01 June 2009
Universe of Spirits
By Vine Deloria Jr.
Many consider Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005), a Dakota (Standing Rock) Sioux, the leading Native American scholar of the past century. His eclectic research, writings, and teachings continue to influence Native and non-Native Americans alike. Often provocative, his works on history, law, religion, and political science helped to shape attitudes about Native Americans and champion their rights. His first book, Custer Died for Your Sins, brought him recognition, and the score of books that he wrote subsequently strove to restore Indian culture to an honored place. He testified before the U.S. Congress about Indian affairs and was on the faculty at the University of Colorado and the University of Arizona. He argued with humor and incisiveness. One famous Deloria quote: “When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, ‘Ours.’”
From God Is Red
When I was very small and traveling with my father in South Dakota, he would frequently point out buttes, canyons, river crossings, and old roads and tell me their stories. In those days before interstate highways, when roads were often two ruts along the side of a fence, it was possible to observe the places up close, and so indelible memories accrued around certain features of the landscape because of the proximity of the place and because of the stories that went with them. He seemed to remember details that other people had missed or never knew. He could point out buttes where vision quests [initiatory spiritual rites of passage] were held, the hill near Standing Rock where the woman lived with the wolves, and obscure landings along the Missouri where the people crossed or where Jack Sully, shirt-tail relative and famous bandit, escaped from a posse.
I came to revere certain locations and passed the stories along as best I could, although visits to these places were few and far between. It seemed to me that the remembrance of human activities at certain locations vested them with a kind of sacredness that could not have been obtained otherwise. Gradually I began to understand a distinction in the sacredness of places. Some sites were sacred in themselves, others had been cherished by generations of people and were now part of their history and, as such, revered by them and part of their very being. As the Indian protest movement gained momentum and attracted many young people to its activities, much of the concentration of energies was devoted to the restoration of sacred sites and the resumption of ceremonies there.
* * *
Reflecting back on the old men I observed as a boy and the utter sincerity of their belief, their humility and hesitancy to rush forward with answers to important questions, in writing the book [God Is Red] I was led back to a great appreciation of our religious traditions. Since writing the book, I have been gradually led to believe that the old stories must be taken literally if at all possible, that deep secrets and a deeper awareness of the complexity of our universe was experience by our ancestors, and that something of their beliefs and experiences can be ours once again.
Black Elk [Oglala Lakota holy man] in his vision saw many hoops of many people and we always recognize that there are other traditions with their ceremonies, so that sacredness is not restricted to any particular group of people and their beliefs. Yet an examination of tribal traditions will show that Indian paths to an encounter with the Great Mystery of life were generally straight and fulfilling. Almost any tribe can be examined and the result will be a bevy of stories about how the people used spiritual powers to live, and these powers are almost always made available to us in a sacred place where time and space do not define the terms of the experience.
God Is Red, Copyright © 1972, Fulcrum Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
The Universe of Spirits
Every Indian tribe has a spiritual heritage that distinguishes them from all other people. Indeed, in the past, recognizing their unique relationship to the world and its creatures, most tribes described themselves as “the people” or “the original people.” Regarding themselves as unique, they rigorously followed the commands of the spirits as they had experienced them over uncounted generations and recognized that other peoples had the same rights and status as themselves. So the idea of quarreling over the traditions by which they lived was felt to be absurd. Religious wars, then, were simply inconceivable, and while they may have fought ferociously over hunting and fishing grounds or launched hostilities in vengeance, the closest they came to combat over beliefs and practices was to find medicines — powers — that could negate the medicine and power possessed by other peoples.
Many avenues of spiritual expression seem to have been shared by tribes. Many tribes practiced the sun dance, the spirit lodge, the vision quest, the sweat lodge, use of sacred stones, and other rituals, with slight variations in format, that originated in the past. Certain birds and animals offered their help to people with some degree of uniformity. The bear, wolf, eagle, buffalo, and snake lent their powers to people of many tribes, although their functions, such as healing, making prophecies, or offering protection against dangers, were often similar.
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Growing up in Bennett County, South Dakota, and listening to stories of the old days and learning, from time to time, of the unusual things that were still being done by spiritual leaders, I have never emotionally or intellectually questioned the veracity of the old accounts. Over the years, I have listened to stories told by others or accidentally come across accounts of incidents in which amazing spiritual powers were displayed. Our ancestors invoked the assistance of higher spiritual entities to solve pressing practical problems, such as finding game, making predictions of the future, learning about medicines, participating in healings, conversing with other creatures, finding lost objects, and changing the course of physical events through a relationship with the higher spirits who controlled the winds, the clouds, the mountains, the thunders, and other phenomena of the natural world. Knowing how little superstition exists in Indian communities, I have always considered these accounts as truthful remembrances of past events. Medicine men, for the most part, performed their healings and predictions in front of large Indian audiences that were saying “Show Me” long before Missouri adopted that slogan for itself.
The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men, Copyright © 2006, Fulcrum Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
