female consciousness, a link that ties in well with the growing feminist or goddess element of the New Age movement.
"Power is female. That's always the first lesson of shamanistic training," tutors warrioress Andrews, adding that the obligation of all women is the education of men.15
Meanwhile, back at Calamigos Ranch — only a few short miles away on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains — Sun Bear's Medicine Wheel gathering had moved inside the lodge to escape a cold driving rain. There, "Grandfather Sun" was teaching some Native American chants and songs; most were unfamiliar to the largely non-Indian crowd.
What happened next was an example of the ability of the descendants of our nation's first inhabitants to keep a moccasin in both worlds without taking either world too seriously.
Strumming his guitar softly, Grandfather Sun warbled "The Forty-Nine Songs," a lengthy ballad about fifty warriors who go out to battle and only one returns. Halfway through the song, Grandfather suddenly began swiveling his hips and belting out the lyrics made immortal by Elvis Presley: "you ain't nothin' but a hound dog!"
It almost brought down the lodgepole.
Chapter 14 || Table of Contents
1. Spiritual Counterfeits Project Special Collection Journal 6, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 25.
2. Russell Chandler, "Foresters, Indians, Clash over Fate of Sacred Ground: Paved Logging Road on U.S. Land Called Threat to Freedom of Religion," Los Angeles Times, 25 August 1985, pt. 1, 3.
3. Cited in Alberto Villoldo and Stanley Krippner, Healing States: A Journey into the World of Spiritual Healing and Shamanism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 159.
4. Chandler, "Foresters, Indians, Clash over Fate of Sacred Ground."
5. Jon W. Magnuson, "Echoes of a Shaman's Song: Artifacts and Ethics in the Northwest," Christian Century, 29 April 1987, 407.
6. John W. Magnuson, "Affirming Native Spirituality: A Call to Justice," Christian Century, 9 December 1987, 1114.
7. Robert S. Ellwood and Harry B. Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 13–14.
8. Brooks Alexander, "A Generation of Wizards: Shamanism & Contemporary Culture," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Special Collection Journal 6, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 28.
9. Michael Harner, Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 138.
10. Celebration of Innovation Workshop, San Francisco, 8 November 1987.
11. Ibid.
12. Ellwood and Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, 168–70.
13. Cited in Beth Ann Krier, "The Medicine Woman of Beverly Hills," Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1987, pt. 5, 1.
14. Ibid.
15. Quoted in Rose Marie Staubs, "Andrews' Sisters," OMNI (October 1987): 28.
