Andrews's nonsense, piece by piece:
"Your article is so rife with error and unfounded innuendo that one hardly knows where to begin."
Ms. Andrews, you don't appear to have read what you are responding to. There is no article.
"My name is Lynn Andrews, and I have spent the past 36 years of my life working with a group of indigenous women healers in many different parts of the world"
There's no evidence of that, none at all. You use Lakota words when talking about a supposed Cree teacher, invent places that don't exist and people with names that no one on these rezzes has ever heard.
"...training under them so that I could bring their stories and their teachings of the sacred feminine back into my own culture, to those who are looking for a greater understanding of the world of the sacred and their place in it than they have gotten from the religious traditions of their childhoods."
Pseudo feminism, ripping off both the mostly middle aged white women who naively go to you, and lying about indigenous women.
"That is not to denigrate any of the traditions in which they are raised. No one owns the truth. No one owns God, the Great Spirit, the Sacred Divine"
And yet you fought in court for a long time to own your version of spirituality and make a huge profit while the people you claim to teach from or honor live in poverty.
[Long irrelevant hypocritical rant of her faux feminism follows]
[Followed by long offensive rant where she pretends to be Native and feminist and anyone who exposes her is accused of being out to kill anyone who disagrees]
"I have never claimed or pretended to be a Native American, have never claimed or pretended to have been taught or to teach the sacred life ways, traditions or medicine of any First Nation people. I have never claimed nor pretended to speak of or for any Native culture, anywhere in the world. I have never claimed that any of the ceremonies which my teachers performed with me and gave me permission to write about were from any indigenous culture or tradition."
Talk about lying with a straight face. That is exactly what you claim.
"It is true that I have been blessed to participate as an invited guest in many Native ceremonies and traditions, but I have never and will never write of nor teach any of them; to do so would be to violate every bond of trust and integrity that has grown between my teachers and myself over these 36+ years."
Actually, that's exactly what you claim to have done.
"I have also stated frequently throughout all this time that while my teachers are all members of various indigenous communities, they do not teach us the teachings and life ways of their born-to worlds. Their teachings are the teachings of the sacred feminine, the Divine Goddess as she has been known and handed down for over ten thousand years in many different ways across the globe. Goddess teachings are to be found in every culture on earth, although most of the records of them have either been eradicated, burned, or are hidden away in the deepest, most inaccessible recesses of libraries of antiquity."
Ignorant and more ignorant, cloaking yourself in faux feminism again. There's certainly no shortage of women healers or medicine traditions.
[Long ignorant offensive rant where she again claims to be the defender of the indigenous and the feminist]
"You can belittle and demean them with words like "pagan," or "cult," or even label them the wild ravings of the mad woman, but just because you say those words does not make it so."
WTH is this imaginary person you are talking to or about? Are you high or going senile? You are ranting against people who aren't here and who never said anything like that.
" You can dismiss whole categories of magnificent people as fluff and nonsense, but that does not make it so."
You can pretend to be a shaman and charge people thousands to lie to them, but that doesn't make it real.
"And so you ask, "Why would a (natural?) blonde white woman claim to be a shaman?"
If your hair is natural then so are the implants of every porn actress, and the spray on tans of every Kardashian. You bear a frightening resemblance to Joan Rivers, except she looks more natural.
And once again, you argue with someone who isn't there.
"The term "shaman" actually comes from the Tungusic language of Siberia: šam?n – "a priest or priestess who uses magic for the purposes of curing the sick, divining the hidden, and controlling events." Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Ed., p.1076."
Your condescension is yet one more example of your racism.
"It has come to be applied to the practitioners almost every given spiritual or medicine way that does not fit into the Judeo-Christian-Buddhist-Moslem categories."
On what planet are Buddhist beliefs similar to the others? Your ignorance is cross cultural.
"Why would any woman of any skin or hair color, or man, for that matter, who is fortunate to put in the time and exceedingly rigorous and disciplined study with shaman teachers of high degree over a number of decades in order to achieve a demonstrable degree of ability not become a shaman woman?"
In your case, boatloads of cash. And your discipline is laughable, unless you're talking about control of banking accounts and royalties. You don't have the discipline to even lie consistently. Most frauds at least study the tribe they lie about. You don't even bother to do that, and you've made similar screw ups dozens of times.
"And having put in that study, having been called by one's own teachers a shaman woman and recognized widely as such by other teachers and healers outside her immediate circle, why could that woman not call herself a shaman woman? The designation "shaman" is not something one bestows on oneself. It is a title that is earned and recognized by one's teachers, first and foremost."
Since nobody but Siberians and anthros say shaman, you clearly have not been called one by anybody but yourself and equally deluded followers.
"You say, "These alleged shamans probably wouldn't even share with each other their secrets." How patronizing that is, to suggest that women are incapable of knowing who they are as individuals, seeking out and recognizing kindred spirits wherever we find them, to share, practice and build on the knowledge and wisdom of ancient women's spirituality. While many of my teachers in the Sisterhood of the Shields prefer to stay close to home, others of them are highly educated and have traveled extensively. Are you suggesting that educated and uneducated women cannot find a deeply sacred shared wisdom in common with one another, a sacredness that has been shared, in an unbroken chain, by our grandmothers and our grandmothers' grandmothers for ages?"
That first sentence was said in an article I read some time ago about you, not in here.
So that's why you make no sense. You very senilely are hallucinating that NAFPS is the Skeptic website that tore your nonsense claims to pieces.
May I suggest to your agent, get power of attorney quick, because Ms. Andrews has lost touch with reality.
"I have also been very careful to state in the beginning of every one of my books that the names and locations where my teachers live and where I go to study with them are changed to protect their safety and their identities. A number of them live under very repressive governments, where to practice even their Native traditions would bring imprisonment or death, not just to them but also to their families … let alone Goddess teachings. Just look at how you spurn such an idea. Or would you prefer a return to the Inquisitions, where it is said that over 85% of the people who were murdered were women?"
What the...?
Did she just claim Canada is murdering NDN women for their sisterhood of shields nonsense?
That is some incredible senility or very strong drugs she is taking...
"Finally, I must most ardently take exception to your statement, "If Andrews is a fraud, that would not mean that she does not bring something beneficial to many women, especially those whose needs are not very deep and who are likely to be comforted by platitudes, fictions, and timeworn expressions of hope, mysticism and power."
Again, she's gone off the deep end, responding to something and someone that isn't here...
If she weren't such an exploiter whose ruined many lives, it'd be tragic.
"...That is the same mentality of superiority and separation that leads to the shootings of Sikhs in their temples, the burning of mosques and holy books, and the bombings in public squares and places of worship the world over. How dare you?"
How dare you exploit the deaths in that temple to defend your crass ignorant racism?
How dare you spend your whole career making a mockery of feminism with your silly lies?
How dare you become wealthy while pandering to the gullible and letting the people you claim to honor die in poverty?
How dare you threaten anyone who disagrees with you with lawsuits, showing everyone how empty your facade of spirituality truly is?
I dare just fine. How dare you?
"Thank you for posting this,
Lynn Andrews"
Time for you to get better medication, or the doctors to commit you...