HAHAHAHA, he calls the Cheyenne "shamans." OMG. Even just normal NDNs who are ethnobotanists and college professors.
I'm looking at the videos where he mentions what gatherings he's come to the US to go to, like the Montana Herb Gathering. These aren't Native events. These are white people things. His event in New York City, same deal. He's a newager.
http://montanaherbgathering.org/theboardOn this page about another white herbalist conference in Boston
http://english.storl.de/general/texte/newsletter-july-2015.html , his perspective is not only completely white, but he speaks glowingly about the colonists, from a thoroughly settler-colonial perspective, and only speaks of Natives
in the past tense. Does he have any contacts in the area, the way anyone with actual history and lived experience in Indian country would?
No. He is actually
surprised that Natives run the restaurant he stops at, even when he is on Wampanoag land. And what does he try to talk to the waitress about? Current Indigenous issues? No, Thanksgiving and Squanto.
Aside from this brief interaction with the waitress, real, living Natives don't exist for this guy. He confidently continues to relegate Indigenous people to the past and grotesquely misrepresent Indigenous cultures in his white-written stories, relaying only the white lies. He even mentions a plant that, had he learned even the most basic things about Cheyenne ceremonial life, he would know some things about how it is used in that culture. But no, he just skims on past it, only noting the European herbal lore or things you can find in books written by white people. Such an obvious fraud.
OK, I've watched his fake "puja" video. He's doing some kind of newage/neoplaygan mashup of his idea of several different cultures there. He's got a South Asian lota, a feather fan, he's talking about the goddess Saraswati but doing things he thinks are NDN.... look, this guy
does not know Cheyenne culture or ceremonies. There is no reason to believe he is anything other than just another German pretendian, another offensive "
Indianer" hobbyist. The only difference is he found the names of some dead NDNs to exploit.
I think this scam of his includes his continuing to give people the false impression, like many German hobbyists want to believe, that the "real" Indians are dead now, so that now the white pretendians can replace them. This is evil.
The ceremonial leader he claims to have known, and may have even met briefly, has trained people in his own family and medicine society to follow after him. That training requires not only full cultural immersion, and speaking the Cheyenne language fluently, but training for many, many years, and then being recognized as having been given the permissions by the full community. All those people who have been trained and granted permissions are
Cheyenne people. Not white, newage ceremony-sellers that no Natives have even heard of.
The fact he's also claiming to heal Lyme disease makes him dangerous. I concur, he belongs in frauds.
