Out of this ambivalence is borne the notion of the noble savage. Deloria goes on to say, “Indians, it is clear, are not simply useful symbols of the love-hate ambivalence of civilization and savagery. Rather, the contradictions embedded in noble savagery have themselves been the precondition for the formation of American identities. To understand the various ways Americans have contested and constructed national identities, we must constantly return to the
original mysteries of Indianness???. And finally, Deloria brings it home: “At the turn of the twentieth century, the thoroughly modern children of angst-ridden upper and middle class
parents wore feathers and slept in tipis and wigwams at camps with multisyllabic Indian names. Their equally nervous post-World War 11 descendants made Indian dress and powwow-going
Gilio 5
into a hobby, with formal newsletters and regular monthly meetings. Over the past thirty years, the counterculture, the New Age, the men’s movement, and a host of other Indian performance options have given meaning to Americans lost in a (post)modern freefall. In each of these historical moments, Americans have returned to the Indian, reinterpreting the intuitive dilemmas
surrounding Indianness to meet the circumstances of their times. Playing Indian is a persistent tradition in American culture, stretching from the very instant of the national big bang into an ever-expanding present and future???.
In another very lucid hypothesis of America’s relentless fascination with Indianness, author Shari Huhndorf, in her book Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, cites the genre of captivity narratives. From Mary Rowlandson’s seventeenth century narrative, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together With the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, to the much more recent Medicine Woman by Lynn Andrews (with many others in between), “captivity narratives have provided opportunities for the dominant culture to tell self-justifying stories of its colonial encounters with Native others in the wilderness???. Huhndorf continues: “In so doing, they remain deeply implicated in the process of conquest, and this fact explains in part their popularity over time. Captivity narrative conventions continue to shape high and popular literature alike as captivity remains a dominant paradigm for representing white/Indian encounters???. The example of Lynn Andrews is particularly egregious. In this allegedly autobiographical account, Andrews, a white woman from Beverly Hills who collects native
baskets and is on a quest to obtain one particular basket which is on the Cree reserve in Canada, finds herself held captive by the elder traditional medicine woman, Agnes Whistling Elk for the
purpose of fulfilling her destiny to train in the ways of medicine. The ensuing drama involves Andrews having to steal the basket from a powerful medicine man, Red Dog, who happens to be
Gilio 6
a white man who had once been apprentice to Agnes, and who has grown more powerful than Agnes herself. Andrews manages to steal the basket from Red Dog, proving her power superior to Red Dog’s, and thus to Agnes. In this narrative what we see are themes of cultural
dispossession, the superiority of white versus Indian, economic privilege, capitalism, and entitlement.
This notion of entitlement may very well be at the root of the New Age movement’s cultural appropriation. There is a growing recognition in academia of a topic known as “white privilege???. Peggy McIntosh, Associate Director of Wellesley College Center for Research on Woman, in her well known essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, courageously assesses the realities of how being white has made her “an unfairly advantaged person???. She makes an important distinction, however, between privilege and conferred dominance. “We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck...Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate.
(Italics mine). Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas, in a series of essays on the same theme, takes up where McIntosh leaves off. In his essay The New White People’s Burden: Take a Hard Look in the Mirror, he asserts, “We should not affirm ourselves. We should negate our whiteness, strip ourselves of the illusion that we are special because we are white…we should learn to ask ourselves, ‘How does it feel to be the problem?’???
When we talk about the dynamics of race in this country, it’s often incorrect to lump Native Americans in with all other ethnic and minority groups. Native people face entirely different sets of circumstance that make their experience and problems unique. The idea of
conferred dominance, which I believe is better referred to here as white entitlement, harkens back to an earlier time in America’s history (what Indians know well) when a certain term
Gilio 7
defined America’s ambitions: Manifest Destiny, the belief that America was divinely mandated to expand the country westward in whatever ways necessary. The phrase, originally coined in 1845 by journalist John L. O’Sullivan in his essay Annexation, became synonomous with Anglo-
American superiority. One of America’s first “great??? historians, Francis Parkman, wrote in his 1851 book The Conspiracy of Pontiac, that Indians were destined “to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward unchecked and unopposed???. History attests to the fact that this westward roll was far more “unchecked??? than it was “unopposed???. But that’s another topic entirely. The point is manifest destiny had an altogether different meaning for Indian people than it did for non-Indians, and still does. For them it means theft, lies, murder, and hypocrisy. In a very concrete way, the phrase “manifest destiny??? is simply code for “white entitlement???.
This sense of entitlement causes a distortion in the perception of what Native spirituality is all about. Part of the problem of non-Indians adopting Indian ways is that they try to fit these practices within a cultural framework that is foreign to the one in which those ways were originated. In the effort to fill a spiritual void, western seekers tend to be more concerned with their own process than with the fact that tribal spiritual systems evolved for a different purpose. John Levell, Executive Director and co-founder of the San Francisco based Center for the Support and Protection of Indian Religions and Indigenous Traditions (SPIRIT), explains, “These ceremonies were given for the survival of the tribes. They were not meant for self-enhancement, no matter how well intended.
Levell continues; “The New Agers take the theatrical parts and completely remove them from the culture. This is not just misuse; it pollutes the source of the belief.
Or, put another way, Shari Huhndorf in Going Native states, “In New Age practices, ‘Native’ traditions generally reflect a heavily European ethos…the fixation on self-discovery and self-healing articulate the very Western ideologies of bourgeois
Gilio 8
individualism. At the same time, the teacher’s selling of “Indian??? knowledge and experiences manifests a profoundly capitalistic mindset.
