PRAIRIE LITURGY

A competent ethnographer who comes to a new community to study “religion” will look at the most global and thoroughly integrated information possible, but a naive pop religionist will tend to look at rituals in isolation and accumulate “theological” statements apart from everything else, pressed into categories from another continent. This is an radically important difference and will lead to quite different results. Most ceremonies and liturgies arise from within the lives of the people. If their lives are changed -- most likely by the introduction of the industrial revolution and concepts of modernity or Christianity -- the whole meaning of everything will change.

Even the sensory world will change: think of the difference between traveling on horseback and traveling by pickup. The smells, motion, distance traveled, exposure to nature, necessary skills are all radically changed; in fact, as much as it was to go from walking alongside dogs to riding alongside dogs. Dogs remain. Perhaps there are few liturgies about dogs because they are “givens” to all reservation life, participants rather than objects of veneration.

The “givens” of the ecology are the substrate of all religion and culture, so for the Blackfeet the four directions, the cycle, the achievement of harmony (fittingness) are the key to survival and therefore feature in ritual. The sterilizing effect of sun, the unpredictable deadliness of lightning, the persistence of wind, the paralyzing cold, are constants. Circling the lodge, monitoring virtue in the sense of tenacity as much as bravery, the importance of being in the right place at the right time are all vital. "Indian time" in its own context is not about being late: it is about waiting for the proper moment when the forces are aligned, then acting.

Amateurs and some professionals only spend part of the year in locus, which usually means they miss the winter. They might not realize the brevity and harshness of the summer arc when hail storms can be barrages of fist-sized ice chunks rather than the little white pellets many think of. They have not competed with bears in the sarvisberry patches. They have not as children lain quietly by a ground squirrel burrow to snare one of them. Such small but indelible sense memories are threads in the fabric of life. I’ll resist my natural impulse to go on with ideas about that metaphor, particularly since there was no woven fabric until Europeans began to supply it.

In fact, the early culture was about tanned hide, fur, bone, feathers, wood, and stone as incarnated in plants and animals. The beads, ribbons, metal thimbles, brass tacks and falconry bells, the knives and spark-striking firestarters were all from European culture. Blackfeet “bundles” developed out of the need to pack things along on horseback in a life based on movement through the cycle of food availability: camas roots now, chokecherries later, newborn large animals now (the skins are lightweight for clothing and, if kept whole, make a container) and fat bison cows later. In spring move towards the prairie while there is water in rivulets, in winter move towards the stream shores where there is wood to burn.

So now it’s possible to understand the major June gathering when all the small groups of nomads came together while there was grass for their horses and it was a little too early for harvesting most things. The importance of sarvisberry soup, which is made from dried berries, as a ceremonial food becomes clear. It’s not about the body of someone -- it’s about having enough food to have gotten through the winter and to eat the last of the stored berries in faith that there will soon be a new crop. It’s a show of appreciation, which is why one fishes out the biggest, fattest berry and hands it up to the little altar.

Christian liturgies have come to be an individual act even if practiced in company. One [sic] tries to save one’s own soul, though it’s good to pray for others. Blackfeet are far closer to the reality that the unit of survival and evolution is the band. Individual loss and suffering are certainly mourned, but the individual acts on behalf of the whole group. Therefore, the modern young men who seek meaning in the Sun Dance ordeal of piercing are guided by individual motives, but in the original ritual this was only part of a complex that rested on the virtue of one old woman. She was not virtuous for her own glory, but because her acts affected everyone. The same was true for the Bundle Keepers; Bundles were meant to be maintained well because they affected the fortunes of the whole band.

It is very hard to keep any religious ritual from drifting off into personal demonstrations of wealth, like the Pacific Northwest tribes who practiced the ritual of potlatch. In that rich ecology one person could accumulate a LOT of wealth, which he redistributed in a feast so generous that the communal bowl was the size of a canoe. The Blackfeet will give blankets and tobacco, but the Kwaikiutl moguls gave everything they had. They could accumulate wealth in intricately embossed sheets of copper which were broken and thrown into the sea. In return for all this, they were entitled to put a sort of disc on their hat. Some men had several discs.

The complaint that people tend to reduce meaningful rituals into attempts to superstitiously and magically control events recurs again and again. When I did my hospital chaplaincy, the Catholic chaplains hated to supply rosaries because people didn’t use them to discipline devotional prayer (keeping track of the number of repetitions of the formula) but rather considered them magical. I wangled a rosary for a young mother with a baby who needed surgery that would require resources the mother didn’t have -- not even emotionally -- and, sure enough, she wound the rosary into the baby’s crib and disappeared, as though the “magic” of some beads would be compensation.

In the same way the liturgies of indigenous peoples are used to supply prestige and “magic” without any real care for the context of the land itself, which is only a backdrop for them rather than the substrate of existence that it has always been.