COMMUNITY LITURGY

“ . . .that which can be expressed only in ritual is not trivial. It is, I think, crucial and because of it I take ritual to be THE basic social act. I will argue, in fact, that social contract, morality, the concept of the sacred, the notion of the divine, and even a paradigm of creation are intrinsic to ritual’s structure.”

--Roy Rappaport

For a person or organization to persist (survive) it must manage on two levels: survive short term environmental fluctuations by adapting (drought) and survive long term by transforming themselves (glaciation). Crucial variables (food, water, shelter) must stay within a range of variability that is survivable. But as variables continue over years to the point of evolutionary change, at what point is this a new organism? (My great-grandfather’s ax has had the head replaced three times and a new handle attached five times. Is it the same ax?)

If the Blackfeet tribe come from the Great Slave Lake, as some anthropologists claim, and then moved to the East Slope of the Rockies on the high prairie where they learned to be buffalo hunters by using piskuns, or buffalo jumps, were they still Blackfeet? When they acquired horses and did their hunting that way, with guns, were they still Blackfeet? When they accepted reservation life and are by now intermixed with other people and make their living like any modern American, are they still Blackfeet?

Immutability: which is the crucial part that cannot change without ending the organism as itself? Rappaport suggests that liturgy can repair a people’s sense of themselves. This has proven to be true for some of the enrolled tribespeople who still perform a “Bundle Opening” every spring, inventing and bridging over as necessary to adapt, but still sitting in a circle of relations.

Because human patterns of behavior are not much specified by genetics, people can change quickly by adjusting memes instead of genes. The terms usually used when stepping away from blood quantum and tribal enrollment are “Indian-identified” or “white-identified,” that is, the self-identity sense of the person as expressed in participation in liturgy like “Bundle Opening.” There is much more resourcefulness in this kind of identity but also more chance of chaos. The controller is VALUES or what Rappaport might call SANCTITY, which he defines as values that are never questioned, beyond questioning. At the high level of values, vagueness is adaptive because it is more inclusive. Most Bundle Openers see themselves as also good Catholics because they consider the values to be the same: compassion (often called “pity” in early translations), dependence on the Great Spirit, personal honor, and family.

Rappaport suggests that such primary process thought is largely metaphorical, which is good because that helps resist heresy (erosion) and hair-splitting. Ultimate sacred postulates are almost beneath (or above) conscious reflection. They are in the mind (“heart”) as the most basic givens. “Even metaphor’s grasp is exceeded. . . . All distinction and all likeness may dissolve into a sense of non-distinction or unity. Ultimate meaning is sometimes called by such names as ‘pure being’ and ‘Being-Itself.’ . . . “ the objectification of self and the world, and the concomitant language, may be overcome for the nonce by the sense of identity with self and the world . . . that constitutes highest level meaning. This is mystical.”

One distinction between religion and “magic” is that religion is shared by a community while magic can be manipulated by an individual, maybe for dubious motives. This becomes important among the Blackfeet because so many outsiders come seeking what amounts to magic for their individual benefit rather than sharing an endorsement of the community values, much less participation in daily lives. Native American Indians have acquired a cultural attribution of high prestige and purity, but that makes those among them who have “fallen” even more stigmatized, guilty of a religious apostasy in addition to the affliction of alcoholism or whatever.

The Blackfeet Thunder Pipe Ceremony (which I don’t know as it is organized today except second-hand, since I have stepped back from these circles, but did know in the Sixties) is an in-gathering of the Beloved Community and also an in-gathering of the spirits of many creatures of the northern prairie. It is not mysterious, or was not when it grew up within the lives of the People centuries ago.

How many years ago? No one really knows, but the Thunder pipes that I’ve seen have brass tacks, brass falconry bells, satin ribbons, and occasionally exotic birds that were once mounted by a taxidermist (they have glass eyes) and that are not local (a parrot, a rooster). The stem or calumet, three feet long, has been drilled by technology similar to that for rifle bores -- in fact, the stem is about the length of a “long gun.” All this suggests post-contact. In fact, the pipe may be the kernel of a liturgy meant to adapt and integrate the new material culture, acknowledging and claiming its power. It may be a source of the mystique of the “peace pipe.”

The stone bowl, where the tobacco burns, is not normally put on the stem because this kind of pipe is not smoked except in times of extremely intense need. The most striking element of the pipestem is a pendant fan, an entire set of colorfully quilled eagle tail feathers, usually from a young golden eagle, not a bald eagle. Bald eagles are fish-eaters found around water. Golden eagles live on the prairie and along the mountains where thermals lift them soaring across the sky. Many ermine hides (winter weasel pelts, which are white with a black-tipped tail) hang with other objects, maybe a Metis assumption sash. There are beads and sometimes the red wool cloth manufactured for trade in Stroud, England.

There’s sometimes a secondary pipe, similarly decorated and called “the woman’s pipe,” which is really a length of gun barrel that had been taken off a “long gun” the way a shotgun is illegally shortened today. And there’s a smoking pipe, maybe not kept in the Bundle. In those days a pipe for smoking tobacco was something like today’s coffee pot, always hot to pour for guests. It was a kind of structuring device: the guest comes, the pipe goes around while there is talk, at some point people have had enough and the guest leaves. It also makes spaces for people to consider what they are saying while they puff or re-light or refill the pipe.

The People gathered according to the seasons, coming from far and wide across the prairie to meet when there was enough grass for the horses and fresh meat for the People. Some think they used the stars as a calendar and others guess they went by the same kind of natural indicators that a farmer might use to decide when to cut hay. The Thunder Pipe Bundle is associated with the spring storms that sweep across the vast grasslands, booming and flashing as they move, and sometimes striking lodges, people and animals. Prayers are made that storms will not do damage, but will water the grass and make the sarvisberries flower, for this is the beginning of the berries that will end up in berry soup.

Berry soup is the ceremonial food, not to symbolize someone’s death, but to work by affinity to encourage a good crop. When handed one’s bowl of soup, one picks out a big fat berry to hand forward to an altar where they are dedicated as examples of what is asked for. If Christian Communion is interpreted as a sharing, a plea for salvation, then maybe berry soup is the same. If Christian Communion is about the Crucifixion of Jesus, then berry soup is not the same thing.

Berry soup is not normally a store-bought food though in desperation blueberries could be improvised. Usually dried sarvisberries are used, the last of the previous year’s crop, so they are more like seed grain than bread. Many different people might donate berries. In the old days they might have been cached somewhere, the way a marmot hoards grass underground among rocks. If you want to be funky, in the old days the seeds of the berries the People ate were returned to the land in the same way that the seeds eaten by birds and animals go back to soil, so sarvisberries grew thick near the accustomed campgrounds. Such elements of the People’s lives traveled through natural feedback loops much in the way that our bodies stay stabilized by metabolic feedback loops in the blood.

Besides the People and the berries being gathered together, there is another in-gathering within the Bundle, the skins of lesser creatures of the land. Anthropologists and aficionados are always dazzled by big bright objects like the spectacular calumet, but often the stronger meaning is in the humble, scruffy sub-bundles. These might include the skins of an owl, a duck, a loon, a spotted fawn, or a muskrat. Each is wrapped in cloth the way a baby would be wrapped, with the head sticking out. They are harbingers of spring, such as owls being especially vocal because of looking for mates, the ducks coming back and pairing off, the fawns being dropped by the deer. Blackfeet didn’t eat these creatures except in some kind of emergency, but they watched them carefully to see what they could learn. The land was their text, the animals the writing on it.

At the Bundle Opening Ceremony, the men choose one of these little sub-bundles to hold as they dance, imitating the animal’s movements as closely as they can. Each animal has its own song. If a person REALLY wanted to be a Bundle Ceremony participant, the right way to go about it would not be reading the complete notes of Clarke Wissler or John Ewers, but walking on the land daily in pursuit of natural history.