What is the Native American Church and Why is Peyote Sacred to Members?
By DEEPA BHARATH and JESSIE WARDARSKI, Associated Press
(Photo Credit: Center for the Study of World Religions)
The Native American Church is considered the most widespread religious movement among the Indigenous people of North America. It holds sacred the peyote cactus, which grows naturally only in some parts of southern Texas and northern Mexico. Peyote has been used spiritually in ceremonies, and as a medicine by Native American people for millennia.
It contains several psychoactive compounds, primarily mescaline, which is a hallucinogen. Different tribes of peyote people have their own name for the cactus. While it is still a controlled substance, U.S. laws passed in 1978 and 1994 allow Native Americans to use, harvest and transport peyote. However, these laws only allow federally recognized Native American tribes to use the substance and don't apply to the broader group of Indigenous people in the US.
Peyote in the wild. (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)
The Native American Church developed into a distinct way of life around 1885 among the Kiowa and Comanche of Oklahoma. After 1891, it began to spread as far north as Canada. Now, more than 50 tribes and 400,000 people practice it. In general, the peyotist doctrine espouses belief in one supreme God who deals with humans through various spirits that then carry prayers to God. In many tribes, the peyote plant itself is a deity, personified as Peyote Spirit.
Why was the Native American Church incorporated?
The sun sets over the gateway of peyotera Amada Cardenas's house in Mirando City, Texas.
Ironwork reflects core Native American Church values of faith, hope, love and charity.
(Photo Credit: VOA)
The Native American Church is not one unified entity like, say, the Catholic Church. It contains a diversity of tribes, beliefs and practices. Peyote is what unifies them. After peyote was banned by U.S. government agents in 1888 and later by 15 states, Native American tribes began incorporating as individual Native American Churches in 1918. In order to preserve the peyote ceremony, the federal and state governments encouraged Native American people to organize as a church, said Darrell Red Cloud, the great-great grandson of Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota Nation and vice president of the Native American Church of North America.
In the following decades, the religion grew significantly, with several churches bringing Jesus Christ's name and image into the church so their congregations and worship would be accepted, said Steve Moore, who is non-Native and was formerly a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund.
Native American rights attorney Steven Moore, left, and Native American Church
leader Steven Benally look at a peyote cactus at Benally’s home on the Navajo
reservation in Arizona. (Photo Credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
"Local religious leaders in communities would see the image of Jesus, a Bible or cross on the wall of the meeting house or tipi and they would hear references to Jesus in the prayers or songs," he said. "That probably helped persuade the authorities that the Native people were in the process of transformation to Christianity."
This persecution of peyote people continued even after the formation of the Native American Church, said Frank Dayish Jr. a former Navajo Nation vice president and chairperson for the Council of the Peyote Way of Life Coalition.
In the 1960s, there were laws prohibiting peyote in the Navajo Nation, he said. Dayish remembers a time during that period when police confiscated peyote from his church, poured gasoline on the plants and set them on fire.
"I remember my dad and other relatives went over and saved the green peyote that didn't burn," he said, adding that it took decades of lobbying until an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1994 permitted members of federally recognized Native American tribes to use peyote for religious purposes.
How is peyote used in the Native American Church?
Steven Benally, a “healer” in the Native American tradition of religious worship,
holds a peyote button. The hallucinogenic is derived from a cactus that grows in the
desert southwest. (Photo Credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
Peyote is the central part of a ceremony that takes place in a tipi around a crescent-shaped earthen altar mound and a sacred fire. The ceremony typically lasts all night and includes prayer, singing, the sacramental eating of peyote, water rites and spiritual contemplation.
Morgan Tosee, a member of the Comanche Nation who leads ceremonies within the Comanche Native American Church, said peyote is utilized in the context of prayer — not smoked — as many tend to imagine.
"When we use it, we either eat it dry or grind it up," he said. "Sometimes, we make tea out of it. But, we don't drink it like regular tea. You pray with it and take little sips, like you would take medicine."
Tosee echoes the belief that pervades the church: "If you take care of the peyote, it will take care of you."
"And if you believe in it, it will heal you," he said, adding that he has seen the medicine work, healing people with various ailments.
David Marbain, roadman with the Native American Church, sings while
holding a peyote fan and gourd rattle. (Photo Credit: Press Democrat)
People treat the trip to harvest peyote as a pilgrimage, said Red Cloud. Typically, prayers and ceremonies take place before the pilgrimage to seek blessings for a good journey. Once they get to the peyote gardens, they would touch the ground and thank the Creator before harvesting the medicine. The partaking of peyote is also accompanied by prayer and ceremony. The mescaline in the peyote plant is viewed as God's spirit, Red Cloud said.
"Once we eat it, the sacredness of the medicine is inside of us and it opens the spiritual eye," he said. "From there, we start to see where the medicine is growing. It shows itself to us. Once we complete the harvest, we bring it back home and have another ceremony to the medicine and give thanks to the Creator."
About the Native American Church of North America
The purpose of the Native American Church of North America is to foster and promote religious belief in Almighty GOD and the customs of Native American Tribes throughout North America in the worship to our Heavenly Father in promotion of morality, sobriety, industry, charity, right living and the cultivation of a spirit of self-respect, and brotherly love and union among its membership throughout North America. As a people they place explicit faith, hope and belief in Almighty GOD and declare full, competent and everlasting faith in our church, through which they worship for religion and the protection of the sacramental use of Peyote.
Native American Group to Digitize 20,000 Archival Pages Linked to Quaker-Run Indian Boarding Schools
By Luis Andres Henao, Associated Press
In this photo taken between 1869 and 1895, provided by the Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College, school children of the Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandotte Mission Indian Territory, gather for a portrait in Wyandotte, Okla. This image is one of 20,000 archival pages related to boarding schools for Native youths operated by the Quakers that will be digitized by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. (Photo Credit: Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College)
A coalition advocating for Native American people traumatized by an oppressive system of boarding schools for Native youths plans to digitize 20, 000 archival pages related to schools in that system that were operated by the Quakers.
The Quakers and other faith groups including Episcopalians, Methodists and Catholics have in recent years either begun or increased efforts to research and atone for their prior roles in the boarding school system that Native children were forced to attend, and that cut them off from their families, tribes and traditions.
For decades, documents related to Quaker-operated Indian boarding schools have been largely unstudied, as they exist in remote and dispersed collections with limited access, said leaders of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. Now, the coalition, also known as NABS, will make them available to scholars and nonspecialists by housing digital records on a public database.
The NABS says it will digitize archival pages related to Quaker-operated
Indian boarding schools.The records will provide a better understanding of the
conditions that children received at these schools. (Photo Credit: National Native
American Boarding School Healing Coalition)
The records will provide a better understanding of the conditions that children experienced at these schools, and help the compilation of statistics, including how many children went missing and died, said Stephen Curley, director of digital archives for NABS.
“There are hundreds of schools that were operated historically with the sole aim to sever ties between child and family and between child and cultural heritage ... so a lot of instances of abuse were administered to these children," said Curley, a Navajo whose own family was affected by the boarding schools. The records, he said, will be crucial to confirming the anecdotal retelling of their harrowing experiences.
"Not to diminish people speaking up and telling their truths," Curley said, "but when it comes to providing testimony and having that inform what policy should look like, looking at the records is going to play an integral role to codify what happened next."
The initiative is funded by a grant of more than $124,000 from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission. It was awarded to NABS to work with Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College and Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College, both near Philadelphia.
"This is a profound moment because as we have been calling on churches to increase the accessibility of these records for years now, it's groups like these at these Quaker institutions who have responded to that call," said Samuel Torres, deputy CEO of NABS, and a member of the Mexica-Nahua Indigenous people.
Partnership leaders said NABS, Swarthmore and Haverford will scan 20,000 pages of enrollment papers, photographs, financial information, correspondence and administrative records this fall.
In this photo taken in 1906, provided by the Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford
College, teachers and students gather for a portrait at Tunesassa School in Tunesassa, New York.
(Photo Credit: Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College)
The records from Swarthmore and Haverford range from 1852 to 1945, according to project organizers. They include at least nine Quaker-operated Indian oarding schools in Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.
After the scanning, project leaders will hold an information session with tribal communities to discuss the findings. The project will include the production of a video with shared oral histories from boarding school survivors and their families.
"One of the reasons that I think the oral history component is so important is a lot of the records that we're going to be dealing with in this project are particularly from an institutional perspective, from the people who ran the boarding schools ... rather than from the children who were forced to attend those schools," said Sarah Horowitz, curator of rare books and manuscripts and head of Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford.
"So it's really important to get to those documents,” she said. “But it also means that those documents are not necessarily telling you, if you read them at face value, the stories of the communities... people may need to read against the grain ... to really get at the stories of the children."
The digitized records will be made publicly available in spring 2024 on a database called the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive, which NABS will launch later this year.
In this November 2019, photo provided by the National Native American Boarding School
Healing Coalition, Indian boarding school survivors pose for a group portrait at the coalition's
Healing Summit at the Tulalip Resort Casino in Tulalip, WA. (Photo Credit: National Native
American Boarding School Healing Coalition)
"Part of the impact of colonialism is that many written records describing the lives of Indigenous people are stored in archives like ours that are far away from descendant communities," said Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, associate curator for Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. She hopes that the partnership opens the way to further discussion of the role those religious institutions had in the operation of the schools.
"Those records can be really important for truth-telling processes and acknowledging and supporting the repair of past harms," she said. "By making these archival records available, by digitizing these records, we can help restore access to communities that were impacted.”
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Founding Father Gen. Anthony Wayne’s Legacy is Getting a Second Look
By JULIE CARR SMYTH
Associated Press
A sign at Wayne National Forest's Athens Ranger Station on U.S. Route 33 in Nelsonville is among
many that would have to be replaced if Ohio's only national forest undergoes a proposed name change
to "Buckeye National Forest.” (Photo Credit: Allie Vugrincic, WOSU)
Some 40 Native American tribes have ancestral ties to Wayne National Forest, a quarter-million acres spread across portions of Appalachian southeastern Ohio. Their citizens have never stopped helping the U.S. Forest Service manage this expanse of forested hills, hollows, streams and lakes even as the name recalls a violent past.
Now, a vigorous debate is underway over a Forest Service proposal to replace the name of Gen. Anthony Wayne, a founding father who Americans of an earlier era celebrated as an “Indian fighter,” with something more neutral: Buckeye National Forest, after the state tree.
Forest Manager Lee Stewart said tribes had been asking for a name change for decades, but their request was formalized last year as part of a sweeping review of derogatory place names undertaken by the Biden administration.
Since 2021, the names of about 650 places and geographic features across the country have been renamed, with involvement by the same federal board that in earlier eras helped get rid of the N-word and a pejorative word for Japanese.
"In thinking of the offensive nature (of the name) to tribes, it's the opportunity to begin to heal, to begin to connect our forest deeper than just around a name," Stewart said. "Ohio has thousands of years of history. The history here is very, very deep pre-history to historic times, where Wayne occupies his space, to the history once we became a state. So Buckeye, we feel, reflects that."
Lee Stewart, Forest Supervisor at Wayne National Forest, talks about the U.S. Forest Service's
proposal to change the forest's name to "Buckeye National Forest," after American Indian tribes
formally said they were offended by the name honoring Revolutionary War General Anthony Wayne.
(Photo Credit: Allie Vugrincic, WOSU)
Proponents see the name change as an act of respect for Indigenous people whose ancestors lived on the land and whose citizens continue to offer their skill and expertise to stewardship of the land, some through treaties with the U.S. government.
The forest’s 381 square miles (987 square kilometers) are used for timber and other natural resources, in addition to featuring campgrounds, a horseback riding network and off-highway vehicle trails.
Before a federal government purchase in 1934, the land was dug, blasted and mined for coal. It was 1951 when the forest was named for Wayne, a Revolutionary War leader whose legacy has been revisited during the nation's recent racial reckoning.
Wayne commanded Army forces during the Northwest Indian War, a confrontation on the American frontier that ended with the Battle of Fallen Timbers, a key victory over confederated Native forces that allied with the British. The resulting truce, the Treaty of Greenville, largely ceded Native rights to most of the territory that became the future state of Ohio, a result some these days see as "ethnic cleansing."
Logan York, a representative of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, said in a statement that Anthony Wayne`s actions "ultimately led to the forced removal at gunpoint of our Miami ancestors from our homelands in 1846."
"Wayne may be a Revolutionary War hero to some, but he is also the main villain in our story of resistance, trying to keep our homes and maintain our lives," said Logan, the tribal historic preservation officer. "For a National Forest to bear the name of Anthony Wayne is a harmful, and painful reminder and devalues us as Native peoples of Ohio."
Opposition to the proposed name change, which has an estimated $400,000 price tag, also is vigorous.
Donald Schultz, 89, who has lived in proximity to the forest all his life, dropped by Wayne headquarters this week to register his objections.
"I am concerned about changing the name of everything, just history," he said. "We need to keep the history this country had. We don't need to change the names of all the history."
Schultz said he recognizes the U.S. government "treated the people horribly that were here, but by the same token, those same people treated the people that were coming here horribly.``
"This was border warfare. It was ugly on all sides,” said Toledo-based historian Mary Stockwell, author of "Unlikely General: 'Mad' Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America" and a book about the removal of Native Americans from Ohio.
Shown is a Pennsylvania Historical Marker for Revolutionary War Gen. Anthony
Wayne. (Photo Credit: Dale K. Benington)
Stockwell opposes removing Wayne’s name from the forest. She believes he has been miscast by history as the "mad" general, when he actually viewed it as his "great misfortune" that President George Washington chose him “to come out to Ohio in 1791, raise an army and face the British-Indian coalition that was stopping the advance of the U.S. across the Ohio River."
“You take down all the statues and rename everything, that's not going to change our turbulent, creative, wonderful and often difficult past,” she said. “We’ve got to tell everybody's story”
Stewart said the Forest Service appreciates Wayne’s significant legacy, which included building the fort at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and inspiring the screen name of Hollywood icon John Wayne.
"We get it,” he said. "This isn’t about erasing Wayne out of history, it’s about reconciliation. To make (the tribes) say 'Wayne' every time they engage, it’s difficult."
It’s appropriate for societal viewpoints to evolve, York said.
"As we look back on history, today we all have increased knowledge that leads to greater understanding, and an excellent way to reflect that is not to forget the past but to change as we change as a people," he said in the tribal statement.
"Wayne might have been a hero to some but not to all, and National Forests are for everyone to enjoy equally, and the name should reflect that," York said.
For Grand Ronde Tribes, Reclaiming Land is a Way of Healing
By Cassandra Profita, Oregon Public Broadcasting
Cheryle Kennedy, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Chairwoman. Spirit Mountain Casino is
the reason the tribes were able to make the purchase, she said: “Spirit Mountain Casino has been
very profitable for us. It’s filled what the government said they would do and didn’t do.”
(Photo Credit: Brandon Swanson / OPB)
Walking between the battered, old industrial buildings that used to be the Blue Heron Paper Mill, Cheryle Kennedy stopped at one of the few places where you can still see Willamette Falls.
But something else caught her eye on top of a building across the river.
“American flag,” the chairwoman of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde said. “Almost like ‘keep out.’”
The Grand Ronde people lost nearly all of their land to broken treaties with the U.S. government and a termination policy that stripped the tribe of federal recognition in 1954.
“When I look at that flag, I see that I’m not welcome,” Kennedy said. “It’s a place of ownership to a nation that decided that they wanted to rid this land of me and my people.”
The land near Willamette Falls is a prominent example of how the Grand Ronde are reclaiming their place on Oregon’s landscape.
he tribes purchased the 23-acre Blue Heron Paper Mill site in 2019 with $15.29 million in profits from Spirit Mountain Casino, buying their way back to an area their ancestors were forced to leave after signing the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855.
Now, on a site that was surrounded by tribal villages before white settlers moved in, the Grand Ronde are moving quickly to demolish the industrial buildings that displaced them.
“Once all of this is down, we will be able to look at it differently,” Kennedy said. “This place needs healing. We all need healing. … We lived here and thrived, and as history moved forward, more and more was taken from us. It really makes you question your ability to live here in America, you know, supposedly the land of the free. No, that’s not true for us.”
The Willamette Falls site is among thousands of acres of land in the Willamette Valley the Grand Ronde tribes have purchased in recent years in an effort to reestablish traditional land management practices. They’ve developed programs to return cultural burning, native plants and Indigenous hunting and gathering practices to a landscape where housing, industry and agriculture have replaced key staples of their culture.
Through land purchases, donations and partnerships, the tribes are rolling back colonial developments to ensure tribal traditions continue.
Reconnecting with Willamette Falls
Kennedy’s family belongs to the Clackamas tribe, one of many folded into the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde following the 1855 treaties. Her ancestor, Chief Wacheno, signed the treaty for the Clackamas people, whose Kosh-huk-shix village was next to Willamette Falls.
Indigenous people in the Willamette Valley faced harassment and the threat of violence during colonization, and white settlers promised safety, reservation land, money, education and health care if the tribes agreed to sign treaties and leave their homeland.
But the settlers and American government broke the treaty promises. After the tribes left the falls, industrial development took over the site.
Over the past several years, demolition crews have torn down 23 of the 55 buildings at the former Blue Heron Paper Mill site, clearing the way for a new development called Tumwata Village.
Kennedy said the destruction is a form of healing.
“It’s been very difficult,” she said. “We used to be the owners from time immemorial of this place. Now it’s back into our ownership. …Our role here is to heal the land as best we can — healing ourselves because we are tied to the land.”
Tribal traditions depend on land
Bobby Mercier prunes hazel trees and gathers branches for basketry in a forest on
the Grand Ronde reservation in June 2021.(Photo Credit: Brandon Swanson / OPB)
After signing treaties with the U.S. government, dozens of tribes gave up their ancestral homelands across Western Oregon and moved to the Grand Ronde reservation in the Coast Range.
There, members of the newly formed Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde were able to continue some of the cultural traditions tied to Oregon’s landscape.
On today’s 11,500-acre reservation, the tribes manage the land for cultural purposes — seeding native plants and gathering first foods such as camas bulbs, burning meadows for elk hunting, and pruning hazel trees for basketry — as well as growing profitable timber.
Grand Ronde tribal member and cultural adviser Bobby Mercier and his nephew Jordan Mercier have a long family history filled with basketry. Their ancestors made piles of baskets to sell in markets, and a photo of their relative Martha Jane Sands stretches across a whole wall of the Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde.
A photo of Martha Jane Sands, second from right, with her family a pile of baskets she made.
(Photo Credit: Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde)
On a trip to gather branches for basket-making on reservation forestland, they spoke to each other in a native language called Chinuk Wawa about their plans to trim the trees and cut their sticks for basketry at the same time.
“The language is what ties us to our old people,” Bobby Mercier said. “They say that’s how they recognize us, that’s how they hear us.”
Before they began their work, they faced the hazel trees and sang to give thanks. Then, they fanned out to do some pruning and collect long, straight sticks for weaving.
“We’ve been doing this since the beginning of time,” Bobby Mercier said. “Forever we’ve been making baskets.”
The Grand Ronde tribes haven’t always had reservation land to manage for their cultural traditions.
The tribes were terminated by the U.S. government in 1954 in the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act, which stripped away federal recognition and all reservation land — except a cemetery. It was part of a national effort to end tribal sovereignty and assimilate Native Americans into United States culture.
Losing their land put tribal traditions like basketry, hunting and gathering at risk.
“This is one thing — weaving with hazel sticks — a lot of our grandmas did and our great grandmas, and it was actually the way that we survived,” Jordan Mercier said. “This is just something unique and special that we have and, you know, it almost went away.”
About The Author
Cassandra Profita is a reporter, producer and editor for OPB's Science & Environment unit.
She worked for The Daily Astorian newspaper before joining OPB and launching the Ecotrope environmental news blog. She produced radio and television stories as part of the EarthFix public media collaboration that covered the environment in the Pacific Northwest.
Cassandra is a fellow with the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources and the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environment Reporting. She’s gone out to sea to cover fisheries and marine heat waves and floated down the Klamath, Columbia and Willamette rivers to report on dam removal, sea lions and salmon. She’s ventured into active wildfires and flown over burned forests to investigate post-fire logging.
Her stories have won awards from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.
Cassandra grew up in Chicago and holds degrees in journalism from the University of Missouri and the University of Oregon.
Special Appreciation to Oregon Public Broadcasting for their permission to share this article.
Homepage Photo Courtesy of the Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center.
Tribal Courts Across The Country Are Expanding Holistic Alternatives To The Criminal Justice System
By Lee Egerstrom
Volunteers arrive at CSI Benner Township prison to build a sweat lodge. (L to R) Lon Navarre,
Lisa Yankton, Chaplain Erroll Wilson, Dr. Tom Weaver, Johnny Creed Coe (kneeling), Rev.Mattias
Peterson-Brandt, and Joy Sorensen Navarre. (Photo Credit: Cherokee Park United Church.)
A unique bond with Pennsylvania prisoners resulted in Minnesota volunteers spending a few days last October building a sweat lodge for incarcerated Native Americans who wanted a place to pray to improve their lives.
“It was a life changing, spiritual experience,” said Lisa Yankton, a Spirit Lake Dakota, Minneapolis poet, and Dakota language and culture teacher at American Indian Magnet School in St. Paul. That was how the experience impacted a volunteer.
Getting the sweat lodge up and going was also “a deeply personal, sacred, religious moment” for the volunteers and for Pennsylvania Department of Corrections personnel at State Correctional Institution Benner Township, said retired Chaplain Erroll Wilson.
Department officials and CSI Benner Township (SCI Benner) corrections staff watched construction and monitored the drumming and singing from Native prisoners. One Corrections official told Chaplain Wilson “he could feel the power of the spirit.”
“I don’t think there will be much institutional opposition to sweat lodges at Pennsylvania prisons going forward,” Chaplain Wilson said.
But foremost, the sweat lodge was created for the benefit of prisoners.
Volunteers dig up ground where the sweat lodge will be placed.
(Photo Credit: Cherokee Park United Church)
It is extremely important for incarcerated Native Americans “who want to change their lives. They need strength and a place to pray,” said former inmate Benjamin Simpson (Lakota/Taino). He is a Pennsylvanian and an original organizer of legal actions that brought the sweat lodge to reality.
“I explain to non-Natives, people who don’t understand, that the sweat lodge is a place for rebirth. It’s a lot like baptism,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is important for prisoners who want to turn their lives around.”
He and another former innate, Marvin “Running River” Banks (Native American/Congo), began petitioning corrections officials for a sweat lodge two years ago at SCI Benner, a medium security prison for males located at Bellefonte, near College Park in central Pennsylvania.
A prison in Pittsburgh had a sweat lodge about 35 years ago. It was destroyed in a flood 30 years ago and wasn’t restored. The Benner Township sweat lodge is the first since then in the state’s 26 prison system.
The prisoners went to court when their petition was rejected. They won. The court ruled SCI Benner and other correctional institutions should allow sweat lodge ceremonies for constitutionally protected religious purposes. It also ruled the institutions didn’t need to provide the sweat lodge.
Given security considerations mostly anchored in not understanding the religious nature of sweat lodge ceremonies, the agreement with the Department of Corrections will allow Native prisons to have four such events annually.
The sweat lodge’s “bones’ and overall structure is complete.
(Photo Credit: Cherokee Park United Church)
With legal matters out of the way, prisoners, Native American chaplains and others went to work finding allies and supporters. Not surprisingly, that brought them in contact with Cherokee Park United Church (CPUC) in St. Paul’s West Side. It is a civil rights-active congregation with long ties with the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Tribal Community (MMDTC).
The church is a merger of both Presbyterian and United Church of Christ congregations and continues to be members of both church bodies. Active within the church are MMDTC members connected to Native causes and events.
These latter ties led to Simpson, Banks and another prisoner, Dale Arnold, along with their prison chaplain friends, to reach out to the church, said Sue Sorensen Navarre, a MMDTC member, Twin Cities business owner and CPUC church member.
She and her husband Lon Navarre, a pipekeeper for the Mendota Mdewakanton tribe and retired St. Paul Public Works employee, were connected with people involved with the project. That included Chaplain Ammon Bailey, a Native American who provides services under contract with Pennsylvania Corrections, and Johnny Creed Coe, a nationally known artist from Pittsburgh who is Lakota and originally from South Dakota.
Sue Sorensen Navarre told The Circle that Coe is a long-time sundancer who danced for four years at the American Indian Movement Sundance at Pipestone. “His sons dance there now,” she said.
Among Minnesota volunteers who pitched in on the effort was Dr. Tom Weaver, a retired Minneapolis and St. Cloud doctor who also had practiced medicine in prisons.
Such talents and personal commitments made a fit with the prisoners for the Cherokee Park church. It has a long involvement in civil rights activities and Martin Luther King Jr. observances, and with powwows with the Mendota Mdewakanton community.
Former Benner Township prisoners Arnold and Banks used an award from their successful litigation against the Pennsylvania corrections system to seed a GoFundMe campaign started by the Rev. Matthias Peterson-Brandt at CPUC.
In the GoFundMe appeal, Pastor Peterson-Brandt explains that the church (CPUC) is acting as the fiscal steward for United Native Prisoners of PA’s religious ceremonies and works to procure supplies needed for sweat lodges.
These efforts have been in the works for several years. The fundraising objective is $10,000 that will be used for the following items:
$2,500 for tarpaulin covers, $500 for saplings for the lodge frame, $1,000 for lava stones, $1,500 for outdoor heavy-duty storage boxes for sacred items and tools, $1,000 for materials to build a lean-to structure for changing clothes, $500 for sacred items, sage, smudge can, antlers, water dipper, and buckets for water; $1,300 for cords of wood sufficient for seven or eight sweat lodge ceremonies, $400 for shovels, globes and tools for tending fires; and $1,300 for miscellaneous costs such as permit fees, honorarium for helpers and elders, waterline installation to the ceremony grounds, plus twine, blankets and seating around the ceremonial grounds.
The sweat lodge is done and ready for use by the Native inmates.
(Photo Credit: Cherokee Park United Church)
“Establishing this sweat lodge will help many other inmates on their path of rehabilitation in the future,” Peterson-Brandt states in the appeal.
Such impacted prisoners do move on with their lives, Simpson and Banks said in an interview. They, for instance, are now working on establishing an American Indian Movement (AIM) chapter in Pennsylvania. Dennis Banks (Leech Lake Ojibwe), a founder of the AIM who died in 2017, continues to serve as an inspiration for the Pennsylvania movement but is not an ancestor, Running River Banks said.
The latter Banks has also written a book, published in 2021, Our Ancestors Are Proud! A Native American Prison Story. It is available through bookstores or from Amazon. And, he said, he has another book, Forgotten Nation, which will be published within weeks. It is a look back at the long Native American history of this country that is usually ignored, Banks said.
Several participants in this joint Minnesota-Pennsylvania sweat lodge project used terms such as “spiritual,” “sacred,” “life-changing” to describe what they experienced in building the sweat lodge and then watching Native prisoners put it to use along with drummers and singers.
They weren’t alone, said Lisa Yankton. “As we were finishing, two eagles soared above us.” It was as if they were “checking out what we had done. I’ll never forget it.”
The GoFundMe online link can be found at https://gofund.me/7a47c7dd. The search title on the site is: “Inmates Need a Place to Pray.”
Additional information is available at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-native-inmates-religious-rights and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cherokeeparkchurch/posts/10157972893303004.
Running River Bank’s book, Our Ancestors Are Proud! A Native American Prison Story, is on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Our-Ancestors-Are-Proud-American/dp/1637510268.
About The Author
Writer Lee Egerstrom traditionally covers agriculture, food companies, agribusiness and international trade. Past president of the National Association of Agricultural Journalists and correspondent to the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington in the 1970s, most of his work over the past 25 years has dealt with issues and public policies affecting agriculture, international trade and rural communities.
Honoring Native Foodways Keeps Dietary Traditions Alive
University of North Carolina at Pembroke students and faculty celebrate native food traditions by sampling selections indigenous to the Americas. (Photo credit: UNC Pembroke American Indian Studies)
By TOMEKA SINCLAIR
The Robesonian
PEMBROKE, N.C. (AP) _ With the Honoring Native Foodways event marking its 10th year, Professor Jane Haladay celebrates the growth in knowledge of indigenous foods over the past decade.
``It started out very small, as sort of a pre-Thanksgiving, community potluck,'' she said. ``Community at that time meant basically students, faculty and staff. It's grown into a much larger event and it has become a community potluck also for the community outside of the campus.''
Haladay is a professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke. She is one of the organizers for Honoring Native Foodways, an educational, potluck-style event focused on indigenous foods.
According to Haladay, the four main goals of Honoring Native Foodways are to celebrate Native American Heritage Month in November, to educate those who participate about the vast diversity of indigenous foods of the Americas by tasting them, to emphasize the health benefits of indigenous foods and to share how people might incorporate some of these foods into their diets.
``We continue to emphasize the theme of traditional American Indian foods and their foodways, their histories, their diversity of those food, the fact that people are eating those commonly today but may or may not know those foods are traditional to native peoples of North America,'' Haladay said.
Professor Haladay heads the annual Honoring Native Foodways gathering. (Photo Credit: UNC Pembroke)
``I say every time native people sit down to eat, it's Thanksgiving,'' Haladay said. ``The term Thanksgiving is not from an indigenous origin, but the idea of sitting down and recognizing and acknowledging the food happens more than once.
``Traditional native cultures have always had first-foods feasts or harvest feasts or some kind of ceremonial marker of the abundance of their harvest or their foods; but it varies from tribe to tribe and region to region.''
Foods that represent the indigenous cultures include earthy themes, such as wild rice and beans; mushrooms; game meats, such as bison and venison; and vegetables, such as turnips, sweet potatoes, corn and squash.
Sean Sherman, a critically acclaimed, award-winning indigenous chef and guest at Honoring Native Foodways, showcased some of these cooking themes during the Honoring Native Foodways event. Sherman has been cooking across the United States and Mexico for the past 30 years, and has become renowned internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods. His main focus has been on the revitalization and evolution of indigenous foods systems throughout North America.
Author and Master Chef Sean Sherman. (Photo Credit: The Sioux Chef)
Sherman attending the Honoring Native Foodways event at UNC Pembroke. (Photo Credit: The Sioux Chef Instagram)
"The Sioux Chef" contains recipes using ingredients indigenous to North America. (Photo Credit: The Sioux Chef)
His cookbook, ``The Sioux Chef,'' contains recipes that only use ingredients native to North America. This means no flour or wheat-based products, dairy, beef, chicken or pork. The book recently won the James Beard Award.
``Indigenous food to me is food that rises from the plants and animals, the ecosystem of a specific place that has been there for millennia,'' Haladay said. ``And that doesn't mean it existed without human cultivation and interaction because it does.
``A lot of the indigenous foods we have today and that native people have had historically require some kind of human interaction to be cultivated.''
From left: Squash and Apple Soup and Three Sisters Mash.
The indigenous food culture does come with its health challenges. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Type 2 diabetes is most common in American Indian and Alaska Native people.
``Native communities have a lot of high levels of diabetes, high-blood pressure and some cancers,'' Haladay said. ``A lot of these diseases are linked to foods.''
Haladay said this is because of historical policy changes that have been forced out of native traditions.
``Earlier 19th century policies that work to exterminate native people's foods were conscious attempts to also subdue native people and bring them under control, so there's a large history behind why a lot of these indigenous traditional food sources and foodways practices have declined or why many people don't know about them and practice them,'' Haladay said.
Sherman's Wallet Fillet.
Squash and Wood Sorrel.
Haladay believes getting back to the basics, to traditional native cuisine, is the answer to healthier indigenous communities. Honoring Native Foodways was established to bring awareness of the fact that the foods still are here today.
``We should just go back to the simplest stuff,'' she said. ``The health benefits of these foods are amazing.''
Haladay and the Department of American Indian Studies recently decided to continue honoring native foods throughout the year on campus by establishing an Honoring Native Foodways Cooking Club, which meets at the Chancellor's Residence kitchen once a month.
``We just chat and cook, and at the end of the hour we have five or six dishes that are prepared, and we make a plate and sit down and eat together,'' she said. ``That is the monthly Thanksgiving.''
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Information from: The Robesonian, http://www.robesonian.com
Lead Photo and Food Image Credits: The Sioux Chef
The Appalachian Trail: the World's Largest Hike
By Ania Borowska
Four hundred years ago in the mid-1800s, the majority of people lived in environments of large fields and forests. Experiencing mother nature was a part of daily life. When the Industrial Revolution transformed society in the 19th century, what was once considered a simple walk in the outdoors became a luxury for many.
The year 2020 brought forward major changes in the hiking world. While gyms were closed during the pandemic and social distancing was the rule of law, hiking became more popular, which is substantiated in the number of hikes, the number of users recording hikes and number of hikes per user.
(Source: Outdoor Foundation, Statista 2022)
The trend continues strong and hiking statistics for 2021, currently being calculated, promise to be even stronger. There are thousands of trails to traverse and the Appalachian Trail is known to be the longest hiking-only trail in the world.
Guest Author: Heritage Month: Extending Our Boundaries
(Editor’s Note: This Heritage Month special will be published until January 10.)
Carnell Chosa, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Santa Fe Indian School Leadership Institute. He is from Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico.
I grew up without a father. As a team, my mother, Aunt Pat, and grandmother shared that position. And for the majority of the time, my grandfather Guadalupe Chosa filled the role. This is probably not unique to many of our youth. And what may seem to be a deficit situation to many can also be an incredibly rewarding experience and opportunity.
It was for me.
You see, in addition to this team of substitute father figures, there was something special about growing up in a small Indigenous community where extended families shared one home and where neighbors and distant relatives were expected to participate in your growing up.
Because our people are connected through land, history and ancestry, the community shared the same core values of contribution, relationship, communality, responsibility, engagement and commitment. What moved this cultural context forward was that the focus of this transference was on youth.
My grandfather cherished this role for all his grandchildren. Growing up in his home, we found that our teaching and learning time happened over meals, but most of the time it was in the multiple farm fields we cared for in Jemez Pueblo. The core of his lesson was always that all young people have different types of gifts and talents to contribute to community. He stressed that their contribution would be more valuable in the future.
Carnell with his family in 1994, including his mom Martha Chosa, Aunt Pat Chosa, Grandma Lupe Chosa, and Grandpa Guadalupe Chosa.
The spirit of this type of intentional and organic programming guided by a sense of responsibility, inspired by creativity, and based on community participation and values, is the framework for the Leadership Institute's work with youth.
Founded in 1997, the Santa Fe Indian School Leadership Institute (LI) serves as a convener think tank to initiate community dialogue on issues important to communities. Specific to LI youth work, this dialogue creates programming opportunities that have guiding principles of community service, mentorship/networking, critical thinking, and policy awareness. Over the course of 20 years these guiding principles have served thousands of youth in our Summer Policy Academy, Brave Girls, Senior Honors Project, New Mexico Summer Youth Tribal Employment, Pueblo Pathways Boys Mentoring, Art and Archeology Academy, and Community Institutes.
Through this work, we have come to further appreciate how powerful and valuable youth participation is to tribal communities. You may be familiar with the saying that adults feel what they say to youth goes in one ear and out the other. Fortunately, our experience has been quite the opposite. In our experience youth today seem to be more aware of what’s happening both internally and externally in tribal communities in regard to policy issues. Today, they are more critical of the social, economic and racial conditions that impact us personally. And they are more curious about and draw from the historical road we have traveled as a people. In our experience, they are looking to be more actively involved.
As a result, our tribal communities must respond. We must not lose the opportunity to engage a young person. As my grandfather shared with me, each young person within our relatively small communities is so valuable and has their own particular gift to contribute. The LI took on this challenge 20 years ago and has learned that youth need opportunity. There are many ways to engage youth. For the LI, our formula is to create space where youth can exercise their voice and activate their advocacy.
Creating space for youth means giving them your time through mentorship, providing learning that is relevant to their lives as Indigenous people, and convening them so that they create a network, or community of diverse talents. This type of resurgent space has created an exciting energy to engage in community. One interesting program, New Mexico Summer Youth Tribal Employment, is an excellent example of how we engage youth in their community.
Over the course of four summers, through generous funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the LI placed 325 youth in meaningful internships in their communities. Paying close attention to their career interest areas or majors in college, the LI worked with professionals in tribal communities and urban organizations to serve as host sites and mentors for youth. Providing this type of space for youth to engage meaningfully during their summer created great outcomes, including tribes hiring their youth for full-time positions, offering them employment to manage tribal websites or blogs while in college, and reintroducing youth workforce programs. The greatest outcome for the LI was igniting the engagement space so that youth know that their skills are valued and that communities know that our youth are talented, available and looking for a pathway home.
First Nations Development Institute’s blog series during Native American Heritage month is a great way to celebrate our communities. It is also a great time to reflect upon how we engage young people who are a part of our community. Extending the boundaries of what home means is critical so that the young person contributing in the community through culture or career is just as valuable as the young person in Albuquerque or Washington, D.C., who is advocating for their community. I believe this is what my grandfather meant when he shared that someday our communities will extend our boundaries through engaging our youth.
Native America Today thanks First Nations Development Institute and Native Stories, where this article originally appeared. To learn how First Nations is making an impact, click here.
The Story of Millie Durgan Beyond “The Searchers”
By Scott Rains
A rare photo of Millie Durgan late in life.
I was fortunate enough to be able to share this amazing story of a Kiowa captive. Sure, it’s been told before, but this was to be the first time told from the Native American side of things. If you’ve ever seen “The Searchers,” this is its source story … but way cooler.
The Legend of Millie Durgan
The tale of Millie Durgan is one woven from the fabric of many stories.
Elements have been told through time, including in the noted book “The Searchers,” which inspired a movie that starred John Wayne. But Candy Kauley Morgan, a descendant of Millie Durgan, said this is the first time the Native American — specifically, Kiowa — story has been told.
A historical sign sharing Millie Durgan’s story was put in place on Oklahoma 19 approximately 20 years ago. (Photo Credit: Scott Rains/Constitution Staff)
“I am the great-great-granddaughter of Kiowa captive Millie Durgan,” Morgan said. “She was 18 months old when Kiowa warriors raided her grandmother’s ranch, where she was living with her Irish family in 1864 near Fort Belknap, Texas.”
The saga begins shortly before the end of the Civil War. It takes place during a peak in the battle between Native Americans who had been living on this continent for centuries and an encroaching new nation.
On Oct. 13, 1864, several hundred Kiowa and Comanche Indians raided home sites in the Elm Creek valley of western Young County, Texas. The Fitzpatrick Ranch was one. It belonged to Durgan’s grandmother and was where the baby was living with her grandmother, her mother and older sister, Charlottie, Morgan said. A family of freed slaves also lived on the ranch.
Millie Durgan’s oldest sister, Charlottie, following her return from less than a year as a Kiowa captive. She had tribal tattoos on her face and arms but was able to assimilate back into Texas society.
During the attack, the Kiowas killed Millie Durgan’s mother and a member of the ranch hand’s family, then took anything of value and set the ranch house on fire, Morgan said. One of the warriors returned to the house as it was burning and found little Millie crawling out from under a bed.
“That man was Au-Soant-Sai-Mah, a noted Kiowa warrior and a partner of Kiowa chief Set-Ankeah (Sitting Bear) or Satank,” Morgan said. “Both of these men were members of the Ko-eet-senko, a warrior society composed of the 10 bravest members of the tribe.”
Au-Soant-Sai-Mah and his wife were childless, so he put Millie on his horse and took her back to their camp and she became their daughter.
“He picked her up and saw her frightened gray eyes and his sympathy and interest was aroused; he thought of his wife and decided to take the girl home,” Morgan said. “He held her in his arms, took her on his horse and cared for her on the long furious dash back to the Wichitas.”
“Millie’s mother, Sue, and a son of Mary Johnson were killed during the raid,” she said.
Durgan’s grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Anderson Carter Fitzpatrick; uncle; oldest sister Charlottie (Lottie) Elizabeth Durgan; and four people from the ranch hand’s family — Mary Johnson and her three children: Jube, Lottie and John, were also captured by the Kiowas — Morgan said. Millie’s uncle was eventually killed. Within a year her grandmother and Lottie were returned. The girl had tribal tattoos on her face and arms. They assimilated back into their lives as settlers, Morgan said. Durgan, however, became Kiowa.
John Wayne in a publicity photo for the film, "The Searchers," 1956. (Photo Credit: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)
In the movie, John Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards, was based on Mary Johnson’s husband, Britt Johnson, a freed slave and ranch foreman who was instrumental in obtaining the release of the captives, Morgan said.
“He (Johnson) traded food blankets and other things for the release of his wife and children, Mrs. Fitzpatrick and Lottie (Millie’s grandma and sister),” Morgan said. “That movie is thought to be about Cynthia Ann Parker, but actually the producers researched several stories about captures, including my great-great-grandmother’s story.”
Durgan led a remarkably different existence than most Kiowa captives, Morgan said.
“It was customary that captives lead a rather hard life and were not much better off than slaves — that wasn’t the case for Millie,” Morgan said. “She was adopted into the tribe and treated well by her new family.”
J.T. Goombi, another Durgan descendant, told how Durgan received her Kiowa name of Sain-To Hoodle. “That means ‘She Killed a Cow,’” Goombi said. “Kids stirred up the livestock and they came running through camp and she grabbed one around the neck and, I guess, she killed it trying to hold it still.”
Identity Concealed
Durgan was raised among traditional Kiowa customs, and Kiowa was the only language she knew, Morgan said. She married a Kiowa named Goombi and her true identity was not known until three years before her death in 1934. Goombi was a scout with Troop L, 7th Cavalry, stationed at Fort Sill. Goombi — also Goomby or Gumby — was her third husband. He was born in 1849 and died in 1908, and from their union came eight children: Mary, Minnie, Jennie, Lillian, Jane, Ellen, Mary and Joseph. Morgan is a descendant of Ellen. Durgan’s first marriage was to Pe-ahtone-ty. They were married in the Kiowa custom and did not have any children, Morgan said. He died before allotment. Her second marriage was to Maun-kau-pate and he also died. They had one son, Au-tau-bo, also known as George Goomby.
J.T. Goombi said Durgan’s light skin and fair hair color were things she hid about herself through most of her life. She would peel green walnut shells and rub the inside onto her skin to stain it darker. When she went in public to deal with white people, she would cover herself with a blanket to remain barely visible underneath.
The Rainy Mountain Indian Baptist Church near Mountain View is where Durgan’s spiritual legacy was forged for her generations to follow, Morgan said.
“When the Baptist missionaries came to Rainy Mountain she refused to take up their religion,” Morgan said. “She was brought up in the Indian religion and had a firm belief in the old idols and medicines.”
Legacy of Faith
The Baptist missionaries wooed her with the sewing circles that took place in the fellowship hall, Morgan said. She enjoyed the activity and she was quilting at the church well before she ever became a Christian, she said. That conversion had an effect on the family line as several teachers, including Morgan’s father, Reuben Kauley, have become preachers.
“All her children adopted the Christian religion and at the death of her youngest son she became a Christian so she could meet her children in the afterlife,” Morgan said. “Her legacy is my family’s faith.”
Millie Durgan’s grave in the Rainy Mountain KCA Cemetery is shaded under a cedar tree’s broad trunk and hovering canopy that stands as timeless as her story. (Photo Credit: Scott Rains/Constitution Staff)
About the Author
Scott Rains is a reporter at the Lawton Publishing Company is an adventurer, poet, pauper, and man about town. He also describes himself as an old school journalist.
Tribe Sues Cal State for Dumping on Sacred Land
Traditional markings and blessed sage adorn the sacred tribal land.
In an attempt to protect the most significant remaining parcel of sacred tribal land in Southern California, the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation – Belardes and the California Cultural Resources Preservation Alliance (CCRPA), filed a lawsuit against California State University-Long Beach last fall, and the litigation has been delayed owing to the pandemic.
The university dumped large quantities of construction debris and dirt on Puvungna, a 22-acre parcel of land on campus that holds religious, cultural and historical significance for the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation - Belardes, the Gabrielino/Tongva, and several other Native American groups in Southern California. These tribal groups’ legal and historical rights are being buried in an apparent effort by the CSU system to move toward “capping” this site in order to clear the way to develop it. The goal of the lawsuit is to see the land restored and obtain a Memorandum of Understanding to permanently protect the land.
Trucks dumping unclean soil on Puvungna.
“CSU has repeatedly tried to take over this sacred land from its original owners, the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples,” said Matias Belardes, Chairman of the Tribal Council of the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation. “We are asking that the university restore the site and agree to a Memorandum of Understanding that would give permanent protection to this site.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has closed the courts, slowed the legal process and delayed the timeline for addressing the damage done to this land.
“We understand that the CSULB administration is facing challenges under COVID-19, but the university has a legal and moral responsibility to remove the construction dirt and debris from this historic site, which has been sacred ground since time immemorial,” said Belardes. “This is not a difficult thing to do. It’s time for the University to end this oppressive act and to respect our people and our sacred land.”
The university’s actions fly in the face of the basic rights of California’s native people as well as a recent executive order issued by Governor Gavin Newsom, in which he apologized on behalf of California’s history of “violence, maltreatment and neglect” of Native American peoples and urged the state to take steps to move toward healing and clarifying the historical record. The dumping activity also violates state law AB 52, which requires CSULB to consult with traditionally and culturally related tribal groups designated by the Native American Heritage Commission before taking any action that would undermine the integrity of this sacred site.
A group of tribal members pose at Puvungna.
Members of the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, the Tongva/Gabrielino and other tribal nations hold ceremonies on Puvungna throughout the year. Puvungna is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and on the California Native American Heritage Commission’s Sacred Lands Inventory.
At this time, the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation - Belardes has an active lawsuit against CSULB to attempt to pressure the university to take appropriate steps to restore this sacred site. As the parties continue to negotiate toward a potential settlement, they are waiting for comments from the State Historic Preservation Office on the University’s proposed treatment plan for the land. Because of the pandemic, this response from the State, and the negotiations themselves, are moving very slowly. It is a point of stress and frustration for members of the Native American community, where each and every day the desecration of this land remains unremedied.
Cover Photo Credit: Daily Forty-Niner
Rare Artifacts from Robert Nittolo Collection on Exhibit in New York
Rare Native American artifacts are on display at Fort Ticonderoga, New York in the exhibition “The Art of Resistance: Selections from the Robert N. Nittolo Collection” for a limited time only through October 2019. These items have never been put on view before, and are considered the most significant private collection of 18th century militaria.
Objects include a rare Native American style bag with ornamentation known as quillwork and a war club which represent the distinctive martial material culture of Native Americans by the late 18th century. These items reveal the unique artistic vocabulary of Native peoples and stand as a reminder of the significant place Native Americans held in the conflicts that shaped North American history.
“This installation recognizes the significant role of Native communities in the fate of the continent, and encourage increasing dialogue between these First Nations and the descendants of the Europeans they fought against and alongside over the long 18th century,” said Matthew Keagle, curator, Fort Ticonderoga. “The artifacts and histories of conflict are the starting point for conversations that further Fort Ticonderoga’s mission to preserve, educate, and provoke an active discussion about the past and its importance to present and future generations.”
An original Society of the Cincinnati gold eagle medal.
Fort Ticonderoga tells the story of the military experience of the early modern world, and the collision of cultures from America, Europe, and Africa that shaped North American history. With an important Native American history, this exhibit highlights the pivotal Native American role in the wars of the 18th century and the unique material culture and artistic traditions of Native America. Despite these conflicts, these traditions and cultures have persisted and are found across North America.
Last year, Fort Ticonderoga had on public display one of the rarest and most important objects from the nation’s founding – an original Society of the Cincinnati gold eagle medal, a priceless Revolutionary War medal. This piece is one of two surviving examples produced in Paris in 1783 for purchase by officers of the Continental Army.
Book Excerpt: The Soul of the Indian
By Charles Alexander Eastman (Santee Dakota)
Charles Alexander Eastman (February 19, 1858 – January 8, 1939) was a Boston University-educated physician and also regarded as an accomplished writer, national lecturer who wrote and spoke about Sioux history and American Indian affairs.
After working as a doctor on various reservations in South Dakota, Eastman became politically engaged and worked to improve the lives of youths. He founded thirty-two Native American chapters of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and also helped begin the Boy Scouts of America.
Eastman is thought by many to be the first Native American author to write about American history from the Native American point of view.
Excerpt from The Soul of the Indian, published 1911:
The Great Mystery
The original attitude of the American Indian toward the Eternal, the “Great Mystery” that surrounds and embraces us, was as simple as it was exalted. To him it was the supreme conception, bringing with it the fullest measure of joy and satisfaction possible in this life.
The worship of the “Great Mystery” was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker. None might exhort or confess or in any way meddle with the religious experience of another. Among us all men were created sons of God and stood erect, as conscious of their divinity. Our faith might not be formulated in creeds, nor forced upon any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselyting, nor persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists.
There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky! He who enrobes Himself in filmy veils of cloud, there on the rim of the visible world where our Great-Grandfather Sun kindles his evening camp-fire, He who rides upon the rigorous wind of the north, or breathes forth His spirit upon aromatic southern airs, whose war-canoe is launched upon majestic rivers and inland seas—He needs no lesser cathedral!
That solitary communion with the Unseen which was the highest expression of our religious life is partly described in the word bambeday, literally “mysterious feeling,” which has been variously translated “fasting” and “dreaming.” It may better be interpreted as “consciousness of the divine.”
The first bambeday, or religious retreat, marked an epoch in the life of the youth, which may be compared to that of confirmation or conversion in Christian experience. Having first prepared himself by means of the purifying vapor-bath, and cast off as far as possible all human or fleshly influences, the young man sought out the noblest height, the most commanding summit in all the surrounding region. Knowing that God sets no value upon material things, he took with him no offerings or sacrifices other than symbolic objects, such as paints and tobacco. Wishing to appear before Him in all humility, he wore no clothing save his moccasins and breech-clout. At the solemn hour of sunrise or sunset he took up his position, overlooking the glories of earth and facing the “Great Mystery,” and there he remained, naked, erect, silent, and motionless, exposed to the elements and forces of His arming, for a night and a day to two days and nights, but rarely longer. Sometimes he would chant a hymn without words, or offer the ceremonial “filled pipe.” In this holy trance or ecstasy the Indian mystic found his highest happiness and the motive power of his existence.
When he returned to the camp, he must remain at a distance until he had again entered the vapor-bath and prepared himself for intercourse with his fellows. Of the vision or sign vouchsafed to him he did not speak, unless it had included some commission which must be publicly fulfilled. Sometimes an old man, standing upon the brink of eternity, might reveal to a chosen few the oracle of his long-past youth.
The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity. They forget, perhaps, that his religion forbade the accumulation of wealth and the enjoyment of luxury. To him, as to other single-minded men in every age and race, from Diogenes to the brothers of Saint Francis, from the Montanists to the Shakers, the love of possessions has appeared a snare, and the burdens of a complex society a source of needless peril and temptation. Furthermore, it was the rule of his life to share the fruits of his skill and success with his less fortunate brothers. Thus he kept his spirit free from the clog of pride, cupidity, or envy, and carried out, as he believed, the divine decree—a matter profoundly important to him.
It was not, then, wholly from ignorance or improvidence that he failed to establish permanent towns and to develop a material civilization. To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one’s fellow-men. All who have lived much out of doors know that there is a magnetic and nervous force that accumulates in solitude and that is quickly dissipated by life in a crowd; and even his enemies have recognized the fact that for a certain innate power and self-poise, wholly independent of circumstances, the American Indian is unsurpassed among men.
The red man divided mind into two parts,—the spiritual mind and the physical mind. The first is pure spirit, concerned only with the essence of things, and it was this he sought to strengthen by spiritual prayer, during which the body is subdued by fasting and hardship. In this type of prayer there was no beseeching of favor or help. All matters of personal or selfish concern, as success in hunting or warfare, relief from sickness, or the sparing of a beloved life, were definitely relegated to the plane of the lower or material mind, and all ceremonies, charms, or incantations designed to secure a benefit or to avert a danger, were recognized as emanating from the physical self.
The rites of this physical worship, again, were wholly symbolic, and the Indian no more worshiped the Sun than the Christian adores the Cross. The Sun and the Earth, by an obvious parable, holding scarcely more of poetic metaphor than of scientific truth, were in his view the parents of all organic life. From the Sun, as the universal father, proceeds the quickening principle in nature, and in the patient and fruitful womb of our mother, the Earth, are hidden embryos of plants and men. Therefore our reverence and love for them was really an imaginative extension of our love for our immediate parents, and with this sentiment of filial piety was joined a willingness to appeal to them, as to a father, for such good gifts as we may desire. This is the material or physical prayer.
The elements and majestic forces in nature, Lightning, Wind, Water, Fire, and Frost, were regarded with awe as spiritual powers, but always secondary and intermediate in character. We believed that the spirit pervades all creation and that every creature possesses a soul in some degree, though not necessarily a soul conscious of itself. The tree, the waterfall, the grizzly bear, each is an embodied Force, and as such an object of reverence.
The Indian loved to come into sympathy and spiritual communion with his brothers of the animal kingdom, whose inarticulate souls had for him something of the sinless purity that we attribute to the innocent and irresponsible child. He had faith in their instincts, as in a mysterious wisdom given from above; and while he humbly accepted the supposedly voluntary sacrifice of their bodies to preserve his own, he paid homage to their spirits in prescribed prayers and offerings.
In every religion there is an element of the supernatural, varying with the influence of pure reason over its devotees. The Indian was a logical and clear thinker upon matters within the scope of his understanding, but he had not yet charted the vast field of nature or expressed her wonders in terms of science. With his limited knowledge of cause and effect, he saw miracles on every hand,—the miracle of life in seed and egg, the miracle of death in lightning flash and in the swelling deep! Nothing of the marvelous could astonish him; as that a beast should speak, or the sun stand still. The virgin birth would appear scarcely more miraculous than is the birth of every child that comes into the world, or the miracle of the loaves and fishes excite more wonder than the harvest that springs from a single ear of corn.
Who may condemn his superstition? Surely not the devout Catholic, or even Protestant missionary, who teaches Bible miracles as literal fact! The logical man must either deny all miracles or none, and our American Indian myths and hero stories are perhaps, in themselves, quite as credible as those of the Hebrews of old. If we are of the modern type of mind, that sees in natural law a majesty and grandeur far more impressive than any solitary infraction of it could possibly be, let us not forget that, after all, science has not explained everything. We have still to face the ultimate miracle,—the origin and principle of life! Here is the supreme mystery that is the essence of worship, without which there can be no religion, and in the presence of this mystery our attitude cannot be very unlike that of the natural philosopher, who beholds with awe the Divine in all creation.
It is simple truth that the Indian did not, so long as his native philosophy held sway over his mind, either envy or desire to imitate the splendid achievements of the white man. In his own thought he rose superior to them! He scorned them, even as a lofty spirit absorbed in its stern task rejects the soft beds, the luxurious food, the pleasure-worshiping dalliance of a rich neighbor. It was clear to him that virtue and happiness are independent of these things, if not incompatible with them.
There was undoubtedly much in primitive Christianity to appeal to this man, and Jesus’ hard sayings to the rich and about the rich would have been entirely comprehensible to him. Yet the religion that is preached in our churches and practiced by our congregations, with its element of display and self-aggrandizement, its active proselytism, and its open contempt of all religions but its own, was for a long time extremely repellent. To his simple mind, the professionalism of the pulpit, the paid exhorter, the moneyed church, was an unspiritual and unedifying thing, and it was not until his spirit was broken and his moral and physical constitution undermined by trade, conquest, and strong drink, that Christian missionaries obtained any real hold upon him. Strange as it may seem, it is true that the proud pagan in his secret soul despised the good men who came to convert and to enlighten him!
Nor were its publicity and its Phariseeism the only elements in the alien religion that offended the red man. To him, it appeared shocking and almost incredible that there were among this people who claimed superiority many irreligious, who did not even pretend to profess the national faith. Not only did they not profess it, but they stooped so low as to insult their God with profane and sacrilegious speech! In our own tongue His name was not spoken aloud, even with utmost reverence, much less lightly or irreverently.
More than this, even in those white men who professed religion we found much inconsistency of conduct. They spoke much of spiritual things, while seeking only the material. They bought and sold everything: time, labor, personal independence, the love of woman, and even the ministrations of their holy faith! The lust for money, power, and conquest so characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race did not escape moral condemnation at the hands of his untutored judge, nor did he fail to contrast this conspicuous trait of the dominant race with the spirit of the meek and lowly Jesus.
He might in time come to recognize that the drunkards and licentious among white men, with whom he too frequently came in contact, were condemned by the white man’s religion as well, and must not be held to discredit it. But it was not so easy to overlook or to excuse national bad faith. When distinguished emissaries from the Father at Washington, some of them ministers of the gospel and even bishops, came to the Indian nations, and pledged to them in solemn treaty the national honor, with prayer and mention of their God; and when such treaties, so made, were promptly and shamelessly broken, is it strange that the action should arouse not only anger, but contempt? The historians of the white race admit that the Indian was never the first to repudiate his oath.
It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years’ experience of it, that there is no such thing as “Christian civilization.” I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and that the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.
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