Pan-Native-American spirituality is not a thing.

I could do another post about the ongoing horror show that is the Trump administration this week. But I'm inclined instead to write about something that comes up occasionally in Pagan, and especially New Age, circles.

This illustration is one example of it. We are going to discuss how very wrong it is. And then we're going to talk about some other weird ideas white people have about Native Americans, particularly their spirituality. 

Nearbirds | Deposit Photos

So what's wrong with the illustration? For starters, tipis were used only by the various Plains Indians tribes. A tipi is easy to put up and take down, making it perfect housing for people with a nomadic lifestyle. But the decorations on this one are sanitized to the point of being meaningless. Here is a photo of some actual Kiowa tipis. See the difference? 

Wikipedia | Public Domain

Bison, an elk smoking a pipe, water monsters -- you get the idea.

Let's turn now to that totem pole. Totem poles are carved by Native Americans who live in western Canada and along the Pacific coast of the US. They are made of cedar -- a tree that doesn't grow on the Great Plains -- and while they can be as short as four feet, they are sometimes as tall as 100 feet. 

Tipis are between four and eight feet tall, generally speaking. So the perspective in the illustration is off -- a real totem pole would probably tower over the tipi. But why would a tipi dweller want to haul around a totem pole? And why would a Pacific Northwest Indian want to live in a tipi when cedar trees were plentiful in their area? The traditional housing for totem-pole-carving tribes was the longhouse, made of cedar planks. Big ones housed multiple families that each had their own area inside the building.

The Ute Indians lived in both tipis and wickiups, depending on the time of year. Members of the Five Civilized Tribes in the northeastern US and eastern Canada lived in longhouses. Southeastern tribes like the Seminole lived in chickees, with thatched roofs but open sides. Pueblo Indian homes were made of adobe, and the Navajo lived in hogans, built of logs and mud. (If you ever get the chance to go inside a hogan, look up; the logs forming the roof are interlaced. Just beautiful.)

Different tribes, different climates, different types of homes. Different languages from different language families, too; here in New Mexico, we have 19 Pueblos still in existence, and depending on the pueblo, their ancestors may have spoken Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Keresan, Zunian, or Uto-Aztecan, and they are not mutually intelligible tongues. The Navajo language is from the Athabaskan language family, as are the languages spoken by Apache tribes and a bunch of tribes in western Canada.

Given all that, why on earth would anyone think that every tribe followed the same ancient religion?

And yet I keep coming across memes on social media that start with, "O, Great Spirit" and purport to be Native American wisdom. Here's one: 

Stolen from a Facebook page

Lovely sentiments, right? 

Which tribe is it from?

You can't tell, can you?

I am going to hazard a guess and say that some white person wrote it and is trying to pass it off as Native. 

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Most Native Americans today are Christian; their ancestors, like those of us with European pagan ancestors, were converted by Christian invaders at swordpoint. They may still practice their traditions, but thanks to Christian missionaries determined to "civilize the savages", a whole lot of their languages and cultural practices are being lost.

There's a scene from a Sherman Alexie novel that keeps coming back to me. I think it might have been in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The main character of the novel, Junior, is a teenager who lives on the dirt-poor Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. The scene is one in which several white women show up on the reservation and say they want to become Indians because Native beliefs are so pure and so on. Junior (assuming I've got the right book) and his friends let the women tag along with them for the day, and they even party together. But once everybody is high, the teens turn on the women, telling them how dumb their romanticized view of Native life is -- and then they send the women packing.

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I get the desire to make life simpler by adopting the beliefs of people who had a closer relationship with the land and all that. But please don't fall for the idea that all Native Americans believed the same stuff and followed the same god. A lot of tribes (most, I think) were polytheistic before the coming of the white man. This idea of a "Great Spirit" was likely introduced by the missionaries and adopted by the Indians -- sometimes right along with their original pantheon, to the missionaries' chagrin. The Natives were simply doing the same kind of syncretism that the Romans did, adopting the worship of other cultures' gods as they met them along the way, but in the Natives' case, the practice didn't play well with monotheism.

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Do me a favor, would you? If you see something posted online that claims to be a "Native American" spiritual something-or-other, ask the poster which tribe it's from. If they can't tell you... well, there's your answer.

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These moments of spiritual blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!