WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Reflections on Spirit

Note 1: Trial by Error. 12/9/98

A most troublesome, and troubling, problem confronting anyone who wishes to comprehend the difference between native American and European phenomenology arises on the field of play separating conceptions and perceptions of spirit. The ground between those two poles, and indeed the issues dividing one from the other are truly polemical, is littered with an accumulation of mutilated corpses that began to return to the dust from which they sprang nearly five hundred years ago. Those old bones, and some more recently added to the pile, are mostly ignored by archeologists. No one wants to dig too deeply in the ground where the only reward is a bone not quite fossilized yet, not quite turned yet to stone. A bone like that might break apart in the hand that uncovers it and begin to whistle in the wind or speak a word too harshly honed against the ones who put it there.

Spirit has always been used to mark, like a continental divide, the difference between "primitive" tribal societies and the more cultured and civilized versions of human community that (dis)claim their existence. (Dis)ing the phenomenology of the other is a practice deeply rooted in Eurocentric racism. The concept of spirit in native American culture has always been (dis)dained by European scholars because they do not want to taint their own scholarship by drawing too close to the (dis)tastefully superstitious underbelly of tribal irrationality. There is much to be feared after all when one opens the door to the knock of Satanic forces and invites the devil willingly onto a field of play. Early sixteenth and seventeenth century religious bigots were aware of the danger native American spiritual beliefs and practices posed to the steadfastness of their isolated (from the rest of Europe and mother church) flocks of impressionable children. The fathers had no choice but to protect their defenseless believers from heathen gods, demons, and monsters.

Does anyone need examples? Bishop Landa in Mexico burned hundreds of Mayan books, and murdered the shamans who possessed them, in an effort to eradicate native spiritual beliefs because the existence of those beliefs interfered with the spread of Christian doctrine in central America. In Colorado, Black Kettle, a Cheyenne leader, brought his people to a peace conference in the mistaken belief that it would be possible for native and European people to coexist peacefully in the same land. A Methodist minister raised a mob of white religious bigots who butchered every man, woman and child in Black Kettle's band. Increase, or was it Cotton, Mather surrounded the entire Pequod nation in the dead of night and burned every one of them to death when he found out he would have to negotiate with a woman for the purchase of their land. Herman Melville wrote a novel about the incident and called it Moby Dick but no European scholar has ever noticed that the name of Ahab's whaler is the same as the native American nation good Christians and true destroyed so they would not be forced to pay for what they only intended to steal.

Spirit, in native American phenomenology, is a complex system of classification applied to the natural world as a means of differentiating between and among the nearly infinite forms of power that exist in, and animate, the living ecosystem of the earth. Spirit has nothing to do with gods, demons, or monsters; nothing whatsoever, in fact, to do with anything even remotely supernatural. To say that native Americans worship spirits the way Europeans worship God is so profoundly misguided, so profoundly in error of the truth, that I cannot even think of words adequate to the task of refuting the absurd character of that assertion. Europeans, in the arrogant belief that their culture defines universal human reality and practice, project their behavioral characteristics into the substance of all other cultures, even though they are always careful to point out the "primitive" incapacities of those cultures to live up the high ideals of their own practice and belief. The early Christian fathers of the New World committed two fundamental errors in their zeal to convert the natives to their religious point of view. They assumed that native Americans worshiped spirits because they could not conceive of any other form of relating human reality to the (super)natural. The first error, of course, was the mistaken assumption that native Americans perceived spirits as supernatural beings.

I wonder now as I write this whether it is possible to convince even one European that the word and concept of God is completely foreign to all Pre-Columbian tribal people. I am tempted to argue in this context that native Americans are, and always have been, atheistic. That would be the easiest thing to say and would settle the issue of the distinction once and for all. To say that native Americans do not believe in the existence of God, however, would be the same as missing the essential point of the distinction between spiritualism and religion which makes it possible to enter into a (dis)cussion of the Myth of Eden in the first place. As difficult as it might be to accept the notion that God is an invention of Eurocentric civilizations (Mediterrian, Judeo-Christian), only and primarily because the idea itself asserts that God is the ultimate universal reality behind all human and natural existence, that fact (that God is nothing more than an invention) must be taken to heart if there is to be any progress toward understanding why native Americans cannot be characterized as atheistic even though they do not believe in the existence of (super)natural beings.

Put simply: tribal people never found it necessary to posit the existence of the (super)natural in order to explain how they were related to the rest of the world. Native Americans have never been afflicted with the arrogant notion that they are somehow above and beyond, as a chosen people, all and every limitation that a natural state imposes on human beings. Native Americans never believed they lived outside of the natural world and hence never had any reason to invent God as proof and cause and rationalization to demonstrate against all evidence that they were, in fact, un-natural. In other words, God exists only in order to prove that human beings (European) are not affected by, or subject to, natural processes, that they are exempt from every restriction human mortality and contingency imposes on them as natural entities. Native Americans never stepped in that trap.

Spirit is nothing more than a way to classify and/or define the various forms of power that animate the natural world. Take the spirit of the bear, for instance. If you live in the natural world, not in an urban environment where the only bear lives in a zoo, it becomes necessary to know the difference between a yearling male and a she-bear who has cubs, between a brown bear and a grizzly. Knowing spirit tells you how to behave in the face of the power that confronts you. If you mistake the grizzly for the brown, you die. If you mistake the yearling for the she-bear with cubs, you die. If you mistake a European for a human being, you die.

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