http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_n37_v34/ai_21239403#continue"Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods. - book reviews
....these essays make abundantly clear, white colonialization of Indian land remains a relentless and ongoing process....
New Age spiritualism presents a more subtle but no less damaging form of exploitation. Indians have what many white people at the close of the millennium desperately covet: spiritual authenticity. Grounded in the visible features of a specific locale, weathered by generations of hardship and persecution, venerated by complex rituals and ceremonies, Indian religion exerts a magnetic appeal upon a new generation of affluent and disaffected consumers, who, in addition to sports utility vehicles, seek to garnish their lives with the trappings of a genuine spirituality.
Every summer at powwows and festivals across the country, hordes of white wannabes appear wearing buckskin and embroidered headbands, brandishing buffalo skulls and Catlinite pipes, eager to participate in sun dances, vision quests and sweat lodge ceremonies. Reading through the essays in this piece, one comes to understand more of the spiritual treasures to which these seekers, albeit clumsily, aspire....
Viola Cordova (Mescalero Apache) dissects the roots of Christian duality, the schism between spirit and substance that has bedeviled European thought since the Enlightenment. Albert Einstein's discovery of the physical principles underlying the basis of material reality helped rehabilitate the reputation of earlier philosophers such as Spinoza, who were vilified for contending that a universal energy (monism) infused all animate and inanimate things. It's a concept that Indians embrace intuitively but that causes no end of turmoil to European minds.
Part of the problem, Cordova suggests, is linguistic. Compared to the fluidity of Hopi, for example, standard European languages are incapable of interpreting the inexhaustible variability of the physical world. "In the static universe of [European languages] nothing happens without a cause or an agent of causation," says Cordova. "In the dynamic model of [the Hopi language] something is always happening without an agent because that is what the universe, by its very nature, does."
And the journal she founded.
http://flash.lakeheadu.ca/~agaamiz/stpurpose.html#anchor146430
