I seem to have been thinking a lot about cultural appropriation lately — issues such as theft of voice and spiritual eclecticism. One way of thinking about these issues is to point to two very different ways of looking at spirituality: for want of existing terms, I have called them indigenist and universalist. Indigenists are communitarian, traditional, hierarchical, and concerned with correct ritual action; universalists are individualist, eclectic, egalitarian, and concerned with psychological states.

---

Joseph Rael, who calls himself Beautiful Painted Arrow and claims Ute and Picuris Pueblo ancestry, describes two kachinas landing in a spacecraft. Dhyani Ywahoo says that she is holder of the Ywahoo Lineage and Chief of the Green Mountain Ani Yunwiwa, and claims that her secret Cherokee lineage is charged with the care of the original instructions encoded within a mysterious Crystal Ark and the accompanying “crystal-activating sound formulas and rituals.” Physician Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who claims to be Cherokee-Lakota, says that the seminal Lakota spiritual being White Buffalo Calf Woman revealed to him that she perceives brain waves as “colorful patterns of electromagnetic energy.”

---

Animism is the view that human beings on the earth live — whether they know it or not — in community with persons who are not human beings. These other-than-human persons may include animals, plants, trees, rocks, clouds, thunder, and stars. The phrase other-than-human persons was coined by anthropologist Irving Hallowell to describe the world of the Ojibwe, in which humans, animals, fish, birds, and plants — and some rocks, trees, and storms — are all relational, intentional, conscious, and communicative beings. Ethnographer Thomas Blackburn reached similar conclusions for the Chumash Indians, whose cosmos, he said, is composed of an “interacting community of sentient creatures.”

---

In June 1992, the Writers’ Union of Canada adopted a resolution defining the term cultural appropriation as “the taking — from a culture that is not one’s own — of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge.” Others have limited the definition to appropriation by a dominant culture from a subordinate or colonized culture. Either definition is full of uncertainty. What constitutes a taking? What are the boundaries of a culture? By what criteria is it determined that a culture is not mine but someone else’s?

---

Rainforest environmentalism is eager to see the rainforest native as sharing the putative purity of the rainforest — closer to nature, less affected by the evils of the world, demonstrating the integrity of the unspoiled. The native of the rainforest is a monolithic figure, the keeper and companion of the plants and animals, an instrument to criticize our own civilization. That purity becomes associated with a wisdom we once had but have lost, and which we need to recover in order to rebuild what our technology has destroyed. The wisdom of the rainforest stands ready to be reappropriated by the dominant culture.

---

It is claimed that many indigenous people share a myth about the eagle and the condor. The story says that once all peoples were one, but split into two groups — the people of the eagle in the north, who are scientific, technological, intellectual, and innovative; and the people of the condor in the south, who are intuitive, spiritual, sensual, and deeply connected with the natural world. For the past 500 years, the myth reportedly says, the eagle, with its technological achievements, has dominated the condor. But now there begins a new pachakuti, a new 500-year period, the fifth of the current cycle.

---

Shamans in the Amazon are not unaware of the problems brought about by their encounter with global modernity. On June 1 through 8, 1999, forty of the most prominent traditional healers from seven indigenous peoples convened in Yurayaco, Colombia, to hold an Encuentro de Taitas, a Meeting of Shamans, and to discuss the future of traditional medicine. One result of that meeting was the publication of two documents — a Código de ética de la medicina indígena del piedemonte Amazónico Colombiano, Code of Ethics of Indigenous Medicine of the Foothills of the Colombian Amazon, and the Declaración del Encuentro de Taitas, Declaration of the Meeting of Shamans, often called the Yurayaco Declaration.

---

Amazonian sirenas, mermaids, look just like the mermaids of the classical European imagination — beautiful blond women with the tail of a fish, sometimes with several fish tails, who have melodious voices and hypnotic eyes, and who live in caves beneath the waters. They travel on boas. Indeed, sometimes they turn into boas; if the woman sleeping next to you turns into a boa during the night, that is a good sign that you have been seduced by a mermaid.

---

Very few indigenous peoples of the Upper Amazon hunt with blowguns any more. The weapon of choice is a 16-gauge shotgun. In North America, we tend to use 20-gauge shotguns for birds and 12-gauge for larger game; the 16-gauge is, in fact, an excellent all-around shotgun, useful for hunting medium-size jungle game — tapir, capybara, agouti, peccary, monkey. But there is a price. Hunting with a shotgun may be too efficient, making it easy to overhunt particular areas. Perhaps more important, it makes indigenous people dependent on manufactured goods: they cannot make, but rather must buy, shotgun shells.

---

Napo Runa Indians who regularly go to work for the oil companies often have themselves cleansed with tobacco smoke by a shaman when they return to their villages. They are having themselves healed of wage labor; they are being cleansed of capitalism. This is a small act of cultural resistance, affirming the validity of their traditional values over against those of their white employers.

---

<< Previous Articles | Next Articles >>